A Man of Letters, page 22
Soldiers’ Pay is Faulkner’s earliest work in prose. Reading it again, one sees immediately, it is much fresher than the later, ruminating and didactic Faulkner. It has the lyrical hardness, the mark of experiment, the crispness of design which were to be found in Light in August and The Sound and the Fury, and is written before Faulkner became so deedily engrossed in his own complexity. He belongs to the period of difficult writing, obliquity, the self-propagating image that grows like a brilliant fungus all over his prose. And when this Southern dandyishness is given up, he is apt to convey the agony of the South in an agonising prose which appears to be chewed like tobacco and occasionally squirted out, instead of being written. The total effect is, however, hypnotic. After being trained for a generation since Joyce on difficult, associative writing, we ought not to be set back, and I can only suppose the English reader lacks the necessary links with the Southern Negro and poor white cultures. But there is more than that to the difficulty of Faulkner: it is not that he is allusive or perpetually putting fresh obstacles in the way of his vision, but that he gives all his allusions and obstacles the same value. I will quote a long passage from a late book, Intruder in the Dust, which describes the capture of a fugitive who has jumped into a river. In isolation it is excellent – but, remember, a whole book has been written in this eye-blinding, mind-stunning incantation:
… he saw the old man jump feet first off the bank and with no splash, no disturbance of any sort, continue right on not through the bland surface but past it as if he had jumped not into anything but past the edge of a cliff or a window-sill and then stopping, half-disappeared as suddenly with no shock or jolt; just fixed and immobile as if his legs had been cut off at the loins by one swing of a scythe, leaving his trunk sitting upright on the bland, depthless milklike sand.
‘All right, boys,’ old Gowrie cried, brisk and carrying: ‘Here he is. I’m standing on him.’
And one twin got the rope bridle from the mule and the leather one and the saddle girth from the mare, and using the shovels like axes the Negroes hacked willow branches while the rest of them dragged up other brush and poles and whatever else they could reach or find or free and now both twins and the two Negroes, their empty shoes sitting on the bank, were down in the sand too and steadily there came down from the hills the ceaseless strong murmur of the pines but no other sound yet although he strained his ears listening in both directions along the road, not for the dignity of death because death has no dignity, but at least for the decorum of it: some little at least of that decorum which should be every man’s helpless right until the carrion he leaves can be hidden from the ridicule and the shame, the body coming out now feet first, gallowsed up and out of the inscrutable suck to the heave of the crude tackle then free of the sand with a faint smacking plop like the sound of lips perhaps in sleep and in the bland surface nothing: a faint wimple wrinkled already fading then gone like the end of a faint secret fading smile, and then on the bank now while they stood about and over it and he was listening harder than ever now with something of the murderer’s own frantic urgency both ways along the road though there was still nothing....
Faulkner clutches at every sight and suggestion with the avidity of suspicion and even mania, and all manias create monotony. This is true even of the mania for domestic realism in Defoe. But in that passage Faulkner is simultaneously conveying the effect of the event on a boy’s mind – for the story is seen through the eyes of a boy. Faulkner’s ambition is visually poetic and he is attempting the instantaneous delivery of a total experience. In all his novels, he is trying to give each instant of experience in depth, to put not only physical life as it is seen directly on the page, but all the historical and imaginative allusions of a culture at the same time. And to the eye alone. If the reader is stunned by the slow deliberate blow, that is precisely the effect Faulkner is seeking, for we do, in fact, live stunned and stupefied by the totality of our experience and our present position in our own life story is simply the little clearing we have cut and the devious fading path we have left behind us, in the jungle. Order, or at any rate pattern, is that which comes afterwards to this romantic novelist who begins in the middle of the mind. He is a man outside the imposed, clarifying authority of some established system of values. We do not really know the beginning of Faulkner’s stories until we have reached the end, till we have worked our way out of the jungle.
Faulkner’s method of story-telling requires no justification: it has the conundrum quality of a pattern, and intricate patterns are as interesting as elaborate plots. He is a superb creator of episode – the opening train scene in Soldiers’ Pay, the comic brothel scenes in Sanctuary, the account of the raid on the Federal breakfast table in the opening chapters of Sartoris – and when he creates passing character, the awful politician Snopes for example, the ink bites. But the true justification of the method is that it creates the South in depth as, I think, no other part of America has been created by a novelist since the time of Huckleberry Finn. American novelists have composed reports, records, chronicles of other regions, but the impression is of life in some passing, cynical, littered encampment; Faulkner, on the other hand, seems to be engaged in a compulsive task, as if he had undertaken awkwardly the building of a culture out of its ruins, as a one-man mission. And perhaps, because of its social tragedy, its knowledge of ruin and decadence, the guilt felt because of its crimes against the Negro, the South is America’s richest artistic soil.
