FALLING FOR FAULKNER

Abstract

7 3 R F A L L I N G F O R F A U L K N E R P A U L W E S T I first discovered William Faulkner in the days when my image of America was one of Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, rolled together with Count Basie and Woody Herman. I no sooner read those Chatto and Windus pocket Faulkners in their blue-and-gold uniforms than I was hooked, and the face of America became his, no longer that of the Kings of Swing. I began, I think, with Intruder in the Dust, an odd overture, followed by Wild Palms and Old Man, in one volume, alternating between them, and then The Sound and the Fury. I must have been eighteen because Intruder came out in 1948, and I now wonder what a small, under-financed public library in an obscure coal-mining town bang in the middle of the Sitwell Derbyshire estate was doing with a hot-o√-the-press work by Faulkner, who, from what I knew, was nowhere near as well established as Hemingway, although his stature increased, like my physical one, over the forties, even if in France, that educated country, he had always been revered. The name of our exotic librarian was Joyce Bramhall. Why was she accumulating Faulkner and giving him his own shelf (by 1948 some ten volumes )? I see her now, leggy, with slightly swollen belly in a tweed skirt, her mouth a gash of scarlet, her glasses thick and opaque as if 7 4 W E S T Y some tart secret infected the lenses. Her nails flashed scarlet, too, and her stiletto heels were high, tottery, and sleek. Was she a Belle Dame sans Something? A corncob woman? On I read, a born addict who had at last found a drug more potent by far than swing. Only four years later I was reading Requiem for a Nun in New York City, a young Hamlet (my nickname then and there) at Columbia sent to roam Manhattan because I knew too much to be in William York Tindall’s elementary graduate seminar, as he himself described it. Thanks to Faulkner, to the very thought of him, between forty and fifty I began to feel unassailable in spite of everything. I wasn’t, of course, but I felt that way, enough to get on with my writing and to mop up like high-calorie gravy such praise as came my way. If you fix one eye on Faulkner and the other on Melville, and you remember some of what Keats said about negative capability , you can just about manage to commit the delectable autonomy known as writing for its own sake, for the glory, the rebirth, the illusion of doing what nobody has done before. There is nothing more unassailable than that, even as things fall apart around you and you see the fruit flies ascending to power without composing so much as a paragraph. Vary the image a bit, amassing the bestiary of the foul, and you could add Zola’s toad of disgust, the one he said you have to swallow every morning before getting on with the work. Swallow it, note the hegemony of the fruit flies, and indeed the demise of yet another noble unicorn gone to rest in Paris or now plying his trade on Wall Street, and you then become clear enough to write for the next few hours as if the world were waiting for your sun to rise and would do nothing serious without you. That’s the feeling, the pumped-up, inspired elation that lofts you – that lofts me – from novel to novel even while the TweetiePies of Stodge College, Oxbridge, cough up some dark perilous matter and plaster it into their album of envious sorrow. Apart from admiring Faulkner’s expertise at caricatural opera, I never took much interest in Yoknapatawpha, the fantastic name only slightly below that of Brobdingnag. Its denizens might have been pinball salesmen in Ethiopia for all I cared. What bowled me over was Faulkner’s noise, that humming and thrumming you heard in the distance as you...