James Agee | A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text (ed. by Michael A. Lofaro) / 2007

invention serves remembrance

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Agee A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text, edited by Michael A. Lofaro (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007)

 

In a year (2008) in which I had determined, after writing about my father's death in 2002, to read James Agee's A Death in the Family, it seemed that I was fated to read the newly released "restored" edition of that book. I admit that I was not completely enthused by the idea, particularly after having read, in March, the review of the "restoration" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review which argued that David McDowell's editing of the original publication of the Agee work in 1957 was "superior" to the Lofaro text:

 

“Lofaro conjectures that McDowell ‘changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book’s marketability’; he does not consider that McDowell might have made his decisions for a simpler reason: to create the best possible book. The new chapters, while interesting, don’t add much to our understanding of Jay or Mary or young Rufus. In fact, everything that needs to be established – the tenderness and conflict within the marriage, Jay’s drinking and tendency to drive too fast, Rufus’ deep sensitivity and his near-worshipful relationship with his father – is handled perfectly, and more economically, in the original version.”

 

     The critic goes on to argue that Lofaro's "most egregious" decision was to remove the "Knoxville: Summer 1915" section, replacing it with a nightmare sequence, which, "with its graphic violence and religious symbolism, is heavy-handed and not nearly as effective."

     In short, he concludes, "Lofaro has made a mess of it."

     My own intuition, moreover, was that what Lofaro argued was Agee's intention of a straight-forward, chronologically-ordered narrative seemed far less interesting than the flashbacks and other modernist narrative devices introduced by McDowell. The sheer size and heft of the "restored" edition, along with these reservations, led me to put off reading the Lofaro edition until late in the year.

      Fortunately, the time in early December in which I came to the fiction also allowed me to slow down the pace of the reading and to more carefully consider Lofaro's voluminous series of notes and annotations—nearly as long as the work itself.

      I have now come to feel that the restored version, contrary to the reviewer's insistence, is far superior: clearer, more emotionally engaging, and, most importantly, in concert with the author's desires.

      Agee, it is apparent, never intended his beautiful set piece, "Knoxville: Summer, 1915," first published in Partisan Review in 1938, to be included in A Death in the Family. And the situation he describes in that prose poem, although it may remind one of the poetic tone and certain incidents in the fiction, makes it seem as if the young boy's uncle and aunt, "living at home," were residing within his own house. Emma, his sister, appears nowhere in that short piece. And the poem ends with a dilemma of self-identity that is not at all an issue in A Death in the Family.

     Lofaro admits that there is no way of definitively knowing that Agee intended to begin his work with the horrifying dream sequence about a John the Baptist-like being, killed by the mobs of the city; but it is also clear that there is no other place for it in the work, despite it being contained in the original manuscripts.

      The dream episode seems quite obviously that of an older man, still haunted by the death of his father; and Agee's own analysis at the end of that dream that the corpse was the father and his recognition that "He [the narrator]

 

      should go back into those years. As far as he could remember; and

      everything he could remember; nothing he had learned or done since;

      nothing except (so well as he could remember) what his father had been

      as far as he had known him, and what he had been as he had known

      himself, and what he had seen with his own eyes, and supposed with

      his own mind....

 

all seem to point to the very beginning of the imaginative voyage upon which the rest of the work will take the reader. As Agee wrote in 1948 to his dead father:

 

      Let me explain what I am trying to do here [in this work].

      I have lived, now, a year longer than you were given to live. I feel

      very heavy in the sense of life and death, and very heavy in my

      sense of uncertainty and of failure in my life so far.... My way of

      trying to handle these things is to try to recall and understand

      my life, as well as I can, and to try to write it down as clearly and

      as well as I can.

 

As Agee wrote his mother:

 

     I am trying to write a short book, a novel, beginning with the first things

     I can remember, and ending with my father's burial. The whole closing

     section is to be as clear an account as I can make of everything I can

     remember, from the morning I woke up and learned that he had died

     the night before, through to the end of the afternoon of the funeral.

 

He notes elsewhere that he is trying to write a narrative that is as chronologically correct and clear as he can make it. "In most novels, properly enough, remembrance serves invention. In this volume," Agee proclaims, "invention has served remembrance."

