Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art, A Biography
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Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art, A Biography
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Overview
The deeply moving, untold story of America's greatest twentieth-century novelist and the three women at the center of his imaginative life This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300165685 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2010 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 616 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Faulkner and Love
The Women Who Shaped His ArtBy Judith L. Sensibar
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2009 Judith L. SensibarAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11503-1
Chapter One
Caroline Barr in Black and White VoicesMiss Callie, Aunt Callie, Aunt Carrie, Great-Great Grandma Callie, Mammy Callie
In 1897, one year after Plessy v. Ferguson legalized racial segregation and Jim Crowism was accepted as constitutional, William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi. Caroline Barr began caring for the baby, known as Willie, either at his birth or in 1898, shortly after the Falkners moved from New Albany to Ripley, William's great-grandfather's hometown. Then sixty-five years old, which to Willie "seemed already older than God," Caroline had grown to maturity and borne children as a slave and then had lived through Reconstruction and its failure ("Mississippi," 16). Freed in 1865, she did not work again in the homes of whites until her daughters, who had been born free, were grown. When she did, it was far from their home in the Sardis area of Mississippi.
Barr's daughters and at least one of her nieces, this first generation of freeborn Barrs, were independent and enterprising. At a time when 90 percent of the country's rural African American population worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, her daughters' families would eventually own the cotton fields nearBatesville they had once sharecropped. Her brother Ed Barr's daughter, Molly Barr, bore and raised eleven children of her own; she also became one of Oxford's few black businesswomen. So famous, or infamous (depending on the sources), did Molly Barr become that in the late 1980s the town of Oxford built and named a road after her. When Callie Barr moved from Ripley to Oxford with the Falkners in late September 1902, Molly Barr was the niece she often visited, with the Falkner boys in tow.
Callie Barr and the Falkner Women: History of a Relationship
A racially composite matriarchy composed of Maud's mother, Lelia Butler, Maud, and Callie began living together and sharing the care of Maud's and her husband Murry's three little boys before the Falkners moved to Oxford. Jill remembers Callie often prefacing remarks with "'When we lived in Ripley' or 'when I came from Ripley with the boys.' I remember her mentioning the Barrs briefly, saying she came from Carolina with the Barrs, is the image I have." She thinks Callie had been "a house servant of Pappy's grandfather's before Pappy was born." Jill's father confirms this, writing that "she did not enter [the Falkner] household until my father's children began to arrive." From then on "she was present day and night, in the house with us while I and my brothers were in our successive infancy." 6 Callie may have come to Ripley by way of Pontotoc, a town directly south of Ripley and slightly southeast of Oxford. Rachel McGee and her daughter say that "they [Callie Barr, her children, and her brothers, Ed Barr and Taylor Robinson] all came from Pontotoc." In one ac count Faulkner writes that Callie "was born a slave, on the plantation of Samuel Barr, in Pontotoc County" and later "came to this county [Lafayette] and to Samuel Barr's brother near the end of the Civil War." Neither census nor tax records confirm Callie's presence in any of these places.
Caroline Barr and Faulkner's maternal grandmother, Lelia Butler, belonged to the same generation. Historically speaking, both were frontier women, both had had hard lives, both had done their share of farm work and of traveling in search of a better living, and neither seemed to have much use for the grown men who had entered and left their lives. But one was born a slave: she may also have lost husbands or lovers to the auction block; according to her great-great grandson, she had seen her own children sold. She spent the majority of her life caring for white families' children, first as a slave and later as a free woman.
