Every Day by the Sun Page 6

  For a short while, William and Dean were the only brothers living at home. Ben Wasson spent many hours in the Falkner home and observed William’s fondness for his youngest brother. He remembered Dean as “a little wren darting in and out of the room, constantly asking his brother for help with his lessons or, perhaps, how a particular Boy Scout knot should be tied. Bill was always amicable.” Ben and William engaged in literary discussions that apparently irritated Murry. “Obviously, Murry thought Bill and I were nuts. He was not at all interested in what we were doing. He was not a literary man. Maud, however, was interested in poetry and writing.”

  At twenty-two, William was reading voraciously and trying to find his identity as a writer. He was less interested in completing coursework than in serving as prop man for the student drama group, the Marionettes. He sketched illustrations for the Ole Miss yearbook. Murry, whose favorite writer was Zane Grey, neither understood nor approved of these artistic leanings. On one occasion he walked in on William showing Maud a newly completed poem, turned on his heel, and left.

  William became a scoutmaster and took Dean and his friends hiking and camping in pup tents. Sometimes they would hike three miles to Thacker Mountain, cook supper, then hike back in the dark following the railroad tracks. One evening, they heard a freight train coming. When it slowed down for a sharp bend, William let the boys hop an empty boxcar and ride back to Oxford. It was an unforgettable moment. After the camping trip, William wrote the letter on the next page to Dean.

  A few months later, however, the scoutmaster-storyteller was dismissed after one of the boys’ fathers, a strict teetotaler, circulated rumors of William’s drinking. (One of the original Scouts told me, years later, “Bill set a good example and would never have taken a drink on a camping trip.”)

  In 1920, William quit taking classes at Ole Miss and became assistant postmaster at the university. His father, of course, had arranged this entrée into federal employ. Murry’s feelings of satisfaction soon faded, however: Faculty members complained that the mail was not being delivered to their post office boxes. They had observed Assistant Postmaster Falkner reading books or sketching, smoking his pipe—anything but what he was being paid to do. It was a known fact that William tossed all but first-class mail in the trash and ignored patrons rapping on the counter. The outraged professors were reduced to sorting through the trash for their mail. “I refuse,” William cheerfully explained to Ben Wasson, “to be at the beck and call of every SOB with the price of a two-cent stamp.”*

  The rebel postmaster continued to live with his parents. Long after Maud and Murry had gone to bed, he and Dean would sit up talking and listening for the whistle of the nine thirty southbound out of Memphis. Trains passed through at all hours within a stone’s throw of the former Delta Psi house. William and Dean knew every engineer by name and could recognize his touch on the whistle. Those were the days of porters, redcaps, and meals in the dining car served on white linen with real cutlery, fresh flowers, and finger bowls. William and Dean were great-grandsons of the founder of a railroad and probably wished (as much as I) that the Falkners still owned a railroad.

  Eight trains were scheduled each day, four of them passenger trains. Walking home from school in the afternoon, Dean could hear the three o’clock heading north and would race to join schoolboys gathered by the tracks. A particular engineer loved children and often would stop and allow two or three lucky boys to climb aboard for a short ride to the depot.

  On Sunday afternoons, the arrival of the three o’clock northbound was a special occasion, a social gathering. Town and gown would gather at the Shack, a café and boardinghouse across the street from the train depot. In their Sunday best, the locals waited for the train, then rushed to see who was getting on or off. The depot would be surrounded by horse-drawn cabs, hacks, and phaetons from Oxford’s three livery stations, waiting to take passengers to their destinations.

  William and Ben Wasson rarely missed a Sunday afternoon. They were as caught up in the excitement and drama as Dean and his schoolmates, especially the arrival of Pullman diners with people framed in the windows, eating and drinking so casually and elegantly. “We wondered where they were going,” Wasson recalled, “and we longed to go with them.”

