From the issue dated November 26, 2004
|
|
William Faulkner: 'Not an Educated Man'
William Faulkner has, by now, become a classic, one of those rare authors who never goes out of style, in part because he enjoys an exalted place on the syllabus of any self-respecting class in American literature. For half a century, college students have encountered such novels as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August during the course of their literary studies. Even high-school students have often found themselves assigned one of Faulkner's books, or perhaps one of his more famous stories, such as "A Rose for Emily" or "The Bear." All that is surprising, given the sad truth that the general reading public tends to shy away from difficult texts in the tradition of literary modernism. It has taken the dedicated work of professors and academic critics over a period of decades to make sure that Faulkner has an audience. Of course, once properly introduced to him, some of those readers continue to seek out his fiction, which accounts for the continuing interest in even his lesser works. It fascinates me that Faulkner, a huge beneficiary of the academy's loving attention, was himself almost phobic when it came to universities and schools, at least until his later years, when he established a fairly comfortable relationship with the University of Virginia. For the most part, Faulkner shunned academe. He was self-educated, like Ernest Hemingway and so many writers of his generation. He had been, at best, an indifferent student, never finishing high school in Oxford, Miss. He entered the 11th grade, in September 1915, only to play football. When the season ended (somewhat ingloriously), he dropped out. That lack of formal training did not, of course, mean that he didn't take his studies seriously. He read widely during most of his life, making his way unsystematically through the major texts from Homer and the Bible to various contemporary writers. As a young man, he was guided in his reading by an older friend, Phil Stone. In fact, Faulkner followed Stone to Yale, taking a room in the same boardinghouse in the spring of 1918. Though not enrolled as a student, Faulkner lived on the campus through early summer in New Haven, taking part in college life as a spectator, even attending the Harvard-Yale boat race along the Housatonic in May. He also spent time in the university library, reading and writing. The United States had recently entered the war in Europe, and Faulkner -- like most of his friends -- wanted to sign up. It was the great adventure of his generation, and he knew it. Having heard that the U.S. military was not accepting applications from prospective pilots, he joined a training program for cadet pilots in Canada, aiming for a commission in the Royal Air Force. Much to his consternation, the war ended before he earned his wings, so he was left to slink back to Oxford with nothing but a few tall tales to tell. Faulkner's hometown happened to be the seat of Ole Miss, where his parents lived in a house on the campus because his father was an administrator. Without enthusiasm, he enrolled in the fall semester of 1919 as a "special student," a category that allowed returning veterans to enter the university without the usual qualifications, such as a high-school diploma. Faulkner would hang around for the next two years, taking courses, rarely turning in a paper or showing up for an examination. In one English class on Shakespeare, he was asked by his professor what Othello meant by a certain speech and replied: "How should I know? That was nearly 400 years ago, and I wasn't there." All teachers have encountered students like that, and we are usually quite happy when the semester ends and that wiseacre disappears into the mist. Paying little or no attention to his formal course work, Faulkner nevertheless wrote a good deal of poetry and fiction, and he became a regular contributor to the student literary magazine. He also spent a lot of his time on the local golf course, and was a fixture at fraternity parties. His main academic influence was an English professor named Calvin Brown, who lived nearby. Brown read Faulkner's work and offered advice; he also suggested directions for Faulkner's reading. But the formal strictures of academic life had no appeal for the budding writer. After kicking around for a couple of years without purpose, Faulkner got a job in the winter of 1921 at the university post office at Ole Miss. For the next three years, he lived with his parents and served as the man behind the grate who sold stamps and sorted the mail. This period was, in some ways, Faulkner's most intimate contact with the academy, as an employee with a certain amount of independence. It was during these years that Faulkner widely expanded his knowledge of literature, spending a huge amount of time in an old leather chair at the back of the PO, reading novels and poetry. He also took advantage of the mail, combing through the latest magazines and journals that came to students and professors -- and he spent a portion of his time writing instead of sorting the mail, often refusing to come to the window when a customer asked for a stamp or help. In September 1924, the postal inspector from Corinth wrote to young Faulkner with a long list of complaints. He was grossly neglectful of his duties, mistreated the mail, showed indifference to customers. When the inspector appeared on the spot to investigate those accusations, he found heaps of unsorted mail. The place was a complete