William Faulkner

...And the main cause of his misery was Estelle, a woman he could hardly bear to be around but was never able to leave for good...

...Helmut Schoeck has been professor and the director of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Mainz...

...Sexually, Estelle seemed burned out, brought down by one bout of poor health after another or simply depressed, which she tried to relieve with alcohol and heavy medication...

...When we got to the gate at the Faulkner property, he parked the car, turned off the motor, and we continued our palaver about the god who lived in the mansion visible through the trees...

...464 pages...

...When he returned from Canada after spending four months in the Royal Air Force, he wore his RAF uniform long after other veterans had consigned their regalia to mothballs and attic storage...

...Despite his cold exterior, his curt and sometimes rude manner, he craved affection...

...and creation is itself part of a death act, an element of self-destruction...

...If we can believe Karl's account, and he employs a plethora of evidence in support of his view, Faulkner must have been one of the most miserable of men...

...He advised me to look up Mac Reed, who owned the main drug store in town and was one of Faulkner's oldest friends...

...His dandyism, along with his apparent lack of ambition and his Byronic flouting of the local bourgeoisie, earned him the moniker "Count No-count...

...Actually, as Karl points out at great length, and with a lot of heavy-breathing speculation on the Freudian nature of his role-playing, Faulkner spent theyears following the First World War alternating between Bohemianism and dandyism...

...If we can believe Faulkner, his role now was to live a celibate life at Rowan Oak...

...His women friends later all testified to how he desired female understanding, affection, sympathy—but of course, on his terms...

...I told him I had no such interest since I knew how Mr...

...Besides that magnificent opus, he also wrote, among other things, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Absalom, Absalom...

...And far too many "dispossessions...

...I had read his article in Harper's' on that subject and respected his feelings...

...7440 North Shadeland Avenue, Dept V-101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 41 in France were first accepted at face value but came back to haunt him years later when Malcolm Cowley wanted to repeat them in his introduction to the Portable Faulkner (1946), the volume that did more than any other to rescue him from semi-oblivion...

...We should not underestimate his dissatisfaction in this area...

...She was caught in a familiar cycle...

...indeed, it cries out for an editor to remove the thousand and one redundancies, repetitions, windy extrapolations, weak analyses, farfetched comparisons, and attempts to show causal relationships where none necessarily exists...

...He also had a few other affairs, and proposed marriage to two of his girlfriends, Joan Williams and Jean Stein, both of whom were more than twenty years younger than he...

...I took the City of New Orleans, a great old train, to Memphis, where I spent the night in the hope of hearing some good jazz (there was none), and then took an early bus the next morning (a Saturday) to Oxford...

...For example, the owner of a small bakery-and-cafe, where I had breakfast and lunch two or three times, expressed what I have since learned was the consensus view of his townsmen...

...Of course, he asked the usual questions, including one that surprised and amused me: Was I an honest man...

...I only wanted to soak up as much as possible in the three days I had before returning to Urbana...

...A magnificent achievement...

...It is not only a basic contribution to social psychology, but also a wise defense of individual excellence and a compassionate but firm refutation of the naive, but all too common, propensity to placate envy...

...Gilchrist invited me to have lunch with him and his wife, an invitation I declined, having already imposed enoughon his generosity...

...Ranging widely over literature, philosophy, psychology and the social sciences, Professor Schoeck elucidates the very destructive aspects of envy as well as the positive role it can play...

...He seemed for some reason to resent Faulkner's making the children play outside in the yard rather than in the house...

...I was not there to argue or qualify...

...Drinking, he admits, "is part of some grand mystery: at the crossroads of the obsession to create and the compulsion to self-destruct...

...Far too many pages are wasted on Faulkner's rather insipid verse (we never needed Faulkner to remind us that he was "a failed poet") and his indebtedness to Swinburne, Housman, the French symbolists, Keats, Conrad Aiken, et al...

...Then Mr...

...For one thing, as the cafe owner told me, he was a hopeless drunkard who onvarious occasions had to be taken by ambulance (driven by one of the man's relatives) to the hospital to have his stomach pumped in order to save his life...

...And no wonder: of its 600,000-plus words, at least 300,000 are not only unnecessary but actually deleterious...

...Please send me a copy of your latest catalogue...

