Today a blog on William Faulkner in Genius

Early this Sunday morning, I pulled Harold Bloom’s Genius from a shelf in my study. Bloom devoted six pages to William Faulkner in this work. Bloom, the late great Yale professor, “America’s prominent literary critic,” had by the time Genius was published in 2002, already written 26 books. The sub-title for Genius is, “A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.” All in 814 pages!

On my shelf with Genius, are three other books by Harold Bloom. The 2005, Jesus and Yahweh, the 2019 Possessed by Memory, and from 2020, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles. This book’s subtitle is, “The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death.” I had two or three other Bloom books but gave them to an orthopedic surgeon in Richmond. Sir William, who saved me from a Sea of Arthritic Troubles, expertly provided two new knees. Ah, the joy of running at age 81!

I will admit, however, that without tennis from age 10, and given my love of literature, I could be as large as Harold Bloom was, from a sedentary existence of reading.

In Genius, Bloom with a photographic memory, gave four of six pages to Faulkner’s Light in August. What famous novel precedes Bloom’s discussion of Light?  Mark Twain’s brilliant Huckleberry Finn. Bloom calls it “a book loved alike by religious and irreligious.”

A statement possibly untrue today in our black book milieu. Would that I had matched Huck with Light, instead of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But that’s for next week.

Bloom wrote that literature of genius like Faulkner’s is our best path for reaching wisdom, which he believes is “the true use of literature for life.” But he says this path “depends upon deep reading.” In the book club I started for the local community college, we agree to read each novel twice before we meet to discuss two novels, as we will this Thursday, September 19th.

From the long list of novels that William Faulkner wrote, Light in August is Bloom’s second favorite.  His first is As I Lay Dying. The book club read this novel last year. Bloom also declares that “Faulkner is incontestably the major North American novelist since Henry James.” I am pleased to say we read Henry at our last meeting. All, I believe, appreciated The Master, Colm Tóibín’s fictional story of Henry James. But most of us were less enthusiastic about Henry’s What Maisie Knew.

Bloom asks a question, which is one I will ask on Thursday. Does the tragedy of Joe Christmas in Light in August, hold up in the United States of 2024, rather than as it did in 1932, when the novel was published?

Next week:  An answer to this question, plus the movie version of Beloved.

Brother Will’s Passing

I found this article by Jim Faulkner in a book of William Faulkner’s short stories (Remember my idiosyncratic filling system?). The article is from the March 1992 Southern Living magazine. Yet in March 1992, I was living in Caracas, Venezuela; and a month earlier the Hugo Chavez golpe de estado took place. Hardly Southern Living territory!

Jim Faulkner with Brother Will

The point is I recently found this piece written by Faulkner’s nephew Jim. He was trying to ‘set the record straight,’ thirty years after his uncle’s 1962 death in Oxford, Mississippi. William did not choke to death, as reported. He was thrown from a horse named Stonewall that returned home to Rowan Oak without William. Jim claims his uncle “limped straight to the barn and got on Stonewall to prove to the horse he could ride him.” Then the 1949-50 Nobel Laureate took to his bed, refusing to have his back checked. ‘He had outlasted pain before.’  Only this time he didn’t; and weeks later William died in a private hospital, his body soon taken to Rowan Oak. There is obviously more to the story.

What did finding this article make me recall?  A story about Faulkner, one I heard in my senior English class at Fullerton High School. It is largely because of Mr. James Hines that I deeply love good literature. I do not remember this single, male teacher and singular man behind a lectern, though he was depicted this way in the annual. Male teachers all wore suits and ties then. Yet this English teacher was relaxed and informal despite mandated attire for men (and dresses for women).

Sometime during the school year of 1960-61, Mr. Hines told us about sitting beside William Faulkner in the deep South. I don’t remember when…the late 1940s or early 50s. The two were in a small, puddle-jumping, propellered-plane with few seats. Mr. Hines said the door to the plane had been closed but suddenly opened for the last passenger. Mr. Hines could not believe who it was, and the only empty seat was the one beside him. James Hines felt he would stop breathing. To have an hour beside an author he had read and reread with adoration. Yet he knew Faulkner was a private man, that he shunned publicity, that he could be a real SOB. What to say? Where to get the courage to speak? Yet if he said nothing, he would regret this forever. By then, we in the classroom, were alert and waiting to know what happened next. Mr. Hines said the plane had taken off and Faulkner had not looked his way or uttered a word. That’s when Mr. Hines found the courage to ask a simple question.

“Mr. Faulkner, would you care to talk?”

Everyone in class open-eared and eager to hear the answer. Had our English teacher conversed with Willliam Faulkner? 

“No.”   “What?” we asked.

Mr. Faulkner had said, “No.” Mr. Hines said they sat, the hour passed, and the esteemed American writer left the plane. Read him now, Mr. Hines counseled, read him again in middle age, and then again when you’re old and know something about life.  I have followed my fine teacher’s advice.   To be continued…

What William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas Wanted

The bloodhounds and a Southern Mississippi posse are after Joe when he awakens and has this realization:

“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral greyness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. ‘That was all I wanted,’ he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. “That was all, for thirty years. That didn’t seem to be a whole lot to ask for in thirty years.”

Joe Christmas was 33 when he expressed this thought on page 246 in my two-tone hard-cover copy of Light in August. I mention the mixed tones of red as reflective of Faulkner’s novel.  Joe was named Christmas because he was left at the door of an orphanage (a white one) as a baby, and later taunted as being of mixed race. Even at the end of the novel, a tragic one, he has no absolute proof that his blood is both white and black.  Nor does the reader, with anything that can be called certainty. Yet Joe Christmas lived as if cursed by the mingling of one blood with the other. He says on page 344, “If I’m not (of mixed blood), damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.”

Just now, Saturday evening, I spent time reading an NPR piece, “What Do We Call People of Multiple Backgrounds?”  I appreciated in this printed version of a radio presentation, a reference to Barack Obama. He, tongue in cheek, called himself a mongrel and mutt. Yet before I read this quip by a former President, I’d already considered a blog that posed the question: What if we all knew our roots and ethnic origin?

In my case, I knew of my English, Scottish- Irish heritage. But what delighted me was to learn I have both Iberian Peninsula and Jewish blood in me. I ask: Who is pure anything? Dogs with AKA papers, perhaps.  And giving a nod to Obama, I ask: Who isn’t a mongrel?  And asking this question brings to mind what Ishmael in Moby Dick asks:  Who ain’t a slave?

My parental name is Wilson from my father. This connotes Son of Will. Serf or slave? Who knows?  But one thing is certain. I do not come from the aristocracy. Yet it is doubtful Prince Harry can claim that either. -😊

All I know from Faulkner’s remarkable novel is that Joe Christmas has spent his life without being able to answer the question: Who am I? He becomes the outcast, the wanderer, the man without ties to land or family, a searcher, an enigma to others. It is true that Joe Christmas kills two persons: His adoptive father, the truly mad Presbyterian Evangelical, Mr. McEachern; and the Yankee, Negro-loving Joanna, who makes the fatal mistake of asking to pray for Joe Christmas.

What a reader will experience in Light in August is William Faulkner’s artistry and genius. He creates a sympathetic character, whose heinous death is unwarranted as it occurs. The novel’s relevance to our times unnerves me: a novel that etches itself on mind and body.

To be continued…