    More importantly, Lofaro shows us that Agee saw this work less as "a novel"—even though he himself, as I have noted above, refers to the work as "a novel"—than as an autobiography, a work, had he lived longer, that might have been embedded within other writings about his ancestors, his mother and father's relationship, and his own later education and writing experiences.

     The Lofaro edition adds ten chapters and restores versions of three other chapters, as well as bringing parts of the text together which were previously divided. The newly-found chapters that Lofaro includes slow down the work and draw the reader into the detail of Agee's world. Indeed, it is this series of details wherein this work has its deepest meaning. As I have written elsewhere, A Death in the Family virtually has no plot. We know from the outset what the major event of the work entails: the father's death. And anyone who has experienced the death of a family member can imagine the effects on a family. What is remarkable about his writing is how Agee makes his family members (Lofaro restores the actual family names, Agee and Tyler, to his text) so immediate and real: the way they cook, shop, worry for and about each other, and share and disagree with each other regarding viewpoints on various issues such as sexuality and religion. The familial details of life are at the heart of Agee's work, and Lofaro's version not only enhances these, but allows the reader to better understand the relationship of husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, and brother and sister.

      Had the original editor, McDowell, more transparently admitted his radical editorial changes, I think no one might blame him for his decisions; I agree with Lofaro's analysis that "he changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book's marketability." The decision to produce a shorter work, the various flashbacks in time and space are quite understandable in a decade in which readers were assimilating Faulkner's great experiments and reading new works by Nabokov, Salinger, Bellow and others. Within this context, Agee's work, as he intended it, does seem somewhat "old-fashioned."

     But McDowell felt it necessary to disavow any major changes, insisting in his "A Note on This Book":

 

            There has been no re-writing, and nothing has been eliminated except

            for a few cases of first-draft material which he later re-worked at

            greater length, and one section of seven-odd pages which the editors

            were unable satisfactorily to fit into the body of the novel [apparently

            the prologue of Lofaro's edition].

 

      If nothing else, however, Lofaro definitively shows just how extensive McDowell's changes were, revealing in many respects how different this book is from the original publication and, just as importantly I would argue, how different is a novel from an autobiography.

     Admittedly, there are a few problems with this "restoration." Agee did not title any of his sections or chapters; Lofaro has chosen to title sections, some with words from the text that seem, within the context of Agee's poetical writing, rather awkward, such as "This little boy you live in," "Perceptions c. 1911-1912" and "Enter the Ford: Travel, 1913-1916." Lofaro also occasionally explains some of Agee's dialect word choices, placing them in brackets within the text, while I feel this might have been better handled through a discrete asterisk with a same-page note. But these are minor quibbles in what has clearly been a long labor of love. 

      Rather than "making a mess of it," I would argue, Lofaro has utterly clarified Agee's intentions and revealed an astounding contribution to American autobiographical writing.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2008

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XIV (Spring 2009).

Arthur Laurents | Home of the Brave / 1946

the coward’s hand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Laurents Home of the Brave (New York: Random House, 1946)

 

Arthur Laurent’s first play, Home of the Brave,* is the story of a young soldier, Peter Coen, part of an engineering division of the US Army during World War II in the South Pacific.

    By the time the curtain rises, Coen, called by his Army companions Coney, has already endured a mission in which he and four others penetrated an island held by the Japanese, secretly surveying and mapping the landscape to prepare for an invasion and the building of a small airport. Just as they finish their jobs and prepare to evacuate, Japanese soldiers discover their position and shoot, hitting Mingo and, later, wounding Coney’s best friend, Finch, who has temporarily forgotten where he put the maps. By the time Coney retrieves the maps, Finch is too hurt to move ahead with him and the others, and they are forced to leave him behind, with the hopes that we can eventually make his way to them before they leave the island that night.

     Events do not go well, and Finch, found and tortured by the Japanese at a distance close enough to where the others are hiding so that they can hear his cries and suffer his torture, horrify the soldiers. As they move off to dig up their canoes, Coney is left alone to protect the gear as Finch crawls into the small clearing, dying in Coney’s arms.

     Coney attempts to bury him so that the Japanese cannot dismember the corpse, but by the time his friends return, he finds himself unable to walk, suffering an inexplicable paralysis. He is carried away by a fellow soldier, waking to find himself in a military hospital under the care of Captain Harold Bitterger, a sympathetic psychiatrist.