By 1907, the year Maud's fourth and last child, Dean Swift, was born, both Lelia, for whom Maud named Dean (Lelia was a Swift), and Maud's mother-in-law, to whom Maud was very close, had died of cancer. Between helping to care for her two mothers and her own children and coping with a difficult and probably unexpected and unwanted pregnancy and her husband's apparently permanent unhappiness, Maud had had a traumatic two years. During this time her emotional dependence on Callie increased as her own mother, suffering intense pain that only morphine could ease, faded. Callie, who had by then worked for the Falkners for ten years, became the eldest in Maud and Murry's household. John Faulkner speculates that "Mammy, in a strong measure" replaced both grandmothers: "Perhaps in a stronger measure than they, for Mammy was never adverse to scolding and had a good deal sharper tongue. I can remember her making any one of the three of us to 'hump it' when we were a little slow in minding her." Whether Maud confided in Callie, we'll never know. Like Caroline Barr in her community, Maud Falkner was known as a very "close" and private woman. Nonetheless, working day and night for the Falkners made Callie privy to family secrets that, as Susan Tucker notes, "could not be hidden within the private home." With her, as with so many black women of her time and place, "such secrets were safe because of racial etiquette that ensured that what went on in a white home would never be mentioned by a black to another white." (At least not another white adult. Children were a different matter.)
The white home Callie Barr first entered in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897 was perhaps more emotionally volatile than most. She became part of the Falkner household during one of the most difficult periods in Maud's long and often rocky marriage. Between November 1896, when Maud Butler and the tall, handsome, and quick-tempered Murry Falkner married in Oxford, and the fall of 1902, she had borne three sons and lived in three towns. In 1902, her husband, who had a reputation for heavy drinking and quick fists, had been summarily removed from his job by his equally hard-drinking and overbearing father, J.W.T. Falkner. Murry's involvement with the family railroad was to be the only work he would ever enjoy. His father, a successful criminal lawyer and entrepreneur, then ordered his son (who had never finished college) to Oxford and put him in nominal charge of one of his several businesses. Murry hated his new work and hated being bossed around, but he had three children to support and a wife who refused to head to Texas to make a fresh start, like so many Mississippians, including her future daughter-in-law's family, the Oldhams. During the years his children grew from babies to young adults, Murry allowed his father to shift him from one unsatisfying job to another, offering only passive resistance. He did minimal work and he drank.
Compounding Murry Falkner's problems was his wife's mother, Lelia Butler. A fervent Baptist and daughter of two of Oxford's founding families, the Swifts and the Pullens, she had joined the household shortly after Murry lost his railroad job. She brought with her painting supplies, Jeremy Taylor's Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying (1850 reprint), Frederick G. Wright's The Logic of Christian Evidences (1893), and T. C. Blake's History and Defense of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (1880). Besides objecting to alcohol on religious and pragmatic grounds, Lelia disliked Murry, whose freeness with guns and fists reminded her of the husband who'd deserted her and their teenaged children in 1887, when she was in her mid-thirties. Before Maud and Murry moved to Oxford, Lelia addressed letters to her daughter as "Mrs. Maud Butler."
We know from Faulkner's daughter and Barr's relatives that Callie also disapproved of Murry's drinking. She could no more curb it than could Maud or Lelia, but the job of coping with him while drunk was among the many intimacies shared by the black and white women whom the four Falkner boys had been taught to think of as their first and second mothers. A generation later and long after his death, Jill learned that her grandfather Murry was an alcoholic, "because all the colored people talked about it. I think his drinking was pretty spectacular. I mean that it was worth comment. When he drank, everybody knew about it. He was a rip-roarer, a pretty exciting drunk and also, I think, a mean one. I've never been told that, exactly, but Mammy Callie alluded to it-that Mr. Murry was bad news when he had been drinking."
Murry died in 1932, a year before Jill was born; her impressions of him are formed by what she learned from Callie Barr, whose teaching methods are revealed in Jill's account. She taught by telling stories. Sometimes these were about confusing or frightening but ever-present taboo subjects that the children's parents never mentioned, like drinking and sex: "Mammy Callie was the only person who ever talked to me about him. Mostly, she talked about how difficult he was. When I'd done something I shouldn't have, she'd say I was exactly like my grandfather. If I were stubborn about eating, for example. He would not eat vegetables. That was very unusual for a Southerner. Well, he drank a lot, and one time, after he'd been to Byhalia, the doctor said he had to start eating them. His answer to that was to demand that Mammy Callie bring him a leaf of lettuce every morning before he'd get out of bed. He'd wash it down with a shot of whiskey, which she'd also bring."
