The Life of William Faulkner, page 36
Faulkner in Paris, 1925.
Estelle Oldham and her daughter Cho-Cho (Victoria), photographed by Estelle’s first husband, Cornell Franklin.
Faulkner in the early 1930s.
Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak: “One has the feeling of walking back in time, into a different world,” said a town resident. The shift from present to past, from the modern neighborhood on the boundary of Rowan Oak to that cedar-lined lane occurs as quickly as the time shifts in Faulkner’s fiction. (Library of Congress)
>Miriam Hopkins, in The Story of Temple Drake (1933), portrays with “perfect understanding the complexities of literature’s most spirited character . . . a strange composite of good and evil forces, a curious mixture of conventional attributes and uncontrollable desires,” wrote the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger reviewer.
9
All in the Family
The Sound and the Fury, October 1929
Southern Decadence
Published on October 7, 1929, The Sound and the Fury follows the fortunes of the Compsons, a southern family in decline: Mr. Compson, the father, is a world-weary dipsomaniac, and his wife a neurasthenic, self-pitying whiner. Their children all suffer a want of love: The oldest son, Quentin, tries to hold on to his sister, Caddy, the only source of deep affection available to this sensitive and troubled young man no longer sure of what it means to be a southern gentleman. He commits suicide in an unbearable state of agony over the futility of his efforts to defend an outmoded code that only confirms his anomalous existence. Caddy is just as crucial to Benjy, her idiot brother, who has been three years old for thirty years and the butt of cruel treatment by virtually everyone, except for Caddy and the family’s black servant, Dilsey. Benjy troubles every Compson except Caddy because his very existence mocks the family’s pretensions to distinction and achievement. He is castrated when it is mistakenly assumed he has tried to rape a group of girls. His loss of manhood ironically reflects on all the Compson males, who in a variety of ways cannot perform the traditional male function of procreating, preserving, and protecting the family. The remaining brother, Jason, named after his father, is an embittered bachelor who satisfies his sex drive by consorting with prostitutes. He is outraged by his family’s failure and tries to get ahead by cheating Caddy’s daughter, named after her brother Quentin. Caddy sends money home that Jason pockets, all the while blaming everyone, except himself, for his lack of success. So fractured are the Compsons by their own frailties and misfortunes that, in the end, they, and their story, can only be repaired by Dilsey, who is presented by a third-person narrator who enters the novel in order to bring some perspective to the skewed projections of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. The novel goes to Dilsey, so to speak, as Faulkner turned to Caroline Barr, a momentary stay against the confusion and conflict engendered by his warring parents and the pervading sense that the family has seen better days. The hard-boiled Jason, working in a hardware store, is reminiscent of Faulkner’s father, Murry, selling equipment and reduced to the nuts and bolts of a mundane existence, or of Faulkner himself clerking in that same store. The age of chivalry was dead, and just making a living made for resentment, palpable in Jason and just as prominent in Faulkner. If the novelist was no Quentin in distress at Harvard, the writer was nevertheless the errant scion. He had a sort of sabbatical at Yale and had sulked about the South he missed, even though he had not won his lady except on the rebound as a Caddy who had come home if not in disgrace, than at least in humiliation, having spoiled her prospects. Southern manhood, as it had been created by the obstreperous old Colonel and his cohort, had collapsed.
To Henry Nash Smith (Southwest Review, Autumn), The Sound and the Fury portrayed the “spectacle of a civilization uprooted and left to die. Scope such as this is not usual in American novels.” This epic note set the novel at odds with the prevailing sentimentality about the Old South, the nostalgia for the antebellum aristocracy, now replaced by the “decadence of an American family”—an unpardonable insult to his region’s pride, as many of Faulkner’s contemporaries saw it. Smith, like other reviewers, was quick to detect Joyce’s influence in Quentin’s stream-of-consciousness section, although Smith insisted on Faulkner’s original use of it. Others, like Walter Just (Philadelphia Public Ledger, October 4), suspected the author of playing a tricky game that made it difficult to tell the two Quentins, boy and girl, apart. This “arty” novel was a “stunt.”
