POETS Day! William Faulkner’s Go at Anachronism

Illustration by Rene Sears

The lyrics to Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road” are

I found out long ago
It’s a long way down the Holiday Road

and

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Take a ride on a West Coast kick

with the phrase “Holiday Road” thrown in repeatedly. The beat doesn’t change – bouncy bass and a metronomic drum with two guitar riffs that loop. One of the four lines he bothered to write was ripped from tradition; not even Mother Goose tried to claim that one as her own.

It’s not a lazy song. It’s colorful. An anthem for someone with places to go and a copy of Republican Party Reptile hidden under his mattress. And there’s a dog barking at the end.

It’s a POETS Day masterpiece. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, some verse.

***

When I worked as a sommelier we’d get travelers from various patches of wine country all the time hocking wares and buying lunch. It was a pretty good gig for a lot of reasons, but the lunches in particular commended themselves. These travelers would be winemakers, owners, sons and daughters of owners, national or regional sales managers, whatever. They wanted their wine on my list and, like dimpled pharma reps feting doctors, they filled us full of food and booze, hosting myself and two or three like-employed at some of the city’s best spots.

These simple rustic farm folks were the face of multinational corporations, so whatever place they held in the hierarchy, they were sent into the field because of their people skills. Some real raconteurs came through. I was at one lunch with an Australian winemaker when a rep from a different distributor walked into the restaurant with another Australian wine maker who I’d tasted with the previous day. Somehow the two Australians had never met each other despite owning huge swaths of property mere miles apart in the Barossa Valley. Two neighbors from north of Adelaide had to go half a world away to meet and I got to make the introductions. The three of us wasted an afternoon on gin and tonic and stories about other neighbors and a barmaid both wished their sons would stay away from. Sheila sounded like trouble.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked in that capacity, so I don’t remember if the specific fault I’m thinking of was endemic to Anderson or Alexander Valley, but one of them had a green pepper problem. Google is useless now. Look up either with any of the many versions of “green pepper aftertaste” and you’ll get ads disguised as articles for the top ten wineries or hotel recommendations. Those go at least three pages deep.

Whichever valley it was, the winery reps would make sure to point out that their winery wasn’t afflicted. “A deep red with hints of cassis, tobacco, and graphite, but none of the green pepper too often associated with A—- Valley.” None of their neighbors had the stink either. They wanted to be clear about that.

Casa LaPostelle’s Clos Apalta is a favorite wine. Alexandra Marnier LaPostelle found something worth celebrating in Chile’s Colchagua Valley and she had Gran Marnier money to let the world know. Clos Apalta itself doesn’t have it, but suddenly I was hit by travelers’ claims of Chilean red’s “charming green pepper” aftertaste. It’s all in the approach, I suppose, but just knowing how an attribute is framed tells me what I want to know. In A—- Valley, green pepper is to be avoided. If you taste green pepper in an A—- Valley wine, the winemaker didn’t achieve the result intended. If you taste the same in a Chilean red, that’s an endearing quirk of the region, like rain in Ireland or drop bears in Australia. They aren’t trying to hide or overcome it, so it’s fine.

That doesn’t mean everybody in A—- Valley dislikes green flavors or no one in Chile works to avoid them. I’m agnostic on the subject. A bit of green pepper can be interesting and like everything else, fits or stands out depending on composition. I’m of the percentage that gets the soapy taste from cilantro that’s the basis for a lot of complaining about the herb, but I like it. It tastes like lavender smells. What’s good in one situation is bad in another.

Read this:

from Prologue

The poplar trees sway to and fro
That through this gray old garden go
Like Slender girls with nodding heads,
Whispering above the beds
Of tall tufted hollyhocks,
Of purple asters and of phlox:
Caught in the daisies’ dreaming gold
Recklessly scattered wealth untold
About their slender graceful feet
Like poised dancers, lithe and fleet.
The candled flames of roses here
Gutter gold in this still air,
And clouds glide down the western sky
To watch this sun-drenched revery,
While the poplars’ shining crests
Lightly brush their silvered breasts,
Dreaming not of winter snows
That soon will shake their maiden rows.

