The Life of William Faulkner Read online

  Archivist Rick Watson, the son of eminent Faulkner scholar James G. Watson, helped me navigate my way through the Carvel Collins Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Rick saved me a lot of time by expediting my access to the papers. I owe thanks as well to Ned Comstock at the Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California. I have known Ned since the mid-1980s, and he has remained an important source of archival material for many of my biographies. He has sent me copies of vital items that I did not know existed. Jenny Romero and the rest of the staff at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have always proven a boon to my research, and that was true in this case as well, pointing me to a script not mentioned in previous accounts of Faulkner’s career. Todd Goddard at Utah Valley University hosted my talk on “Faulkner as Screenwriter” and secured funding for a trip to Salt Lake City so that I could examine the Faulkner-authored scripts in the Howard Hawks Collection at Brigham Young University.

  Similarly, through a generous invitation from Faulkner scholar Stephen Hahn at William Patterson University, I was able to examine the important work Donald Philip Duclos did on William C. Falkner, the old Colonel.

  Jennifer Ford, Jessica Leming, and Lauren Rogers, in Special Collections at the University of Mississippi Library, facilitated my work in its Meta Carpenter Wilde Collection and other choice items such as Faulkner’s handwritten script “Wooden Crosses,” a first-draft screenplay that became The Road to Glory. And thanks to Gerald Walton for helping me out on my interest in the Ole Miss golf course that Faulkner played on. I’m grateful to William D. Griffith for a splendid tour of Rowan Oak and for answers to my questions.

  Elizabeth Sudduth, Director of the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, made my visit to consult the Frederick R. Karl Archive and Malcolm Argyle Franklin Collection efficient and profitable.

  Matthew Turi, Manuscripts Research and Instruction Librarian, Research and Instructional Services Department, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina, helped to facilitate my work in the Robert H. Moore Papers.

  Meredith Mann in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library helped me navigate through the Joel Sayre Papers, as did Mary Catherine Kinniburgh in the Berg Collection for various Faulkner items.

  David Harper and Jessica Stock made my visit to the M. Thomas Inge Faulkner Collection at West Point a delight and an edification. I was able to follow Faulkner’s walking route to his talk.

  Penny White, reference librarian, and the Digital Production Group at the University of Virginia Library aided in acquiring the volume 1 cover image and several of the images in the galleries.

  Edward Perry and Marcus Gray, two Faulkner scholars, have stuck with me over several years, making important suggestions about items essential to this biography. I thank Patrik Andersson for answering my query about the correspondence between Faulkner and Else Jonsson, and John Waters for answering my questions about Jean Stein.

  Other Faulkner scholars, including Ted Atkinson, Sarah Gleeson-White, Arthur Kinney, Claude Pruitt, D. Matthew Ramsay, Timothy Ryan, Stefan Solomon, and Sally Wolff-King have responded to my queries and have contributed to the completion of my biography. I’m grateful to Jack Elliott for sending me an advance copy of his valuable work on Faulkner’s last days, and for his last-minute corrections of material relating to Faulkner’s ancestry and his early years. I should have consulted Jack sooner.

  For sound advice about matters related to Faulkner and publishing, I’m grateful to Craig Gill, the Director of the University Press of Mississippi.

  My fellow biographers Jonathan Alter, James Atlas, Kate Buford, Betty Caroli, Mary Dearborn, Gayle Feldman, Anne Heller, Justin Martin, Marion Meade, Sydney Stern, Will Swift, and Amanda Vail have given me much good advice, encouragement, and items to mull over for this biography.

  Thank you, Barbara Barnett, for helping me with my rudimentary French and figuring out a Faulkner caption, and William Crawley for speaking with me about Faulkner’s visit to Mary Washington University. And to Rosemary Clark, for untold great finds and research assistance, I am immeasurably indebted.

  Several research award grants from Baruch College and the PSC-CUNY Research Fund made it possible to travel to archives and to conduct interviews for this book. Biography is an expensive endeavor, and without such help I don’t see how I could have taken on so many research projects.