Callie's story makes a joke out of the grandfather's drinking, but it also instructs Jill in how not to grow up like him. Even more important for understanding Faulkner's childhood and Callie's role in his education, Callie's story characterizes Murry in the same infantilized terms whites typically reserved for blacks. Callie has, as Ralph Ellison would say, "changed the joke and slipped the yoke." Here, instead of a black servant, it is Murry, the white master, who, though an adult, is only half a person, a person of a race (and gender) that remained a child. Callie treats him as a "boy" or "uncle"-not as a man. Such shrewd reversals were a constant in the stories Callie told the young Willie and his brothers. As Faulkner's own, often piercing stories about race reveal, the implications of her tales were not lost on him. But what he envisioned in his fiction and what he would or could do in his life did not necessarily coincide.
From the time he was a small child, Faulkner saw that his father's drinking engaged the attentions of both his mother and Callie Barr. From his grandfather and father, he learned that drinking could be used to dull emotional pain, attract a certain kind of care, and avoid responsibilities. The response Murry Falkner got from his two mothers may explain one reason why the grown Faulkner repeated his father's self-destructive and childlike behavior with his mother and Callie. Only as a child had he not felt guilt and shame for wanting the emotional warmth Callie gave him. Drunk, he could reclaim that childhood state, just like his father and grandfather.
Although Jill says that, long after Callie's death, she was told that Callie was the only person who could stop her father's binges, the record shows-and she remembers-that no one could. Callie's relatives report that even in the late 1930s, when Faulkner drove Callie to their house on the outskirts of Freedman Town to visit, he'd take along a jug of white lightning and go off in the woods to drink. When he'd return to the McGees', Callie would reprimand him; "he'd weep and promise to stop and she'd say, if he stayed this late [in the woods] again, 'I goin' to come and get you.' And he'd get in his old high-wheel car and him and her-she was so little you couldn't hardly see her-down the road they go."
These stories are significant because they help explain Maud's and Callie's relationship to each other and to the man and the children they both spent five decades of their lives caring for. All the Falkner boys experienced their joint mothering as a twinning and a twining, but Willie was the only one to use his experience of being cared for by a black and a white mother to create some of the most revealing and painful fictional renderings of how racism permeates, binds, yet, ultimately, destroys every relationship it touches.
He was also one of the few Modernist writers to push beyond the macho mystique of alcohol to explore its role in the class, racial, and sexual politics of Southern culture and history. He was the only writer to translate its effects on the mind into a unique poetics of modern identity, one that destabilizes time and space and dissolves the boundaries and traditional distinctions between exterior and interior reality.
By the time he was sixteen, Faulkner was probably already, by medical definitions, an alcoholic. At twenty-three, when he still was trying to become a poet, Faulkner first used alcohol as a trope for the divided and disintegrating self. The Marionettes (1920), his symbolist dream-play, is its protagonist's alcohol-induced dream about his double, whom he imagines as another, freer self. By early 1925, owing in part to Faulkner's reading of Estelle Oldham's unpublished short story "A Crossing," her fictionalized response to and revision of his play, his aesthetics of alcohol had become de-idealized. His first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), reflects this. Its opening scene draws on what Estelle's story had revealed to him about how parents or surrogate parents can use alcohol to destroy their children and make them conform to their will. In the novels that follow, The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary, alcohol is the weapon of choice of those in charge, like the Compson children's father and uncle and all of Temple Drake's would-be and actual rapists. Characters as dissimilar as Benjy Compson and Temple Drake are force-fed bootleg liquor in scenes that portray the ways the strong literally force alcohol on the weak to obliterate their identity or selfhood by disorienting them so that they lose their grasp on reality.
Forcing liquor on young boys appears to have been a rite of passage in Faulkner's family. Although Faulkner never told such a story about himself, except to say that before he'd reached his teens he was regularly downing his grandfather's "heeltaps," his brother John's son, Jimmy Faulkner, remembers his induction at fourteen: "That was bad. John and Brother Will were drinking out at the farm. They were drinking straight whiskey-corn whiskey-out of a tin cup. I was going from the house down to the barn to catch a horse and go riding. I walked past them and Brother Will called out and said: 'You're old enough now to have your first drink, and we want you to have your first drink with us.' I said 'All right.' So they had this tin cup, poured whiskey in it and said, 'Here.'" Jimmy had seen his father and uncle drinking, so he, too, drank the whole cup of "200-proof" alcohol at once. "I couldn't breathe.... It burned my stomach." Jimmy could barely drag himself home and once there, he couldn't even crawl into bed. His mother was furious and called Maud. But the family punished Jimmy and his father: "This caused a split in the family: nobody would talk to John or me." Only Maud tried to protect the child from any more of his uncle's jokes: "Nanny [Maud] wouldn't let me come down to Brother Will's house by myself."
