{Photograph} by Gary Bridgman. courtesy of wikimedia commons, licensed below CCO 2.5.
“That’s the one bother with this nation: every part, climate, all, hangs on too lengthy,” William Faulkner wrote of his native Mississippi in his novel As I Lay Dying. “Like our rivers, our land: opaque, gradual, violent; shaping and creating the lifetime of man in its implacable and brooding picture.” There got here a day when, as a reader of Faulkner, I wished to see what he was speaking about. If the tendency of issues in Mississippi was to hold on too lengthy, as Faulkner claimed, possibly the populace and the panorama could be roughly the identical as they’d been when he wrote these traces in 1930. The drive from Brooklyn to his home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, was seventeen hours.
5 hours in, I made a pit cease at an abolitionist holy website: the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. John Brown’s raid on the armory, in October 1859, was one of many proximate causes of the Civil Warfare. It enraged a plantation-owning class already fearful of northern agitators. “I need to free all of the negroes on this state,” he stated, referring to Virginia, the place half 1,000,000 individuals have been enslaved. His plan was to grab weapons and hand them out to males within the close by fields, fomenting rebel. With twenty-one followers, he stormed the armory and held elements of it for 2 days earlier than U.S. marines flushed him out. All that’s left of the armory, largely destroyed within the subsequent battle, is the fire-engine home, which occurred to be Brown’s ultimate redoubt. He was captured there, after which taken to jail, tried, and hanged. I stood in the home; it’s the dimensions of a two-car storage, dwarfed by the inexperienced, misty mountains that encompass it. It drove residence how tiny Brown’s pressure was, for it to have been capable of match inside such a small place—how insufficient to his acknowledged activity.
In Faulkner’s novella “The Bear,” John Brown seems with out warning, in the course of a stream of consciousness, and has a dialogue with God. He explains to Him that he, Brown, is uncommon amongst males solely in that he sees slavery for what it’s, a “nightmare.” God asks, “The place are your Minutes, your Motions, your Parliamentary Procedures?” Brown responds, “I ain’t in opposition to them. They’re all proper I reckon for them which have the time.” Observe that Faulkner makes God sound lame and officious, and provides Brown, an Ohioan, the locutions of a backwoods Mississippian. As a person of motion, and as an individual who acknowledges the true nature of issues, Brown is a sort of honorary Southerner.
Faulkner known as Lafayette County, his residence, “the ultimate blue and dying echo of the Appalachian mountains.” That is true. I adopted the backbone of the alpine chain southwest from the peaks of Harpers Ferry, the place the climate was cool and nice, down by means of Tennessee, till the mountains dribbled away within the warmth of northern Mississippi. Lafayette County was the final place the place the hills have been substantial. I drove an extra hour west to see the Delta, which was flat, in step with its fame. Then I circled and drove to Oxford.
Rowan Oak, the place Faulkner lived from the age of thirty-two till his dying at sixty-five, stands simply outdoors of downtown Oxford, but it surely’s surrounded by woods, invisible from the highway. From the filth parking zone, you stroll by means of a hardwood forest of virgin timber till a clearing opens earlier than you and you might be in a secluded “postage stamp” world, to make use of Faulkner’s time period, a number of acres of grass and gardens walled in on all sides by dense foliage. There’s a lengthy, broad footpath lined with aromatic pink cedars, planted within the 1870s as a result of they have been thought to fight yellow fever. The footpath results in a giant white home. Most of Oxford seems like several American school city, block after block of modest Colonials on their little inexperienced heaps. However at Rowan Oak, the manorial panorama perseveres.
The 2-story clapboard home was in-built 1844 by William Turner, the identical Oxonian who constructed the close by mansion that impressed “the Compson place,” the setting of The Sound and the Fury. Rowan Oak will not be as grand because the Compson place, not to mention the cotton-kingdom palaces within the environs of Natchez and Charleston. It seems like a crude drawing of a Greek Revival home; 4 Doric columns assist an unadorned pediment. It’s plainer than Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, and about the identical dimension. However Dickinson’s home faces the road and is seen to its neighbors, regardless of the poet’s well-known reclusiveness. Rowan Oak, against this, is hidden from the encircling village, set aside; it takes a little bit of effort to get to or away from it. You’d suppose that Faulkner, well-known for writing interlocking tales a few neighborhood the place all people was in all people’s enterprise (his invented Yoknapatawpha County) would have lived in a home located as Dickinson’s was, on a thoroughfare, within the thick of issues, and that Dickinson would have lived in a spot like Rowan Oak. Circling the home counter-clockwise, I noticed the wood smokehouse Faulkner erected on the ruins of the quarters for enslaved individuals, the publish oak barn he constructed for his cow, and the secure he constructed for his horses. He cherished driving; he joined two foxhunting golf equipment whereas Author-in-Residence on the College of Virginia, and a fall from horseback at Rowan Oak was a think about his early dying, as a result of the ache from the damage made it more durable for him to remain sober. On the fitting facet of the home, there was the portico, the place, standing within the shade one night, Faulkner’s spouse, Estelle, gave him the title for one among his novels, remarking that there was one thing uncommon concerning the high quality of sunshine in August. She later threw the one extant manuscript of Mild in August out the window of a shifting automobile, forcing her adulterous, dipsomaniacal husband to tug over and collect the pages.
