“The Agony
and The Sweat”

When William Faulkner came home from World War I, he was 21 years old. As he stepped off the train at the Oxford station that cold December morning in 1918, he faced an uncertain future as a civilian. He was returning from five months in Toronto as a cadet in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and with the abrupt end of the war, he found himself back in Mississippi with a discharge in hand and not a prospect on the horizon.

He was coming back to a South in decline, which still felt the effects of the Civil War and reconstruction, and to a town and economy built largely upon cotton and tenant farmers, county-seat lawyers and bootleggers, country storekeepers, peddlers, Negro farm hands, sharecroppers, bushwhackers, and carpetbaggers. There was nothing in the air that gave the handsome, uniformed soldier any indication of the destiny that awaited him.

He was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Miss., on Sept. 25, 1897. He was the oldest of four boys to Maud and Murray Cuthbert Falkner (he added the “u” to his name in 1918 for literary effect). When he was one year old, his father moved the family to Ripley, Miss., and four years later to Oxford, Miss. His roots went back generations and lay in the scrub pine and black, loamy farmland of North Mississippi. His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, had been a colonel in the Confederate Army, and made a brief literary reputation for himself when he published the best-selling novel The White Rose of Memphis in 1881. “The Colonel,” as he was called, survived the Civil War and lived an adventurous life, eventually becoming a successful railroad speculator, but was later murdered by a former business partner in 1889.

Along with his three brothers, William Faulkner grew up at the turn of the century in a part of the country that was still emerging from frontier status; life was part Huck Finn and part Wild West. He learned to hunt and fish and quickly became an expert at handling and shooting guns. His father owned a livery stable, and for much of his youth, the boys lived among horses and dogs and the outdoors.

He attended Oxford High School, where he had little taste for formal education and more of a taste for drinking and carousing, and he eventually dropped out of school in 1915. He went back to school that fall and played football, breaking his nose and quitting after only one season, never to return. During much of this time, he had been reading and writing poetry with an older friend of his, Phil Stone, who later attended Yale and became important to Faulkner’s early development as a writer. After some time, he began showing Stone his own poems and was encouraged by Stone’s receptiveness to his work. Faulkner continued to compose dozens more poems and short stories for the next two years.

When the Great War came in 1914, it made many a young man hot for adventure, and the young William was no different. He liked the idea and romance of flying, and immediately tried to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Service, daring to become one of the newest breed of fighter pilot. But, the Army unceremoniously rejected his application because he did not meet the height and weight requirements for pilots, and he was put on a train and sent back to Oxford. Dejected and desperate, he went to Canada. Faking a British accent and lying about being a Canadian citizen, he was eventually accepted as a cadet and sent to basic training in Toronto in July 1918. Ultimately the war ended before he could either finish pilot training or take part in the war, and he was discharged in December. He returned to Oxford unemployed, uneducated, and uncertain of any future he might have.

That summer, he looked up an old flame he had dated before the war – a young, pretty girl from an old, established Oxford family named Estelle Oldham. They had planned to marry as soon as William was in a position to do so. But the war came, and on his return to Oxford, he discovered that Estelle had instead married a local lawyer, Cornell Franklin. Faulkner retreated into himself and to a life of odd jobs as he struggled to make ends meet. He spent a year as a sales clerk in a bookstore, and a short time as a post office clerk, until he was fired for not delivering the mail. Finally in 1919, he took some classes at the University of Mississippi, where veterans were allowed to attend even if they had no high school diploma. But school suited him less after the war than it did before it, and he dropped out after only a year.

It was as a student at the university that he published his first poems, and after he left the university, he continued to publish a steady stream of poetry along with the play “The Marionettes” (1921). He then traveled to New York, where he published his first book, The Marble Faun (1924), and that same year he traveled to New Orleans and met Sherwood Anderson for the first time. He and Anderson hit it off, and Faulkner lived with him for a year while Anderson began to guide Faulkner in his development as a literary artist.

By 1925, Sherwood Anderson began noticing something emerging in Faulkner’s work. He encouraged him to give up poetry altogether and concentrate on writing prose. Anderson saw in his prose the echoes of a new kind of voice that Anderson and others recognized immediately as the spark of a new and different literary style. This encouragement generated a flurry of experimental prose that Faulkner was finally able to publish in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Encouraged by Anderson to broaden his horizons, Faulkner sailed for Europe aboard the tramp steamer West Ivis in 1925, and traveled to Italy, Switzerland, France and England before returning to Oxford that December. He spent considerable time in Paris, mingling with the artistically fertile left bank community. He did not make friends easily there, and felt the pretentiousness of many of its prominent residents to be personally offensive. He left the city unimpressed by its artistic community, yet he drew from these experiences, using his travels through post-war Europe as a backdrop for many of his early stories.

Among them was his first real novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926), a story based loosely on his impressions of World War I. This was followed a year later by the novel Mosquitoes, then a series of poems, and another work, Flags In The Dust, later reworked and republished as Sartoris (1929). At the same time, he was dating a local belle, Helen Baird, writing numerous poems to impress her and woo her over, but Baird was not interested at all in a man with no money and no apparent future. Secretly, however, he was still in love with Estelle, but she was still married to Cornell Franklin. As the 1920s drew to a close and as he struggled against reluctant publishers, sagging sales, bad reviews, and debt, something dramatic was about to happen that would change William Faulkner – and American literature – forever.

