A new biography explores the influence on William Faulkner of the three most important women in his life. ADRIAN FRAZIERreviews Faulkner and Love: The women who shaped his lifeby Judith L. Sensibar, Yale University Press, 595pp, $40
SOMETIMES A book is unpersuasive page after page, but in the end it changes how one sees a subject. That is the case with Judith Sensibar’s study of Faulkner, his mammy, his mother and his wife.
It is her original claim that too much has been made by male biographers of what Faulkner learned from international modernists such as Conrad, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, and nothing much at all of what the “art and craft of his fiction” owes to the women in his life.
The first of these was Caroline Barr, who died at 107. She was the Faulkner family nurse for two generations, and sometimes told the children stories of her past – the five children and their various fathers, the time in slavery in Virginia, or maybe it was South Carolina, and her years with her family on the road across the post-bellum south to Mississippi. Some of the Barrs became sharecroppers, and, at 65, Caroline got a place in the kitchen of the Faulkner house. This was not long before the birth of the novelist in 1898. He came to see her as a member of the family, a piece of inherited property, and his moral centre. Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury(1929) is her portrait. Go Down, Moses(1942) is dedicated to her.
One fascinating aspect of Sensibar’s argument is that for a white boy growing up in such a household, a point comes where he begins to “act white”. Then he must “demean and cut himself off physically and emotionally from the black mother who nursed him and the black children with whom he ate, slept, and played”. The moment of initiation into racial injustice is a trauma that shapes his life. It causes grief, guilt, shame, blocked desire, and anger, none of which he can acknowledge. White alcoholism, Sensibar speculates, both the mint julep in the parlour type and the white lightning in the woodshed sort, enables southerners to forget the pain that follows from rejection of the black mother.
This “racialisation” by separation from the “black maternal” was a feature of the childhood of many white Americans, in fact most of the middle class born before 1960 in the eastern half of the nation. In our house in St Louis, “Mandy” presided, a Mississippi woman who was a terror with a hickory switch; she had also raised my father. She taught us both to run like the wind when hearing the sentence, “I’m fixing to whip you!” My school friends nearly all had “maids” too. Some took the bus home after dinner; more stayed in the house weeks on end without a day off, just like Faulkner’s mammy. The precise effects of such a system seem incalculable, but Sensibar makes an effort to spell them out. None of them are good, though it has to be said that paradoxically the races lived at closer quarters then – much closer.
WHILE THERE ARE some passages in Faulkner’s letters and novels that she can read as “camouflaging” psychically loaded incidents in his early childhood, the documentary evidence of Callie Barr’s life, or that of Faulkner’s mother, is next to nothing. Pages are spent on the interpretation of their tombstone inscriptions, there being little else to go on. The vast American apparatus of genealogical research is employed, and two-page family trees are constructed for mammy, mother, and wife. Sensibar and her research assistants interview their descendants three generations down. Her speculation takes up where their reports leave off.
There having been only 1,800 citizens in Oxford when Faulkner was born, I was half-expecting my great-grandfather, George Able, might be mentioned. He was the banker down the road in Water Valley, but had a winter home in Oxford. My great-aunt Carrie claimed that as a debutante she waltzed with young Willie, but Sensibar makes it clear Faulkner never strayed from the bar to the dance floor. I hoped my other aunt, Elise, might at least have been telling the truth. She used to say she had pushed the novelist down the sidewalks of Oxford, Mississippi, when he was still in his baby carriage; that was, she recalled, just before her family left for a long visit to the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis – an excellent verifying detail. It turns out that Faulkner’s family did not even move to Oxford until 1902, when William was four years old, too big for a buggy. Sometimes first-hand reports on fiction writers are fiction too.
BUT SENSIBAR HAS to be going on with what evidence can be found. Certainly it makes sense that to understand Faulkner, or any man, you would want to know as much as possible about his wife, mother, and child-minder.
Maud Butler Falkner (the novelist added a “u” for his pen-name), his mother, was a cold and distant woman. In the 1940s, she did hundreds and hundreds of paintings, of which few survive – idealised family portraits, “negro cabin scenes”, and at least one portrait of Callie Barr.
Obviously, these cannot have been an influence on the novels of her son; most had already been written. Did the “visual imagination” that led to these amateur pictures shape the boy’s imagination, as claimed?
Even harder to swallow is the assertion that her portrait of Callie, copied from a snapshot, taught Faulkner to question the racist codes that Maud herself upheld. However, Mrs Falkner may have helped her son by serving as the model for the horribly conventional and fake mother in The Sound and the Fury. There was more grist for his mill in the social history of her ancestors, like his own, pioneers trying to erect Old South hierarchies in the territory of northern Mississippi after the Indian Removal and Trail of Tears in the 1830s.
Estelle Oldham, the novelist's boyhood love, and, after her first marriage failed in 1929, his wife, was the Muse for his 1920 illustrated dream play, The Marionettes. She herself wrote stories while in the Far East with her first husband. Granted, it is possible that these led the way for him in their treatment of race and sex, but on the grounds of both chronology and the surviving examples of her stories, it is hard to believe that her writings, and not those of Joyce, Stein, Conrad, and Sherwood Anderson led – in terms of the "art and craft of Faulkner's fiction" – to the breakthrough of The Sound and the Fury, with its multiple points of view on one incident, each rendered by a separate stream of consciousness.
However, that Estelle is the original of Caddy in that novel can be believed – a bold, honest, free-thinking little girl who climbs a pear tree to peer at adults through the window of the house. Is that a funeral inside, or a party? She relays what she sees to the boys below, black and white. They stare upward, and see that the bottoms of her drawers are dirty from the mud of the creek. Her three brothers can never forget that fraught image. Faulkner gets a whole masterpiece out of the one inexhaustible, many-sided scene. Sensibar’s book speculatively explores the meaning and sources of that image in ways that truly enhance The Sound and the Fury.
Incidentally, her book also helps one appreciate how very far the country has come, and how slowly, in the 148 years since the Act of Emancipation, with Michelle and Barack Obama in the White House.
Adrian Frazier is the author of George Moore, 1852-1933, and directs the MA in Writing and MA in Drama Theatre Studies at NUI Galway