  On March 3, 1922, Murry’s father died. In all probability his death did not affect Dean greatly, since he had only had casual exposure to the Young Colonel. By the time Dean was old enough to be influenced by J.W.T., his grandfather was deaf and approaching senility. William, however, was much saddened. He remembered his grandfather telling stories of the Civil War, passed down from the Old Colonel. One of his favorites was how Colonel Falkner, who had resigned his army commission, made the family fortune by smuggling black-market goods into Memphis. He would pack sugar, flour, coffee, and tobacco on mules and send his “loyal retainer,” as the Falkner family referred to the colonel’s slave, across Union army lines. If picked up, he was to pose as a runaway. Pappy liked to say that the Falkner family understood the true purpose of war—to make money.

  One Sunday afternoon Dean and William were attending an ice cream social at the First Methodist Church. William leaned over and whispered that he had borrowed a car (though certainly not his father’s Buick). Would Dean like to go to Memphis? Within minutes they were on their way. Both brothers knew their grandfather’s tale of traveling the “Reivers’ Road” that passed through College Hill, north of Oxford. There was a family of reivers—thieves—who flooded the road and charged J.W.T. a fee for pulling him out after his car got stuck.

  Arriving in Memphis, William took his twelve-year-old brother to the red-light district on Mulberry Street, where he parked in front of Miss Reba’s, a deceptively staid two-story house on this quiet, tree-lined street. Dean went into the parlor with William and was introduced to the “lady of the house.” He was allowed to stay until all the girls came in, and then he was sent outside. He played jacks on the sidewalk until his brother emerged. They rode back to Oxford over the clay hills of Mississippi singing Methodist hymns all the way.

  ABOUT THE TIME that William withdrew from Ole Miss, he self-published his first serious attempt at writing, a play called Marionettes. He hand-printed the one-act play and illustrated it with pen-and-ink drawings of bare-breasted women. Then he stapled the little book together and pasted it to a cover. He made six copies, which he and Ben Wasson circulated among their Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers. Wasson would later write: “My copy was passed among the students and there was a wild scramble to see it, since word had gotten around that the ‘Count’ had written and illustrated a salacious book containing ‘hot’ illustrations. The text of the book was undoubtedly influenced by Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.… The final full-page illustration in Marionettes was felt to be by those who saw it a real ‘eye popper’ inasmuch as it showed Marietta, the heroine of the piece, depicted with two nude breasts in a full forward view which was, as one student said, ‘titillating.’ ” Ben and William sold five copies for $5 each so that the author could “buy some corn whiskey.” (In 1975, one of these books sold for $30,000 at auction in New York.)

  On summer afternoons William and Dean would walk down Mill Street to Calloway’s Pool, change their clothes in one of the wooden bathhouses, and spend a pleasant four or five hours swimming. Dean was an expert swimmer and diver. The Olympic-sized concrete pool had a swing. One of his favorite stunts was to stand on the swing and pump until he was going as high as he could go. Then, timing it exactly, he would let go of the rope and dive off the swing into the water. It was a perfect dive every time, or so it was said.

  Dean learned to tolerate his brother’s penchant for drinking and partying with his college friends. Oxford was dry in 1921, though crated liquor could be shipped by railway express. This was how fraternities obtained whiskey even though it was against the law. One day in late November, Dean and some friends were crossing a footbridge by the tracks. They spotted an empty whiskey crate. One
of them began joking about the crate being an early Christmas package. “I think it’s addressed to William Falkner,” the friend said. There was an awkward pause. Dean shrugged it off. “It’s none of your business, but you’re probably right,” he said.

  *Some of my favorite pictures of him are those taken at West Point, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, in a gray suit, black bowler hat, and with a folded umbrella, his back as ramrod straight as any cadet. His son-in-law, Paul Summers, himself a former cadet, had arranged the West Point visit and accompanied him, which I think accounts for the stunning photographs. He was in a good mood.

  *How it would have amused the former postal employee that in 1987 the U.S. Postal Service issued a William Faulkner stamp, though he probably would have declined an invitation to the official ceremony honoring him. Ironically, he married the Oxford postmaster’s daughter.