It was August once I was there, and I assumed I noticed what Estelle meant: the humidity was so intense that the sunbeams appeared sticky, honeyed. Nevertheless it was cool and dim within the lobby, the place a graduate scholar stationed in an armchair collected my seven-dollar payment. There was no one else round, so he confirmed me the library within the entrance of the home, the place Faulkner had written Mild in August and Absalom, Absalom!. There have been good-looking bookshelves Faulkner had constructed himself, with particular compartments for his shotgun shells. Naive artwork hung framed on the partitions. This was the work of Faulkner’s mom, Maud. There was one portrait of Faulkner, and one among Maud’s grandfather in his Accomplice uniform, each males sporting the identical unhappy, mild expression. I walked down the corridor to the again research, the place Faulkner wrote his late novels. The plot for A Fable was outlined in pencil and ink throughout two of the partitions. There was one thing deeply Faulknerian about this: a screenwriter’s preoccupation with plot coupled with a modernist’s urge to transgress. Write an in depth define, positive, however on the wall, like a convict scrawling on the wall of his cell.
I couldn’t proceed upstairs, to the Faulkners’ separate bedrooms, with out listening to my professor, the good Southern author Allan Gurganus, one among only a few novelists who may with justice be named Faulkner’s successor, describe these bedrooms in his mellow drawl to a rapt classroom. “It was a home divided between two drinkers who despised one another. He drank whiskey, she drank wine. And let me inform you, girls and boys …” Right here, Allan leaned ahead and paused to look every one among us within the eye. “You possibly can nonetheless style the poison within the air.”
The one proof of discord within the Faulkners’ bedrooms was the window AC unit in Estelle’s, put in the day after William’s funeral, as a result of he hated air-conditioning a lot he wouldn’t let her set up it whereas he was alive. I didn’t know to what diploma my feeling of immersion in an unwholesome miasma was Allan’s affect, and to what diploma it was the persistence of marital toxins within the environment, however I wished to get open air. I walked down the corridor onto the balcony, and it began to rain, first a patter, then a downpour. It launched the scent of the healing cedars. I went downstairs and out into the rain, and when the rain stopped, steam rose from the grass and the round backyard, from the scuppernong arbor and the knot of wisteria.
This was a good looking place. However when Faulkner and his household moved in, it was rustic within the excessive. The home was lit by oil lamps and heated by a cast-iron range within the kitchen. His stepdaughter, Cho-Cho, recalled that it was “tumbled down, surrounded by brush, out of doors privy, snakes, no electrical energy, plumbing.” However Faulkner was an avid do-it-yourselfer (see Geoff Dyer’s research of D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, for extra on modernist writers and the house enchancment impulse). He added facilities all through the thirties and forties, funding his tasks along with his work on Hollywood screenplays, like The Large Sleep and To Have and Have Not.
Throughout Faulkner’s lifetime, no one knew whether or not Rowan Oak was a spot the place individuals had been enslaved. It was well-documented that Robert Sheegog, the home’s authentic proprietor, had enslaved many individuals, however Sheegog owned a number of properties, and this one was not a labor camp out within the nation however a house constructed for leisure, near city. The previous at Rowan Oak was each current and befogged in Faulkner’s day, a topic of hypothesis, like Joe Christmas’s parentage in Mild in August or Charles Bon’s in Absalom, Absalom!.
After I’d wandered the grounds, I spent the weekend in Oxford, a heady expertise for a Northern fetishist of issues Southern. I ate catfish and grits, drank whiskey in a bar on the outskirts of city the place outdated males in hats performed guitars. I visited Faulkner’s grave and his birthplace, drove across the Mississippi hill nation, and ate okra with congenial strangers. I attempted to know why I felt drawn to this a part of the world. To that finish, I drank whiskey in a second bar, this one downtown, overlooking the statue of the Accomplice soldier who gazed “with empty eyes,” in Faulkner’s phrase, on the sq.. I made a decision the rationale was this. I grew up in Amherst, a mile down the highway from Dickinson’s home, and Massachusetts is the Mississippi of the North, Mississippi the Massachusetts of the South. They’re on reverse sides of the American political spectrum, however they’re each locations the place the current is dwarfed and chastened by the previous. In Massachusetts, a given location is called the spot the place the minutemen confronted the redcoats on the inexperienced, or the place Jonathan Edwards delivered his sermon “Sinners within the Arms of an Indignant God,” or the place the Mayflower landed, or the place the whalers set sail, or the place the tea was dumped within the harbor. In Mississippi, it’s the identical: right here’s the place Grant’s military bivouacked; right here’s the place the previously enslaved Union troopers drove the Texans from the sphere; right here’s the place Elvis grew up; right here’s the place Emmett Until was murdered; right here’s the place the earliest blues music was carried out. I’ve heard each Massachusetts and Mississippi maligned as boring, and I’ve tried to clarify to the maligners: It’s good to cease residing a lot within the current.
Faulkner is, in fact, the man who stated, “The previous isn’t useless. It isn’t even previous.” Rowan Oak preserves the bodily proof of his compulsion to reside in a home that summoned bygone instances, a necessity shared by the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury, Joanna Burden in Mild in August, and Henry Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!. You possibly can see the agrarian outbuildings he rebuilt, the air conditioner he forbade (actually astounding), his driving boots, and the encircling woods that make the hum of site visitors disappear.
Benjamin Nugent is the creator of Fraternity: Tales, and the recipient of The Paris Evaluate’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize.