disaster, and Faulkner was soon dismissed. "I reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life," he said at the time, "but thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who's got two cents to buy a stamp." The actual story is more complicated than that, as Joan St. C. Crane suggested in a 1989 article in the Mississippi Quarterly, where she argued persuasively that Faulkner engineered his own downfall, perhaps even concocting the letter from the postal inspector as a big joke. (The inspector actually showed up, but he was much less accusatory than the letter had suggested.) Faulkner always enjoyed a good story, even at his own expense, and he was desperate to get away from the post office and the cloistered atmosphere of the university itself. He wanted free. From that point on, Faulkner remained wary of the university, often refusing invitations to visit campuses. Something about the aura of the academy threatened him, and he mostly preferred to remain at the margins of academic life. Once, speaking about his work in Japan, a questioner asked him about the relationship between literary style and ideas. Faulkner replied that he "didn't know much" about such things. He added: "I'm not even an educated man. I didn't like school and I quit in the sixth grade. So I don't know anything about rational and logical processes of thought at all. I didn't have enough mathematics to have a disciplined mind." Faulkner seems to have insisted on a romantic notion of genius, believing that works of imagination flow from a source deep in the writer's unconscious, and therefore are not approachable by the rational mind. Inside the academy, however, interest in Faulkner as a writer developed from quite early in his career. One of the first signs came in 1931, soon after the publication of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). He was invited to a conference of Southern writers at the University of Virginia, and it amazed him to find himself the center of attention. Everyone wanted to meet the young man whose work had rather quickly attracted the attention of serious critics, and he was mobbed at one cocktail party, where he leaned heavily on the arm of his editor, who had come down from New York to accompany him. Faulkner drank so much, in fact, that he threw up at the feet of his admirers, and was led back to his hotel and put to bed. After that embarrassing experience, he wanted little to do with academic conferences. Faulkner made very little money from his novels, so he was forced -- much like F. Scott Fitzgerald and so many others -- to seek employment in Hollywood. In those days, famous writers flocked to the studios, where they were paid huge sums for doing relatively little. Certainly Faulkner, in the '30s and '40s, did very little in Hollywood, apart from pursuing younger women and drinking vast quantities of alcohol. (He did receive writing credit for work on several well-known films, including The Big Sleep in 1946. But his contributions to screenplays were usually fairly minimal, consisting of notes for transitions and plot twists.) He had, by this time, married (unhappily) and fathered a daughter, setting up a permanent home in Oxford, where he lived only a short walk from his mother's residence. There -- between bouts of heavy drinking -- he managed to write novel after novel until his death in 1962. Invitations flowed in from colleges and universities, but Faulkner mostly shied away. He was aware that literary scholars and professors of literature found his work intriguing, and it pleased him when they invited him to their campuses, but he rarely accepted those invitations. One could write volumes about Faulkner's reception in the academy, and those books would have to deal with the question of why this particular author's work proved so attractive to professors, beginning in the late '40s. The answer would have something to do with the dominance of the New Criticism in that period, with its emphasis on the close analysis of texts. As Cleanth Brooks, a Yale professor who was at the forefront of the New Criticism, once told me in an interview: "His work explained so much about the working of fiction. It was perfect for the classroom, and inspired a generation of critics, who learned how to read closely by reading Faulkner." Academic critics liked the complexity of modernist work. T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, for example, flourished among critics and professors; there was so much to discuss in class about, say, The Waste Land or Ulysses. Allusions could be traced, and the ironies in the work could easily be discussed. With its complex shifts of time and multiple narrative perspectives, Faulkner's work was ideally situated to exemplify modernism. The very difficulty of reading Faulkner seems itself to have been an attraction, as it gave readers something to "unpack," to disentangle. One could tease out the various strands of the text, discuss the use of symbols, and guide students through the density of the author's language. These were not easy books to read without help, and the help of teachers and critical books was welcome. Long after the heyday of the New Criticism, that is still the case. Faulkner's complexity remains appealing, as narrative structure has continued to intrigue critics. Faulkner's idiosyncratic style has provided fodder for deconstructive critics, who can tease out meaning from sentences that seem to circle around the subject without quite landing on it. And Faulkner naturally attracts those critics who focus