Faulkner has the ubiquity of the reporter who knows the corruption of a town or a region inside out. He has also the moodiness of the man of letters. His capacity to catch mood is apparent in Soldiers’ Pay when he placed a dying, speechless, returned soldier in the midst of his story and played the reviving post-war world of 1918 around him, as it moved into jazz and bootlegging. His lyrical power in that book is mannered, but his mannerisms represent a passionate attempt to burn the scene into our senses for ever. He is excellent at crowded scenes; in social life, in dances, court house gatherings, riots, train journeys, Saturday night streets, where a sinister action winds separately in and out among the wanderings of people. He is a novelist of journeys. He is no great hand, indeed he is painfully stiff, in describing the inner life of sensitive people; and he is too concerned with the visual scene for the crucial business of creating large characters. Even his distinctive people are minor figures, and this suggests sterility of imagination. But he is remarkable in grasping the essential fragment, the live coal which keeps a life going, so that we are aware of living among the unconscious motives of people and of knowing how they will act. His men are rarely friends, his women nearly always enemies except for idealised creatures like Mrs Powers in Soldiers’ Pay. He is especially good at shallow young women, whom he hates and exposes, but whose points and vanity attract him. His weakest characters are the rhetorical cynics whose Shakespearian tone adds a vague oratorical fog to the tale; but this strange mixture of artifice and realism is his native mixture. In all his people, except the figures of pure evil like Popeye, he is sifting until he comes down to the infinitesimal deposit of humanity. His brutality is frightening because it is sardonic and always has a theatrical twist – one thinks of the man, running with a petrol can at a lynching, who gets himself blown up by mistake.
Faulkner’s sense of human pain and the damage done to people, their blank cruelties and the disguised suffering which they have accepted as part of the furniture of life, comes from a maturity rare in American novels; and he has shown here the power to grow out of the bitterness and cynicism and bragging sentimentalities which Hemingway never advanced from. In the didactic novels of his later period there is no uplift. He inculcates the rudiments of humanity, by cunning and the correcting of observation. If the boy in Intruder in the Dust is likely to side with the accused Negro, it is because he has learned to test his experience and to listen to his sensibility. He will always remember what the smell of the Negro really is after being wrapped in the old Negress’s quilt in her cabin: it is the smell of poverty.
I do not know whether these merits could have made Faulkner a great novelist, but they make him a source. Rancorous and obsessive, he has carried his quarrel with his region very wide, like some preacher chased out of town. And, what subjects – the English novelist will sigh – he has to hand. What advantages a lawless society brings to the writer.
(1962)
Henry James
The Last Letters
In the final volume of Leon EdePs exemplary selection of ‘Henry James Letters’ we find two contrasting views of letter writing. If letters have real charm, James said, they are the most delightful of written things. He is the majestic bumblebee of that art, pollinating his friendships with his speculations and his intimacies. But, thanking that voluminous novelist Mrs Humphry Ward for ‘ploughing’ through ‘The Golden Bowl’ and praising it, he groans on her behalf. Looking at the pile of unanswered letters on his own desk, always late with his replies, and knowing that he will have to sit up long past midnight to deal with them, the toiling novelist says:
The letters of life, in general, become more and more its poison, moreover, surely – and are a matter against which, for myself, my heart is rapidly casing itself in impenetrable steel. One must at last go in, absolutely, for life-saving (the ‘life’ being our own); and they are verily life-wrecking.
They are at odds with his principle that ‘art’ – the art of his fictions – ‘makes life’. If, as it seems to Mr Edel, the letters of this volume may be the best James wrote – less formal, less distant, more candid, affectionate, and even passionate – this is because in middle life his character has altered. The sleepy erotic and physical impulses of his nature have been awakened late, but not ‘too late’, as Strether felt in The Ambassadors.
There is indeed more openness in James’s personality. Edmund Wilson noted it. In the early volumes, the brisk, even pushing American Puritan has come to Europe to discover and conquer. He is the eager annalist of his adventure in a ripe civilisation and, above all, of its manners and social history. The classic American obligation ‘to keep in touch’ – to leave no social stone unturned, and to report back to his gifted family – excites him and makes him cogent and amusing. He is won over imaginatively to the extent of hating what he called ‘American simplicity’ and, of course, by the ‘sense of the past’; but he retains, especially in offhand London, his love of what he called (in one of his novels) the beautiful American ‘fuss’. We have seen him, in the earlier letters, giving up magical Rome and his nostalgias for Paris in favour of ‘odious’ London and the comforts of the English language; because the city was livable, you became accepted as a character in a society of characters, to whom being what they were (or pretended to be) was a kind of mundane religion. London, especially after the Oscar Wilde trial, was no longer Victorian and was knowing about family secrets: Edwardian manners had contrived discreet, ironic formulas for ‘speaking out’, though not in front of the children.
