The Burden of Southern History

12 The Burden for William Faulkner

12 The Burden far William Faulkner IF THE COMPARISON IS NOT CARRIED TOO FAR, WlLLIAM Faulkner's relation to the South resembles James Joyce's relation to Ireland. For both of them, their native culture and tradition, and to some extent their land's history, provided the subject matter of their fiction. For Joyce, that was true of all his great works; for Faulkner, fourteen of his nineteen novels, including all the great ones, center on one mythic county of his native state, and the others, but for one, on other parts of the Lower South. Both men were conscious of the provinciality of their culture and its subordinate relation to a dominant one. Both were insistent— Joyce less so—on the distinctiveness of the culture that was their own, though neither of them romanticized it. In Faulkner's case it seemed to justify the publication of a large Glossary of Faulkner's South with thousands of words—such as "shikepoke" and "laplink"—to assist not only his foreign readers but also non-Southerners whose native language was English. Other comparisons, however, seem less helpful. Joyce left Ireland as a youth and remained in exile the rest of his 266 THE BURDEN OF SOUTHERN HISTORY life. Faulkner stayed rooted in Mississippi, save for stints in Hollywood to stave off bankruptcy, a few brief trips abroad, and a self-dramatized residence in Virginia toward the end. Yet both Faulkner the homebody and Joyce the exile continued to nurture powerful if contradictory emotions about "home": love and hate, devotion and dismay, loyalty and shame. Faulkner, unlike his American contemporaries —Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and others of the "lost generation"—:never threw off the bonds of family, clan, proliferating relatives, and community. His obstinate withdrawal into provincial Oxford , where he did nearly all his writing, could be attributed to failure, until his writings eventually made him world famous. With the coming of fame, the mysteries and the paradoxes of the writer and his writings demanded and received more explanations, some wildly contradictory ones, while new Faulkner puzzles and enigmas kept appearing. Why, for example, was recognition so slow in coming? His greatest novels appeared between 1929 and 1936, and yet by 1945 all seventeen of his books except Sanctuary were out of print. Commenting on his Nobel Prize in 1950, the New York Times complained that his South was "too often vicious, depraved, decadent, corrupt," and added primly that "incest and rape may be common pastimes in Faulkner's 'Je fferson > Miss.' but they are not elsewhere in the United States." The important break for Faulkner's reputation in the United States came with Malcolm Cowley's publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946. Then the literary editor of THE BURDEN FOR WILLIAM FAULKNER 267 The New Republic, Cowley had already conceded that "there is no other American writer who has been so consistently misrepresented by his critics, including myself." In the introduction to his selections in 1946, Cowley spoke of Faulkner as "an epic or bardic poet in prose." And higher praise still was to come from reputable American critics. A question yet to be answered satisfactorily was why the Mississippian 's accomplishment was appreciated widely abroad before it was at home. Sartre, at the peak of his antiAmericanism , declared Faulkner to be a god for French youth, and Faulkner already had a devoted public in Italy and Japan. More and more unanswered questions piled up. How was one to reconcile the life of the writer with his achievement ? A seventh-grade dropout, Faulkner was virtually without formal education, and well along in his youth without a penny or a job. A furious worker, he also became a pathological drinker, a consumer of bootleg booze in huge quantities over incredible spells, with disastrous results . Periodically confined to institutions to dry out, he eventually died in one. His wife, Estelle, shared his addiction , which was more a consequence than a cause of their unhappy and tumultuous marriage, as were her attempts at suicide. Yet they stuck it out to the end despite the long succession of his attractive young women lovers with literary ambitions, whose letters Estelle sometimes intercepted. A family man in more than the nuclear way, Faulkner also stuck to—or was stuck with—an extended family of as many generations of relatives as happened to be around at a given time, along with proliferating nieces...