Later!

Claire

See you Monday!

I know we don't start till next week, but may I please refer to the first line in the Minter? Charlie? Just the first line? How can it hurt?

"William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on 25 September 1897, the first child of Maud and Murry Falkner."

What captured my attention in that sentence was the fact that we have yet another first child in the family who became a famous writer...the first similarity we encounter with James Joyce. I wonder if a study has ever been made of birth order and famous writers? There seem to be many first borns in this position, don't there?

And note the difference in spelling of the family name. There's got to be a story there!

Alright, I'll be quiet...but let me tell you this - I love writers' biographies. When Charlie suggested Biography, this is the first kind I thought of. Love to compare my secret yearnings to write with those who have gone ahead and done it! And I come away with a better understanding of why I never made it! But I am first born in a family of five...

See you all Monday!

I believe I've heard of some study of first born writer's and that it is an astoundign stastic...

JOAN'S GOT THE BLOTNER!!! OK, Joan. You asked for it. WHENEVER there's a question of authenticity or interpretation we're going to ask YOU TO GO TO THE SOURCE: The 800+ page BLOTNER and find out! HAHA!

Factoid: New Albany, MS is the home of a Wal-Mart Super Distribution Center. I Know this from my work. What does it mean?

This is an exciting experiment, Charlie!

I hope tons of people join in the discussion, even if the biographies are not available! It will make the reading of A.A! a breeze! Well... less daunting. Faulkner is a complex character himself and his early years explain all that.

Back on Friday!

The writer keeps referring to the story as a myth...representing what happened to the south I guess. Do we have a good definition of MYTH?

Claire

Amazing Lady, please audit here even if you don't have time for the book. And then do get Absalom, Absalom! for November and join in that discussion. Not a long book and we go nice and slow. Time won't be a problem and if you understand the context, which you will pick up here in this one, you will be so very well prepared!

See y'all tomorrow! (Mississippi talk!)

myth. 1. A traditional story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that informs or shapes the world view of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the customs or ideals of society;

2. A story, a theme, an object, or a character regarded as embodying an aspect of a culture;

3. A fiction or half-truth, esp. one that forms part of an ideology;

4. A fictitious story, person, or thing

Manana!

LEGEND - a story coming down from the past; especially : one popularly regarded as historical although not verifiable.

The same? Or does MYTH seem to connote something more meaningful and deeply ingrained in our consciousness than LEGEND? Your thoughts??

I’ll leave it there for now. Myths and legends…

I'm going to stop right here, but not before saying something I may take back later...I hope so. I don't like this kid! Maybe because I don't understand him. I liked Jimmy Joyce...another weird child, but somehow I understood him - and where he was coming from. I guess I don't have to like him to appreciate his work. Or even understand where he's coming from...a complex man. My first impressions are often way off - so I'll try to keep an open mind here!

He inserted a "u" in his own name

According to the notations I'm reading (Cliffs NOtes) the old spelling of his last name didn't have the U. It was put in there by the publisher of his first works by mistake . He liked it and kept it. . . maybe to express his own power and individuality within the overwhelming world he had inherited...to find his own place within the MYTH.

CHARLIE, I like the distinction between myth and legend, legend being a particular happening and myth relating to the general historical happenings diversified and changed into a folk tale. . . . within the remembrance of things past.

I was in a class that studied Greek mythology and liked it because each character expressed some aspect of my own human psychology. The old Greeks knew what we were made of didn't they.Their characters, selected for their particular human attributes peopled fictional tales to creat LEGENDS. I think the same thing must have happened to the BIBLE. . . now taken to be real by many who use it to manage their lives.

"But he spent time with him, lots of time listening to his father and buddies swapping tales of the old south...lots of real stories.">

But were they real, these stories or had they already begun to change to become the stuff of folklore or legend. HIs writing style is like that..gossip and half-remembered stories exchanged in neighborly fashion by real people. At least this is what I glean from CLIFFS NOTES.

Claire

Charlie

Charlotte - Good point about WF’s name change also having the effect of claiming ”his mother for himself”, Minter makes the same point about his mother and goes further: by changing the Old Colonel’s surname he exercised “a subtle authority, even a kind of dominance” over his legacy. His first book was dedocated to his mother. The letters he wrote home, almost for his entire life were written solely to his mother.

"A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conquerer, that confidence of success that often induces real success."

"One genealogical historian has written that there is a strong possiblity that the immigrant ancestors were John and Elizabeth Faulkner who arrived in Maryland in January of 1665...The descendents would variously identify their lineage as Scottish, Ulster Irish and French Huguenot.

The 1790 census spelled the name Faulkner, in other records it appeared as Falkner, Folkner, Fortner, and probably Falconer.

Then we go right up to the Colonel and his straaange story. He goes to fight in Mexico and his discharge papers, dated Oct. 6, 1847, his name is still spelled Faulkner. At some point thereafter, he dropped the "u". (Great-granddaddy dropped the "u"!!!)

Eighty years later the Colonel's namesake would make the notation on a form: '(surname originally Faulkner).' One of his other descendants would say that there were 'some no-account folks' in another part of the state who spelled their name Faulkner, and he didn't want to be confused with them."

claire, I probably wouldn't have liked you either! HAHAHAHA

Juuust kidding! Seriously, I don't dislike young Billy for those reasons...heavens, my own boys would have been in that category! And there were things I did like about him...his ability to listen to others, and the way he retained all that he heard, including colloquialisms, intonation...

I dislike his lack of feeling for his father, writing him out of his own biographies...just because he regards him a failure. His father didn't leave...he worked every day to provide for his family, perhaps not as well as young WF would have liked...but I didn't like that trait in him at all.

I dislike his affected ways, his dress, his effete mannerisms. I don't understand them. He was small and yet he was an athlete. He was a football quarterback, a pitcher, a shortstop in high school, and yet a poet, a bohemian, an aesthete. A complex character! Is he experimenting? It is said that he would rather observe others, such as at dances...sit in silence and watch others. But then it is said he was a leader! When I say I don't like him, it's probably because I don't understand him...YET! He makes me uncomfortable. He isn't open and direct. He seems stuck on himself. What is mama doing sewing those tight, tight pants for him? I don't get that either. Why is she encouraging him like this?

We shall see. I don't think this is going to be easy, but agree that when we get it straight here, we will bring more understanding to what we are reading in Absalom!

Charley I like CHOLLIE except for the ie at the end and if you leave out the H you have COLLIE, my lifetime preference/passion since exposure to LAD A DOG by TERHUNE at age eleven. It's amazing the influence literature has on us isn't it. Anyhow CHOLLY is good...gets my vote. :_} Claire

Oh, right June: Big Daddy – Burl Ives!!

Claire - It seems that William , as well as all the Faulker boys were “their mother’s sons”. Later, he did have trouble in school being known as “quare”- not sure of the exact connotations during that time – jus plain strange, I think..

Betty: Minter does give a good overview of what he’s out to show in the preface doesn’t he. His main thrust, it seems is to differentiate WF from many of today’s writers: writers of alienation and disconnectedness as opposed to the connected nature of the work of WF. Connected to REGION and with a deep sense of HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS. What he calls this “unusually strong sense of holistic unity with his family, and especially with his mother.” Then he goes on to show how these connections came about and how they show up and define the work of William Faulkner. Betty, I’d be curious to know what you thought about this WF “persona” changing – APART from its implications regarding his sculpting his identity as an artist, if any. I don’t know if I’m being clear. I guess I mean to say that isn’t this something we all do (to greater or lesser degrees at a young age)? Try on different roles to see how they fit? How comfortable they are?

Unchoosing his father!!! Perfect!!

And Betty – that’s a GREAT story about your name change. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.

The other thing was his statement that “Like his life, Faulkner’s art serves the double purpose of deception and expression.” Fascinating and I think this is something he’ll be developing throughout and I’d bet we should keep it filed away as we read Absalom, Absalom.

Charlie

And Oates on the “U”: WF first used it for the development of his “British” persona as he applied to the RAF in order to join the war effort. The impetus for joining itself was part of the “jilted lover” persona that he embraced after Estelle married Cornell Franklin. Later, Oates informs, he applied the spelling to the Old Colonel as part of the introduction to the publication of his pastoral, The Marble Faun.

June - Me too! Mine will be here this week (The Modern Library Absalom) - I've already learned that Bennet Cerf was the Modern Library guy...and I just thought he was the smart guy on What's My Line!!!

I've said this before, but I love those little Modern Library hardcovers with the little ribbon bookmark!

"I am writing the same story over and over, which is myself and the world"

"Writing became his way of rereading, reseeing, forcing the reader to do the same."

The more I read, I am coming to understand him. This is a complex personality we are dealing with, isn't it?. There were several events in his life which explain the sudden change in his Honor Roll performance through the fourth grade to his abrupt withdrawal into himself after the start of the fifth grade, when he simply read, drew and did as he pleased. On the school ground, according to a classmate, "he stood around listening, rather than talking, watching, rather than playing.".

Fall, 1906(third grade) - Paternal grandmother, Sallie Murry dies. Young Billie attended the funeral and burial in the cold rain.
An interesting woman, important to WF. She often entertained the Women's Book Club and wrote verses of her own...What is the Best Time in a Woman's Life? was one of them. (How would You answer that one?) - a long, happy variant on the seven ages of man.

Young WF had spent a lot of time in Ripley, Miss. with these grandparents, listening to grandpa JWT Falker (John Wesley Falkner) tell stories of "Kunnel Falkner" the soldier, fighting in Virginia..It is interesting that the boy singled out the one single thread in all these stories, the few books penned by great granddaddy on his war experiences...and decided that he "wanted to be a writer like great granddaddy". He also learned here that "People at Ripley talk of him as if her were still alive, up in the hills someplace, and might come in at any time."

But it was with Grandma Sallie that he talked and told stories of his own...and now she was gone and Grandpa went into mourning ...

---

Spring, 1907 (end of third grade) - maternal grandmother dies fo cancer. Family grief is great. She had come to live with the them in 1902 and had been a great influence on WF's imagination...Mother Maud had nursed her all through this period, leaving the boys to their own devices...The funeral was held in the parlour.

---

August, 1907(start of fourth grade) Baby brother Dean was born. Mother and Mammy Callie focussed all their attention on baby. The boys were free from adult supervision at this point. Mammy Callie, as Charlotte pointed out, was a second mother to young Billy. From her he heard stories of Slavery, her life on the Plantation, the War, the Klan. He developed a sense of wonder from her inexhaustible stories fo the Plantation and her people. He began to join in the story telling with her, with the Negro blacksmith on his grandfather's farm in Ripley.