For every exasperated reviewer there was an exhilarated one, like Ted Robinson (Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 18), who proclaimed Faulkner’s technique “strikingly original and hauntingly effective.” A first reading of the Benjy section confused him until he realized that in the “idiot’s consciousness there is no sense of time, and any chance smell, sound, or other physical stimulus will take him back to some past event that impressed him.” Recounting Quentin’s suicide, Jason’s cupidity, and his niece Quentin’s promiscuity, Robinson deemed the novel a “sordid and revolting story” with a “tragic dignity” reminiscent of The Brothers Karamazov—a comparison other reviewers also made. Robinson hailed a work of genius.
In the Providence Journal (October 20) and the Nation (January 15, 1930), Winfield Townley Scott and Clifton Fadiman were not impressed, believing Faulkner’s modernism amounted to obscurantism and, in Fadiman’s words, that the “characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them.” Julia K. W. Baker (New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 29, 1930) hailed “one of the finest works in the tragic mood yet to appear in America.” She singled out Caddy as a “beautiful character. There is something uncanny in Faulkner’s penetration of the feminine heart. Ask women how true his rendering is. They know it, men can merely sense it.” Baker caught an aspect of Faulkner’s treatment of race that escaped most reviewers: “The benevolent tyranny of negroes over any Southern household is charmingly reflected in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner knows and loves the negro.” If he read this review, one can imagine him thinking about how true this was of his own experience with Caroline Barr. The reviewer in the New York Times (November 10) noted the “efforts of the Negro servants, a peculiarly sane chorus to the insane tragedy.”
Evelyn Scott’s pamphlet-length endorsement—she was a highly respected southern poet and novelist—irritated reviewers like Clifton Fadiman even as others welcomed an eloquent guide to a difficult work. Scott’s involvement, suggested by Wasson, gave the novel a “blue ribbon” sendoff that Faulkner deeply appreciated.1 She had no doubt of the novel’s permanence and wanted to be the first to say so. She countered the impression of Faulkner as a morbid writer. Pessimism and despair certainly informed his fiction, but so too did his “reassertion of humanity in defeat that is, in the subjective sense, a triumph.” She regarded the novel as refuting materialists, whom she does not name, although Jason Compson would certainly be numbered among them. Benjy she saw as a kind of Adam before the fall, an innocent who cannot experience the full descent into human consciousness. Describing Quentin as an “oversensitive introvert, pathologically devoted to his sister, and his determination to commit suicide in his protest against her disgrace,” Scott did not apparently see how both Quentin and Benjy are Caddy-driven, so to speak, with Quentin representing Adam after the fall. Scott realizes that Jason, in his own way, is as mad as Quentin and as easily riled as Benjy. Jason dreads, like Quentin, the moment when his world will collapse, when his investments will fail, when his family will let him down—again. Scott summed up Dilsey and the last section of the novel in a sentence: “She is the conscious human accepting the limitations of herself, the iron boundaries of circumstance, and still, to the best of her ability, achieving a holy compromise for aspiration.” Scott calls Jason, with his scorn for “outworn tradition,” the “young South,” or he might be called the “New South” that Henry Grady championed, scornful of tradition and hospitable to industrialization and new business but also full of the connivery that Lillian Hellman dramatized so cannily in The Little Foxes. He is the “dollars and cents” man, “completely rational” and also completely deluded, like an Edgar Allan Poe ratiocinating character. For Scott, Dilsey embodies wholeness, while her white folks “accept their fragmentary state, disintegrate. And she recovers for us the spirit of tragedy which the patter of cynicism has often made seem lost.”