With the publishing of The Sound and the Fury (1929), Faulkner had found, as he called it, “that chronicle which was a whole land in miniature, which, manipulated and compounded, was the entire South.” While his earlier novels were flawed by their simplistic narration and distance from their characters, a complete transition of thinking seems to have occurred with The Sound and the Fury. He discovered what had been there all along, all around him, and he looked it in the eye, took it in and distilled it down into a new way to see the world he knew. He took what he remembered from his childhood and re-forged it into something new, drawing from family tradition, from dialogues between former slaves and itinerant farmhands, from the old and proud and faded Southern aristocratic families, from afternoons spent listening to gossip in the courthouse square and to squatting men leaning over to pass around the Mason jar of white corn whiskey. They were familiar scenes to any Mississippi boy from a small town. But Faulkner transformed them, elaborated on them, giving them a convulsive, emotional life of their own. His characters suddenly became more human, more heroic, sometimes diabolical, becoming, as it were, symbols of the old South, of the war and of reconstruction. He accomplished this by first creating a world of his own in which to work – mythical Yoknapatawpha County – resplendent with a history all its own played out by its residents in brightly lurid detail. Secondly, he interwove the stories of its characters and their conflicts into classic parables of the South. Faulkner loved the characters he created and the land they came from but from which they could never escape. His ultimate objective was not merely to reveal a declining South, but to explore his own questions about the human condition, putting it in the terms and context of the place with which he was most familiar.

Armed with what he called his “postage stamp of the native soil,” the years between 1928 and 1933 became years of stunning accomplishment in Faulkner’s career. In addition to the publishing of The Sound and the Fury, he produced the novels As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light In August (1932). He wrote a tremendous number of short stories – including his famous A Rose For Emily (1932) – and he finally began making money from their sale to the magazines. In addition to these changes, his personal life also improved. Estelle suddenly divorced Cornell Franklin. She and Faulkner were finally married on July 20, 1929. They bought an old, dilapidated house on 30 acres at the edge of Oxford for $30,000 and named it Rowan Oak.

For the next few years, Faulkner lived at Rowan Oak in the center of his Yoknapatawpha world and its residents, whose chronicler he had become. Whenever he wrote, he maintained absolute focus and clarity; he refrained from drinking and rarely left the house until his work was finished. Once finished, however, he would go on roaring benders that lasted days or weeks, and when he had enough, he returned to his wife and home to nurse himself back to health.

But for all his early success, he could not make enough money to live on. So, in 1932, he reluctantly moved out to Hollywood; there he worked as a screenwriter–on and off–for the next 20 years. There, he mingled with the stars and befriended director Howard Hawks, with whom he shared a common passion for flying and hunting. Though it did bring him solvency, it was a job he disliked intensely. He described it as “an excuse to collect a paycheck.” He wrote 10 screenplays during his Hollywood years, five of which were produced and for which he received on-screen credit. Among the more notable films he wrote for are Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1943), starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. He also wrote The Big Sleep (1944), another Bogart-Bacall film, The Southerner (1945), and Land of the Pharaohs (1955). But despite the steady work, Faulkner often became deeply homesick for Mississippi. He frequently descended into pits of depression and drank heavily on account of it. He would mysteriously disappear from the studios for days and weeks at a time, on another bender. His co-workers often covered for him and it became a behavior that was curiously tolerated by the studio executives. After a week or two, he would walk into the studio as if nothing at all had happened.

“He simply drank,” someone said. “If you left him alone, he would drink for days, sometimes as long as a week...and when he was ready to sober up, he would.” Once he told actress Lauren Bacall why he drank: “With one martini, ah feel bigger, wiser, taller, and with two it goes to the superlative, and ah feel biggest, wisest, tallest, and with three there ain’t no holdin’ me.”

Despite his problems with alcohol, Faulkner managed to produce nearly a novel a year throughout the 1930s. By the 1940s, he began exploring racial relations in his works like Go Down Moses (1942) and Intruder In The Dust (1948). But by the mid-’40s, he was spending a large amount of time in Hollywood to alleviate his money problems. As a consequence, he wrote fewer works during this time and was published less, and his reputation in America declined rapidly. Interest in his work returned somewhat with the publishing of The Portable Faulkner (1945), and by the end of the decade, his reputation as one of literature’s premier novelists and short story writers was cemented when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for the year 1949, describing his writing as “a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.”

In the following decade, his works began piling up National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, and he began speaking at universities, ultimately becoming a writer in residence at the University of Virginia in 1957. He also traveled to Asia, Latin America and Europe as an Ambassador for the State Department. With all this activity, his writing suffered and he wrote less frequently.

Now in his 60s, he also continued his perilous drinking and hunting activities that often resulted in injuries from numerous falls off his horse. One such fall on June 17, 1962, landed him in the hospital in Byhalia, Miss. He returned to Rowan Oak, but within two weeks something was clearly wrong. He was taken back to the hospital in Byhalia, where he died of heart failure on the morning of July 6, 1962. William Faulkner is buried beside his wife Estelle in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford.

by Stephen Enzweiler

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