     In December 1945, the date this play appeared at the Belasco Theatre in New York, the events of World War II was still so fresh that the audiences who attended the performances would have felt the circumstances of the play had occurred only yesterday. The play’s events are described as just a year earlier, and only five months before the play's opening the US had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

     If today much of the psychological jargon and the treatments used to help Coney seem obsolete and naïve, one must remember that although Freud had perhaps been assimilated by the intelligentsia, even a couple of years earlier a major character in Guys and Dolls had been told by his girlfriend, “Nathan, you got psychology, everybody’s got it!” The ideas of post-war syndrome and psychological hysteria were startlingly new concepts for the general public; treatment by "narcosynthesis" must have seemed almost futuristic.

     Any sensitive reader today, in our cure-all culture, might be able to discern that the problem with Coney was a terrible feeling of guilt for not having protected his close friend Finch, the only one of the group for whom his being Jewish seemed to have no significance. The discovery later that Finch, in a moment of duress, turned on his friend, parroting the statements of the other men: “you lousy yellow…” stopping before he finished the word "Jew," and transforming it into the word “jerk,” helps us to further understand Coney's guilt. The hurt Coney momentarily endures in that statement results, a few minutes later, in a momentary flash of pleasure when Finch gets shot. And we realize that his regret for that momentary sensation is entangled with the hundreds of racial and religious epithets Coen has had to endure not only throughout his life but, more particularly, while he has put his own life on the line for his prejudiced companions.

     Laurents has created a painful and revelatory play about how racial slurs and prejudices effect all Americans who must suffer them, whether in civilian or military life. But the situation upon which Laurents focuses, where Americans such as Coen were helping to battle just such hatred in Europe and elsewhere, makes such disgusting behavior even more insufferable.

     Only two years later, in 1947, the film Gentleman’s Agreement, would even more interestingly reveal the ugliness and prevalence of American anti-Semitism and its effects on good families and human inter-relationships, including Gregory Peck’s love with the liberal WASP Kathy Lacey (played by Dorothy McGuire) and, even more evidently, the job aspirations of the Dave Goldman (John Garfield). In that sense both of these works, Home of the Brave and Gentleman’s Agreement should be understood as works that helped, if all too slowly, alter standard American prejudices with regards to being Jewish, prejudices which my own father, fighting in World War II, thought he was challenging as well through his actions as an Air Force bombardier flying over Germany.

     Yet I cannot help but feel there is something “more” going on in Laurent’s play that is not at all an issue in Gentleman’s Agreement, another matter that renders the central subject of Home of the Brave somewhat diffuse and incomprehensible. The good psychiatrist perceives the “central” issue, so it seems, and “cures” his patient by helping Coen to realize that every soldier, of necessity, feels, for an instant when another soldier is hit, a momentary sense of relief, expressed, as another of Coney’s group, Mingo, puts it “Thank God, it’s not me!” Coen is made to understand that he is like everyone else, no matter how men like the intolerant T. J. describe him. That, in turn, frees Coen to forgive himself, to comprehend his flash of anger and hatred towards his dying friend as an instant of justifiable self-protection.

 

    Even the psychiatrist, however, laments that he cannot go further, in the short period he has to work with his patient, into Coen’s past in the comprehension of his mental issues. By play’s end, now with Mingo’s help, we can only believe that—unlike T. J.’s suspicions that one day Coney will go “off” again—he will survive in the civilian world as a productive human being. Yet Laurents, we feel, or at least I do, has left something out. Why has Coen gone “off” in the first place? It is hard to believe that a Jewish man living in what was an anti-Semitic society in the 1930s and 1940s, fighting in a War that, at least in the European scene, occurred in part because of the German hatred for and determination to destroy all European Jews, would still be so utterly sensitive to what appears, at least in the context of the play, as a few racial slurs. Yes, they would be painful, angering, particularly, when uttered—or almost uttered—by a dear friend. But then, a moment before, Coen has referred to Finch as a “dumb Arizona bastard,” perhaps to Finch just as painful an epithet. Of course, there is a radical difference, one is a statement dismissing one’s home state and the conditions of life there; the other is a complete dismissal of belief and cultural identity, not only one’s own identity, but the identities of one’s father and mother and all the generations before that. Yet both demean and belittle the individuals to whom these slurs are thrown.