Few reviewers were able to view the novel’s subject matter and its form together or to understand the role style played in Faulkner’s exquisite sense of structure. On the contrary, they chided him for lack of control and sensationalism, for dwelling on disease for its own sake. However, the New York Times reviewer ended with a succinct paragraph that does lead the way into a full consideration of the novel: “The author has chosen an unusual medium for his story in not one but four styles. Yet the four are welded together in perfect unity. The objective quality of the novel saves it from complete morbidity.” Faulkner may well have been building on “The Book of the Grotesque” in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which dramatizes how truth gets distorted in the minds and manners of individuals.2 Each narrator has a truth to tell, but in the telling, the truth itself buckles under the psyche’s pressure.
Many critics have sought the source of the genius displayed in Faulkner’s fourth novel, the one that set him apart from his earlier work. Many of the characters, scenes, and techniques in The Sound and the Fury have their analogues in his poems, sketches, and novels. The novelist “revisited his past, saw it afresh, and reworked it into his future.”3 Benjy is not the first idiot in Faulkner’s fiction, Quentin is not alone in his obsession with a sister lost or unattainable, Mrs. Compson is not the first mother to be emotionally absent from her children’s suffering, and the ending in Dilsey’s church is not the first time that Faulkner finds a sense of salvation without which his white characters are doomed. But no totting up of precedents and influences can account for the sudden aesthetic discovery that amazed Faulkner himself.
Benjy
The first paragraph of The Sound and the Fury is a work of wonder, a precise capturing of a moment, a scene, a perception fused in a sensibility akin to the imagist poets, seeking direct treatment of the “thing”:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. [April 7, 1928]
Faulkner’s language is a verbal representation of what Benjy sees, “at the precise moment of seeing.”4 No other character can remain so bereft of language, so innocent of nouns like “golf” to describe what he sees. No imagist in Faulkner’s time was likely to describe the absence of flowers. It is April and the flowers have not yet bloomed, but in summer Benjy has seen them there in the spaces where the flowers are now not yet there. The “curling flower spaces” may also represent the fragmented visual pattern of what Benjy perceives in the floral design of a cast-iron fence like the one behind which Edwin Chandler played, the severely retarded brother of Faulkner’s first-grade teacher, Annie Chandler.5
Why go to all this trouble? Clifton Fadiman might have asked. John T. Matthews has an answer: “It is as if Faulkner wants to convey the immediacy of life—the most direct sensations of what constitutes reality—prior to the intrusions of ideas, beliefs, even language itself. And what constitutes Benjy’s reality, as Faulkner imagines this cradle of human consciousness, is the experience of loss, lack, pain. Consciousness of self is born in the twilight of an awful rupture—in a separation from the ambient nurture of the mother-world.”6 Benjy is bereft of his loving sister, Caddy, and his existence isolates him dreadfully from what others take for granted.
Faulkner spent many days on the roughly made Oxford golf course looking for lost balls and losing his composure, as a fellow golfer had observed. And looking for what is lost absorbs Benjy all day and every day as he cries for the departed Caddy as the golfers, in the next paragraph, cry for their caddies. Life, for those moments, becomes fixated on what is lost. The golf course is the lost greener pastures of the Compson family, which has sold the land, piece by piece, to maintain its position and to send Quentin to Harvard. Caddy is the lost southern belle, the lost cause of happiness that Benjy yearns to recover, that Quentin wants to redeem, and that Jason seeks to renounce by tormenting Caddy’s daughter, Quentin. The flag is the Compson standard brought low in a hole, now part of a pointless and yet obsessive game, with Luster (Benjy’s black minder) on the other side of the fence as intent on finding his lost quarter as Jason will later be on the money he steals from his niece Quentin. “They went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped” is a perfect representation of the parallel universe Benjy inhabits alongside the one that suits Luster, sounding like Jason fixated on money and scornful of “niggers.” Luster tells Benjy: “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.”
