The Wintering (50 page)

But who, I wondered, would fall in love with a woman fifty? I felt her full of delusions, and wished she were not so frail that she'd taken my arm for support on the way into the restaurant. I felt protective of her, too. History goes round, an old black woman would someday tell me. And, at forty, when I was getting a divorce, my oldest son asked why I was ruining his and his brother's lives when mine was already over.

And someday, too, Bill would tell me a wise thing when I was trying my wings thoughtlessly. “You won't have that face forever, Joan. You better have something else to offer people when you are older.”

If, while driving with him one day, his wife threw out the car window the manuscript of
Light in August
and he had to get out into the road and pick up the scattered pages, perhaps resentment on both their parts can be understood. Faulkner told me he sent out short stories for thirteen years before an editor ever bought one. Where, she might well have asked, was he, after all, going? And from where were the creature comforts to come she expected as a southern woman born to the time and place she had been? Success came too late for happiness, I suppose.

The first meeting in Memphis would set the tone for all of them there: so much aimless driving. I saw parts of the city I had never seen before, and have never been able to find since; eventually, in warm weather, we could sit beneath trees near the Mississippi River. Once, driving through a park in the city's center, he said that I should write a novel about us: write it as a fast, urgent exchange of letters, the way it really was, and name the girl Laurel; Laurel Wynn, he added. I used that name in my second novel, but it was a book about my father's life,
Old Powder Man
. Trees figured prominently in his poems in
A Green Bough
and in much of his prose; and finally it was Mississippi woods that offered shelter with the least strain for meeting near where we lived. Yet, walking once at Bard in snow, he said that trees were our enemies, and hoped we would lose our way among them. I wondered why all people his age couldn't talk that way, rather than so boringly. That January day in Memphis I drove across the bridge over the river into Arkansas and back. And finally stopped on a bluff in a park, the Mississippi in panorama below. He might have guessed, he said, that I'd like the river too.

Sitting there, I asked if he thought he'd have written if he had left Oxford. And he replied that if he'd gone to the New York Bowery, what was worth it in Faulkner would have gotten itself written. But if he'd been the Bowery bloke, he wouldn't have been Faulkner.

Rain turned to slush on the windshield, and I was cramped and frozen from sitting so long behind the steering wheel. Once he put a hand on my arm, and I tensed in surprise, and he took it right away. I suggested lunch finally, and he was contrite. He had not remembered, he said, that at my age I had to eat in the middle of the day; at his age, he didn't. I drove a long way across town to pass time, and to a drive-in I'd frequented as a college freshman in Memphis. Midweek and past the rush hour, it was almost empty. On the nickelodeon the Mills Brothers sang “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” And he said that might be for me. But why? Because he was going to fall in love with me, or possibly already had. Hadn't I realized what it might mean when I wrote that letter? No, I had not. Well, don't worry about it; if he fell in love, we couldn't help it.

Memphis and northern Mississippi, our countryside, always have been one place. At that time neither industry nor strangers had moved in. Memphis was not much more than an overgrown small town. An acquaintance of Mrs. Faulkner's saw us in the booth that day and reported us in a Memphis juke joint. Juke joint? I said. This first meeting was the last one in which I was not a known factor in his life.

Letters took the place of what would have been more meetings. Sometimes “the thing” that moved him so in the first letter came out of mine again: the wind over Cyndos, blowing the April, whitening the seas, the falcon the hawk diving down a white cliff somewhere something in the sad the eternal the wanting believing heart.…

And now certainly his mail was not safe, and he suggested General Delivery in Oxford, in care of Quentin Compson; but then supposed him too well known and suggested instead A. E. Holston (from
The Hamlet
). I rather doubted that the postmaster in Oxford knew Quentin Compson, either.

