Faulkner and an Undergraduate

By John A. Church (College ’59)

In this Ralph Thompson photo of Faulkner at a UVA track meet in 1958, John Church can be seen in sweat togs standing next to the hurdles on the far side of the track.

I was nearing the end of the fall semester of my third year in the College of Arts and Sciences. Except for a required chemistry course in the spring semester, the remainder of my schedule was relatively free. Now was my chance to branch out and explore some other areas, as befitted someone pursuing a liberal arts education.

I had always enjoyed English literature but had never read much that was written after the nineteenth century. The course catalog had an offering called English 28, Contemporary American Literature, meaning starting at about 1900. It looked interesting. I knew, however, that it was intended for English majors, and English had always been a strong department at Virginia. As a nonmajor I couldn’t take it without specific permission from the instructor, and so I went to see Joseph Blotner.

I gave Mr. Blotner a sales talk about how much I liked English literature and wanted to take his course. He quickly learned that I was a chemistry major and seemed really puzzled and cautious about having me in his class. English and chemistry are what one might call orthogonal disciplines, i.e. at right angles, the one having little or nothing to do with the other. So what was I trying to do? Didn’t I know that this was an intense course that demanded lots of reading and analysis, and that I would be up against serious competition? I could almost read his mind: What would I think of some dilettante English student who wanted to try his hand at an advanced chemistry course with little or no preparation? (Obvious answer: I would have admired his courage, but advised him as strongly as possible not to do it.) But seeing my persistence, Mr. Blotner finally relented and let me sign up anyway, probably against his better judgment.

At that stage I was unfamiliar with the words that Alexander Pope had put into the mouth of his pedantic literary nemesis Richard Bentley: “For thee (i.e. the Goddess of Dullness) we dim the eyes and stuff the head/With all such reading as was never read.” I was soon loaded to the gunwales with reading that was seldom read even then, and probably almost never these days except in English classes. We started off with The Ambassadors by Henry James, an enormous and convoluted unpageturner published in 1903. I imagined that one reason Mr. Blotner had assigned it was that he was trying to get students like me to drop the course early on. I somehow managed to get through this stultifying comedy of manners, and then after Theodore Dreiser’s equally lengthy but considerably more interesting An American Tragedy, things started to change.

William Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University during this period, which was one reason I had wanted to take English 28. (Blotner was later to write a long biography of Faulkner, authorized by the writer’s family after Faulkner had passed on in 1962.) As a suitable diversion, Blotner accompanied Faulkner all over the Grounds, including to our track meets, which probably appealed to Faulkner’s horse-racing interests.

We commenced our Faulkner journey in Mr. Blotner’s class with The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, soon getting deep into the saga of Mississippi’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County and its stupendously decadent denizens. Most of the latter would have struggled to put one word after another on paper, but they thought in streams of consciousness that went on for page after page of muddled confusion, indecipherable time shifts, antecedentless pronouns, neurosis, outright psychosis and miry misery, with occasional flashes of sardonic humor to leaven the unbearable messes of their hopelessly depressing lives. Still, I would rather read ten of these books than one comatose The Ambassadors. Faulkner was often charged with writing such material after having had a few bourbons, and I could easily understand why this perception had arisen.

Faulkner gave frequent afternoon seminars in Rouss Hall to which students from many different graduate and undergraduate English courses were invited in turn. Faulkner did not lecture or volunteer material here; he was a quiet, shy, and private individual who inhabited his proprietary county and rarely left it. He had given a memorable address upon receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, but public speaking was not really his forte.

Students would come to the seminars with carefully-prepared questions typically addressing some abstruse point in one or another of his novels or stories. Faulkner would respond extemporaneously, gracefully, and as completely as he could under the circumstances. Although he answered most of the questions clearly and would sometimes expound upon them at length, the process was obviously difficult for him at times, as it no doubt would be for any author with a substantial opus. When stumped, he would unabashedly ask for help from Gwynn or Blotner. Occasionally, as at the seminar I attended on May 2, 1958, he would say very simply, “I don’t remember” or “It’s just a story.”

Upon being asked in one of his early seminars if he had read Henry James, Faulkner replied “Yes, but without much pleasure. Henry James to me was a prig, except for The Turn of the Screw, which was [a] very fine tour de force.” A few years ago, I read Faulkner in the University, Gwynn and Blotner’s condensation of Faulkner’s seminars, for the first time. I found it entertaining reading, and I confess that it gave me much pleasure to read Faulkner’s assessment of James. Due to lack of space, however, many of Faulkner’s remarks had to be omitted in the Gwynn and Blotner book. The present compilation now restores these omissions as completely as possible. In particular, the audio tapes provide much additional insight into Faulkner's thoughts as he responded to questions from the participants.

Perhaps I may be permitted to digress from my direct recollections of Faulkner the man to Faulkner the writer. I have enjoyed his stories and novels and have much appreciated the introduction to them that I received in Blotner’s course. Among dozens of other unforgettable characters that he created, Faulkner invented the avaricious and amoral Snopes family of The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion partly to satirize the growing crassness and commercialism of the South in the early twentieth century, and in this he succeeded admirably. The names of the Snopeses are memorably apt. The chief schemer is Flem (phlegm), who always seems to be chewing his eponymous cud. Among his many other misdeeds, Flem overlooks and even encourages the adultery of his stunning but clueless wife Eula in order to gain advancement in a local bank so that he can embezzle from it. After a series of earlier money-grubbing schemes, Flem solicits a bribe from Eula’s father to marry her, she being pregnant by another man. In a marvelous passage, Flem, who had no soul to begin with, cheats Satan out of it anyway. Then there is the vicious bushwhacker Mink Snopes, who eventually murders cousin Flem for not having helped him escape from prison after a previous assassination; proverb-quoting I. O. Snopes, who chisels his own kinfolk; honest grocer Wallstreet Panic Snopes (the son of good-hearted Eck, who after all is not a real Snopes); Montgomery Ward Snopes, who runs a photographic studio with pornographic postcards on the side, and various others. (If Faulkner were writing today, we might have Subprime Mortgage Snopes and Stimulus Package Snopes.) Finishing one of his novels tends to leave one wandering around in a depressed daze for several hours, which must mean that it was a good one. End of digression.