Like Quentin following his shadow in his section of the novel, Benjy is measured by the shadow of himself he sees on the garden fence near the broken place where he always gets snagged on a nail. This ritualistic action, occurring on April 7, 1928, repeated evidently many times, goes all the way back to Benjy’s childhood, to the day (December 23, 1908) when Caddy “uncaught” him, freed him as no other has done since her flight from a confinement on ancestral ground that Benjy and Quentin can never escape, no matter the distance between Jefferson and Cambridge, the golf course and the Compson home. Caddy is the only Compson who speaks in a loving manner to Benjy. She comes home from school and runs to him (spring or early summer 1908): “‘Hello, Benjy.’ Caddy said. She opened the gate and came in and stooped down. Caddy smelled like leaves. ‘Did you come to meet me.’ she said. ‘Did you come to meet Caddy. What did you let him get his hands so cold for, Versh [Luster’s predecessor].’” She mothers Benjy, rubbing his hands on a winter day just before Christmas, while her own mother bemoans her Benjamin as “a judgment on me.” Caddy is natural woman, unsullied, trying to speak a language Benjy understands: “You’re not a poor baby. Are you. Are you. You’ve got your Caddy. Haven’t you got your Caddy.” Every boy, every man, needs a Caddy. She is not just the sister Faulkner never had. She represents the love he never found enough of from his own mother, although she was nothing like the self-pitying Mrs. Compson, except that both women find it difficult to express love. Mrs. Compson will not hold the five-year-old Benjy, which is the way to quiet him, Caddy tells her. Always the lady, Mrs. Compson calls her daughter Candace, pointing out that “only common people” use nicknames. Caddy understands quite well that her mother’s job is to evade responsibility, telling her, “You go up stairs and lay down, so you can be sick.”
Benjy’s laments are constantly and harshly interrupted, which is the way children, not only idiots, experience their world: “Cant you shut up that moaning and slobbering, Luster said. Aint you shamed of yourself, making all this racket.” The italics signify a time shift, a return to Benjy’s cruel present (April 7, 1928), where slave and master, so to speak, Luster and Jason, see in Benjy only a weakness to be deplored, not a soul to be salved, as Dilsey ministers to Benjy in Caddy’s absence, although even Dilsey expresses her impatience when she shoves him into a carriage. Accept no substitutes for Caddy; they are of no avail.
Benjy is in a position to see everything without the ability to comment, but we are hardly at a loss in understanding that his Uncle Maury is an alcoholic. Benjy notices all his trips to the sideboard. We also can figure out that Uncle Maury is having an affair with Mrs. Patterson, when Mr. Patterson comes running up to the fence on their property to intercept Maury’s love note that he has entrusted to Benjy. Earlier Caddy is scolded by Mrs. Patterson, who is put out because she told her lover not to “send you alone.” Mrs. Patterson snags herself on the fence, like Benjy, with only an irate husband to unsnag her. Caddy’s fate is to be snagged on the hypocrisy and duplicity of family life. She is used by the very adults who will condemn her promiscuity. To Jason, named after his father, the family is, even as a boy, a burden he would shirk but for his own greed still tied to a Compson brand, a business from which the grown-up Jason still hopes to profit. Benjy has to keep his hands in his pockets to keep warm; Jason, as a boy, keeps his hands in his pockets as a sign of keeping to himself just as he will later pocket the money Caddy sends for the support of her daughter, Quentin. All these detrimental behaviors, the Benjy section intimates, began in childhood in the fraught world of Sigmund Freud, notwithstanding Faulkner’s claim not to have read the alienist. Benjy shows us; he cannot tell us. He is constantly sending out alarms that no one but Caddy can interpret. Benjy is Wordsworth’s child, abandoned, the child who never becomes the father of the man but whose proximity to nature and his sister who smells like trees brings life back to its first principles, its grounding in the earth.
The unladylike seven-year-old Caddy takes off her dress when it gets wet while her older brother Quentin berates her for impropriety, slapping her while she splashes him in the branch they have been playing in. Caddy’s spontaneity riles the rule- and convention-bound Quentin and his jealous, calculating brother Jason. Quentin predicts they will get a whipping, but Caddy is already vowing to run away from home. The sense of crime and punishment (whipping is mentioned twenty-five times in the novel) spoils the Edenic world of Benjy’s senses and corrupts the Compson childhood as Jason continually threatens to tell on the children for their transgressions.