     Throughout one of the earlier scenes, moreover, Coen calls Finch a “jerk” numerous times. A few minutes later he describes Finch to Mingo as “the Arizona tumbleweed.” So Coen himself is not above handing out a few epithets that suggest his friend’s backwardness, lack of education, and cultural isolation. What exactly does Coen’s over-sensitivity to slurs he must have heard much of his life suggest? I am reminded of an important scene in Gentleman’s Agreement, when Phil Green (Gregory Peck) revels to his Jewish friend, Dave Goldman, that he is pretending to be Jewish in order to write a story about anti-Semitism: 

        

Phil Green: I've been saying I'm Jewish, and it works.
Dave Goldman: Why, you crazy fool! It's working?
Phil: It works too well. I've been having my nose rubbed in it, and I don't like the smell.
Dave: You're not insulated yet, Phil. The impact must be quite a business on you.
Phil: You mean you get indifferent to it in time?
Dave: No, but you're concentrating a lifetime into a few weeks. You're not changing the facts, you're just making them hurt more.

 

So too does Peter Coen seem to be concentrating all his hurt into a single incident having to do with a young Arizona boy named Finch.

    Of course, it helps to know that he and Finch are not just friends, but are planning, when they are discharged, to open a bar together in…Finch’s “whistlestop home” in rural Arizona. A Pittsburgh Jewish boy in Arizona? Something is wrong with this picture. Or, I should perhaps say, something is quite right—if you comprehend the situation. The two men are clearly in love, whether or not they know it or the author is willing to express it. The very fact that Peter Coen, who keeps Kosher and is religiously observant, would be willing to abandon city life and move to a small town in the Southwest in the 1940s—long before that area’s startling growth—in order to open a bar where “married men” will feel comfortable, speaks volumes. The two men are suggesting a long term relationship completely off the beaten path, which was a way of saying, in those days, they were committing themselves to one another.

     Of course, Laurents cannot speak of this, and why should he? His central issue was painful enough. To have illuminated it as a story of their love would have completely overwhelmed any other concerns he might have wanted to express. Or, to put it another way, if Laurents had centered the work on gay sexuality in 1945, the play would never have been produced. While it was the time to discuss, finally, the issue of anti-Semitism, gays would have to wait through the blistering attacks on homosexual writers, composers, and other figures of the early 1960s until later in that decade to even bring up the issue. Laurents would be one of the earliest to suggest these issues in his 1948 screenplay Rope, where he and Hitchcock created a situation where two gay men simply lived together, without making anything of it in the story; but then they were murderers, based on the real life figures Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

     I know there are a few readers, who have read several of my essays, who will say that I find these issues in too many plays, films, fictions, etc.—and they are right. My response is that for much of the 20th century writers who wanted to consider these difficulties had no choice but to bury them in other narratives that opened for those who understood and were sympathetic to the situations and were closed or oblique to those who were not.

    Moreover, I want to make it clear that I am not diminishing the obvious concern of Laurents’ play.  It’s simply that the love between these two soldiers, sexual or not, intensifies and clarifies everything!

    Laurents, moreover, takes this issue even further when, once Coen has regained his sense of self and purpose, he goes off with another man—this time Mingo—perhaps the kind of married man for whom Finch and Coen had planned their bar. Mingo suggests he is willing to partner, at least the bar, with Peter. A man whose wife has abandoned him, Mingo even likes poetry (perceived by many in this decade as a woman’s avocation), which he claims throughout the play his wife writes, but which we suspect, given the appropriateness of the lines he quotes, he himself might have written:

 

                                  Frightened,

                                  you are my only friend.

                                  And frightened, we are everyone.

                                  Someone must take a stand.

                                  Coward, take my coward’s hand.

 

    The ending is a bit like Rick and Louie’s last lines in Casablanca:

 

                                  Coney: Hey, coward.

                                  Mingo [turning]: What?

                                  Coney: [coming to him]. Take my coward’s hand.

                                      [He lifts the bag up on Mingo’s back.]

                                  Mingo: Pete, my boy, you’ve got a charming memory.

                                      [A slight pause.]