That February he came east, and, sitting over a drink at the Biltmore, we talked and devised a play, and he set to work immediately on
Requiem for a Nun
. Correspondence says that had it not been for our discussion, he would never have thought of a play, though I remember nothing of what was said. He sent me copy at Bard, wishing me to write on the play too; to be his collaborator, he thought, would be my breakthrough in writing. I made some attempts, but at twenty-one my heart was not in trying seriously to rewrite Faulkner. My being his collaborator on the play would also be an excuse to offer his people and mine for our seeing one another. He wished when the book was finished that he could dedicate it to me. If only, I said, I could have been born earlier, or you later. No, he said. Earlier I was too busy writing to have had time for you.

I knew instinctively I had come along in his life at the right time: when he needed something, a catalyst to start him writing again. He wrote that when he picked up
A Fable
, after many years away from it, he needed something, someone, to write not
to
but
for
: to be close and read the work and say, almost inattentively, Yes, yes. Keep on. I love you and believe in you.

But I worried it was simply my age that drew him.
It wasn't your face in the Memphis bus station that day. I would never have known it if you had not come up to me
. And didn't I realize I was not the only young woman to write him? I could imagine that, and knew there was a multitude of young women who would like to be in Faulkner's company; and in New York girls far more worldly than I. He never cared to use his fame to his advantage. It is sad that in a recent documentary of his life on television he was depicted as something of a womanizer; he was not. Many times after I moved to New York, and he was there for long periods, he ate alone at the New Weston if I had other plans. By chance, after I was married, I saw him coming out of his dining room alone one evening; and the idea of his solitariness moved me to wonder, as I always had, why he chose to be alone when he could so easily have summoned company.

After graduating from Bard, I went back to Memphis, and we abandoned that summer the idea of meeting in the city. Not only was there more fear of his being recognized, but a city seemed wrong. And we decided upon a town about halfway between our respective towns, called Holly Springs. Sometimes I took my mother's car there. And sometimes I walked half a block from home to Lamar Avenue and flagged down a Greyhound bus. Once my mother asked what I'd been doing to get one arm so sunburned. It had rested on the car's windowsill down and back, and I don't know what I replied. I met him always at the shady courthouse square. We set off down a highway to Pott's Camp, though I never saw anything but a road sign announcing it ahead. Turning at the sign, we traveled blinding, red, dusty country roads that wound in a maze through emptyish countryside. I suppose in those days I thought all woods belonged to God, and I don't know if we ever trespassed finding places in them to sit. He brought beer, and a lunch for me; he always thought of me as “young enough to need to eat in the middle of the day.”

Since it was not the nature of either of us to talk very much, we simply did not talk a lot. It was so hot, and everything so still. And we perspired. That he could smell of sweat made him Bill, rather than Faulkner. I came once with pencil and paper and, sitting on a tree root, said I thought I ought to ask questions about his work, and write it all down, but I didn't know what to ask. He waved a hand and said I didn't need to ask those kinds of things; that what I got from the solitude and silence was enough. We agreed there was not enough silence in the world, and that most people wouldn't understand two people wanting to sit in the woods all day to be together, talking or not. We were soul mates, and if that was sentimentality we were not against it. What's wrong with sentimentality? I asked. Faulkner said, People are afraid of it.

Driving along one of these country roads once, and only slowing down, he reached into the back seat and said, I have something for you. He put into my lap the original manuscript of
The Sound and the Fury
, handwritten. And sitting one day in a one-room apartment I had in Greenwich Village, which was chocolate brown when I moved in, and which he painted white (house-painting was his first profession, wasn't it?), he asked where the manuscript was. It's here, I said. It had gotten more and more valuable, and he put it in a safe at Random House, giving his editor, Saxe Commins, a letter saying the manuscript was irrevocably mine, beyond any future claim; though I've never seen it again.

After our second meeting in January, Faulkner had read my story in
Mademoiselle
. I was touched, and never knew how he had gotten a back issue. The point of writing, he had said, was to make something passionate and moving and true, and the story was moving and true. It made him want to cry a little for all the sad frustration of solitude, isolation, aloneness in which every human being lives, who, for all the blood kinship and everything else, can't really communicate, touch. I knew if he thought that at his age it would be true always for me, too. And was it not why he wrote, and why I tried to?