  I’m very pleased that my shrewd agent, Colleen Mohyde, and my astute editor, Eric Brandt, combined to make this a better book. To Susan Murray, my magnificent copyeditor, and to the vigilant Morgan Myers, my heartfelt thanks for making this book, line by line, and chapter by chapter, better than I could make it myself. And it is gratifying to say here how much I valued the support of the late Mark Saunders, the former Director of the University of Virginia Press.

  Lisa Paddock, my wife and a wonderful Faulkner scholar, patiently listened to my plans for the biography and made many excellent suggestions. I’m sure it was a trial, at times, to put up with my obsession, but she has borne it pretty well.

  The Life of William Faulkner

  1

  Beginnings

  1825–1910

  The Big Dog

  Because William Faulkner’s characters are obsessed with the past, the same has been said of their author. Biographers dwell on his family history, especially the example of his great-grandfather, the old Colonel, William C. Falkner (1825–1889),1 who embodied the “three major legends of the South: the Cavalier Legend, about family origins and personal style; the Plantation Legend, about ‘the golden age’ before the war; and the Redeemers Legend, about the glorious unseating of the carpetbaggers.”2 Biographers quote young Willie’s public avowal that he wanted to be a writer like his great-granddaddy, and they have assiduously investigated the old Colonel’s life, exhuming details that Faulkner may not have known or have cared to examine. When Donald Philip Duclos pressed Faulkner for details, the novelist suggested the scholar fill out the record with fiction, which is precisely what Faulkner had already done—as Duclos pointed out to him.3

  The elements of Faulkner’s southern heritage, and particularly his family history, do not come fully into play until his third novel, Flags in the Dust, published as Sartoris, a truncation that magnifies, sometimes simplifies, and debunks Falkner family lore. The old Colonel figure, John Sartoris, embodies the myth more than the man William C. Falkner. The man, more townsman than plantation owner, and certainly no cavalier with legions of slaves, was a lawyer and businessman who came out of the war with a fortune—how, no one knew, although he may have acquired his wealth as a blockade-runner after leaving the Confederate army in 1863. And what did William C. Falkner have to do with Reconstruction? In Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished John Sartoris shoots carpetbaggers attempting to win an election with black votes. Nothing like this episode occurred in William C. Falkner’s life. William Faulkner carefully selected the fictional value in his great-grandfather’s career and scorned the biographer’s search for evidence. Here is what mattered, Faulkner told Robert Cantwell, who published a Life magazine profile in 1938: The old Colonel was “overbearing” and “had to be big dog. He built the railroad after the Civil War because he wanted to make a lot of money.” This man was not fit for Faulkner’s fiction. Money as such does not enter into John Sartoris’s calculations. Faulkner’s fiction never examines the man too carefully and favors deploying him through the veils of memory and nostalgia. The old Colonel, “a grasping, pushing stinker,” resembled a robber baron, “exemplifying the social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century.”4

  Was Faulkner “haunted” by his great ancestor?5 The legend suited him insofar as it was good material for a story. He told Cantwell about the Colonel’s big marble statue in the Ripley cemetery, still there in the capital of the old Colonel’s enterprises. Faulkner pictured his great ancestor riding through “that country like a living force. I like it better that way. I never read any history. I talked to people. If I got it straight it is because I didn’t worry with other people’s ideas about it.” Absorbed in his own creation, he lost track of what was Falkner and what was Sartoris. He would have to go through the novel page by page and ask himself, “Did I hear this or did I imagine this?”6 He used what played well on the page. Like Bayard Sartoris in The Unvanquished, who rejects and honors his father’s legacy, William Faulkner repudiated but also revered his heritage.

  The legend of the old Colonel and his exploits during the war were part of Uncle Ned Barnett’s repertoire. Born in 1865 and raised to serve the old Colonel and the next generations of Falkners, Ned had an air of authority stemming from his propinquity to the past. Ned appears with his own name in The Reivers, the novel that brings Faulkner full circle back to family history. “He is a cantankerous old man,” Faulkner told Cantwell, “who approves of nothing I do.” When Faulkner introduced Cantwell to the reserved, almost formal Ned, the mention of the old Colonel’s name seemed to “make Ned older.” Asked to provide details about his master, Ned grew silent; the “recollections seemed troubling,” Cantwell observed. Perhaps most telling is Cantwell’s conclusion that “Colonel Falkner’s life brooded almost oppressively over that cabin in the woods. . . . I sensed its reality, not so much to Faulkner as to the old man.”