But when Mammy Callie turned her attention to Maud and baby Dean, WF's silent withdrawal began.

---

Fall, 1908 (start of fifth grade) A terrible event occured in Oxford and WF had a friend who was a brother of one of the principles who gave him all the gruesome details.

Nelse Patton, a Negro trusty at the jail, was sent with a message to the wife of a prisoner, mother of three children. He made advances toward her, she drew a gun (lots of guns in his background), Nelse grabbed a razor - and killed her. He was caught, (by the brother of WF's schoolmate), and put in the jail. While there, a mob of angry men, broke into the jail, shot him, castrated him, mutilated him, put a rope around his neck and dragged his body around town from the back of a car...then hung his naked body from a tree.

The Coroner's jury conclude that "Nelse Patton came to his death from gunshot or pistol wounds inflicted by parties to us unknown".

That October, Billy Falkner was on the school Honor Roll for the last time...

And Joan thanks for all of that history. Billy suffered real trauma. Think about what we do for the children and the adults involved in such things now i.e. Columbine School. In those days we were supposed to just "get over it" and move on. . . . Clearer and clearer.

Claire

I t is a thin pamphlet, only fifty eight pages, but includes the following catagories and only costs five dollars...worth having I think for an aid to reading this book.

The table of contents is as follows

LIfe and Background

Introduction

List of Characters (both major and minor) and classified as such with small explanations.

Critical Commentaries for each chapter. I found them to be more explanatory than critical. Dr. Roberts must have tought this as a course many times and is a "fan".

Structure and Meaning Thru Narration

Character Analyses

Story as Myth --Cholly he uses ledgend and myth interchangeably here

Faulkners Style (which I read first) I often begin a book at the back...the summing up setting the scene and the tone.

Do pick it up if you can. I got mine from Amazon.com.

Claire

You wrote about Billy “dealing with the events of his life” by rewriting them. You might have also added – reinventing himself in the process, trying on new personas. By the way, the incident in the Fall, 1908 is very close to the plot from one of his novels (Sanctuary??).

Claire

Betty - “But what was so painful to read was how he seemed to freeze and let someone he truly cared for slip away. So, some of what he preferred he didn't get to have.”

What fascinated me was how when these situations, these life situations occurred, those situations over which he seemed unable to exert or unwilling to attempt control, WF was more than adept in using those situations to alter how he might perceived in the face of his impotence. He altered his persona, created his own character. Became the jilted lover. In some cases this almost seemed a compulsion.

"I am writing the same story over and over which is myself and the world."

I like NERDS because I am one. I'm highly socialized now even though I give in to an occasional desire to confront, but those youthful years were pure social hell (add acne to the equation too). Take it from one who has been there. We work our way out but while in best cases we develope only independent spirit in worst ones , we can become serial killers. Somewhere in between are artists who have learned to SUBLIMATE their painful feelings. I've spend a lifetime creating ART. It will never make me famous but is a great comfort . . . to be in my own world making my own rules. Our cultural rules are often arbitrary . "the emperor is naked applies . . . at lease I've always thought so.

Claire

This mama (me) blames herself for not spending enough time and energy on the first of her own four sons...and even though he is wildly successful today, accepts no credit for this either.

Aren't we looking at the formative years of this small boy to understand the circumstances that produced the giant author? As Charlotte has concluded, writers are different from the rest of us; isn't it an interesting exercise to determine why this is so? Is it nature or nurture that makes the difference? Would Faulkner have become the writer he is had he had Ward and June Cleever for parents? Probably? Would readerdoc like his fiction better then? Did all the circumstances we are considering forge him into the writer he did become?

Minter has much to say about the impact of his warring parents.

He admired his mother's "fierce will and enduring pride." He saw "conspicuous (and unacceptable) weakness" in his father. "His fiction reveals the deeper direction of his sympathy, which was toward children." This will definitely be something to watch in Absalom!

Just as he was to dress for the role of the injured RAF officer later, he began to dress the role of the Romantic poets...high collars, silk ties, and the tight, tight pants that he had Maud sew for him! (blame the mama for humoring him?). He did look "different" from all the other boys in Oxford, and it was then that they began calling him "Count" and quair">

Can you just see him, Charlotte? Already he looks different from the rest of us!

He also began writing his own poetry at this time, but it was not strict imitation of the English poets he was reading, though he did imitate! He began to combine elements of that poetry with his knowledge of the hills, the fields and the inhabitants of Mississippi.

Minter:
"When he finally discovered his imaginative home, it was a place born neither of Mississippi life nor English poetry, neither of actual earth, nor imaginative heaven, but of tensions between them."

ps. We were all nerds, claire - or we wouldn't be here! How many homecoming queens among us, raise your hands!.

Claire

Sorry to see you leave the Pears disvcussion and here you are!! Hello and glad you're here!

Charlotte what a wonderful summing up of Billy. Are you a writer? You made it live.

I remember picking up something by Faulkner years ago and accidentally hitting on a passage where he degraded women. I thought, "I'll never be able to abide this chauvinist pig" and put it down for FOREVER. I thought then. This biography helps me to understand him and then I'm much older and mellower than I was then. I've been reading the book with the help of Cliffs notes and ENJOYING it, now that I understand the style and the artists background. Into chapter four already. When we start to do it in November I'll be very interested in doing it again with all of your input.

Claire

Betty - I must confess that I think I WAS sending up a warning signal to you!! (Oh, my what’s Betty gonna say when she reads this, I thought – but it will be interesting to see where we can point to the Faulkner we learned about from his Biographies in his novel).

Minter writes that Poetry became more and more of a dead end for Faulkner. Poetry was convention, form – tight pants – and the preferred mode of expression of Phil Stone. By moving away from Poetry, he also shed his tether to Phil Stone. And began to find his true voice. First with literary criticism then short stories, he moved toward prose and a form that allowed for experimentation. He needed the freedom of expression that prose would provide. “Poetry seemed to him – and as he practiced it, it was – all order and restraint.” It was about this time as he was reading William Huntington Wright (“The ability to write great poetry is an excellent preparation for the writing of great prose”) that, as Charlotte has pointed out from her reading of Oates, that Stone introduced Faulkner to Balzac.

I've been thinking a lot of Faulkner, the poet - as so many of the Great Books (all?) authors we have read during the last three years! I think it would be an interesting study to learn how many of our outstanding writers today actually began with poetry as so many of the earlier greats did...

Although WF made the break from Poetry, he would always regard himself as a "failed poet". The restraints of poetry were too much for him. He won a prize for poetry at OLE MISS after that one year as a special student...in 1920 - he was 23.

And although he didn't ever attend any more classes, he still lived on campus, spending months with the drama group called the Marionettes. This period seems to be a developmental marker.

He wrote a one-act play called The Marionettes which "was written primarily in prose, but includes several songs written in tetrameter couplets." Minter says that even the prose is strongly reminiscent of Faulkner's poetry. It "echoes many late nineteenth century poets, French(Verlaine) and English."

"Earlier he had used his writing to display his reading; now he was using it to recast his earlier writing."

The move from poetry to prose (though not really ever leaving the poetic influence) marked the real change from order and control, restrictions to the freedom of the bohemian (Do you feel Joyce here?)

Minter tells us that the problem with poetry "turned mainly on voice" - I thought it interesting that even WF's handwriting "was becoming more and more contstricted, so private that sometimes even he had difficulty reading it a day or two after producing it.

...he needed to find a literary mode less haunted by giants and less bound by conventions. Only then could he hope to discover voices that would encourage him to use not simply the books that he had read and the emotions that troubled him but the world he observed and the old tales and talking that he had heard."

ps. Charlotte, if it looks like a duck and talks like a duck, then...

claire...you are way ahead in Absalom, blazing the trail for the rest of us! I'm still dithering with the heading for the discussion and haven't opened the first page yet! I do have it in front of me...the nice Modern Library edition. It feels so nice in my hands. I intend to sit down with it on Sunday. So very happy to hear from you that the reading is smoother, after the biography. A sign our "experiment" is working!

I'm waiting to hear how Absalom goes down with readerdoc, after reading the biography!

Ella, an interesting thought about alcohol and the early 20th century writers. Do you get the impression from the biography that WF is an alcoholic...or will become one? So far we have seen him drinking with his father as a young boy, and then while at Ole Miss...it will be interesting to see if he becomes a problem drinker!

The intro. explains that critical work on Faulkner has now exceeded that of any other author en English save Shakespeare, and that attention would have amused Faulkner himself. That most critics throw up their hands in despair unable to detect any thread of intellectual consistency.

He is depicted as an untutored denizen of the backwoods whose thinking did not really go beyond conventional pieties such as courage, pride and honor and whose sheer genius enabled him to produce great literature devoid of any acquaintance with the cultural currents of his times. Faulkner did everything he could to foster this conception. "I'm not an educated man," he protested in an interview. "I didn't like school and I quit about the sixth grade. So I don't know anything about rational and logical processes of thought at all."

It is not hard to see what made Victorians so enthusiastic about their culture. Not only did it value thrift, diligence, and persistence- attribute so crucial to success in a burgeoning capitalist economy -but it held out the vision of a world largely free from sin and discord, reflecting their immense optimism about the progress that the industrial order would bring. To them, Victorianism seemed distinctly uplifting, a set of values that offered moral certainty, spiritual balm, and the hope that the world might at last rid itself of the barbaric baggage remaining from humankind's dark, preindustrial past. A century later when Falulkner was coming of age, this same culture would be regarded by some as fossilized and deeply oppressive, but it was the light that gleamed in the eyes of millions on both sides of the Atlantic, a chief source of strength in their effort to initiate what they believed would be a far better stage in human history.