A good bit of 17^th Century poetry seems formulaic to my modern eyes and ears. There are masters from the time and they rightfully strike us with awe, etc. But there are a lot of imitators from the period. You’ll read about courtiers and other nobility playing at poetry; insults and retorts, flirtations and demure teases, kissings up and puttings down. I get that it was expected for a gentleman to write verse at the time and while those who made a serious go at it were judged by their merits, many amateurs were admired for the practice. I suspect it was like golf is now; a passable familiarity is assumed in some circles and nobody really cares if you can putt worth a damn as long as you participate and don’t wreck the cart in a non-entertaining-when-embellished-at-the-bar way.

I’m not talking about Marvell, et al. Good poets survived because they were cherished and preserved, but there’s always an entry or two in even the best anthologies that I can’t help thinking is still read for no reason other than it survived – more than a sneaking suspicion. If you look at the above excerpt of stilted tetrameter couplets, you might give it the “didn’t get thrown away for a long time” concession and see it as an interesting example of a period poet doing his best to conform to popular conventions. Not good but interesting. When you find it was instead from the prologue of a piece written by a 20^th Century winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, you know more deeply than before that poetry relies on a different skill set than prose.

William Faulkner put out The Marble Faun in late 1924. He’s famous for a prose reset. His first two novels, Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitos, were published in 1926 and 27. Neither were received as he’d hoped. I’ve read that he was told a variation of “write what you know” and that spurred him to flesh out Yoknapatawpha. According to him, he knew soldiering so those first two novels were already what he knew. But despite his claims to others, he never saw service or trained to fly. He was raised in the south. So he’d not yet found his authorial voice by 1924, but he should have known better.

I have a 1960s edition with Faulkner’s two best known poetry volumes reproduced in one, so it’s The Marble Faun in addition to A Green Bough. A Green Bough has variations in rhyme and meter. The Marble Faun does not, and I’m unsure whether it’s meant to be one long poem or a collection. It seems to be a collection. The poems, if they are, end mid-page and begin atop a new one but without titles. They’re all of a piece thematically, and they are all mind-numbingly tetrameter couplets. It’s hard for me to accept that the man who wrote The Sound and the Fury wrote this.

In the introduction, dated September of 1924, so not an understanding retrospective look at the development of one of our greatest writers, Phil Stone puts as good a spin on the work as he might, but he can’t pass over obvious flaws without addressing them. (I’m aware that they are referred to by Stone as “poems” rather than “poem,” but I’m still not convinced.)

“They are poems of youth. One has to be of a certain age to write poems like these. They belong inevitably to that period of uncertainty and illusion. They are as youthful as cool spring grass.

They also have the defects of youth—youth’s impatience, unsophistication and immaturity. They have youth’s sheer joy at being alive in the sun and youth’s sudden, vague, unreasoned sadness over nothing at all.”

In other words, bless his heart.

Grading on the curve, the best of the lot comes on page 44.

The world stands without move or sound
In this white silence gathered round
It like a hood. It is so still
That earth lies without wish or will
To breathe. My garden, stark and white,
Sits soundless in the falling light
Of lifting bush and sudden hedge
Ice bound and ghostly on the edge
Of my world, curtained by the snow
Drifting, sifting; fast, now slow;
Falling endlessly from skies
Calm and gray, some far god’s eyes.

The soundless quiet flakes slide past
Like teardrops on a sheet of glass,
Ah, there is some god above
Whose tears of pity, pain, and love
Slowly freeze and brimming slow
Upon my chilled and marbled woe;
The pool, sealed now by ice and snow,
Is dreaming quietly below,
Within its jewelled eye keeping
The mirrored skies it knew in spring.

How soft the snow upon my face!
And delicate cold! I can find grace
In its endless quiescence
For my enthralléd impotence:
Solace from a pitying breast
Bringing quietude and rest
To dull my eyes; and sifting slow
Upon the waiting earth below
Fold veil on veil of peacefulness
Like wings to still and keep and bless.

I’m not sure if I liked it or if I disliked the rest so much that not-as-bad was respite. He’s trying too hard to impersonate a passe archetype and it’s unnerving. The shirt’s too puffy.

I remember first reading The Sound and the Fury in tenth grade. If you haven’t read it, the book is divided into sections with each section being a day, three in 1928 and one in 1910. The second section is the one in 1910 and it’s from the point of view of Quentin Compson, not to be confused with Quentin Compson, on the day of his suicide. It’s among the most haunting pieces of writing I’ve come across and evidence of Faulkner’s capacity for composition and flow. Pass on his poetry for the music of his prose:

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.