Simply Faulkner by Philip Weinstein

Author:Philip Weinstein [Weinstein, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO007000
ISBN: 978-1-943657-03-2
Publisher: Simply Charly

The source of his fascination with flying leaps off the page here: the inhuman power of the planes. They pulse with capacities that mock self-imposed human limits. They transcend conventions erected to make life safe, organized, mutual. Free of the messiness of human attachment (life on the “painwebbed globe”), they beam forth sheer autonomous speed.

The pilots who fly them, drunk on such speed, have abandoned all calculations that sustain life on the land. As one of the pilots says about the races in Pylon, “And the ship is all right, except you won’t know until you are in the air whether or not you can take it off and you won’t know until you are back on the ground and standing up again whether or not you can land it.” You also won’t know if you’ll survive until afterward. No preparation is any good. So much for plans to master life in time, to calculate before and after. To fly those “kites” was to experience time as pure presence.

“Breathing is a sight-draft dated yesterday,” Faulkner’s character, Will Varner, later claimed in The Hamlet (1940), the first novel of Faulkner’s Snopes family trilogy. His words imply that our breath has a possible liquidation date of “yesterday” written on it—it is collectible on sight. Our final exit could be any time, and there will likely be no notice. Nothing brought home this dimension of life’s uninsurable tenure more powerfully than flying. In its intrinsic risk Faulkner must have recognized its hypnotic appeal: the dance with death itself. Is that why, after hearing in June 1934 of the famous pilot Jimmy Wedell’s fatal crash, he deemed the moment right for writing his own will? Wedell had crashed while giving a beginner flight lessons. But how would this event—how would anyone else’s disaster—have prepared him for the airborne nightmare hurtling toward him?

The Waco biplane deal with Dean seemed too good to be true, and it was. One day in late 1935, after Dean had taken up a group of student-passengers in the Waco, he failed to return. Rumors of a crash spread. Late that afternoon Faulkner got the dreaded call. The plane had crashed, and Dean was dead. The Waco had been found, buried six feet under the earth; all the bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. That night, Faulkner did not allow other family members to approach the mangled corpse of his brother. Carrying a photo of Dean with him, he worked with the undertaker for hours, recomposing a face that might pass for Dean’s. What atonement was Faulkner enacting during this gruesome ritual? Likely it was a mix of family piety (make Dean presentable again for his mother and his wife), self-inflicted torture (it was his Waco, hence his fault), and the painstaking inscription of a life-long memory (Dean’s ruined face to remain forever inside him). The accident was never fully explained, though experts believed one of the passengers had been given the controls and had put the plane into a fatal spin.

No one was officially to blame, yet Faulkner could not forgive himself for what had happened.

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