At the core stood a distinctive set of values and assumptions that shaped the way Victorians perceived their world. These included a belief in a predictable universe presided over by a benevolent God and governed by immutable natural laws, a corresponding conviction that humankind was capable of arriving at a unified and fixed set of truths about all aspects of life, and an insistence on preserving absolute moral standards based on a radical dichotomy between that which we deemed "human" and that regarded as "animal." It was this moral dichotomy above all that constituted the deepest guiding principle of the Victorian outlook On the '"human" or "civilized" side of the dividing line fell everything that served to lift humans above the bests- education, refinement, manners, the arts, religion, and such domesticated emotions as loyalty and family love. The "animal or "savage" realm, by contrast, contained those instincts and passions that constantly threatened self-control and therefore had to be repressed at all cost. Foremost among those threats was, of course, sexuality, which proper Victorians conceived of as a hidden geyser of animality existing within everyone and capable of erupting with little of no warning at the slightest stimulus. All erotic temptations were accordingly supposed to be rooted out and all passions kept under the tightest possible control, the aura of secrecy and the stigma of shame compromised their lovemaking even in marriage. A glorious future of material abundance and technological advance was possible, Victorians were convinced, but only if the animal component in human nature was effectively suppressed.

Victorians saw life in rigid pairs - all or nothing, white or black - civilized or savage - superior and inferior classes and races were unambiguously divided into black and white, likewise insisted on placing the sexes in separate spheres. Woman were deemed by nature emotional and passive and men rational and assertive. All of these dichotomies, it was believed, were permanently rooted in biology and in the general laws of nature. The right way the moral way was to keep the boundaries fixed and clear.

What the Victorians aspired was a radical standard of innocence and purity - to banish from their lives all traces of evil and corruption and to create a brave new world with harmonious perfection. They longed for a world that was not just intelligible, reassuring and morally challenging, but symphonic as well. The paradox was that in seeking harmony the Victorians erect barriers between themselves to any person or thing that might prove disharmonious. That explains their insistence on a constant attitude of moral optimism, focusing on the lovely, admirable and hopeful as well as their moral conception of aesthetics, in which art was to emphasize the beautiful and inspiring. It also accounts for their predilections for hero worship, through which the values of purity and goodness were enshrined in individual personalities. Innocence remained a powerful and almost universal cultural ideal

The later Victorians were the last generation among English-speaking intellectuals able to believe that man was capable of understanding his universe, just as they were the first generation to suspect that he never would! When the highly educated saw the reality they tried to avoid introspection. "I'll look no more within" it was a pledge they could not keep and in Faulkner's south there was no morbid introspection. Southern Victorian thought meant; the sweetness and light - the command to resist the devil, to overcome the wicked one - the reward was not only great worldly property which obedience to this command brought but also, a great inward peace and satisfaction.

Aspects of those three legends were manifested in the Giant in the Earth (The Old Colonel). It would also seem to me that Faulkner’s movement from poetry to prose mirrors his transition from Victorian to Modernist sensibilities.

maryal O: Welcome. We’re lucky you found us. We’ll need all the help, indeed “professional” help, we can get. Some of us have been trembling at the prospect of the “difficult” writing were in for. And there you said “his most difficult novel.” Thank you for joining us. May I ask how DID you hear about this site? What other Faulkner biographies have you read? Went to the library today and picked up another biography – this one by Frederick Karl which, along with the Blotner, is in the door stop category at over 1000 pages. I won’t have time to read it but I’ll browse. I also saw a memoir by Meta Carpenter…

Betty - Clearly this bragging about his “illegitimate children” was a part of the bohemian, hard living, hard drinking artict persona that he cultivated. Oates is pretty clear about the fact that Faulkner and Estelle stopped sleeping together after the birth of their second child, Jill. They had a sexual relationship up until that time, although Minter believes that their “great unhappiness” was more than just financial “and was almost certainly sexual.” He also began his affair with Meta Carpenter in Hollywood during this period and it was quite steamy, apparently, becoming “an unabashedly erotic lover.”

Sometime around the turn of the century the intelligentsia in Europe and America began to experience a shift in sensibility that would lead to an explosion of creativity in the arts, transform moral values, and reshape the conduct of life throughout Western society. Utterly changed was; painting, sculpture, music, the dance, the novel, drama, architecture, poetry and thought. This change was equated with the beliefs and lifestyle of the artistic avant-garde at the turn of the century and notes radical experimentation in artistic style, deliberate cultivation of the perverse and decadent, flaunting outrageous behavior designed to shock. The movement was composed of highly talented poets and painters based in the bohemian quarters of certain large cities, Paris, New York, Vienna, and Berlin. - Picasso, Pound and Joyce - Others, like Lionel Trilling, depict Modernism as an adversary culture that emerges as negative and rebellious in character and cannot be pinned down with precision.

Modernist thought represents an attempt to restore a sense of order the human experience under the often chaotic conditions of contemporary existence. As romanticism dominated the nineteenth century, Modernism has come to dominate the twentieth with late Modernism coming into existence by the 1950s.

As most artists, philosophers, and psychologists chafed under the burden of Victorian repression they began to explore the far murkier and less predictable operation of human perception and consciousness. Writers experimented with "the stream of consciousness" - that this raw sensory flux was as close as human beings could ever come to knowing reality. All artists began to loosen restraints, open themselves to the world and perfect their ability to experience exoerience - exactly what the Victorians most feared. Modernism involves the tree stages in the development of all culture:

First stage - early rebellion - the breaking up of systems, types and absolutes

Second stage- re-structuring of parts - a re-relating of the fragmented concepts

Third and final stage - a dissolving, a blending, a merging of things previously held to be forever mutually exclusive.

Defining things Modern as not so much things falling apart but that they fall together.Not disintegration but super-integration.Cubists placed all planes and percpectives on the canvas simultaneously so the viewer could not select individual facets of the painting for attention but would have to experience it as a fused whole. Victorians held sincerityas their most prized character trait.
Modernists have demanded authenticity which requires a blending of the conscious and unconscious strata of the mind.

The code of sincerity necessitates intense self-knowledge that the Victorians sought to avoid therefore, the stream-of-consciousness technique captured the real vital potential self as opposed to the old stable ego.

We must be aware that Modernists have believed, we will never succeed in coalescence of the varied fragments of our existence. The only lasting closure in Modernist terms, comes with death. The quest for and avoidance of integration accounts for the special role are plays within the Modern culture. This medium allows the quest can be pursued with safety and what is especially suited for art is its reliance on symbolism, metaphor and myth.

Victorians saw art as a vehicle for communicating and illustrating preordained moral truths. The Modernist see art as the principal vehicle for exploring and fashioning meaning in a world where meaning must constantly be re-created. It begins with a premise of an unpredictable universe where nothing is ever stable and humans must be satisfied with knowledge that is partial and transient at best. Moral values must remain in flux shifting in response to changing historical circumstances. Individuals must subject themselves to the trails of experience and must not shield themselves behind illusions of gentility but confront the ugly, the sordid and the terrible for that is where the important lessons are to be found. Innocence demands instead apprehensions of reality no matter how painful.

Self-division of this sort is not unusual among literary artists. "Writers are a perfect case of split peronality", Faulkner once remarked. "he is one thing when he is a writer and he is something else while he is a denizen of the world." Charles Dodgson, the meek, retiring mathematician could indulge in his extroardinary gift for fantasy only when adopting the persona and pen name Lewis Carroll.

To understand him, his wife once insisted, one had to begin with the fact that he was so definitely dual, to the point where there were two Bills. He experimented with an extensive repertoir of trail idnetities, battle-scarred WW1 aviator - southern aristocrat - bohemian writer - small town derelict. By the late 1920s a pattern of two central selves imerged - old fashioned country gentleman and contemporary writer. On some days he would appear riding a horse all liveried up as they say, dressed like a colonel then he'd come out with long whiskers and look like a hippie.

When he visited friends in New York, namely Buckminster Fuller and avant-garde puppeteers Jim and Cora Baird he would withdraw and work in a deliberately plain room at Rowan Oak. Often he would resort to a transe like state to sustain this self, writing at a white hot pace and consuming fair quantities of alcohol, though rarely allowing himself to become actually inebriated while writing.

The other Oxford Faulkner, remained based in nineteenth-century values and increasingly made his peace with the traditions of his native town. Faulkner bought and restored a large ante-bellum home, as well as a working plantation, took ritual walks to the town square dressed like a country squire, displayed a fondness for tweeds, pipes and riding to the hounds. Those who knew him in Oxford told how he would take offense at profane language and walk away at the first sign of of-color humor although, while in Hollywood he delighted in telling "gamy" tales and readily employed obscenitites in his professional correspondence. Where as in Oxford, if hunting companion or friend started telling dirty stories, he was gone.

While in New Haven soon after WW1 he wrote "all this freedom does is to make them miserable" refering to blacks. Later through Modernist eyes he agives at the insight that the "nigger" persona did not arise from biological traits but instead represented an identity that southern whites had imposed on blackes in order to demean and sujugate them.

His early attitudes toward sex and gender, internalized as a child, would remain to encumber him, rendering problems with his relationships with his wife and many of the other women with whom he interacted as an adult. Like so many men of his era, he would both idealize women ans paragons of sexual purity and simultaneously resent them for the moral standard they seemed to enforce on him. One primary reason he was drawn to Modernist culture is the promise it held of delivering him from that repressive standartd, allowing him to revise significantly his view of woman. The Victorian part of him required that the narratives that unveiled the southern lady, revealing her with a normal range of human passions and a sexual drive behind her facade of absolute purity appear duly punished for her sins either through death or some form of mutilation.

"Faulkner offered a redemptive model that was offering to light a better path to the future for the South in particular but also, the wider world."

Balzac - "the artist is an omnipotent god who moulds and fashions the destiny of a new world."

I love this! Am having the best time coming to know this complex character...or at least coming to realize the reasons he is so difficult to pidgeonhole!

And the posts keep coming with one "aha!" after another! Thanks you all! You are performing a great service! We shall romp through Absalom!

Claire

maryal O - So Col. Falkner had a black family as well? I have missed any reference to that in the Minter or the Oates. Interesting. The theme certainly comes up I some of his novels, though, so that explains that!

And was stopped in my tracks and completely distracted and overwhelmed with depth of the posts...Barb, you have outdone even yourself in the research which goes such a long way toward explaining the dual nature of WF's personality, the South, the U.S. at the time...actually, Europe too!

~And before I could comment and thank Barb for her helpful research (you didn't scan all that, did you Barb! You typed it all out!!! I could tell from the spelling! VBG! ) Thank you for that...all of it!

~ Then there's claire's totally disarming remark, which set me off on a different track! We're all learning together in these Great Book forays, claire! That's the beauty of it! We're learning to appreciate what we never did learn in school! It's not too late! More importantly, we're getting to know and to understand one another! That's the part I love! Sure, I read Balzac...a long time ago...in French. That was my major! Did I appreciate it...at all? No, I translated it! I don't even remember it! Wasted! Wasted on the young me...but the older wiser me is hungry to read it all again...everything! Because it means something now! I know life now! I know what these authors are talking about now! Bring it on!!!