  IN 1924, WILLIAM WAS EAGER IF NOT DESPERATE TO SEE HIS work in print before he turned thirty. He feared dying in his late twenties. He and his friend and mentor, attorney Phil Stone of Oxford, agreed to share the expense of self-publishing The Marble Faun, a slender book of poetry. The publisher was a New York firm, the Four Seas Company, who agreed to print five hundred copies at a cost of $400—half to be paid in advance and half after the books were delivered. When the books arrived, he and Stone peddled them on campus and in town, and within a short time had sold seventy-five copies. Stone ordered another fifty to be shipped to him. The book was priced at $1.50, a lot more words for the price than the $5, handmade Marionettes, but The Marble Faun didn’t have pictures.

  William had written his own biographical sketch for the book: “Born in Mississippi in 1897. Great-grandson of Colonel W.C. Faulkner. [He added the u to match the new spelling of his surname.] C.S.A., author of The White Rose of Memphis, Rapid Ramblings in Europe, etc. Boyhood and youth were spent in Mississippi, since then has been (1) under-graduate (2) house painter (3) tramp, day laborer, dish washer in various New England cities (4) clerk in Lord and Taylor’s book shop in New York City (5) bank and postal clerk. Served during the war in the British Royal Air Force. A member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Present temporary address Oxford, Mississippi. The Marble Faun was written in 1919.”

  Shortly after the book was published, Phil Stone and Judge John Falkner, William’s uncle, happened to meet on the square. “There’s a black sheep in everybody’s family and Billy’s ours. Not worth a cent,” said the judge. Stone rushed to his friend’s defense. “You’re wrong about Bill.… There’ll be people coming to Oxford on account of Bill who would never have heard of the place except for Bill and what he writes.”*

  Unsure about the success of his first book, but excited at seeing his work in print, William left for New Orleans, where he lived in a cramped apartment on Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter. Here he met Sherwood Anderson and William Spratling, wrote articles for the Times-Picayune, and enjoyed the “Bohemian life” in the company of writers and artists. Early that summer he moved into the vacation home of the Stone family at Pascagoula, where he worked on his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, typing on a concrete picnic table within sight of the ocean.

  He found time, however, to date a beautiful and sophisticated girl named Helen Baird, and fell in love with her. They roamed the coast and William showed her his favorite haunts in the French Quarter. He wrote a sonnet sequence that he dedicated to her, and like Marionettes, hand-printed it and saddle-stitched the folded pages in the center; he then glued the endpapers to a cloth cover. He called it Helen: A Courtship. (The handmade volume is now part of the Tulane University Library collection.) One of its themes was the traditional sonnet conceit that one loved most intensely when one’s affections were spurned. In attaining his goal, the would-be lover ironically lost interest in the beloved. This would prove prophetic in a way. In August, Dean drove Maud to the coast to visit William, only to find him in the throes of breaking up with Helen. She had decided to marry another man, perhaps sensing that one day her poet would pack up his sonnets and leave.

  In July 1925, William set sail for Europe. Landing in Italy, he made his way to Paris, where he took up residence near the Luxembourg Gardens. He spent hours feeding the pigeons, watching children sail toy boats in the fountain, and revising short stories and narratives that would later form parts of his novels Sanctuary and The Sound and the Fury. Dean and Maud couldn’t wait for his letters from Paris. He wrote his much-loved Aunt Bama,* “I have just finished the most beautiful short story in the world. So beautiful that when I finished it I went to look at myself in a mirror. And I thought, Did that ugly ratty-looking face, that mixture of childishness and unreliability and sublime vanity, imagine that? But I did. And the hand doesn’t hold blood to improve on it.”

  He was referring to material he would use in Sanctuary: “On the street old men wore overcoats, and in the Luxembourg Gardens as Temple and her father passed the women sat knitting in shawls and even the men playing croquet played in coats and capes, and in the sad gloom of the chestnut trees the dry click of balls, the random shouts of children, had that quality of autumn, gallant and evanescent and forlorn.”

