To Hell with William Faulkner

Aping the Style of Classic Authors: 3

“Anyone that spends too much of his time about his style, developing a style, or following a style, probably hasn’t got much to say and knows it.”

-- William Faulkner (truncated from a longer sentence because this is Faulkner, after all.
The beginning capitalization and ending punctuation are mine.)

To hell with William Faulkner.

In Go Down, Moses Faulkner carries us through the grief of a Black widower and shows us a white man who, in recounting the other’s actions, believes them proof the race incapable of grief. It was a profound glimpse into the racist mind, and one I can’t balance against Faulkner’s reputation outside the covers of his books.

To hell with William Faulkner.

That particular section of the book is called “Pantaloon in Black”, and in 1940 Faulkner sold it to Harper’s as a short story for $400. That’s the equivalent of $9000 today.

To hell with William Faulkner.

He didn’t even falter. He released one hand in midstroke and flung it backward, striking the other across the chest, jolting him back a step, and restored the hand to the moving shovel, flinging the dirt with that effortless fury so that the mound seemed to be rising of its own volition, not built up from above but thrusting visibly upward out of the earth itself, until at last the grave, save for its rawness, resembled any other marked off without order about the barren plot by shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read.

To hell, I say.

“Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”

—interview, The Paris Review, 1956

It’s reported that when his editor suggested readers preferred shorter sentences, Faulkner turned in his manuscript with pages of periods at the end—to be inserted wherever the reader pleased.

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To hell with Faulkner.

As we have nothing much to say, you and I, let’s devote our time together pondering and developing our style. Sound like fun?

In talking about imitating the style of famous authors, we’ve discussed parataxis, polysyndeton, and cumulative sentences, but these are elements of rhetoric. Rhetoric has rules. Style does not. It may be an element of a given style to rely heavily on certain rhetorical devices and avoid others, but that’s only a choice among the options available. As Andrew Bashford says, rules are for grammar, and societal rules are for usage. The closest style comes to rules is occasionally breaking them.

The Rules of Style

One: The bad habits of the young writer are not his style.

When first we set out to write, we use filter words. We refer to one character by an abundance of tags, relying on these shuffled words to inform the reader and avoid boring him with our repetition. We make countless, countless mistakes, and then as our mistakes are pointed out to us, we complain:

“This is what makes my writing unique. You’re making all writers sound the same.”

Our early ignorance didn’t build a unique voice, only ones distinct from those worth reading. We sounded like every other page in the trash heap.

Aren’t we winnowing our writing down until we’re all the same? Yes. Yes, we are. This was the purpose of your education, to create clarity and a knowledgeable attendance to the rules. Naked, skeletal, you’re meant to sound the same as every other, because rules are the skeletal structure upon which your style is draped. Without those rules, you have no style, only a heap of discarded clothing.

Two: Talent is skill, easily attained. Where are our talent is weak, we strive to hone our skills. Where are our talent is strong, we assume no skill is necessary.

I know it’s not been said before, but to hell with William Faulkner. His attitude about style is born from one who takes to style as a fish to water. It’s so woven into his environment, he can’t even see it. He has no name for it and no patience for those who worry about such things.

But this was a man with style:

We went along the fence and came to the garden fence, where our shadows were. My shadow was higher than Luster's on the fence. We came to the broken place and went through it.

"Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail."

Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. The ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry because one of them got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and knotted.

Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they'll get froze. You dont want your hands froze on Christmas, do you.

— The Sound and The Fury

Cormac McCarthy paid attention to that style. He followed that style; spent time thinking about style; developed his own style—but then McCarthy was famously a man without much to say.

Three: Style is the aesthetic of obeying and disobeying literary rules in a cohesive and pleasing manner.

Without style, you’re your story’s reporter—which is fine. I’ve said before that a writer imagines his work to be a Michelin-star restaurant, but the reader wants McDonald’s. Brandon Sanderson claims to be a writer without style. Stephen King calls his writing the McDonald’s of literature. They’ve sold a book or two and managed a few fans.

We can dress without style. We can write without style.