For Mr Edel, the change in James’s character starts first of all after the personal shock of his humiliating failure in the theatre. He had been jeered by the unsparing Cockney gallery. Sick of dining out, the engaging bachelor who knew everyone went briefly to Italy, where (heaven knows) life is lived out on every yard of pavement, and then returned to ‘chuck’ London for Lamb House in Rye, where there was no wear and tear, to write his last novels. And to brood on a startling Italian experience. In Italy, in his fifties, he had fallen in love – a ‘first love’, too – with the handsome young Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Innocent of physical love (it is supposed), James had discovered what many had suspected: his nature was homosexual. As a novelist and a man, he had been a neutral observer of love, seeing it through a veil of interests and manners: he had not know the body’s craving for physical touch, the prompting of the blood. Now to Andersen he will write, in this volume, of ‘a caress of your hand’; he will admit, as Mr Edel says, ‘the body’s insistence on an active tenderness’. The passionate letters to Andersen leave no question of James’s helpless physical attraction – if nothing more – to a young man whom he thought godlike but who was not a great sculptor (as James soon saw) and who had shrewdly sought out the famous novelist largely to push his own career. James invited him to live and work in the studio of his house at Rye. The young man came for a matter of days and then went his way, and after that was evasive and negligent. James now had the wretched experience of the ‘too late’. A fitful correspondence goes on. In 1902 (when he is fifty-eight), he writes to comfort the young man, who has lost a brother:
Now, at least, my weak arms still can feel you close… I’ve gone through Death, and Death, enough in my long life, to know how all that we are, all that we have, all that is best of us within, our genius, our imagination, our passion, our whole personal being, become then but aides and channels and open gates to suffering, to being flooded. But, it is better so. Let yourself go and live, even as a lacerated, mutilated lover … Beautiful and unspeakable your account of relation to Andreas. Sacred and beyond tears. How I wish I had known him, admirable, loveable boy – but you make me: I do. Well, he is all yours now: he lives in you and out of all pain.
This is the letter of an awakened and tender man, no longer withdrawn. James returned to Rome only once after this; correspondence flags. Replying to a ‘missive’, he writes with affection for the man but with candour about his work:
Your production is prodigious and heroic and very beautiful and interesting to me – so much so that, dearest Hendrik, I affectionately and heartily declare, even while seeing less than ever where this colossal multiplication of divinely naked and intimately associated gentlemen and ladies, flaunting their bellies and bottoms and their other private affairs, in the face of day, is going, on any American possibility, to land you. I won’t attempt to go into this last question now – you know already how it perplexes and even not a little distresses me.
In another letter, he complains that Hendrik appears not to differentiate sufficiently between the gentlemen and the ladies, notably in the case of his last ballerina, who is insufficient in hip ‘or to speak plainly, Bottom. She hasn’t much more of that than her husband.’ He would wish the faces of the sculptures were not so ‘blank and stony’ and without individuality. He hopes against hope that he and Hendrik may meet again, and says he will be ‘cast down’ if they don’t.
It is surprising that the avid reader of Flaubert, of the Balzac of the Contes Drolatiques, even of Turgenev’s First Love, should have known the sexual impulse (so far as we can tell) only through the printed page – not that this has ever been a guiltless indulgence, as everyone knows. What impresses us is the effect of the Andersen affair on the novelist. He has had – as, indeed, his father had had – a ‘vastation’, if of a different order.
The spell of the letters really lies in their idiosyncrasy. They are communings with himself as much as with his friends. They are also talking letters. They are written in his dictating period, and he writes as one listening to his own voice as it leads him on, watching his words float on the air, and delighting in the studied mischief of his hesitations and parentheses. He always evokes the friend to whom he is writing. His enormous privacy flowers. His lonely room fills up with voices; he carries his friends down the happily rambling stream of consciousness. He is full of affection and news. With almost socialite cunning, he has placed himself not far from Folkestone, the cross-Channel port: in turn the spider and the fly – catching or caught by his American friends as they come chattering in from the Continent or depart to it. ‘Life-wrecking’, of course – life being ‘art’. He amuses his friends with literary prattling. About Kipling – who is not far off – James reports once feeling that he had the seeds of an English Balzac in him. But ‘I have quite given that up in proportion as he has come steadily from the less simple in subject to the more simple, – from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws.’
As Mr Edel says, James himself had his own mania for minutiae. From other mysterious rumblings sudden moral definitions shoot out. Remembering that ‘dear man’ George Meredith: ‘Still, it abides with us, I think, that [he] was an admirable spirit even if not an entire mind.... The fantastic and the mannered in him were as nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight.’ In his remarks about George Sand he stages a prolonged alarm. ‘Dear old George’ is ‘more prodigious the nearer one gets to her.’ He remembers Nohant:
What a crew, what mœurs, what habits, what conditions and relations every way – and what an altogether mighty and marvellous George! – not diminished by all the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and so many other persons!) at home. Poor gentlemanly, crucified Chopin! – not naturally at home in grease.
And then he goes off at a tangent into something we have all noticed about the French and their ‘precisions’ and formulations on the subject of amour- and, indeed, everything else. One feels, he writes,
that Providence laid up for the French such a store of remark, in advance and, as it were, should the worst befall, that their conduct and moeurs, coming after had positively to justify and do honor to the whole collection of formulae, phrases and, as I say, glibnesses – so that as there were at any rate such things there for them to inevitably say, why not simply do all the things that would give them a rapport and a sense?
