William Faulkner’s Inner Demons

Joanna Ng, Intern

William Faulkner was arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. In a new biography of the writer entitled Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner, Philip Weinstein narrates the events of Faulkner’s life while discussing their impact on his work. Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College. In the following excerpt, Weinstein gets inside Faulkner’s head as the novelist struggles with recurring problems involving his family and his addiction to alcohol.

He was not unconscious the whole time. Specific details would flare into focus, then flee as swiftly as they had come. All he knew for sure was that he could not move, though he could not remember why. Where was he anyway?…An image arose in his mind: he was in New York, at his favorite hotel, the Algonquin. He had come here to complete the contracts with Random House for The Unvanquished: which meant that it was November 1937. He had come here to forget something as well – he suddenly knew what that was – but he had less luck there. Meta Carpenter was who he wanted to forget, who now appeared in his mind’s eye with aching clarity. He concentrated again, his screen of consciousness widened. Depressed – he had reasons for it – he had been drinking steadily the night before. He had drifted from bar to bar, then seen no need to stop once he returned to his room. He vaguely remembered the sensation of booze sliding down his throat, the sought-after numbness it radiated. But how had that moment led to this one? Straining once more, he got hold of another image. The last thing he had done was to make his way into the bathroom and settle onto the toilet seat, bottle in hand. Time for one more swig before bed.

Bright sunlight bore down on him, and the room was unaccountably full of cold, moving air… Looking up, he saw an open bathroom window. Had he imagined last night that he was still in Mississippi, where on going to bed he would often open the window a crack, even in winter? Then he recognized the noise he had been hearing for some time now: the hissing sound of a steam pipe, just behind him, his back resting on it. He had passed out in this bathroom. His mind, still whirling, permitted larger oases of lucidity. He realized suddenly that he was in the wrong place: he had no business lying against that pipe. He could tell from its sound how hot it had to be, but his back – which ought to know – had reported no signals of pain. It didn’t even hurt now. How long had he been in this position? When would he find the energy and focus needed to get up again? Like’s Joe Christmas caught in the dietitian’s room in Light in August – lying flat out in his own vomit and realizing that, for better and surely for worse, he was completely in others’ hands – Faulkner waited for someone to come. Eventually someone always did. This was a hell of a way to begin the day.

The moment is emblematic in its self-destructiveness, though its gravity is new. He had been drinking heavily – and occasionally passing out – for over twenty years. But up to now he had been lucky enough to avoid New York hotel steam pipes, as well as other complications linked to a lifetime of boozing. Some time later that morning – minutes? hours? – he heard knocking, at first cautious and then louder…Within a few minutes Jim Devine – Random House fellow writer and boon drinking companion – had managed to get the door opened. Devine found him there, moved him gingerly, then gasped. The wound inflicted on his lower back by the steam pipe must have looked pretty alarming. Though it didn’t hurt yet, Faulkner had done himself real damage this time…These third-degree burns (the size of a man’s palm) would eventually require several skin grafts – grafts that in turn became infected and never entirely took…The doctor that Devine took Faulkner to stared at his patient’s back, then at the patient himself, and asked, “Why do you do this?” Grimacing with incipient pain but showing no other emotion, eyes hooded by emphatic curved brows, Faulkner responded, “Because I like to….”

…Alcohol penetrates to Faulkner’s private core as a human being.  But several aspects of its appeal locate more broadly outside him – as dimensions of a larger (and typically masculine) history of family, region, and country.  Male Falkners had been drinking excessively, and being dragged to clinics to dry out, long before William was born.  Colonel W. C. Falkner was an inveterate drinker; legends of his alcoholic  exploits were passed on to his great-grandson.  As for the Young Colonel’s extravagance, Faulkner could draw on both recounted stories and personal experience…Finally, his father himself was widely known in Oxford as a “mean drunk” – one all too likely to move from intoxication to violence.  As well, Faulkner was unlikely to forget those vivid instances of Murray being hustled off by Maud to take the “Keeley Cure.”  The boys were brought along, so they could recognize the evils of alcohol (and – this part unspoken – witness at pedagogic length the degradation of their father)…Men in his family drank to excess – all of his brothers had trouble with alcohol as well. Wrought into the fiber of their identity, alcohol was their tacitly affirmed way of (not) coping.

The notion of manhood-and-alcohol went beyond Falkners.  It partook more broadly of a Southern male mystique – one not limited to the South but prevalent there.  Southern boys…often learned to drink excessively, early on.  Faulkner not only stole from his grandfather’s cache of whiskey while working in his Oxford bank, during his late teens, but was already engaging in sustained bouts of drinking two or three years earlier.  He did not, as a young man, gain the sobriquet of town drink without having put in some effort.  More speculatively, one can say that many Southern men sought, and found, a haven of male camaraderie by way of drink.  The shared bottle of booze was a talisman allowing them to secede from the world of womenfolk and adult responsibilities – to declare once more their untamed independence.  “We don’t want him tame,” Sam Fathers says of the wild dog, Lion, that eventually takes down the great bear, Old Ben, and forfeits his life in doing so (Go Down, Moses). There are few values more abidingly lodged in Faulkner than the desire to remain untamed.  Throughout his life, he would refuse to compromise, come to terms – as though doing so would amount to caving in.