~Then comes the frosting! Maryal O drops in to say she is so happy to have found us!!! Oh my! You know Faulkner intimately, as we are just getting past the first handshakes! You are so welcome! What a treasure! You know stuff we are dying to know! (How do you pronounce Absalom?) I bet you never experience the tangible enthusiasm you will find here with us - in a classroom of the young wastrels, er, ah rascals you are probably used to! You will certainly find that we read from a totally different perspective! Welcome aboard! Again.

I'm sorry! I told you I got distracted by all the goings on in here! Be back in a bit, and I promise to stay on topic!

Robby

...there appears to have been one aspect of the Old Colonel's life at this time that was far more private and surely did not enhance his stature in Ripley. As Joel Williamson has discovered, strong evidence indicates that Falkner, beginning just before the war, maintained a black "shadow family" within his household, consisting of a light-skinned mulatto mistres name Emeline and, in all likelihood, at least two daughters he had fathered by her. This situation, of course, immediately conjures up the conventional image of the wealthy planter sexually exploiting his helpless female slave, but existing records point to a very different sort of relationship.

If anything, Falkner seems to have been more closely tied emotionally to Emeline than to his white wife, who would eventually leave him and move to Memphis. It also appears, if the information handed down through Emeline's descendants can be believed, that he not only sent the older Daughter (named Fannie Forrest Falkner anfter his favorite sister and favorite Confederate general) to a nearby black college but visited her there often, bringing bouquets of flowers. How ever this behavior might be judged by later-twetieth-centurey standards, there can be no question that it violated fundament racial norms in the Colonel's own day, yet, strong minded as ever, he resolutely persisted in it. Whether his great-granson ever knew about this alternate branch of the family remains entirely a matter of conjecture.

Claire

Cliare

I am writing the same story over and over which is myself and the world."

Please get the book - if you have to borrow or steal it! We need you! You could buy it...if you click the B&N Bookstore button up in the heading, type in AB-suh-lum and you'll have it in days! Mine came in two! There is a very inexpensive paperback available from B&N...

Please stay!

Well, Robby, about two years ago, I tried to follow up the Odyssey discussion with the Old Testament...but was talked out of it...no, not in Aramaic!

MaryalO...may I call you Malo, or don't we know one another well enough for that? You know you are located only about 40 minutes from my house! We could "do" lunch. My treat! I love Annapolis! You really started something with the mention of the shadow family and the Mississippi black population. Back in a bit with what I found in Blotner.

Sidetracked again,
Joaun (I added the "u" just for this discussion)

Bethesda, Mary! Even better. Some dull winter's day we could do tea!

I keep getting sidetracked and fear I won't get to Sherwood Anderson today, but there is always tomorrow! I skimmed Blotner and found some interesting information on the Negro population as it was called then...but he doesn't seem to mention the shadow family. (how does one skim 800 pages and see everything, you ask!)...All right, so maybe there is something I missed, but I gave him lots of chances to mention it! I find it difficult to believe that Blotner wouldn't know about it if WF did. They "hung out" together...their families were close friends. There is very little that WF would not tell Blotner. He goes into great depth regarding the Old Colonel too.

Here's some information that I did find, though...some relevant to present discussion , some just interesting...

---

~First some information regarding the Murry Falkners arrival into Oxford, Lafayette County, Mississippi:

Lafayette County - almost square, roughly 25 miles on each side. Slightly off center to the west was the city, the railroad tracks running between it and the university and angling off a bit to the southwest...Meandering across the northern border - the slow-moving Tallahatchie River...forming three irregular roughly parallel bands. The southernmost band, about eight miles south of Oxford, was the Yacona River - bearing on old maps the Chickasaw name, Yockeny- Patafa Remember that!

~Where the Falkner boys had lived, the county was less than one-third Negro. In Lafayette, nearly 10,000 of the county's 22,000 inhabitants were black. Directly or indirectly, the livelihood of all of them was dependent upon cotton. Some good-sized plantations, but small patches. Cotton was an unrotated crop which badly taxed the land. ...

~Falkner home: six blocks south of the Oxford courthouse, on a lot that occupied the whole block - house set well back from the street - a big one with a fireplace in every room but the kitchen. It was rather ornate, elaborate trim where porch supports met the roof. The extra-large windows flanked by tall shudders.

~ Family needs space because Lelia Butler (Damuddy) had moved to stay. Her piety - kept son in law from profanity on Sunday...no cards...

~Her daughter Maud needed more help with three active sons...

Caroline Barr had been a house servant of the Young Colonel before coming to work for Murry. She moved into the cabin in the backyard. She was a neat black woman, weighing less than 100 lbs. Born into slavery, sometime around 1840 she had been freed at 16. Could not read or write, but told stories... Her own children had grown and she became second mother to the boys. They loved her stories and they loved her. In her starched dress, ironed apron, immaculate headcloth...To the children, she was Mammy Callie; she called young William, "Mimmie.

Boys spent much time at the Big Place of JWT Falkner now that they lived in Oxford. Very depressing as Grandma, Sallie Murry was in pain and dying and Grandpa was nearly totally deaf. Spent time reading...Maud made sure the boys attended the Methodist Church, though she was a Baptist. She took strength and pleasure from her church but even more from her books... She enjoyed Shakespeare, Balzac, Conrad, Tennyson, Browning...

~ The boys spent much time in the stables, especially with Ned Barnett, listening to stories of the Old Colonel...

---

~ William C. Falkner had studied law on his own, passed the bar, married Holland Pierce who died shortly after giving birth to WF's grandfather. After the War, he plunged into his law practice, found time for political activity including the harassment of Negro voters. He had remarried and His wife Lizzie Vance had seven more children. He had been a slaveowner since his first wife had come to him with her dowry...he bought and sold slaves, practiced law and invested in land...prospered. That's all Blotner says about the Colonel and those slaves.

---

~ He does however make much of the long-time family servant, "Uncle Ned Barnett" who first worked for JWT Falkner and then, for Estelle and William Faulkner until Ned's death - WF sent him to be buried in the family plot with his great grandfather! I thought that a bit strange...as if there was more to that story, but Blotner said no more. He did say however, that many of the Negro servants in WF's fiction were based on Uncle Ned.

Sollie, Chollie, no time right now for thoughts of Sherwood Anderson, but you all are doing such a great job, I'll just enjoy for a bit.....

Charlie

Claire

The “warm interrelationship with the blacks” like Faulkner’s in some ways could tend toward the paternal, don’t you think?

I've promised myself that I will learn to spell and say that before we begin AB-suh-lum together...Sue, Maryal? You can't help me with the spelling, but how about the pronunciation? Barbara, we'll have a spelling test in Chicago! Is this Lafayette County as I'm thinking it is?

I read the first chapter of Absalom on Sunday...and am hooked! You know what I like about it, as your future DL? It's the kind of book that you will really want to reread and share with the group once you've been through it!

Maryal, you asked about the reading schedule here...Charlie has posted it for the Minter and the Oates in the heading, but as you may have noticed, we are "playing with time", just as WF liked to do. It seems that chronologically, for every step forward, we take two back! I'm afraid I'm going to ask that we all go back, way back, after having read the first chapter in Absalom and look at the Old Colonel's life before he settles down and starts his family in Oxford. We really haven't discussed that at all here, and I suspect we will wish we had when we get into the novel. Will you please check your biographies for this and share here what you find?Before his marriage?

Yes! We will doUlysses, but not right away - still recovering from Portrait...and claire, wait for us...if you go it alone, it will end up in your own garage sale! I know you and can predict your exasperation. Hold onto it! It's being called by many, the book of the 20th Century. We will do it!

readerdoc will you return to the seaside cottage come spring - or will Texas become your permanent base? When is the move? That's always tough! Good luck!

Barbara your research and counsel and Charlotte's insights go far in preparing us for the Southern mindset at the turn of the last century.

We are really going to be well-prepared - able to understand and appreciate Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha County and the glorious writing all the more when we reach Absalom!

Will you please check out the Colonel's early story? I'll try to make it back tonight, but haven't a minute more right now!

Good morning, Pat! It's true, Pat is always here...her presence is comforting to say the least!

For all of your questions regarding size, color, italics, fonts you'll need to put everything between <>, the greater than, less than brackets.

If I show you here, you'll only see the result, so I'll just tell yuo that for italics you put the letter i in front of the title and then /i after it - to turn it off. It would look something like this when you are typing in your post:

(i)Absalom(/i)...except you have to use the magic <> intead fo the (). You try it and then we'll do color. Isn't this fun? You introduce us to Faulkner, we'll teach you html!

So Jefferson is in Yoknapatawpha (pronunciation hints?) as Oxford is in Lafayette County. Does the map WF drew up resemble Lafayette, Miss - or is it strictly imaginary?

fThe canvus vest was worn by the man (sutpen) who came from no where, but not to straighten his shoulders. It was said to be because he was poor and couldn't afford better. I'm getting ahead, but reading the book at the same time as all these biographical tidbits is a good way to visualize and understand WF and AA. I'm on chapter five now only inbetween I plan to read something easy I picked up at Cosco the other day. . . . good junk my usual fare.

Claire

Born in Tennessee, the eldest of three children. The family moved to Missouri but William Clark Falkner left home at fifteen, which was not unusual for the time, and headed for Mississippi. Karl emphasizes the violence inherit in the family history, starting with The Old Colonel. One story as to the reason he left home at fifteen was because of a Cain and Abel type situation with his brother. At any rate, on his journey he stopped to find his Uncle who had been arrested on a murder charge. The “story” also goes, as The Old Colonel told it, that at this point he was befriended by a little girl who helps him out with some money. He was to marry this little girl, Lizzie Vance, many years later, after the death of his first wife. Karl points out that this is part of family legend and may or may not be entirely accurate. This was reworked in the Thomas Sutpen character. Meantime, the uncle, John Wesley Thompson was acquitted of the murder charges. The Old Colonel becomes the ward of his uncle. Active in the Mexican Wars, but was discharged because of an injury or mysterious origins. Married (1847 – and part of the dowry was slaves…) and the Young Colonel was born the following year. He became a lawyer and started to amass his fortune. In 1849 he stabbed a man to death in a duel, shortly after this his wife died of TB. Two years later he married Lizzie Vance, but not before shooting another man to death. He was tried for murder and lo and behold the prosecutor was “none other than the younger brother of the man he had killed in 1848. Just after he was acquitted the father of the man he had killed pulled the trigger of a gun at point blank range but it misfired. WC spared his life. By now The Old Colonel was a secessionist, a successful salve trader and landholder. In the Civil War he raised first a company of men, then later a regiment of his own, but he was forced out of both positions. He was also the author of narrative poetry, novels and travel journals. After the Civil War he got into railroad building.