on the importance of race in American literature, as it was a subject he often took up in his fiction. There is also, of course, the undeniable fact that Faulkner was a superb writer, perhaps the most compelling and complex writer of his generation. His work was all of a piece, a vast tapestry of sorts, and it seemed -- it still does -- essential that the academy focus on the very best work of any given period. Faulkner, with Hemingway and Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, surely earned his place on the syllabus the old-fashioned way, by appealing to a range of readers over time, impressing them with the quality of his imagination and the language in which his thoughts found embodiment. By the mid-'50s, Faulkner had become established as a leading American novelist. Having traveled the world as a speaker, he became more comfortable in his public persona, and discovered that he really liked the attention from young readers. So when he was offered a position at the University of Virginia as a visiting writer in 1956, he agreed to give it a whirl. The job would not be demanding, he was assured: All he had to do was make himself available to students at specified times, and to give a certain number of readings. The main attraction of Charlottesville was the presence of his daughter, Jill, and her husband, Paul Summers. He had a new grandson, too -- another big draw. So he began what proved a happy (although tangential) relationship with the university, as he returned to the campus at various intervals to meet with students, to give readings and talks, and to participate in the life of the university. On one memorable occasion, he read aloud his story "The Old People," and then took questions from the audience of students and faculty members. When asked about the racial problems of the South, he responded: "I, too, feel the old inherited prejudices, but when the white man is driven by the old inherited prejudices to do the things he does, I think the whole black race is laughing at him." In a situation like that, it would seem that Faulkner provided a kind of model for the artist as frank thinker, as someone willing to confront his own limitations. It was quite rare, before the 1960s, for colleges or universities to provide a home for writers, and many of the well-known literary figures of the 20th century -- Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stevens, and others -- had little or nothing to do with academic settings. They often went out of their way to avoid them, as if fearing that somehow their time or creative talent would be sapped by the academy. Among writers of that period, Robert Frost was a notable exception. He was a familiar figure at Amherst, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Middlebury from 1917, when he first stepped onto the campus at Amherst, until his death in 1963. Interestingly enough, Frost also shared with Faulkner a sense of having been self-educated. He attended Dartmouth briefly, then Harvard for almost two years, but he never graduated, and it was not until middle age that he made his peace with the academy. In some ways, the success of Faulkner at the University of Virginia may well have encouraged other institutions to invite writers into their midst. Beginning in the '60s, writers have become familiar on campuses, and many creative-writing courses are taught by professors who have some experience themselves as writers. Given the broad access to higher education in the United States in the past four or five decades, it seems unlikely that writers will emerge -- or teach -- in the academy who have not been formally educated. That means, of course, that the rough-hewn idiosyncrasy that marks Faulkner's novels and stories may be a thing of the past, as readers now expect a certain conformity to the norms of "educated" writing. The obvious downside, perhaps, is that originality of a kind suffers, and contemporary fiction certainly does seem beset by an element of homogeneity, even a certain blandness. (Some of the exceptions, like Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, owe something of their own freshness to their reading of Faulkner.) It should be noted that Faulkner (unlike Frost and most writers in the academy today) did not actually teach. His mind was disorderly in many ways, and his reading had never been systematic. His full genius came into play only on the page, in his fiction, where he had easy access to a vast unconscious; he seemed to write for a whole region, and to write that region into the world. He transformed his "little postage stamp" of a county in Mississippi, which he called Yoknapatawpha, into a mythic sphere, a place of universal significance. Yet few, if any, of his accomplishments had anything to do with academic training. That Faulkner has been so much studied, so much analyzed, so deeply and thoroughly taught is not anything he would himself have predicted as he sat, bored out of his mind, in the classroom at Ole Miss in the months and weeks before he dropped out, for good. Then, too, as a young writer, he could never have guessed the degree to which the academic establishment would provide a perennial, and grateful, audience for his fiction. Jay Parini is a poet, a novelist, and a professor of English at Middlebury College. His One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, was recently published by HarperCollins Publishers. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 14, Page B6 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education