By 1936, Faulkner had fully worked out and integrated the trope of alcoholism into his modernist poetics. In Absalom, Absalom! young Thomas Sutpen's father's alcoholic haze spreads like a disease to his impressionable youngest son. It enfolds and disorients the ten-year-old child in the first temporal stage of his dislocating "fall" from innocence to knowledge. This stage is figured literally in his family's journey from the "unraced and unclassed" country of the child's birth in the mountains of West Virginia, "where the land belonged to anybody and everybody," down into his "rebirth" in the Tidewater Basin of large-scale plantation slavery. As the boy drives their wagon filled with his brothers and sisters, their few belongings, and his father "snoring with alcohol," then waits outside an endless stream of taverns "for the father to drink himself insensible," and drives on "to a sort of dreamy and destinationless locomotion after they had got the old man out of whatever shed or outhouse or barn or ditch and loaded him into the cart again," his mind becomes a mirror of his father's and a metaphor for his own dissolving but as yet unraced and unclassed self. Like a drunk, he loses all sense of direction and time: "So he knew neither where he had come from nor where he was nor why." He even loses his memory: "He became confused about his age and was never able to straighten it out again" (AA, 179, 182, 184).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations....................ixPreface....................xii
Acknowledgments....................xviii
General Introduction....................1
Part 1. William Faulkner and Caroline "Callie" Barr INTRODUCTION....................19
1. Caroline Barr in Black and White Voices....................25
2. Caroline Barr's Origins....................34
3. Negotiating the "Mammy" Tradition: Callie Barr as "Second Mother"....................56
4. Callie Barr and Maud Falkner....................66
5. Caroline Barr and Faulkner's Poetics: Go Down, Moses....................89
6. Family Secrets: "Mississippi"....................111
Part 2. Faulkner's Mother, Maud Butler Falkner INTRODUCTION....................129
7. Maud's Mysterious Ancestry....................139
8. Willie Falkner's Childhood World, 1896-1907....................161
9. From Honor Roll to Truancy, 1907-1914....................186
10. Choosing Roles and Role Models....................197
11. Learning to Speak with His Eyes....................205
12. Reading Faulkner's "Mothers"....................221
Parts 3, 4, and 5. William Faulkner and Estelle Oldham INTRODUCTION....................237
Part 3. Estelle and Billy, 1903-1914 13. Estelle Oldham's Mississippi Frontier Family....................249
14. Kosciusko Childhood, Southern Belledom, and Estelle's Fictional Memoir, 1897-1903....................264
15. Billy Falkner and Estelle Oldham, Oxford, 1903-1914....................289
Part 4. First Loves, First "Marriages," 1914-1926 16. Shifting Alliances, 1914-1918....................309
17. The Oldham-Franklin Wedding, April1918....................323
18. Marriage in the "Crossroads of the Pacific," June-September 1918....................336
19. An Army Wife, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, September 1918-May 1919....................348
20. Stolen Interludes, 1919 and 1921....................359
21. The Marketing of Estelle and Her Rebellion....................387
Part 5. The Emergence of a Mature Novelist 22. Estelle's Shanghai Sojourn, 1922-1924....................407
23. Collaborating with Estelle, Oxford, 1924-1925....................424
24. Faulkner's Other Collaboration, New Orleans, 1924 and 1925....................441
25. The Sound and the Fury and Its Aftermath, 1925-1933....................456
26. Faulkner's Suppressed Tributes to Estelle, 1933-1935....................481
List of Abbreviations....................501
Notes....................504
Select Bibliography....................569
Index....................581