He said that the force and the passion and the controlled heat would come in time. I worried about writing. He said it was good to worry: that was part of it; the suffering and the working, most of all the working, the being willing and ready to sacrifice everything for it—happiness, peace, money, duty, too, if I was so unlucky. Only, quite often, if you are really willing to sacrifice any and everything for it, everything will not be required, demanded by the gods.

I had all along been trying to write other stories, but none were good enough that he could help them. And it seemed to me that in trying, he was rewriting them. But I wrote now another story set in the same countryside, as my first had been, as innate to me as it was to him. I spent childhood summers in my mother's Mississippi birthplace, a tiny community of three hundred called Arkabutla. The happiest part of my childhood was staying with my grandmother, surrounded by aunts, uncles, and first cousins. Once, in New York, we were going to a party given by a Random House editor and Faulkner said he was so much more comfortable going with me. I was surprised because he had known these people a long time. But you are my countryman, he said.

My story was sparked by a retarded man in my grandmother's town. People teased him by saying, “You're not crazy, are you?” And he'd reply, “Naw. But me ain't far from it.” How, I wanted to know, did people not know his feelings were hurt? And so my story began to write itself in my head. I took it to Faulkner in the woods, and after reading it, he said, This may be it.

He took the story home but found nothing to do to it. It was too good for even him to touch, he wrote.
It's all right this time. I think you can stop worrying, and just write. The next one may not be this good, but don't let that trouble you either
.

In my story the retarded man was a mute. And I don't remember my first title, but Faulkner didn't like it. He said I was writing about a human being, true. But he thought the title should refer to a
condition
, some applicable quotation, such as “a little child shall lead them,” though that was not quite right. Some word, maybe, like “twilight,” some tender word, or, for emphasis (since the story opened in a traveling picture show), some savage word or phrase out of Hollywood motion-picture slogans about the education or artistic value or the importance of motion pictures.

When I saw him he suddenly suggested “The Morning and the Evening,” out of Genesis, when God created day and night; because to my mute Jake, all time is the same; it doesn't matter to him whether it's morning or evening. In the King James version, the evening and the morning were the second day; whether Faulkner deliberately re-arranged the title or remembered wrongly, I don't know.

My opening was, “The owner-manager did not take his first customer for a looney.…” And Faulkner suggested a few words to capture instantly, he said, the owner's character. He wrote: “The owner-manager (everything else too, with the exception of the licensed projectionist which union regulations forced him to hire).…” But he crossed that out, and rewrote: “(and ticket seller and -taker and everything else too, with the exception of the licensed projectionist whom labor union regulations compelled him to hire) did not take the first customer in the line beyond the window for a looney, and tried to charge him full admission.” However, youthful perversity, and a desire to have it as much mine as possible, made me write finally: “The owner-manager was also the ticket seller and ticket taker and would have been his own projectionist, too, if labor regulations had not forced him to hire a licensed one. He did not take his first customer for a looney and tried to charge him full admission.” Always Faulkner and I spoke of Benjy and Jake in the same breath; but suddenly I wrote him a letter that began: “My God! I've just been re-reading
The Hamlet
. And Jake is not Benjy. He's Ike Snopes!” Though at the time I wrote the story I was not consciously thinking of characters or situations in either
The Sound and the Fury
or
The Hamlet
.

Years later a young professor in South Carolina said to me he did not believe he could have understood
The Sound and the Fury
when he was twenty. I said nothing, but began a long drive back to Connecticut, and somewhere in the southern landscape suddenly thought, Of course, I did not understand it then. I felt it, and only Benjy's section. I knew that what had moved me was his inarticulateness, because I felt it to be my own; and so many years later I could write convincingly about a mute's desire, and inability, to communicate.