“A curious phenomenon developed: The old colonel’s son who grew up outside his orbit became a considerable success, whereas the children who came along with the second marriage, to Lizzie Vance, were either doomed to die young or else, like William Henry (the eldest), threw themselves away trying to match the old man…Of the eight children born to Lizzie Vance, five would be dead by 1878, with William Henry shot to death that year. Though he knew that his business partner harbored deep resentments against him for what he thought were unfair practices, the old colonel, now 64 “was tired of killing…[and] somehow ready to surrender; for while he knew Thurmond was set to kill him, he refused to carry a weapon. It was as though he accepted the end. It came, predictably.” On Nov 5, 1889, Thurmond shot him through the mouth and he died 36 hours later.

This use of graphic description was meant to describe their characters. When graphic descriptions are used for such perposes, it's wrong to treat them as isolated instances meant to tintlate etc. Americans are still swimming about in a Victorian swamp, even today.

, Trying to get it right, or just saying it another way.<b/> Artists and Writers redo their work all the time. I do't think the motivations are economical.

Claire

I will tell you my impression though...the subject is merely alluded to as some deep dark secret in the ancestral history of Quentin Compson...this secret is an embarassment and a curse on the family. But Ella, I don't think there is ever anything about incest except veiled allusions to the fact that something wasn't quite right between the brother and the sister. I don't think you should fear graphic descriptions of this terrible act. claire seems to be saying the same thing.. Don't make up your mind based on stuff that is coming out in this discussion about secrets in Faulkner's own past. The shadow family is one secret, the incest another. We need you, Maryal! Reassure Ella, or she'll put her book in the next yard sale before she even opens it!

We are talking about big talent here! Big talent doesn't need sensationalism, even when author is starving!

Charlie, thanks so much for the background story of the Old Colonel's rise to success, a man who came from nowhere, perhaps escaping from somewhere to rise to such power, building an empire in the rich soil of the southern plantation. From the rise of the Colonel's wealth and position, to Ella's concern about the perverted tones of the family history, can't you just smell the parallels between this story and the RISE and FALL of the SOUTH?

Maryal, we do appreciate your reassuring words to Ella. So much so that you will be rewarded with a little html regarding color...the same as before, (using the little <..> to surround your command rather than the (...) in the example), tell your computer what color font you would like: (font color=red)Maryal (/font) Just remember to turn it off with (/font) or the rest of your post will be red from there on...

It's important to know here that Faulkner is not graphically describing incest, but reporting it, in context, and also condemning it as a criticism of the South...of the Southern culture, which ultimately led to its fall...

Some pent-up thoughts regarding the "Big Talent" of William Faulkner and also about how this talent did or did not put food on the table...

~Was it you, Charlotte, who commented on the good fortune of this budding author to have friends in high places who were in a position to bring him the attention of the publishing world? Or did you say that he was fortunate to have had the encouragement of such friend during his developmental years? Or both? Was it luck or was it inevitable?

~It is my growing impression that his TALENT was such that it would have bubbled to the surface without any of them...that is the extreme of what I believe.

~He certainly had his mother to thank for the early introduction to literature...which he loved to imitate - his preferred method of assimilation. This education was obviously far superior to what was being offered in the schoolroom. (I'd like to mention here the many home-schooled kids who come into the Folger with a passion for Shakespeare that is rarely seen in the average elementary schoolers...)

~But the stories of the Old South, the Old Colonel, the plantations swirling about him - to which he paid such close attention and then assimilated into his own experience to the point where he began to retell those stories through the prism of his own imagination...this was HIS OWN TALENT at work! The listening, the assimilation, the retelling This I believe was an innate gift and I believe it would have become recognized under any circumstances.

His strict, demanding, practical no-nonsense mother recognized this special talent... to the point that she followed his every wish and whim..sewing those tight pants and silk shirts which enabled him to act the Romantic poet if that was what he required to assimilate their personae.

~Phil Stone...I'm still not clear about his position here...he wrote letters of introduction for WF to meet Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and James Joyce? Where does this come from? He's a young man...only four years older than young Faulkner. How did they meet? We are told that he was shown Faulkner's poetry and was impressed! Blotner's biography tells us that Phil was attending Yale in New Haven ( a hotbed of budding writers) at the time...working on his second BA. He was dating a girl from Oxford who was a friend of Estelle Oldham. It was Estelle who gave Phil's girlfriend some of the WF's poetry for Phil to read. That's how that relationship started. All understandable. Logical that they would meet. We are told that the relationship consisted of Phil talking and WF listening...does this sound familiar? The same was to happen with Sherwood Anderson - he listened, Anderson liked the audience. Wf listening, taking it all in .

But to me the most interesting thing about those letters of introduction to the literary giants at the time...he never used them once he got to Paris! Never went near them! Not only that, Minter writes, "although he knew he would never use them, Faulkner packed the letters." Now what do you make of that. He spent 6 months (I think that's right) in Paris and never went anywhere near them! And he wasn't planning to.. Wouldn't you have expected that to be the highlight of his trip...just to LISTEN to these greats? Instead we are told that he avoided them, preferring to spend his time with artists. What do you make of this, claire, June?
<P. Well, my time is up and I never did get to the part about what a starving artist must do with his BIG TALENT to feed his big appetite!

I am loving this whole experience too, Maryal! Walked the dog this morning chanting Y

Charlie, thanks so much for the background story of the Old Colonel's rise to success, a man who came from nowhere, perhaps escaping from somewhere to rise to such power, building an empire in the rich soil of the southern plantation. From the rise of the Colonel's wealth and position, to Ella's concern about the perverted tones of the family history, can't you just smell the parallels between this story and the RISE and FALL of the SOUTH?

Maryal, we do appreciate your reassuring words to Ella. So much so that you will be rewarded with a little html regarding color...the same as before, (using the little <..> to surround your command rather than the (...) in the example), tell your computer what color font you would like: (font color=red)Maryal (/font) Just remember to turn it off with (/font) or the rest of your post will be red from there on...

It's important to know here that Faulkner is not graphically describing incest, but reporting it, in context, and also condemning it as a criticism of the South...of the Southern culture, which ultimately led to its fall...

~Was it you, Charlotte, who commented on the good fortune of this budding author to have friends in high places who were in a position to bring him the attention of the publishing world? Or did you say that he was fortunate to have had the encouragement of such friends during his developmental years? Or both? Was it luck or was it inevitable?

~It is my growing impression that his TALENT was such that it would have bubbled to the surface without any of them...that is the extreme of what I believe.

~He certainly had his mother to thank for the early introduction to literature...which he loved to imitate - his preferred method of assimilation. This education was obviously far superior to what was being offered in the schoolroom. (I'd like to mention here the many home-schooled kids who come into the Folger with a passion for Shakespeare that is rarely seen in the average elementary schoolers...)

~But the stories of the Old South, the Old Colonel, the plantations swirling about him - to which he paid such close attention and then assimilated into his own experience to the point where he began to retell those stories through the prism of his own imagination...this was HIS OWN TALENT at work! The listening, the assimilation, the retelling This I believe was an innate gift and I believe it would have become recognized under any circumstances.

His strict, demanding, practical no-nonsense mother recognized this special talent... to the point that she followed his every wish and whim..sewing those tight pants and silk shirts which enabled him to act the Romantic poet if that was what he required to assimilate their personae.

~Phil Stone...I'm still not clear about his position here...he wrote letters of introduction for WF to meet Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and James Joyce? Where does this come from? He's a young man...only four years older than young Faulkner. How did they meet? We are told that he was shown Faulkner's poetry and was impressed! Blotner's biography tells us that Phil was attending Yale in New Haven ( a hotbed of budding writers) at the time...working on his second BA. He was dating a girl from Oxford who was a friend of Estelle Oldham. It was Estelle who gave Phil's girlfriend some of the WF's poetry for Phil to read. That's how that relationship started. All understandable. Logical that they would meet. We are told that the relationship consisted of Phil talking and WF listening...does this sound familiar? The same was to happen with Sherwood Anderson - he listened, Anderson liked the audience. WF listening, taking it all in .

But to me the most interesting thing about those letters of introduction to the literary giants at the time...he never used them once he got to Paris! Never went near them! Not only that, Minter writes, "although he knew he would never use them, Faulkner packed the letters." Now what do you make of that? He spent 6 months (I think that's right) in Paris and never went anywhere near them! And he wasn't planning to.. Wouldn't you have expected that to be the highlight of his trip...just to LISTEN to these greats? Instead we are told that he avoided them, preferring to spend his time with artists. What do you make of this, claire, June?

Well, my time is up and I never did get to the part about what a starving artist must do with his BIG TALENT to feed his big appetite! But Charlotte has begun that discussion already

I am loving this whole experience too, Maryal! Walked the dog this morning chanting Yoke nuh puh TAW fuh all the way...

What do you make of this, claire, June?

Well, my time is up and I never did get to the part about what a starving artist must do with his BIG TALENT to feed his big appetite! "HOw can I answer that. Mine isn't a BIG talent, I do manage to starve a little. folks are glad to recieve art and pottery etc. for free, but don't pay, unless it's in a very expensive frame...They seem to really like frames best.

I might refrain from visiting GREAT artists even if it's easy for fear of ADULTERATION. I'm very subjective and I might be afraid that I'd be so open to the wonder of their work that it might rub off on mine.

Claire

Claire

a great site...go see.

Claire

Claire

Charlotte: You advised us to remember that “there is more than one Quentin” and commented on the use of recurring names. Yes, Karl makes the same point. Talking about the genealogy of the old colonel, Karl notes that the “proliferation of names, confusing even for the seasoned Faulknerian, reveals repeated duplication on genealogical charts, which then carries over into Faulkner’s life as a writer. Recurring names, common in Southern families, become part of the strategy of telling and retelling. Quentin Compson, for example, repudiates not only himself in suicide but an entire line of declining name-repeating Compsons. Faulkner biography must be found in just those seams.” Thanks for bringing that point up Charlotte. I think it is an important thing to keep in mind. Thank God, by the way, for the maps, chronology and genealogy that appear in my copy of Absalom, Absalom as well as in the biographies. The thing I have trouble with most in novels is keeping the names straight. Which shouldn’t surprise me since I forget a person’s name immediately after meeting them. I don’t want to know what that says about me!!