                                  Coney [softly]. Delightful!.....

 

And it is…charming, delightful, as the one-armed survivor and the formally paralyzed man walk off into the sunset.

 

*Over the years, I have made note of the countless times coincidence has played an important role in my life. I read this play while I was visiting New York, having found it in the library located in Sherry Bernstein’s apartment where I was staying. The books in the room in which I slept belonged to Charles Bernstein’s brother and were stored on an entire wall of the room. I often chose to borrow a book on my visits there, and on the evening of May 4th had chosen quite at random to read Laurent’s play before I fell to sleep after midnight. The next morning in a taxi on my way to a Broadway matinee, the radio news reported that Arthur Laurents had died.

 

New York, May 8, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2011).

William Faulkner | As I Lay Dying / 1930

the dreadful hollow

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage Books [Vintage International], 1930)

 

I recently reread and taught Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, sharing with my class the timeworn themes of the book, the strange family dynamism of the Bundren family, the narrative Rashoman-like structure of the work, the social and economic situations of the family in relation to the financially depressed South (As I Lay Dying was originally published in October 1930, the same month as the stock market crash), and the mythic journey of the family from their home to Jefferson to bury Addie, where they endure nearly unbearable trials of earth, air, water, wind, and fire.

     But as I began teaching the book this time around, particularly during the discussion of their tribulations, I was forced to admit that while in most classical works these trials generally resulted in redemption and/or transformation, in Faulkner’s novel only Anse, the father, receives any benefit: a set of new teeth and a wife to replace the one whom he has just buried. Cash nearly loses his leg, and, if the doctor is to be believed, will be partially crippled for the rest of his life; Darl loses his mind and is taken away to the Mississippi State Hospital in Jackson; Jewel loses his horse and any possibility of mythic potentiality that lay in his centaur-like being (early on, his body is described as “in midair shaped to the horse” [p. 13]); Dewey Dell is stripped of the money Lafe has given her for an abortion (and stripped of any remaining respectability by the salesman MacGowan), dooming her to the kind of servitude to family-life that Addie has had to endure; and even the young boy Vardaman loses, if nothing else, his innocence, perhaps even his future sanity. In his desperation to get Addie to her own “flesh and blood” in the Jefferson burial ground, Anse has sucked the very life out of his sons and daughters, one by one, so that he might obtain the set of teeth and, almost magically, be able to remarry.

      And just as suddenly, it became clear to me that the family’s trip from their mountain-top home (the location of which is made clear in Peabody’s visit to the Bundrens, where he has to be towed up to the top by a rope) into civilization is not only a trip to Hell, but a sort of metaphorical rendering of what has already happened in Addie’s life. The Bundren shack lies at the entrance of Hell, a place in which the light appears to be “the color of sulphur matches,” “The boards look like strips of sulphur” (p. 43) and “The air smells like sulphur” (p. 76), their hellish voyage presaged by Faulkner’s title, a quote by Agamemnon in Homer’s Odyssey, “As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”  Even before Addie’s death we begin to perceive that the family members she has borne are no longer whole beings.

      As Michael Neal Morris has noted in his internet essay, “Wood Imagery in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” in many ways the Bundrens are a people made of wood, “The Bundrens are rigid in that they are hard, unbending people who stick to their principles, no matter how absurd or impractical. Death in the novel is not only the physical death of the matriarch, but also the spiritual death of those who retain their foolish pride.”

       Cash, quite obviously, is a carpenter who spends most of the early part of the novel constructing the coffin of wood, with adze and saw endlessly constructing a container of death, his saw like a tongue lapping away at life, “one lick less, one lick less.” Cash’s major statements in this book are numbered, as in a sort of maddened series of notes on how to build a coffin. Jewel is described as having a face made of wood and is represented in several places in the book as being “wooden-faced”:  "He sits lightly, poised, upright, wooden-faced in the saddle, the broken hat raked at a swaggering angle.” Although Darl is not described as wooden, he is, as Cora and Tull make quite clear, “queer,” with something wrong in his head. Dewey Dell is characterized as having “a dazed way.”