...We have also been told that Estelle would attempt suicide on their honeymoon, and then of course a fuller account of the attempt is given when the marriage takes place in 1929...

...W hat I best remember about Mr...

...Quan...

...It also shows evidence of Karl's having succumbed to Faulkner's unhappy addiction to mere rhetoric...

...Following that rather dubious sublimation we are told which half of the brain is stimulated and which depressed by drink—the latter being the side that "energizes memory, history, and a moral-ethical basis for one's acts...

...37.50 William H. Nolte 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 T ike so many other outsiders, I first Li learned of Faulkner's devotion to Bacchus from reading the Robert Coughlan articles that appeared in Life magazine in the fall of 1953, and were later incorporated into the little volume The Private World of William Faulkner...

...he was a lifelong sufferer from insomnia...

...maybe not...

...dollars...

...Despite all the renown that had come to Faulkner by way of the medals and awards he received in that decade, including the Nobel Prize, he was almost as much the outsider as he had been in the 1920s...

...Trivial as all this must sound to the reader, and it is trivial, I still recall the ride out in the new, high-powered Oldsmobile, which Mr...

...When Cowley wrote him about Hemingway's marital problems, and said that a letter from Faulkner might cheer Papa's spirits, he answered in a manner that reminds one of the cynical Jason IV of The Sound and the Fury: I'll write to Hemingway...

...After getting a room at the hotel, and realizing that I was (as usual) short of funds, I went to the bank—in that ancient age banks stayed open until noon on Saturday—to cash a check...

...He also defended Faulkner's early (in the 1920s) disregard for public decorum—in particular, his appearing barefooted on the streets downtown—as being attributable more to absentmindedness than to bad manners or the desire to shock...

...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...

...it was an aid to the creative process, and so forth...

...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989...

...So now we know...

...When asked what a student from Illinois was doing in Oxford, I told him of my interest in Yoknapatawpha County...

...America may be called many things, and more than a few of them unflattering, but to say she is fallen and dispossessed (whatever that means) and in need of sacrifice, crucifixion, and repentance is to emit the sort of nonsense one might expect to hear at a late-night gathering of Holy Rollers...

...One of the few books to extensively explore such an important topic, this classic study is now available again...

...Nor can I read the following two sentences without grinning and rolling my eyes to Heaven: What alcohol did for Faulkner was mediate between conflicting tensions, whether those he shaped into art or those created by a mother and father who represented different cultural poles...

...Gilchrist (I believe that was his name) okayed the check and told me to come back when the bank closed in an hour or so and he would drive me out to Faulkner's home...

...Besides, I was eager to talk to Mr...

...If his temperate (or temporizing) views, frequently expressed in the national media of that time, were dismissed as being reactionary, or anyhow containing a residue of racism, by many Northerners, they were thought to be highly inflammatory by Southerners...

...Estelle's first marriage, to Cornell Franklin, a man her parents much preferred to Faulkner, whom the Oldhams apparently liked but considered a failure from the start, lasted almost exactly eleven years and produced two children...

...For another, he was an atheist...

...The passage makes more understandable Faulkner's remark in the appendix he wrote for The Sound and the Fury, which Cowley included in the Portable Faulkner, that Jason IV was the first sane Compson since the family migrated to this country from Scotland more than a hundred years ago...

...Alas, poor Yorick, and poor Oedipus, and poor Faulkner, and poor reader, now we know...

...Incidentally, Faulkner spent more than ten years working intermittently on A Fable...

...In short, it needs editing...

...Karl describes what he considered the major cause for his unhappiness, circa 1933, this way: Under [his increasing responsibilities], he was not satisfied sexually, nor would he be until he gained a succession of compliant younger women...

...There are too many "lost Edens" and "Edenic visions" cluttering up the landscape...

...During the course of my lengthy chat that afternoon with Reed, he told me that once he discovered what was revealed in the Life articles he simply removed the magazines from his rack...

...A shoddy piece of bookbinding, to be sure, but not without a relevance of sorts...

...Well, yes, at least in money matters I might be trusted...

...s I say, Karl's biography is a mess —gauche, pompous, otiose, obtuse, inane...

...Which seems to me a devastating indictment of Faulkner's artistry...

...Finally, he was a nigger-lover...