Joan: The Rise and Fall of the South? The Rise of the old colonel and the Fall of the clan ? The Rise and Fall of Thomas Sutpen? Joan are we talking BIG themes here?? Thank you for pointing out the (now) obvious place of incest in Faulkner’s thinking. Stupid, stupid me! I hadn’t thought about it that closely but just wondered why he seemed “obsessed” with the subject while at the same time being obviously a man who loved his children deeply.

June: Of course. Salinger. Then there’s Updike also. And Wolfe Too, Sue? Only read Can’t go Home Again….Probably what sets Faulkner apart in this sense is the creation of a whole geographic region complete with history. Good point about Oates, June. If you read Minter and Oates, you get a little feel for the derivative nature of the Oates. Read by itself, this is not a problem and it sure is easy going, rather nicely written.

That's what I was trying to ask you claire, and June...not about starving artists, but rather, what you thought of the fact that Joyce used his precious time during this much anticipated trip - with the artists, rather than the writers.

So what are we to conclude from this...that art mattered to him..? That he feared he would copy his contemporaries...that he would spoil the hard -won freshness and originality of his own expression? Why did he ignore the writers? Minter tells us that when he returned to Oxford "he worked at reconciling his art with his genius".... Minter says later of Sherwood Anderson that he fostered in Faulkner the "belief, necessary to a writer, that his own emotions are important" and "the desire to tell them to someone," I always associate poetry with art, art with emotion. Does this provide any explanation for his exclusive association with the artists? Is that what he was struggling to improve in his writing? Did he need the artists and their retrospection more than he needed the writers at this point?

It reminded Faulkner of the great-grandfather's mansion in Ripley. He had always wanted to be like the Old Colonel, to write books and own a mansion like him. With his own antebellum home, a wife and children, Faulkner could walk proudly in the Old Colonels footsteps and thumb his nose at everybody in Oxford who called him Count No 'Count.

Not only did the calm and simple life of the rural folk impress him, but the landscape seemed to summon up in his mind vivid images of a heroic Cavalier past that he found immensely appealing. In the town of Pavia, he told his mother, he found "old, old walls and gates through which mailed knights once rode, and where men-at-arms scurried over cobble stones." Walking through a French forest on another occasion, he would "sit down and imagine he could hear horns, and dogs, and see huntsmen in green jackets galloping past, and then the king and his cavalcade in gold and purple and scarlet." Clearly this was not the same Europe that Fitzgeralk and Heming way had come to find.

He spoke to a painter, a real one. He wont go to the highly Modernist exhitbitions at all. He says, "its all right to paint the damn things. but as far as looking at them, he'd rather go to the Luxembourg gardens and watch the children sail their boats. And I agree with him."

Barb!!! I think you have answered the question that has been puzzling me about WF's avoidance of the writers...even more than being intimidated- that last paragraph seems to indicate that our young writer was more interested in observing and experiencing life (his walking through Italy and France on foot!) with the eye of the artist, than to talk to writers about how they wrote about what they saw. Like observing the children sailing their boats, rather than looking at an artist's modernistic interpretation!

He also is an artist himself and is interested in developing that aspect of his talent...

You’re better than me, Charlotte. I feel I need the aid of a bio study either before or after reading the authors work – at least in the case of a writer with the depth of talent that Faulkner has. I need signposts – things to look for or I fear I’d miss too much. I admire your dedication that you dive right in to the body of work itself. I need training wheels first!!

Thanks again, Mary for encouraging us not to be scared off! Hey everybody – with the help of Joan and Maryal O - Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf anyway??

Claire

I can see him naming his daughter after Aunt Bama...but not yet why he named the other Jill. It must have been a similar reason...after someone who meant a lot to him or to his writing career, I'll guess!

Charlotte, what a luxury it would be to read all the works of an author to observe the development and piece together motivation and intent! I envy your time. I did that a long time ago with several authors, Fitzgerald was one. But I don't and lots of us don't have the time before we start Absalom - that's just one of the reasons the biographies are so valuable! Even if you read Sound and the Fury, you still would have to read Flags in the Dust/Sartoris to really comprehend what it took to establish Yoknapatawpha County! I don't know about you all, but I'm finding this "experiment" - reading the bio first - to be invaluable as I begin the reading of Absalom...it seems familiar, and I am right at home...

.

I'm baaack. because I think the Flags in the Dust rejection was crucial...for several reasons.
We've been discussing Faulkner the artist...and Minter tells us that after his stay in Paris, Faulkner begins "to master his ambivalence he felt toward art. He concludes that he wants to "shape his dream in marble, on canvas or paper." He wants to create in some art form. One part of him wants "to move through his world like a living force, stirring beautiful women, living great adventures." He is suspicious of words though..."You begin to substitute words for things and deeds."

In 1925 he wrote that poetry had simplified his early life by providing "an emotional counterpart that required no partner." Now he finds he can sell his fictional essays, short stories for money...and finds that fiction is more "liberating", more enabling than poetry!

He finds himself returning to Oxford more and more. Minter tells us that Joyce's exile found him peering back to his lost home through a distant window. Faulkner returns to ensure he would look again at what had been within...

he found himself for the first time writing what he had heard seen, felt and thought.

he wrote of a shadowy past at once cursed and glorious

he wrote of self-preoccupied individuals and families - of entangled and doomed ancestors

...of descendants of two entangled and doomed races

...and two entangled and doom sexes

Does this sound familiar? He wrote 600 pages and on his 30th birthday, he wrote to Aunt Bama that it was finally finished.

He was confident when he finished...believed that it would bring him both commercial and critical success. To Faulkner it seemed he had discovered "an inexhaustible kingdom", but to his publisher it seemed he did not even have a story to tell." Minter calls this one of the darkest periods in his life. After the rejection, he wrote to the publisher that he still believed that it was "the book which will my name as a writer."

He tried to rewrite, to write..(he had also spent all the advance money the publisher had given him) and needed to write to earn the money. He couldn't revise it...thought he didn't need to. Finally sent it to friend, Ben Wasson who sent it to 10 publishers before an editor at Harcourt Brace liked it - but they said it had to be cut. WF let his friend Ben do it. They renamed it Sartoris and dedicated it to Sherwood Anderson.

The book is considered flawed, but a crucial mark of his emergence as a writer of great originality...it contained promise of greatness and announced the direction Faulkner's career would take...Minter adds that The Sound and the Fury confirms what Flags in the Dust suggests, containing most of the social elements that become a part of Yoknapatawpha fiction and a strong sense of place. This seems to be the determinant in the direction his art would take...I'd like to read it...if I had the time. It will go on my list!

Ella - You mention Faulkner’s “constant need for money” that “drove him not only to writing but drinking”. I was never completely satisfied by Minter or Oates as to why Faulkner drank so much. Do we ever know why? I guess all the things mentioned contributed. Minter does note that it seemed a sort of decompression after finishing a long bout of writing. I thought that was telling. As for what may seem like obvious ways to cut expenses rather than scratch for more money to pay off debts don’t think “Southern tradition” so much as the need to keep up appearances that he was doing well, that he was NOT Count no Count.

Now, Claire you really MUST settle on ONE pet name for me – doesn’t matter which!!!

Aunt Bama really was the keeper of the family legacy, the stories. She was still alive well into Faulkner’s middle age I recall.

Betty - interesting side note for those of us who read Pears on a Willow Tree - we talked about the four generations and the different interpretations we had about the changes from one to the next. Minter: “The Sartoris family retraces Faulkner’s deepest sense of his own family’s story: Flags in the Dust is a tale of division so fundamental that it accounts for both the early heroism and the marked declension of a family. In it we move from a first generation that is predominantly courageous and creative to a second that is less vital and more divided yet remains committed to life and then to a fourth that comes to love and seeks death.” Minter notes the missing “parental generation.”!! Betty – note the courageous first and the “less vital” second…..

Joan - Both Minter and Oates agree on the wildly different perceptions Faulkner had about his work on Flags in the Dust to those of would be publishers. The “inexhaustible kingdom” was, in fact, the Great Discovery of this Chapters title. The corresponding Oates Chapter (A Cosmos of my Own) notes that from that point on “Like Anderson, he no longer trusted people in the outer world; he trusted only his fictional characters, the figures and symbols of his own fumbling dream>”

CHARLES the use of pet names is to "defang" an otherwise intimidating source. You're the leader here, very knowlegeable and as you said Charles is a bit formal and you wanted to be more intimate with us all. Well, how about POOPSIE? *VBG) NOw I laugh when I think of you instead of being intimidated.

Claire

Claire

I'm just rolling through this morning and will copy out your comments to mull over morning coffee. Maryal, I do remember reading that Estelle tried to drown herself on her wedding night, but didn't know that it was alcohol-related.

Here's what I found in Blotner late last night!...I am very curious to learn whether WF drank during the writing of a book, specifically Absalom. Blotner deals with the drinking at length and his comments range from the "everybody drank a lot back then" to "the possibility of an inherited link, an intolerance to alcohol"...

I didn't find anything yet about the extent of Estelle's drinking, except that she did drink. Maud used to come to the house and pour their whiskey down the drain. Here's Blotner on the alcohol issue - remember that Blotner spent much time with the Faulkners as a family friend:.

~"Faulkner's daughter (don't know which one): 'He used drinking as a safety valve. It (feelings of depression, exhaustion and lassitude) had to come out some way and almost invariably at the end of a book. ...the signal that the bouts were coming on...he'd start reciting Shakespeare's 'when daisies pied and violets blue, and lady-smocks all silver white...; or a recitation of The Phoenix and the Turtle...the bouts would last for a week, or ten days or longer.'

There were at least a half dozen other situations that produced the drinking, but there was abstinence too. He would swear off completely for a year. Most of the time he did drink...for long periods whether moderate or considerable, his drinking would be controlled It would have had to be, for him to accomplish all the work he did. But there were extended bouts...which required hospitalization.

~...certainly a predisposition in his family and in the culture:

no such thing as social drinking in their part of Miss. - Liquor was bought from bootleggers...consumed sub rosa. Drinking tended to be hard.