  Like John Sartoris, the old Colonel had been shot down in the street, the murder victim not only of rivalry with a former business partner, Richard Thurmond, but also of Falkner’s own unrelenting torment of his competitor. His great-grandson remembered how those on the Thurmond side would cross the street rather than acknowledge a Falkner.7 It was precisely this kind of bad blood
that Lincoln sought to allay in his postwar policy and that Faulkner assuaged in stories like “An Odor of Verbena,” based upon the old Colonel’s murder.

  Faulkner imbibed much of his family history from his great-aunt, Alabama Falkner McLean, the old Colonel’s last surviving child. Bama, as the family called her, was his favorite, to whom he felt he must account, and for whom he named his firstborn child. He enjoyed her “charming grand-duchess air” and her habit of making “penetrating stage asides.” She intimidated her family, as one Falkner put it, but Bama was also a “stimulating person who read much, talked about what she read, and inspired you to do likewise.”8 She would later say that she could see the old Colonel’s facial expressions in his great-grandson.9

  Through his Aunt Bama, William Faulkner also accessed the playful side of the old Colonel, especially in evidence in Rapid Ramblings in Europe. In a dedication to baby Roy, his affectionate appellation for Bama, the “pet of the household,” Falkner quotes from her unintentionally funny letter to him: “Mama and I are well; my big doll had its nose broken clear off. Hoping these few lines will find you enjoying the same blessing.” The author then turns to us: “I don’t think she meant to express a wish that the letter would find my nose broken, consequently I inscribe this work to her.” This delightful, idiosyncratic book presents a boasting hero who also casts a skeptical eye on himself and even engages in buffoonery. In short, he is a comic figure whose commentary is not so different from his great-grandson’s humorous exposures of vainglory and chicanery. The old Colonel was a trickster—never forget that when assessing William Faulkner’s presentation of himself and his ancestry. In the old Colonel’s famous novel The White Rose of Memphis, set aboard a steamboat, virtually every character masquerades as someone else, leading a double life, pretending to be royalty, cloaking in the costumery of a party baser motivations and commonness that have to be redeemed by the nobility of women fighting for their men.

  Faulkner scoffed at his great-grandfather’s famous melodramatic novel: “The men all brave and the women all pure.”10 But he also said the book was better than the general impression of it. The novel may have at least provided the great-grandson with an antidote to the acrimony that infested southern accounts of the war. For Colonel Falkner began his best-known work in a spirit of reconciliation:

  Let the past bury the past—let us cultivate a feeling of friendship between the North and South. Both parties committed errors—let both parties get back to the right track. Let us try to profit by our sad experience—let us teach forgiveness and patriotism, and look forward to the time when the cruel war shall be forgotten. We have a great and glorious nation, of which we are very proud, and we will make it greater by our love and support. It was a family quarrel, and the family has settled it, and woe be to the outsider who shall dare to interfere!

  The Falkner desire to defend the South’s case ended with the old Colonel, and William Faulkner’s fiction reflects the same attitude, although the past could not be so easily buried as the old Colonel hoped.

  If Colonel Falkner sought reconciliation in his prose, he perpetuated divisiveness in both his private and public life. He had been a slaveholder and most likely miscegenetic. In The Siege of Monterey (1851), before he had become reconciled to defeat, Falkner admonished the North: “Do you wish to rob us of our slaves? / If so, give us our bloody graves.” Yet the old Colonel was not like those South Carolina fire-breathing rebels. He suggested the North might yet offer redress of grievances and that “secession is a serious undertaking, / It will set the whole globe to shaking.”11 More was at stake than economic losses resulting from the abolition of slavery. The peculiar institution represented a way of life that had evolved in a sort of morganatic way. William C. Falkner and Richard Thurmond may have shared a black mistress, and their possession of her may have contributed to the acrimony that ended in Falkner’s death. He is reported to have said, while dying, “What did you do it for, Dick?”12 The question signifies, perhaps, not merely Falkner’s shock and baffling inability to understand how he had alienated friends, family, and foe alike,13 but also a certain intimacy, a shared experience with Thurmond, that contributed to Falkner’s plaintive last words, although the evidence for such an intimacy has been disputed by Jack Elliott, now writing a revisionist biography of the old Colonel.14