     Darl notes of his father: "He had that wooden look on his face again; that bold, surly, high-colored rigid look like his face and eyes were two colors of wood, the wrong one pale and the wrong one dark.” At several points, moreover, Anse’s whole being is described as hollow, his arms dangling from his shirts, his “chin collapsing slowly,” a man, “dangle-armed, humped, motionless” (p. 51). The name Anse means, in French, a cove, defined in its first meaning in Webster’s English dictionary as “a recessed place: concavity,” which, as we know is something “hollow.”

     In short, the Bundren family members are not just living at the lip of Hell but are themselves already dead in Hell, hunkering, as Eliot describes it in his poem “The Hollow Men,” at the “last of meeting places,” groping together, avoiding speech, “gathered on [the] beach of the tumid river.”

 

     In her horrible apologia spoken from the dead—Faulkner’s strange, almost “postmodern” tour de force—Addie expresses Anse’s condition quite clearly: “He did not know that he was dead.” She means this, obviously, metaphorically, that he is one of the “living dead,” one who, because has he no imagination nor vision, is, as Morris argues, “spiritually dead.”

      Yet I think, given the events of the novel, that we have to understand this sentence also as being literal, that Anse is actually one of the living dead, a vampire if you will, a man who early in the novel is described as never sweating, afraid that if he were to sweat he would die (p. 17). Anse also admits that he has no heart: “…I just cant seem to get no heart into anything,” “…I just cant seem to get no heart into it" (p. 38). In the same chapter, Anse complains of being unable to “eat God’s own victuals as a man should,” and throughout the book he refuses to enter any other man’s house, insisting that he “wouldn’t crave nothing,” and can subsist on what little food they have brought with them, despite the fact that their voyage takes several days.

      Once one begins down this path, it quickly becomes apparent that Faulkner is interested in the vampire myth and even in the story of Dracula at a much deeper level than it might first appear. If Anse is one of the living dead, a vampire who sucks the blood from Addie and his children, we begin to comprehend many of the mysterious aspects of the book. Jewel’s wasting away—which his brothers attribute first to an affair with a married woman, only to later discover that he has nightly been felling trees (another reference to the woodenness of this family) to make enough money to buy a horse—can also be comprehended, metaphorically, as a disease resulting from a loss of blood. The scenes describing his condition (pp. 128-136), in fact, closely resemble Bram Stoker’s descriptions of Lucy Westenra as she wastes away from the vampire’s bites.

       Blood is mentioned throughout the book, not only in Anse’s repeated creed of flesh and blood, but particularly in the scene describing Vardaman being “bloody as a hog to his knees, (p. 38),” ordered by Anse to clean and cut up the large fish he has caught, the fish representing forces against which the Bundren's are allied, Christianity and Christ.

      While Dracula and his vampire family escape their mountain-topped mansion as bats, the hollow men and women of the Bundren family leave their home as buzzards. Early in the book, Jewel sees his family members sitting like buzzards (p. 15), and soon thereafter buzzards begin to appear in the skies. By the middle of their voyage Vardaman, the youngest, and, therefore, perhaps the least dead of this vampire-like family, is kept busy chasing the seven buzzards (the number of family members) away, wondering where they go at night.

      We know that secret, and if we recognize Anse and the others as being transformed into the buzzards that follow along with Addie’s stinking corpse—a smell which horrifies everyone but the family itself—we can better understand, moreover, Anse’s humped body and his propensity, described several times early in the novel (see pp. 18, 19, 29 and 30, for example), to “rub his knees.” In his one section, Samson clearly seems to link the buzzard he sees with the family:

 

                     I saw something. It kind of hunkered up when I come in and I

                     thought at first it was one of them [the Bundrens] got left, then

                     I saw what it was. It was a buzzard. It looked around and saw me

                     and went on down the hall, spraddle-legged, with its wings kind

                     of hunkered out, watching me first over one shoulder and then

                     over the other, like an old baldheaded man. When it got outdoors

                     it began to fly. It had to fly a long time before it ever got up into the

                     air, with it thick and heavy and full of rain like it was.