Great-grandfather - heavy drinker

Grandfather and father engaged in bouts that ended in hospitalization.

All of Murry Falkner's four sons drank, and to excess.

There was no doubt that Faulkner's extraordinary capacity, from the time he began drinking his grandfather's whiskey to his subsequent exploits with better whiskey, that the inheritance had been conveyed though one friend in the Vieux Carre looking back on the old days did not recall him as an outstandingly heavy drinker...'we all drank hard'

~He drank because of the way liquor tasted and the way it made him feel Good bourbon, good wine...made him feel good, provided relaxation, a sense of well-being...made him feel in his own words, 'bigger, wiser, taller'.

~He drank out of avoidance as well as for pleasure...shy, claustrophobic in crowds...it was for him an analgesic, an anesthetic...it removed him from the situation through excessive drinking...

~Hunting trips...provided a complete change of atmosphere from his writing...but there was always whiskey around the campfire...

~ There were also periods of faked drunkenness - when Bill was bored, when he wanted to avoid work or to be waited on...

Reactions following prolonged extensive drinking...headache, nausea...withdrawal, tremulousness, insomnia, hallucinations, delirium, hypersensitivity, alcoholic epilepsy...WF would experience all of these at one time or another. But he was fortunate in that he had a strong constitution and was spared some of the extremities to which other writers among his contemporaries were reduced. But his drinking would produce the equivalent of one, two, sometimes more serious illnesses a year. His own euphemism for such an illness was "a collapse".

I am gathering that though alcohol is a major problem in Faulkner's life, he was an episodic alcoholic, capable of going periods without drinking and did not write while drinking. Will be interested as we continue to see if this is true...

Even if you can point to deterioration from one generation to the next, it would be close to impossible to establish cause.

A manuscript fragment now at the University of Virginia strongly suggests that Faulkner originally intended Flags in the Dust as a war story about fighter pilots in France in the mode of Soldiers' Pay focused on the typical "Lost Generation" themes of glamour, fatality, and transcendence. In this initial version of the novel's opening sequence, Bayard Sartoris and his twin brother John (called "Evelyn" in the first few pages) meet in the air over Arras, only to have John shot down by the swarming "Huns." There is a brief mention of Bayard's stay in Memphis, where he was temporarily posted to train American pilots, and of their "grandfather's home in northern Mississippi," but otherwise one finds no attempt to identify the aviators as southerners. ...Faulkner must have sensed that the formula of Soldiers' Pay was leading him to an artistic dead end, for he soon began again in a very different manner. His new opening was set in the attic of the Sartoris home, and Old Byard, the grandfather of the two young pilots, sifting among the family relics and reminiscing about its genealogy. Faluner's purpose was transparent: to establish unimpeachable aristocratic credentials for this southern planter clan, thereby substantiating the Cavalier myth. ...His Sartorises were not merely successful antebellum planters but in fact traced their line back as far as the Plantagenets; The original Bayard Sartoris was said to have fought as a feudal knight at Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War, brandishing the same Toledo blade that now resides in Old Bayard's treasure chest.

...In an unpublished piece done in 1933, he acknowledged "We more than other men," he noted of his fellow southern writers, "unconsciously write ourselves into every line and phrase, postulating our past vain despairs and rages and frustrations." he had encapsulated that despair and rage in Benjy Compson's scram at the very end of The Sound and the Fury and in the horrific rush of "pent black blood" attending Joe Christmas's "crucifixion." Now it was necessary to move backward in time to locate the sources of that anguish, an undertaking even more torturous that would involve some of the most difficult writing of his career. No wonder he allowed himself a few years of respite.

...In February 1934 he started the novel about an antebellum family named Sutpen that would eventually become Absalom, Absalom...Asked twenty years later "What character or incident caused you to write Absalom, Absalom?" Faulkner replied instantly: "Sutpen." "The other characters," he explained, "I had to get out of the attic to tell the story of Stutpen." Repeatedly through the years he would insist, "It's Sutpen's story." Yet in the two short stories that served as the germ of the novel, Thomas Sutpen is a relatively minor figure who differs in certain crucial respects for the Sutpen of Absalom.

What is troubling about Sutpen is not his rapid rise in the world--if anything, Faulkner seems to have admired his great energy and self-reliance -- but rather his decision to repudiate his first wife because of the small, virtually undetectable amount of "Negro blood" that she apparently possessed. At the time of their marriage he had not suspected there was anything wrong; not only did Dulalia appear "white" (her skin is described as "parchment-colored," much like that of Joe Christmas), but she came from a wealthy Haitian planting family, supplying just the kind of match Sutpen needed to fulfill his ambition of becoming a great planter himself.

The American Medical Association recognizes alcoholism as a disease which can be arrested but not cured. One of the symptoms is an uncontrollable desire to drink. Alcoholism is a progressive disease. As long as alcoholics continue to drink, their drive to drink will get worse. If the disease is not arrested, it can end in insanity or death. The only method of arresting alcoholism is total abstinence.

Alcoholism is a lifetime disease. Most authorities agree that even after years of sobriety, alcoholics can never again control their drinking once they start.

Alcoholics drink because they think they have to. They use alcohol as a crutch and an escape. They are in emotional pain and use alcohol to kill that pain. Eventually, they depend on alcohol so much that they become convinced they can't live without it. This is obsession

When some alcoholics try to do without alcohol, the withdrawal symptoms are so overwhelming that they go back to drinking because drinking seems to be the only way to get rid of the agony. This is addiction

Most alcoholics would like to be social drinkers. They spend a lot of time and effort trying to control their drinking so they will be able to drink like other people. They may try drinking on weekends of drinking only a certain drink. But they can never be sure of being able to stop drinking when they want to. They end up getting drunk even when they had promised themselves they wouldn't. This is compulsion

It is the nature of this disease that the patients do not believe they are ill. This is denial Hope for recovery lies in their ability to recognize a need for help, their desire to stop drinking, and their willingness to admit that they cannot cope with the problem by themselves.

Alcoholism is a "family" disease. Compulsive drinking affects the drinker and it affects the drinker's relationships: Friendships, employment, childhood, parenthood, marriages all suffer from the effects of alcoholism. Those who care are the most caught up in the behavior of another person. They react to an alcoholic's behavior. They see the drinking our of hand and try to control it. They are ashamed of the public scenes and in private they try to handle it. It isn't long before they feel they are to blame and take on the hurts, fears, the guilt of an alcoholic.

These well-meaning people begin to count the number of drinks another person is having...All their thinking is directed at what the alcoholic is doing or not doing and how to get the drinker to stop drinking. This is their obsession

Watching another human being slowly kill themselves with alcohol is painful. They make the mistake of covering up for the alcoholic those day to day responsibilities and relationships the alcoholic is not worrying about. They fix everything, make excuses, tell little lies to mend damaged relationships and they worry some more. This is their anxiety

Sooner or later they alcoholic's behavior makes other people angry. They realize that the alcoholic is not taking care of responsibilities, is telling lies, using them. They have begun to feel that the alcoholic doesn't love them and they want to strike back, punish, make the alcoholic pay for the hurt and frustration caused by uncontrolled drinking. This is their anger This may explain the behavior of Faulkner's mother to his Dad??

Those close to the alcoholic begin to pretend. They accept promises, they believe, they want to believe the problem has gone away each time there is a sober period. When every good sense tells them there is something wrong with the alcoholic's drinking and thinking, they still hide how they feel and what they know. This is their denial

The most sever damage to those who have shared life with an alcoholic comes in the form of the nagging belief that they are somehow at fault; they were not up to it all, not attractive enough, cleaver enough, to have solved this problem. They think it is something they did or did not do. These are their feelings of guilt

Theories abound. Writing and drinking are both part of the same oral mechanism…not very satisfying. The manhood syndrome. More interesting. That while “writing literature in an age of science, physical accomplishment, extension of new frontiers” drinking “provided continuity with the doers who opened up the country and proved their masculinity.” For Faulkner, whose drinking was particularly American (private and not social)…”the cowboy on the range, the frontiersman with no one to look to except himself, the independent man or woman who eschews connections.”

Joan, Karl theorizes that Faulkner did drink while writing – “it may some day be possible to connect Faulkner’s long, almost undisciplined sentences to the fact that he started drinking early in the morning as he wrote. Once the alcohol had taken effect, he felt unassailable, invulnerable, and the result could be a lack of discipline or differentiation, such as those interminable sentences.”

Finally he says: “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. 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; his mother, the desire to read, the support for his writing, the “feminine” world of literary endeavor which contradicted what thee father represented.”

Well, Oregon Betty, myth may be the key. Back to that again. We return to the Oracle.

O’Neill, Lewis, Steinbeck, Hemingway. Other American writers who may have been considered Nobel candidates who were also alcoholics: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, Thornton Wilder. Still others: Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote, Dashiell Hammett, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Theodore Roethke…etc., etc.

Okay, I'll have to accept that he was drinking when he wrote Absalom! Maybe he did most of his work in the early morning? Hemingway did that! Before his thinking was too muddied. I'll bet Blotner has something to say about that! Will have to look.

This all reminds me of the one barber in my son's college town. The kids would cut class - anything to get to Wendell early in the day if they needed a haircut...as Wendell had the same tendency. No one would trust him with those clippers in the afternoon.

doc Betty when do you leave for Texas? Then I'll really have a tough time adjusting! May I still call you readerdoc until you move?

"Wolfe made the grandest failure because he had a vast courage-courage in that he attempted what he knew he probably couldn't do." And so the grandest failure was to attempt the impossible, to reach for something so difficult, so pure as art, that it was doomed from the start.

I’d argue that Faulkner passed through stages one and two in his relationships to people. Then focused all his attention on his “cosmos”, his writing, to explore the third stage.

I’ll be out of town for about a week – should be back on the 10th or 11th. So at least I’ll be able to hold the fort while ya’ll are in Chicago. Then – on to Absalom, Absalom

Charlie

Not that Faulkner particularly minded repeating himself: I came to believe, after sitting in on many of these classes, that he enjoyed the possibilities for incremental variation in his answers, responding one way today and another way next month, especially about his own work and that of other writers. Faulkner always distinguished between "truth" and "facts"; "facts" sometimes annoyed him.