...Faulkner was pulled apart from childhood by parental tension: his father, that world of men, frontier sensibility, hard drinking, a sense of self which can never be penetrated because it is so fiercely disguised and defended...

...The two are interlocked, so that drink is as necessary to life as is creation...

...Faulkner can get away with such stuff, at least sometimes, but the critic should steer clear of employing words for their clang tint or connotations...

...The question is not merely one of orality, but of life and death...

...Gilchrist drove with abandon, seldom looking at the road as he chatted with me or pointed out some object for my attention...

...Just why he was so heavy a drinker is hard to say—thus making possible allkinds of speculation...

...With virtually everyone else in the community, or so I was led to believe, he thought Faulkner had gone too far in supportof the civil rights proponents...

...He shows that the concept of envy is necessary to fully understand both the totalitarian state and the utter futility of egalitarianism...

...Right out of Wuthering Heights, I thought, or some other gothic novel...

...Gilchrist admitted he had read only a few of the short stories that had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post...

...And that was Reed's inability to consider, to take seriously in any fashion, the prospect that racial integration might someday come to Mississippi...

...By then I was an avid fan, reading everything that appeared on my hero...

...The man, who must have been in his middle thirties, recalled that as a boy he sometimes went home with Malcolm Franklin, Faulkner's stepson, after school...

...Name Address City/State/Zip Mail to: Liberty Fund, Inc...

...Though hardly an ardent advocate of integration, Faulkner caused some alarm even among his closest friends, as well as the members of his family...

...I cannot recall how many times he injured himself by falling down the stairs at Rowan Oak, the antebellum home he purchased in 1930...

...WILLIAM FAULKNER: AMERICAN WRITER Frederick R. Karl/Weidenfeld & Nicolson/1,131 pp...

...Professor Karl constantly "conjectures," to use his word, that this or that may appertain, may have been the unconscious motive (Freudian paradoxes are everywhere in dismal and dismaying evidence) for Faulkner's (or someone else's) having done this instead of that...

...A long book by any standards—though not as long as Joseph Blotner's two-volume life, which Karl constantly uses for factual material—this new biography seems much longer than it is...

...Even so, he took a decidedly dim view of marriage...

...All his work, including even his early drawings, is placed under rollers and spread out to a fine thinness...

...his mother, the desire to read, the support for his writing, the "feminine" world of literary endeavor which contradicted what the father represented...

...Apparently man can be cured of drugs, drink, gambling, biting his nails and picking his nose, but not of marrying...

...The veil has been removed...

...Karl tries to explain his alcoholism in various ways: it was the "manly" thing to do...

...He also carried a cane and affected a limp, the offspring of some (imaginary) heroic exploit...

...His outlandish tales of derring-do as a pilot LibertyPtess/LibertyClassics ENVY By Ilelmut Schoeck Envy is a drive which lies at the core of man's life as a social being...- So writes Helmut Schoeck in Envy, first published in German in 1966 and in an English translation in 1970...

...We are informed that it was not unusual for him to drink a fifth of bourbon a day, and then be at his writing desk at 4:00 a.m...

...If a few citizens accepted him, and sought to conceal if not defend his deficiencies, the average Oxonian objected to him for moral reasons...

...Figuratively speaking, the book had come "unglued" long before it physically fell apart...

...I even took time off from my graduate studies in Urbana to visit Oxford (in November 1958, to be exact) and have a look at the mythical Yoknapatawpha County...

...All orders must be prepaid in U.S...

...Long before Faulkner marries his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham Franklin, we have been informed (several times) William H. Nolte is C Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...

...He then asked if I was interested in meeting "Mr...

...And if war is all wars, temporality is eternal presentness...

...Not about the writer's oeuvre, since Mr...

...It's nice to recall that there was at least one giant in the earth in them days...

...Hardcover $16.00 Paperback $ 7.50 Liberty Fund, Inc., 7440 North Shadeland Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46250 0-86597-063-7 0-86597-064-5 Liberty Fund edition, 1987 Please send me: Envy Liberty Fund edition, 1987...

...At cocktail parties, particularly in New York and Los Angeles (which he called "the plastic asshole of the world"), he was seen drinking as many as fifteen martinis before being hauled away to bed...

...Needless to say, I contented myself with listening to the recital of sins, offering no comment on the subjects of alcohol, religion, or Negroes...