  To explain why the old Colonel had to die as he did requires a narrative nearly as convoluted and fragmented as Absalom, Absalom! or Go Down, Moses. In fact, biography might contribute to understanding those historiographical novels by revealing that, like his characters, Faulkner could only know his family’s past by intuiting and imagining it—just as the connection between Thomas Sutpen, slave owner, and his black son, Charles Bon, is established through deduction and insight. The story begins in 1859, when Colonel Falkner settled a lawsuit in favor of his client Benjamin E. W. Harris and as a fee took possession of his client’s slave, Emeline, and her three children.15 Falkner acquired several slaves in the same manner. Among Emeline’s progeny, it has always been told that Colonel Falkner fathered her fourth child, named Fannie Forrest Falkner, the first name perhaps the sobriquet of his sister Frances, and the middle name in honor of Nathan Bedford Forrest, that wily scourge of the invading Yankees who appears in his great-grandson’s Civil War fiction.

  Fannie’s birth most likely occurred in 1863, in Pontotoc, Mississippi, thirty miles south of Ripley. Colonel Falkner had retired from his role as military man, aggrieved that he had not received the recognition and higher rank that his heroic efforts deserved. He was apparently estranged from his wife, Elizabeth Vance, who moved permanently to Memphis. In Pontotoc, he might have resorted to lucrative blockade-running that provided for his postwar investments. Colonel Falkner suffered from physical complaints that might have been bleeding ulcers. He may have found emotional support in Emeline, then twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The author of The White Rose of Memphis and other sentimental novels and poems, and known to indulge in emotional public reminiscences about his early life and struggles, created male characters who are simply at a loss without the women in their lives, women who express a purity and patience that their impulsive and imprudent male lovers can never match. Only women in The White Rose of Memphis have the stamina, tolerance, and conviction to prevail. For all their simplistic characterization, the female characters in Falkner’s most famous novel are the avatars of women like Clytie and Judith in Absalom, Absalom!16

  After Emeline’s death in 1898, her Ripley cemetery tombstone identified her as Mrs. Emeline Falkner, and although no record of an actual marriage has been found, she has been memorialized as such by a family that has always believed, like the descendants of Sally Hemings, in both their black and white progenitors. Alfreda Hughes, Emeline’s great-granddaughter, grew up in West Baltimore with the understanding that she shared the same great-grandfather with William Faulkner.17 The black Falkners believe that only Fannie, among Emeline’s children, was sent to college with Colonel Falkner’s support. Deaths in the black community were not news, and yet the Ripley Standard reported: “‘Aunt’ Emeline Falkner, one of the good old ante-bellum colored women of Ripley, died Monday at the home of Sam Edgerton, her son-in-law.” Calling Emeline “Aunt” was itself a tribute, since most black people were not addressed as Mr., Miss, or Mrs. and were acknowledged only by their first names or by nicknames, if not simply referred to as “boy” and “girl.”18 Williamson notes that Emeline is the “only Mrs. Falkner in the [Ripley] cemetery” where the old Colonel’s “marble self rises above all.”

  After Colonel Falkner’s death, a mulatto woman (Emeline?) was rumored to have visited Thurmond in jail before he made bail, though the historian Jack Elliott attributes the rumor to an effort to discredit Thurmond.19 For a fact, both Emeline and her daughter Fannie worked as servants in Thurmond’s house. These fraught connections between Thurmond and Falkner result in Williamson’s suggestion that the “failure of the jury to convict Thurmond was not simply a matter of money spent overtly and covertly in his defense.” To Jack Elliott, however, “too much has been made about possible irregularities in Thurmond’s trial,” and acquittal was “based upon convincing the jury that the defendant was in fear of his life.”20 The Tupelo Journal reported the “deadly feud” between the two men, and any gesture on Falkner’s part that Thurmond might have considered threatening may have been enough to convince the jury that Thurmond acted in self-defense.