 

       By novel’s end, accordingly, we understand how Anse has “worn out” his wife, sucking the blood from her body—just as he almost crucifies Cash upon the coffin of his own making by embedding his leg in concrete; transforms Darl into a maddened Renfield-like figure (and in this context we can also better understand Addie’s statement that her family “uses one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam” [p. 172]); robs Jewel of any transformative potential by selling his horse, the beast that is described almost as being part of Jewel’s body; and dooms Dewey Dell to a life of patriarchal servitude. And Vardaman? Perhaps he is destined to commit suicide, his blood already having been drained by the suck of his own teeth:

 

                  From behind pa’s leg Vardaman peers, his mouth open and all color

                  draining from his face into his mouth, as though he has by some means

                  fleshed his own teeth in himself, sucking. (p. 49)

 

At work’s end only Anse, the original vampire, remains intact, with a new set of teeth and a new bride into which he can sink them. 

 

*    

 

     When I first read As I Lay Dying as an M.A. student in Lewis Lawson’s 1973 Faulkner seminar at the University of Maryland, a woman in the class suddenly burst into tears one day as we were discussing this novel. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered, “but you are all speaking of this work from an objective position which I simply cannot share, having just gone through the death of my mother.” For years I have described this incident as being one the earliest indicators to me that the New Critical perspective of literature was about to crumble. The woman in our class, I now perceive, was correct in her assessment; by enfolding the popular vampire myth within this modernist masterpiece, perhaps Faulkner himself knew that he had created—as Darl describes Anse’s face upon the death of Addie—“a monstrous burlesque of all bereavement.”

    As I began research on this short essay, I came upon a brief piece from 2006 in the Los Angeles Times reporting that among the manuscripts found in Faulkner’s papers by his daughter Jill was a full-length, unpublished screenplay about vampires titled, unsurprisingly, Dreadful Hollow!

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2009).

     

 

John Hawkes | The Beetle Leg / 1951

life force

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Hawkes The Beetle Leg (New York: New Directions, 1951)

 

Except for his Alaskan novel, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, The Beetle Leg is Hawkes’s only fiction in which the action is located in America. Hawkes has plenty of American characters in his oeuvre, but on the beaches of Greek islands and other exotic locations they become figures that might be just as at home on the moon. Hawkes, or perhaps his publisher, even titled a collection of his short works Lunar Landscapes. The Beetle Leg, which purports to be a Western, might as well also be lunar located, and indeed much of its action occurs in the moonlit desert. In its near lunatic story, moreover, it would be difficult to speak of plot. Let us just say it’s “story,” if you have to have one, concerns the various comings and goings, loves and deaths, of a group of characters living in the isolated desert encampments of Mistletoe, Government City, and the nearest “town,” Clare. The Sheriff, the Lampson Brothers, Ma, Cap Leech, Finn Mandan, Thegna, Harry Bohn, the Red Devils and the intruders—Camper, his wife Lou and their rattlesnake-bitten son—are figures in this unlikely tale, as prickly and isolated as the desert landscape, and as dangerous and hostile as the mosquitoes, lizards and snakes that inhabit it.

     If the character names sound like they’re from early Djuna Barnes stories it is no coincidence; Hawkes has often been compared to Barnes. His insistence that he read her work long after he had begun his own writing only reiterates that there is an authentic strain of Gothic exaggeration in American culture; and, like Barnes, Hawkes’ exploration of that tradition has helped to make him one of the most noted of American writers.

     The Beetle Leg is not so much about the American West as it is about how a desolated landscape and near complete isolation affects its inhabitants. Not only is the world of Misletoe, Gov. City, and Clare naturally harsh, but the absurd creation of a dam, which clearly does not properly function and gives way from time to time to catastrophic mud slides, makes these outposts nearly uninhabitable. In a world, moreover, with very few unmarried women, sexuality is ambiguous. In their violence, the men of The Beetle Leg seem also to gather themselves into almost sexual postures—dance, incessant touching, and a camaraderie that far outweighs their detestation of each other. Women are shared and, even in the marriage we witness, the groom/child spends the night, not with the bride, but with another. In such an environment, violence is nearly palpable, and the novel ends with a cathartic and horrible release of tension as the men gather to shoot down the motorcycling tribe of local Indians, the Red Devils. The passion and affirmation these figures nonetheless display is astounding. The life force is everywhere, Hawkes seems to argue, and these raw aggregates of clay and straw live by pure American pluck, perpetual pioneers in an already settled planet.                                                                            

 

Train from Münich to Rome, October 15, 2003

Reprinted from My Year 2003: Voice without a Voice (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2013).