Tricky, as I say; but I reasoned that Faulkner had to keep from boring himself over so many interviews and conferences, and so quite understandably wished to embellish here and there, to revise the "facts" now and then, just for fun. ...I was to hear him tell one group how much he detested Jason Campson, of The Sound and the Fury-- and to hear him tell another group a month later, that Jason was one of his favorite characters. "any man who hates Babe Ruth can't be all bad"...He would talk about flying, horses and hunting with anyone; but if forced to talk about literature, his own or others, he would almost unfailingly hide behind a shield of irony, amiable banter, or assumed forgetfulness.

Claire

It's a terrible burden that the Negro has to carry in my country. It's astonishing that any of them can disassociate themselves enough from that problem and that burden to make anything of a talent. And when one does, I think it implies a very fine talent, that it is strong enough so that he can accept the fact that he is a Negro and then stop worrying about it and be a writer. Much more difficult than the white man.

And further:

"If left to the children there would be no race problem. It was only when they grew up and inherited the southern economy, based as it was on a system of black peonage, that they accepted racial distinctions between blacks and whites."

Estelle's drinking seems to have increased... from social to private - becoming a problem during these early days...the honeymoon actually. From reading this chapter, I can understand their situation and find that it was not unbearable for either of them...that there was something there for each, or they would have parted...and rather than a deleterious effect on WF's writing, the pattern set at this time seems to have had a positive effect!

Phil Stone and others were opposed to the marriage...thought it would increase his already difficult financial burden and distract him from his writing. He was right about the first, but wrong on the second count. Estelle was accustomed to spending freely on clothes, on herself. She brought her silk gowns to their honeymoon in Pascagoula...WF brought only his beachcomber clothes. He also skipped the hygiene department, let his beard grow. It must have been a long honeymoon...This isn't two weeks and then home to Oxford.

At one point they took a honeymoon break to New Orleans - to the Vieux Carre where the dinner conversations, music, parties gave Estelle a chance to wear her fine gowns. We are told that WF could be elegant on occasion...and Minter relates that as a boy he had purchased clothes and acquired the habits of a dandy to impress Estelle. That explains a lot to me! I thought he was merely imitating the dress of the Edwardian poets!

It was the return to Pascagoula, that the pattern seems to have evolved. Estelle remembers well her first marriage, and her immediate regrets. She had learned from this marriage, that she did not want to live without Faulkner. She learned from her honeymoon with Faulkner that she would have less of him than she needed.. "She discovered that she meant less to him as his wife than she had as his first love." She begins to drink because of her loneliness and wades into the ocean dressed in her favorite silk gown to drown herself. It surely sounds like a call for attention from her new husband! Where is he, what is he doing that she should feel so desperately alone?

Three guesses! He was enraged at the editing job Ben Wasson had performed on The Sound and the Fury in order to get it published. He buried himself in his writing, retreating to his fictional kingdom...where he lives with his love character, Caddie Compson - "the maid that life had not time to create", "his impossible heart's desire." The funny thing is that the character is very much like Estelle, based in fact on his perceived abandonment by Estelle when she married Franklin. He will continue to dwell in this kingdom for the rest of his life.

WF decided he could not live on his writing alone and took a night job at the University of Miss. - starting at 6 pm and working 12 hr. shifts. I'm not at all clear what he was doing there, but Minter tells us that he would write all night...As I Lay Dying, sleeping during the day for short periods...with daily visits to his mama.

Nothing written here about drinking during this period...but can imagine Estelle's reaction to this routine. If she was drinking from loneliness on her honeymoon...

But no, though his financial burdens have increased, his writing has not suffered as was feared by many before his marriage! And yes, I agree with Maryal and Charlotte, he did find happiness, escape in his writing...perhaps Estelle found hers in her improved financial situation, which his writing would begin to provide. But the Great Depression is just around the corner!

He would devote the greater part of his efforts as a Modernist writer...searching for an ideal twentieth-century southern identity...That search would give rise to a series of characters who would in some manner bring together attributes of culture, race, and gender...to undergo immense suffering as the price for violating fundamental taboos, these exemplary figures were meant to stand as no less than contemporary invocations of Christ, redemptive models ...many of these Modernist Christ figures...would turn out to be either black or female.

In daily life he would continue to relate...on his accustomed basis of paternalistic superiority...To the end of his days the nineteenth-century attitudes toward sex and gender that he internalized as a child would remain to encumber him, rendering problematic his relationships with his wife and many of the other women with whom he interacted as an adult. Like so many men of his era, he would both idealize woman as paragons of sexual purity and simultaneously resent them for their moral standard they seemed to enforce on him.

...He began to explore gender in the same way he had race. He would commence with what might be called an unveiling of the southern lady, revealing her to be a person with the normal range of human passions and sexual drives behind her facade of absolute purity, and then proceed to create a number of female characters who broke decisively with Victorian mores in general. Such a daring move, however, was bound to upset his internal psychic balance. If his Modernist self deeply admired these liberated women, the Victorian part of him required that the narratives in which they appeared duly punish them for their sins, either through death or some form of mutilation.

...two figures would come closer to his vision of Christ-like perfection...Charlotte Rittnemeyer of The Wild Palms and Linda Snopes of The Mansion each undergo a terrible travail following their revolt against conventional gender roles,...

...As it happens, this portrait of heroic androgymy has led some critics to designate Faulkner an incipient feminist, just as the ordeals to which he subjects Charlotte and Linda, along with earlier woman characters, have convinced others to see him as a hopeless misogynist. Although both labels carry a measure of truth, they fall decisively short of capturing the full reality of William Faulkner. Only an interpretation that takes into account the tensions arising from his conflicting selves can do that. On gender, as with everything else, his position in his best fictions was that of a Modernist engaged in a continuous rear-guard action against a significant part of his own psyche.

Perhaps no other major American writer would struggle so hard as Faulkner did to become a Modernist...His career would be spent gathering up the fragments of myth and culture that had been bequeathed to him in order to recast them into a workable identity that could withstand the new conditions of twentieth-century life and perhaps offer the possibility of heroic action.

We saw his fear and resentment of his mother's strong domination. He responded by ignoring her wishes and her feelings by avoiding his chores and his schoolwork. His fictional women are often cold, self-involved, withholding the affection which he craves. His desire to be strong and self-sufficient causes him to be wary of the female who "engulfs and controls." He can control them in his fictional kingdom.

Then there is the bitterness and distrust of women because of the "wounds inflicted by Estelle and Helen" - Estelle the "earliest and deepest disappointment ... from which he was slow to recover", his heart's delight, the object of his poetic expression...followed by the flirtatious Helen Baird...who did not take his romantic soul any more seriously than had Estelle. In his fictional kingdom, these young provacateuses must be punished, must fall. He views puberty as the end of innocence and compensates for his disappointment in his fiction.

So, What I am proposing is that rather than a representative of the male attitude toward women at the time, our author is responding to the tensions within, brought about by the domineering mother who withheld the affection he craved, and the distrust of the thoughtless young women who turned away from his expressions of affection and romance. I will look upon his work as a very personal reaction to the women of his experience. And I will accept his work as a valid expression of this experience.

Claire

I have a book of WF Photographs here, the Cofield Edition I love to peer closely at the faces. I must say that Estelle looks quite content in the photos, impish, playful, bettydoc...not "degraded" or "empty". WF looks happiest with his daughter Jill - the caption says he was a doting and adoring father...

The photo of him you see up in the heading - the one on the left, has this caption as Cofield recalls:

"United Press needed a publicity shot for a write-up on Sanctuary, Bill's first big success. On this occasion, Bill wore an old, old, brown tweed coat, red bandana hanky in his pocket, white seersucker pants smeared and spotted with paint, uncombed hair.

He objected to the whole procedure (considered it a waste of his valuable time). It took the very best persuasive powers of his wife, Estelle and me to get him to perform this feat."

I am off to Chicago this week, but will be back bright and early next Monday morning to begin Absalom, Absalom! Chollie, I'd be so happy if you and the gang here would spend a bit of time checking the biographies you are reading for information regarding Faulkner's life when he wrote this novel. I think it would be helpful to us to set it in this context.

If Absalom and other writings are considered an alligory for southern life, the community acts as a character which expresses it generally although the characters themselves don't seem to be concerned. so far in chapter one....Miss Rosa is a pretty earthy character although she does turn Sutpen down in his suggestion of a trial sexual relationship and never speaks of it openly until later in the book it's more in terms of her reputaion than personal insult, demeaning to her sense of self and family. (comments?) I'll look for more of this as we read.

Claire

Claire

Charlie

We could not have predicted what kind of novel Faulkner would write in order to represent such elements; but is clear that his greatest fiction shadows his own existence, however exaggerated and misshapen events become when touched by his creative energies. In Sutpen Faulkner saw a surrogate…The greatness of Absalom rests on its narrative method – the strategy of telling and retelling, a device perfectly fitted to Sutpen’s, and Faulkner’s, need to write and rewrite history. In Sutpen, Faulkner was able to infuse much of his own duality, his own ambiguities and problems, as well as those of his Faulkner heritage. The nation, represented as the South, was like a poison infecting his blood.”

Another thought: As most of you know, Joan takes the reading and study of her Great Books at a slow and steady pace. Given the nature of how Faulkner ‘tells and retells’ his tales from new angles, different perspectives, it will be interesting to see how our judgements change and progress as we get further into the novel. I’m really looking forward to it. See you there!

Charlie

CHARLIE I thing the biography as a preparation is wonderful. Now I know how the other books fit in and maybe even why. Sutpen wore a canvas vest .....a small thing but I'm aware now of where WF got the idea. Thank you all who read up on Minter and Oaks. I didn't have it so appreciated you sharing it and your insights. Good experiment. Let's do it again next time. Speaking of which -- bravo had a film called Henry and June last night which was from one of Anaise diaries about her and June and Henry Miller while he was writing Tropic of Cancer. I loved it. I met him once, my what a horney old man. . . The three of us were all young women and he just had to try is luck. . . I think he was pushing eighty or did he live that long. He was a lousy painter. I don't know why he was famous for that.

Sometimes writers are more interesting than the things they write, especially when taken in tandem with others of the same period, although Miller was a little later --Tropic of Cancer written during the thirties when hitler was coming to power.

see you all at GB. . . . . Claire

It will remain open here in the General Discussion area until we finish the novel...either for further comment or for research. Do you all know how to use the "SEARCH" feature of the software? Just click it on, type in the subject..."alcoholic" for example...and then you'll get to read all the posts that included that word. It should help once we get into the novel...

We're all ready for you up in the "Current Discussion" of Absalom...bring your precious selves up there, you hear!