  During a walking tour of the French countryside, he sent his father, Murry, a postcard about British hunting parties: “Swell looking Lords and dukes spinning along in carts behind trotting horses. They go out hunting in red coats, and ride right over you if you don’t dodge.” He also sent Dean an illustrated postcard depicting a hunt—“Le Cerf hallali sous Bois”—the stag at the finish. “What do you think of a country like this?” he wrote his brother. “But you can’t kill a deer like this here unless you got a red swallow-tail coat.”

  William was back home before Christmas, a man of the world, an artist shaped and matured, as were his contemporaries James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, by a Paris apprenticeship. He attended Dean’s high school graduation in the spring of 1926 about the same time that he cashed his first royalty check for Soldiers’ Pay. Estelle had come home from Shanghai with her children, Cho Cho and Malcolm. They spent several weeks in Oxford with her parents, the Oldhams, and created quite a stir with the children’s Japanese amah. Estelle was unhappy and thinking of divorcing Cornell Franklin. William began seeing her again. That fall, Dean was kicked off the Ole Miss football team for being “too small.” He had played quarterback for Oxford High School, as William had, but Dean also hoped to play for the Ole Miss Red and Blue. At five feet eight inches and 135 pounds, Dean was not meant for the brutal college game. I don’t know if his father pushed him to play, but no doubt Murry’s lifelong interest in sports had something to do with it.

  Dean’s introduction to higher education barely altered his daily routine. He still lived with Murry and Maud in the former Delta Psi fraternity house. He walked to class, just as he had walked to high school, and came home for lunch every day. His attitude toward academics had not changed, either.

  My father attended the University of Mississippi for one reason only, to play baseball, yet he didn’t make the Ole Miss varsity baseball team until he was a fifth-year senior. There was no such thing as redshirting in those days, but somehow an extra year of eligibility was “found” for him, as well as the occasional gift of a passing grade. The angels of innocence, the gods of childhood, were still smiling on Dean even as he entered his twenties. For William, as he approached his thirtieth birthday, the fear of failure and burden of genius lay heavy upon him. And yet he was about to enter the most productive period of any writer in all of American letters.

  By 1927, William, who’d been living in New Orleans, had taken Sherwood Anderson’s advice to return to Oxford and write about “that postage stamp of native soil” that he knew best, the people, places, and traditions with which he had grown up. He was to find so much material waiting in his hometown that he “would never live long enough to exhaust it.” He moved back into the Delta Psi house, where in warm weather he and Dean slept on the screened porch on the third floor to escape the heat, listening to the night trains. Dean’s grades
were weak, but his college life was as enjoyable as anything else he had ever done. He was playing baseball, had pledged SAE, the same fraternity to which William had belonged, and was a man about campus.

  William’s favorite holiday from the typewriter was playing golf with Dean on the university course. They played barefoot, and according to Dean’s special rules, using a single club that each chose for the other. Once Dean took a .22 rifle onto the golf course, shot par with a nine-iron, and bagged his limit of squirrels, or so the story goes. William began calling him “Whiz.”

  In 1927 William completed Flags in the Dust, the first novel set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In it he introduced the aristocratic and doomed Sartoris family. William and Phil Stone both felt this novel would reach a wider audience than his war novels, Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes, both published by Boni & Liveright.

  To William’s shock and dismay, Horace Liveright rejected the manuscript, writing that it lacked “plot, dimension and projection.” William was outraged, perhaps not as much at the criticism, which he could accept, as at his publisher’s failure to recognize his grand design, his sweeping vision of the South.

  “It’s too bad you dont like Flags in the Dust …,” he responded. “I’d like you to fire it on back to me, as I shall try it on someone else. I still believe it is the book which will make my name for me as a writer.”

  William went to New York determined to get out of his contract with Liveright, and Flags in the Dust was eventually published by Harcourt, Brace under the title Sartoris.

  In the summer of 1928, William was at work on his most ambitious novel yet, The Sound and the Fury. Dean, meanwhile, spent much of his time oversleeping on his summer job as a cement truck driver. Oxford was going to have its first paved street, “Depot Street,” which ran from the train station to the square.