Taking Leave of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison

I’m holding a circular fob attached to a USC key chain; and on the small white circle is a cheeky quote from the infamous Oscar Wilde.

“If one cannot enjoy reading a novel over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

I would amend this to say that a good book club discussion of a novel requires a second read. Which is why I gave Toni Morrisons’s Beloved that second read last week, not counting the time I read her novel in 1988 when it won the Pulitzer Prize.

This past week I read about Morrison’s life. It interested me that she wrote her M.A. thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, two famous & earlier postmodernists. I also learned her Nobel Prize was awarded for “postmodern shifting narration.” This characteristic of her writing is understandable given her M.A. work on both Woolf and Faulkner.

Last Thursday at the book club meeting, I was glad to hear from those who appreciated Beloved more than I did. This is how book clubs should be, with novels read carefully and members speaking from having given serious attention to the literature.

Yet I will admit that after seeing the three-hour movie of Beloved, I thought about skipping a second read. Yet how could I do that when I expect the members to read each novel twice?  My copy of Beloved is 274 pages in three parts. Near the end of the second, Morrison shifts from an observing third person narration to first.

“BELOVED, she my daughter.  She mine.”

Then another segment, “BELOVED is my sister.’

A third begins, ‘I AM BELOVED and she is mine.’ This one has white spaces within the writing.

A fourth begins, ‘I AM BELOVED and she is mine.’ This page is without white spaces. But it also ends with, ‘She is mine.’ Next are three pages of a prose-poem. “Oh, please, Toni” I wrote in the margin. The next chapter returns to the third person narrator: “It was a tiny church no bigger than a rich man’s parlor.”

The critics were kind to Toni Morrison and Beloved.  But the black critic, Stanley Crouch, noted that Morrison “perpetually interrupts narrative with maudlin ideological commercials.” This claim rings as demeaning. I wonder if Stanley watched the movie instead of reading the novel.  It’s fair to say (!) Beloved was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Stick to your talk show, Oprah.  But then… who am I to judge because I do not watch horror films! Which is what it was, as well as corny and mawkish, and very very long. (I shun qualifiers, but they apply here.) Okay, different works and different flicks for different folks! 

What will the book club be reading in November? 

Two novels with the same title of Snow: one by the masterful John Banville, who combined forces with his ghost writer, Benjamin Black, for an Irish mystery under Banville’s name. The second Snow is from the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, who won the Novel Prize in 2006. His novel is long. Banville’s can be read in one sitting. Who can stop reading this mystery? I couldn’t.

I leave you this Sunday with two lines from a Jorge Luis Borges poem, “Boast of Quietness,” as a tribute to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison.

“Writings of Light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors”

&

“My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.”

Back in two weeks… Gail and Ilona

Today a blog on William Faulkner in Genius

Early this Sunday morning, I pulled Harold Bloom’s Genius from a shelf in my study. Bloom devoted six pages to William Faulkner in this work. Bloom, the late great Yale professor, “America’s prominent literary critic,” had by the time Genius was published in 2002, already written 26 books. The sub-title for Genius is, “A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.” All in 814 pages!

On my shelf with Genius, are three other books by Harold Bloom. The 2005, Jesus and Yahweh, the 2019 Possessed by Memory, and from 2020, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles. This book’s subtitle is, “The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death.” I had two or three other Bloom books but gave them to an orthopedic surgeon in Richmond. Sir William, who saved me from a Sea of Arthritic Troubles, expertly provided two new knees. Ah, the joy of running at age 81!

I will admit, however, that without tennis from age 10, and given my love of literature, I could be as large as Harold Bloom was, from a sedentary existence of reading.

In Genius, Bloom with a photographic memory, gave four of six pages to Faulkner’s Light in August. What famous novel precedes Bloom’s discussion of Light?  Mark Twain’s brilliant Huckleberry Finn. Bloom calls it “a book loved alike by religious and irreligious.”

A statement possibly untrue today in our black book milieu. Would that I had matched Huck with Light, instead of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But that’s for next week.

Bloom wrote that literature of genius like Faulkner’s is our best path for reaching wisdom, which he believes is “the true use of literature for life.” But he says this path “depends upon deep reading.” In the book club I started for the local community college, we agree to read each novel twice before we meet to discuss two novels, as we will this Thursday, September 19th.

From the long list of novels that William Faulkner wrote, Light in August is Bloom’s second favorite.  His first is As I Lay Dying. The book club read this novel last year. Bloom also declares that “Faulkner is incontestably the major North American novelist since Henry James.” I am pleased to say we read Henry at our last meeting. All, I believe, appreciated The Master, Colm Tóibín’s fictional story of Henry James. But most of us were less enthusiastic about Henry’s What Maisie Knew.

Bloom asks a question, which is one I will ask on Thursday. Does the tragedy of Joe Christmas in Light in August, hold up in the United States of 2024, rather than as it did in 1932, when the novel was published?

Next week:  An answer to this question, plus the movie version of Beloved.

Brother Will’s Passing

I found this article by Jim Faulkner in a book of William Faulkner’s short stories (Remember my idiosyncratic filling system?). The article is from the March 1992 Southern Living magazine. Yet in March 1992, I was living in Caracas, Venezuela; and a month earlier the Hugo Chavez golpe de estado took place. Hardly Southern Living territory!

Jim Faulkner with Brother Will

The point is I recently found this piece written by Faulkner’s nephew Jim. He was trying to ‘set the record straight,’ thirty years after his uncle’s 1962 death in Oxford, Mississippi. William did not choke to death, as reported. He was thrown from a horse named Stonewall that returned home to Rowan Oak without William. Jim claims his uncle “limped straight to the barn and got on Stonewall to prove to the horse he could ride him.” Then the 1949-50 Nobel Laureate took to his bed, refusing to have his back checked. ‘He had outlasted pain before.’  Only this time he didn’t; and weeks later William died in a private hospital, his body soon taken to Rowan Oak. There is obviously more to the story.

What did finding this article make me recall?  A story about Faulkner, one I heard in my senior English class at Fullerton High School. It is largely because of Mr. James Hines that I deeply love good literature. I do not remember this single, male teacher and singular man behind a lectern, though he was depicted this way in the annual. Male teachers all wore suits and ties then. Yet this English teacher was relaxed and informal despite mandated attire for men (and dresses for women).

Sometime during the school year of 1960-61, Mr. Hines told us about sitting beside William Faulkner in the deep South. I don’t remember when…the late 1940s or early 50s. The two were in a small, puddle-jumping, propellered-plane with few seats. Mr. Hines said the door to the plane had been closed but suddenly opened for the last passenger. Mr. Hines could not believe who it was, and the only empty seat was the one beside him. James Hines felt he would stop breathing. To have an hour beside an author he had read and reread with adoration. Yet he knew Faulkner was a private man, that he shunned publicity, that he could be a real SOB. What to say? Where to get the courage to speak? Yet if he said nothing, he would regret this forever. By then, we in the classroom, were alert and waiting to know what happened next. Mr. Hines said the plane had taken off and Faulkner had not looked his way or uttered a word. That’s when Mr. Hines found the courage to ask a simple question.

“Mr. Faulkner, would you care to talk?”

Everyone in class open-eared and eager to hear the answer. Had our English teacher conversed with Willliam Faulkner? 

“No.”   “What?” we asked.

Mr. Faulkner had said, “No.” Mr. Hines said they sat, the hour passed, and the esteemed American writer left the plane. Read him now, Mr. Hines counseled, read him again in middle age, and then again when you’re old and know something about life.  I have followed my fine teacher’s advice.   To be continued…