...T he material on Faulkner's drinking habits or, rather, habitual drinking, would make a sizable monograph—entitled, let us suppose, "The Writer as Heroic (but Most Unhappy) Lush...

...He pauses in one place to give us a little lecture on alcoholism among American writers living and dead...

...At least you will be safe then from any other one marrying you—which is bound to happen if you ever divorce her...

...We are cautioned that things are seldom what they seem to be and the insignificant must be shown to be significant...

...In asking him about any such prospect, which seemed to me inevitable, I may as well have inquired when he thought people in Oxford would begin attending church services without any clothes on...

...Though he admitted that Faulkner did have a most unfortunate drinking problem, he objected to its being bruited about in such a sensationalmanner...

...Reed, however, was only indirectly related to Faulkner...

...Never content to tell us anything, no matter how insignificant, and then perhaps remind us later by repeating it a time or two, Karl insists on six, seven, or a dozen repetitions, assuming, I suppose, that his readers cannot possibly remember what they have just read...

...We have, of course, Meta Carpenter's account of her longtime affair with Faulkner, A Loving Gentleman (1976), which Karl avidly mines...

...Bibliography, index to names and subjects...

...On the way back to town Mr...

...And then later we are reminded a few more times of the fact, or what may have been a fact...

...I'm not sure what that means, particularly the bit about the brain energizing history, nor does it help much to be then told that "Liquor establishes a dialectic within the individual which nothing can resolve...

...Or, for that matter, how many times Estelle fell down the same stairs, for the same reason...

...Thomas S. Szasz...

...I see no reason, for example, for his telling us half a dozen times that Helen Baird served as the model for Charlette Rittenmeyer in The Wild Palms...

...BOOK REVIEWS W hen I was slightly more than halfway through Frederick Karl's William Faulkner: American Writer, and beginning to wonder if there was no end to the thing, if my agony was to be permanent, a goodly slab of the text (about 220 pages) came unglued from the spine and slipped quietly into my lap...

...between 1929 and 1936—without doubt the most remarkable display of genius ever shown by an American novelist...

...Price Amount Hardcover $16.00 Paperback 7.50 Subtotal Indiana residents add 507 sales tax Total We pay book postage rate...

...Faulkner detested intrusions on his privacy...

...Reed...

...Since 1965, Dr...

...Well, maybe...

...In one place Karl notes that Faulkner may have been indebted to Dostoevsky for the Christ parable in A Fable, and then adds: "But Faulkner did not need the Russian writer to understand that a fallen, dispossessed America, now caught in the coils of a great conflict, needed sacrifice, crucifixion, repentance...

...He told me that on one occasion when their play extended beyond nightfall, Faulkner suddenly appeared outside, probably drunk, and began screaming curses at the stars above, ranting and raving at the powers and principalities of the air like one gone berserk...

...And too many profundities that merely befuddle—for example: "War is, Faulkner repeats, all wars, the Civil War as archetypal...

...But drink he did—from his middle-teens almost to the day of his death...

...In other words, a three-headed monster...

...Bill," who had left the bank only minutes before I entered...

...but not in any simple equation of art-as-life and drink-as-death...

...Though Karl's explanations run the gamut from the dubious to the plainly silly, his documentation of Faulkner's dependence on liquor makes one wonder how he could have produced as much as he did—and he was the most prolific major writer of his generation—when his binges landed him in hospitals and drying-out clinics numerous times, and would have killed him several times over except for the intercession of family, friends, and editors who had him forcibly restrained...

...Poor bloke, to have to marry three times to find out that marriage is a failure, and the only way to get any peace out of it is (if you are fool enough to marry at all) keep the first one and stay as far away from her as much as you can, with the hope of some day outliving her...

...A most timely and necessary book, with the unmistakable stamp of the classic upon it...

...He wrote Light in August in six months...

...Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...

...that the marriage was doomed from the start, and that Faulkner knew it, and that he may have married her because he knew it...

...I am made even more uneasy by the statement that Faulkner's long, involved sentences were a result of the booze he consumed while the divine afflatus had him by the ear...

...Informed by the teller that I would need the approval of the bank president, I approached that remarkable figure, a huge old man with a walrus mustache...

...it acted as an escape mechanism...