When attending Cavalier track meets at Lambeth Field, Faulkner was permitted to judge running events and also time them, although his timings in all likelihood were unofficial. At one such meet, I was in the stands with some of my friends when not participating myself. For part of his time at Lambeth on this occasion, Faulkner went over to a remote section of the stands and sat there alone. One of my friends asked us whether we would like to go over and talk with the author privately. None of us took him up on this suggestion, whereupon he sallied forth unafraid and spent some 15 minutes or so alone with Faulkner. Upon returning, he said that they had had a very nice conversation but was unwilling to divulge the subject matter.

Mr. Blotner has recently written an engaging autobiography (An Unexpected Life, 2005). Surviving a forced belly landing in a B-17 behind German lines, enduring bedbugs and lice at POW camps, and having known William Faulkner so well should certainly qualify as unexpected. His book is quite touching in places, if giving somewhat short shrift to the nuances of Charlottesville academic society; Blotner was from a far different biome, northern New Jersey.

Aristotle had a notion that within every raw piece of marble lies a predestined statue that will appear after a sculptor has simply removed the superfluous parts. In Pope’s concise paraphrase, you hew the block off and get out the man. Critics differed as to whether Blotner, in his massive two-volume 1974 biography of Faulkner, had successfully gotten out the man or just reduced him to powdery fragments that shed little light on how or why he had written his books. “Footnotes to Genius” ran the title of an unfriendly review in Time magazine, while others praised the study as definitive. Several extensive condensations and reissues with new matter have taken place, most recently in 2005.

Many writers, including Faulkner if one is to take his statements about such biographies at face value (“Don’t tell [my readers] anything [about me], it can’t matter to them”), prefer that their lives not be described at all, unless by themselves. This does not discourage those whom Faulkner called “academic gumshoes” from intruding in the dust. Their efforts continue to be the basis of a thriving cottage – one hesitates to say academical village – industry. Kipling’s valedictory “The Appeal” is one author’s plea for privacy about his personal life, one that often goes unheeded:

If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for the little, little span
The dead are borne in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

Notes and Sources

John A. Church is the author of Pleasant Riches: The University of Virginia in the Late Fifties (privately printed, 2009), from which most of the above material has been adapted. He was the City Editor for The Cavalier Daily who wrote the headline for the 16 February 1957 article “Faulkner Begins Stay As Writer-In-Residence.” He adds:

“I read the transcript and listened to the tape recordings of the Faulkner seminar that I attended on May 2, 1958. I couldn’t at first remember having asked a question myself on that occasion. However, just before the end of the second of these two tapes, I did a double take when a person clearly using my own voice posed the following question: ‘Sir, you’ve mentioned that these people in The Sound and the Fury are doomed. Is it your theory that people everywhere are doomed, or is it just these people in Mississippi?’ Faulkner began his answer with ‘No, no,’ followed immediately by laughter from the audience. He then chuckled and went on to give a ringing response: it was only the Compsons themselves who were doomed, because they lived in the past and ‘refused to accept now and tomorrow.’ Could I have just been intentionally priming Faulkner for the kind of answer that he gave? I can’t say now, because it’s impossible for me to remember exactly what was going on in my head more than half a century ago. In fact, many other Faulkner characters do appear to be doomed, though not necessarily in the Compsonian sense. Whatever the case, Faulkner’s answer was an eloquent one, and so I’m indeed glad that I did ask the question.

“My father had a far more significant connection with William Faulkner than any of mine. In October 1931, Faulkner attended the Southern Writers Convention at the University. Randolph W. Church (College ’29, Grad ’32), later State Librarian of Virginia and a graduate student in English in 1931, met Faulkner and other prominent writers of the day at the convention. The following account of some of these events is from my father’s small booklet entitled ‘John Cook Wyllie 1908-1968: A Very Personal Remembrance’ (privately printed, 1972): ‘There were literary giants in the earth in the early days. Through the good offices of perceptive members of the faculty they came to visit the University, and John [Wyllie] and I had the opportunity of meeting and talking with many of them: T. S. Eliot, James Stephens, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, and, not least, an introspective little man who claimed Yoknapatawpha County, and who later made the University his final home. For him, we were commissioned to see that the University Library had in its collections all of his then extant printed material – no mean task. We were also required to find him when he became lost, and I vividly recall a sombre dawn when he was located, curbside, in the lower town.’ One can only speculate as to what might have happened if Faulkner had not been lucky enough to have been rescued in this way. John Wyllie was the University’s twelfth Librarian, serving in this capacity from 1956 until his untimely passing twelve years later. He had previously been Curator of the McGregor Library at Alderman and was a noted expert on rare books.”

Acknowledgment

I thank my brother Randolph W. Church Jr. (College ’57, Law ’60) for supplying extensive files of the Cavalier Daily from our time period as well as photocopies of pages from the Virginia Spectator.

©2010 John A. Church (j.church@mindspring.com)