Writing on the Wall

One of the many five-star reviewers of a Faulkner book on Amazon entitled his review, “Faulkner Being Faulkner,” and went on to say, “You don’t read Faulkner as much as you work your way through Faulkner.” – And that primer was the first clarity I had been given as to why I’ve never been able to finish a Faulkner book. If I were to take all the books off my shelves and organize them into piles by author, my Faulkner pile might be the tallest of them all. I’ve started many, but I’ve never finished any. Upon reading other reviewers, I find I am not alone.

I know I’ve started As I Lay Dying at least twice, and made it about halfway through each time, because my bookmarks are still in the book. It’s a small book, less than 200 pages, one he wrote in only six weeks; it should be possible to finish the book by willpower alone if not pleasure – but each time I put it down it is hard to pick up again. Like magnets set the wrong way, the book repels me when I reach for it.

Maybe I’m just not to be a Faulkner reader. But that doesn’t keep me from visiting any author’s home even if it’s about 1,000 miles from my own . . . Rowan Oak – that is the name Faulkner gave to his stately, white-columned home in Oxford, Mississippi. He named it after the rowan tree, a symbol of security and peace.

His book, which I arrived home motivated to read, is called A Fable, one for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. It chronicles a sort of mutiny among World War I soldiers living in the trenches during the seven days of Holy Week. Being a thematic kind of reader, I thought it might be fun to read the book, knock it out so to say, before Easter time in late April this year. But what really impressed me was the way he sketched out the idea for the novel on the walls of his study – in storyboard technique – beginning with Monday, outlining all that would happen on that day, and continuing around the room till he reached the end of the week which he called Tomorrow – and having to write that on the backside of the door because he’d already run out of wall space for that seventh day.

I was alone in that room, Faulkner’s writing room – the unassuming desk, the typewriter his mother gave him and which he used his entire life, the Adirondack chair where he sat . . . I looked around to the writing on the walls, too overwhelmed just then to read all the scrawly, scratchy handwriting under each day of the week, but rather clicking pictures so I could read it later – preferring my time to be used for absorbing the place.

I stood transfixed in the center of that universe where a writer’s work had its genesis – like standing in the chaos of a swirling world before earth and sun and sky had been formed – but this time, in the mind of a man most likely kept hostage by the Tennessee sippin’ whiskey he loved so well to boost his enthusiasm for a project. There I stood, only the man and his graphite and grease pencils no longer there – the energy still was. Empty whiskey bottles stood in a glass case out in the hallway, relics of the day.

I’ll bet there was noise going on the day he came up with that idea – an “other language” kind of mumbling that came from that room as the words formed out of darkness and into the light of day. There were loud scratching sounds as he wrote on the walls . . . and his patient wife Estelle went about her chores, probably delivering freshly laundered clothes to a back bedroom . . . what now?. . . she must have thought wildly, always at loose ends with herself as another bottle of whiskey fell to the floor. I’m making all this up of course. I don’t know how it happened that day. I do know her own bedroom is full of books on spiritual matters.  An easel is propped near her bed and the walls are lined with the still lifes she painted . . .

Faulkner hated air conditioning, it is said – and that is noteworthy given the Mississippi summers. That’s one thing I remember clearly about As I Lay Dying – the oppressive heat he describes as the old woman watches her coffin being built outside the bedroom window. I know he experienced that kind of heat, knew it well. Nothing at Rowan Oak explains why he hated air conditioning, but I surmise it was the sound – that droning, grating sound that interferes with what the muses have to say. I could understand his sentiments as I walked through the yard space of Rowan Oak – an embracing kind of breeze that wound through plentiful oak trees hosting birds that had nested there for generations before and after Faulkner's death, their songs unabated. The peacefulness of Rowan Oak, like so many things about Faulkner, is of an “other world” quality.

Nevertheless, his wife installed air conditioning the day after Faulkner died – not buried yet – and he would rest in state in the parlor with the AC burring and humming and churning non-stop on those July Mississippi days. The drone of the AC would eventually drive his spirit away – but it was the thing Estelle felt compelled to do for the benefit of the living on that first day of the ten remaining years she would have without him.

 The feeling of that room – the days of the week written on the walls – that is what made me want to give the man one more chance at reading him – much as Estelle must have given him one more chance at living with him each time he came off a binge and produced a thing of beauty – one day at a time.