Faulkner by Blotner Joseph;

Author:Blotner, Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2005-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

BOB HAAS had asked Jim Devine to make the return trip with Faulkner, and so they boarded the train for Memphis. Estelle met them there. On November 10, Devine wrote Haas from Oxford that Faulkner had not needed sedatives or liquor on the trip. But Faulkner’s doctor “has been cutting off the dead tissue and later intends to graft on some skin. As a result. Bill has been in a very nervous state, but I don’t think it will last long.” It was a bleak November, sunless and cold, with gusty winds. When the furnace went out, they kept the fireplace blazing, and Devine read to his friend there in the library at Rowan Oak. When Devine finished “Carcassonne” he turned to Faulkner and asked, “What docs it mean?” Curtly Faulkner answered, “It means anything you want it to mean.” He added defensively that he had read a lot in the Bible and Shakespeare that he didn’t understand. Later Devine managed to persuade him to sit for an interview on November 17 with a university student named Harold Burson. Faulkner told him that The Unvanquished would appear in February but that his best novel was “yet to be written.” He was working on one now, he told Burson, and however long it took, he would stay at Rowan Oak until it was completed.9

He resumed work on The Wild Palms without missing a beat. Before going to New York he had left the manuscript on page 6 with a line ending with the syllable “ar-”. Now he wrote in the left-hand margin “Nov 23, ‘37” and began the new line with “chaic.” He was describing the doctor’s nightshirt as he roused from his bed to answer Harry’s call for help.10 What had begun as a short story about the impact of passion on a provincial Baptist doctor was becoming a novel about tragic lovers.

On November 29, with Devine back in New York, Faulkner returned the contract for the novel to Haas. He thought he would be able to send it in by May 1, “though I cant give my word as to this, not having any great degree of peace in which to write.”11 Thematic elements in the novel would reflect this lack of peace, and it would be suggested on a symbolic level by a recurring image: “the palm fronds clashing with their wild dry bitter sound against the bright glitter of the water. . . .”12 It was not hard for him to project the pain his principals felt. Not only did he still feel twinges in his back, but he would later declare that he wrote the book “to stave off what I thought was heart-break. . . .”13

As his novel grew, he fleshed out the characters. Now Charlotte demonstrated a kind of harsh masculinity that suggested Drusilla Sartoris, and her appearance recalled Helen Baird: a “dark-haired woman with queer hard yellow eyes in a face whose skin was drawn thin over prominent cheekbones and a heavy jaw. .

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