I think of early episodes on The Great British Bake-off and the contestants whose food looked wonderful but lacked any flavor: style over substance. The substance is the purpose of the thing, and if I can make an ugly cake that tastes fantastic, my cake has served its purpose.

Literary readers will balk at that idea, especially those who think they can read a few sentences and judge the worth of a popular writer. Literary writers are judged on the beauty of their sentences, but popular writers use sentences as vehicles to carry their story. They have little more purpose than that, and you can’t judge the flavor of a cake by a peek through the bakery window.

Plain cakes can taste great.

But a beautiful cake can taste great, too, and if you have an interest in developing your style, that’s a worthwhile undertaking. I believe beautiful sentences came easy to Faulkner, but he had to work to give his writing flavor. For some, it’s the other way around. For others, everything is a struggle.

Right and wrong are not judged by what comes easy or hard. In the end, what matters is the result.

Learning from Faulkner

Faulkner drew from Herman Melville, and its ironic, the impact of Melville’s writing, considering he died in relative obscurity, buoyed by a small fandom, mostly diehards lingering from his first novel which did well. The fame and popularity of Moby Dick began in 1919 and grew in the 1920’s, thanks to the interest of what today we’d call an influencer.

In 1919, Carl Van Doren, editor of The Nation magazine, recognized the 100th anniversary of Melville's birth by assigning a related article to Raymond Weaver. The book’s rise in fame came from that piece, which you’re free to read here.

Melville died in 1891.

As a young man, Faulkner published his first poem in 1919. His formative artistic years were shadowed by a blooming interest in Melville and Moby Dick, and that helped shape his style.

Meanwhile, Hemingway’s style was forged from his years as a war correspondent and, I believe, from his love of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Your style as a writer will have as its foundation what you most love to read as well as the circumstances under which you’ve learned to—and the purposes for which you—write.

It is a curse of style to underappreciate and be blind to your own. The truest examples of style will always seem to be those who write in ways you don’t, and when you see stylistic masters warring, like Hemingway and Faulkner, I suspect it boils down to this basic insecurity.

The first lesson of style is to learn to see and appreciate your own. Don’t hide or replace it. Exaggerate it. Test its limits. Examine your influences and the path that led you to who you are as a writer. Know yourself and know those who inspired you. Then you can branch out, explore, and mimic contrasting styles.

You’ll note that Faulkner is famous for long sentences, but he used short sentences, too. Conversely, Hemingway, was famous for short sentences, but he used long ones as well. For each, it was about frequency and what grabbed the reader’s attention. Hemingway’s long sentences are still more focused and are generally cumulative sentences built on verb phrases. Faulkner’s long sentences are wild and unpredictable, a combination of techniques that demanded the reader hold on tight for any hope of understanding.

Yet, consider this passage and how the short sentences and repetition of words often feels more like Hemingway than our stereotype of Faulkner:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

"Here, caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

"Listen at you, now." Luster said. "Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight."

They were hitting little, across the pasture. I went back along the fence to where the flag was. It flapped on the bright grass and the trees.

—The Sound and The Fury

Brandon Sanderson has a wonderful series on writing that you can find on Youtube, but I’m going to risk saying he’s wrong about style. He sees it as a window. Some styles are like stained glass windows, obscuring the action. Some are clear.

Style doesn’t obscure the action. Style becomes part of it. The way something is said becomes part of the message conveyed and the image built. An author can say things through his style that he might never say clearly.

For example, what is the cumulative effect of all that repetition? Fence. Flower. Hitting. Flag. Hunting. Grass. Flower tree. Flag. Hitting. Flag. Hit. Hit. Fence. Flower tree. Fence. Stopped. Stopped. Fence. Hunting. Grass. —and that’s just one paragraph.

There’s more than just the action, there’s a separation. I’m not a part of the action but held back from it, watching it move, longing to be a part of it. There’s a psychological aspect of the character’s experience that isn’t told to me or even shown; its conveyed at a nearly unconscious level through style, making the character’s experience my own.

The stained glass of style illuminates the story.

Personal Style vs. Temporal Context

One of the challenges of learning from the masters is simply the changing tastes and trends of time. Consider passages from Moby Dick against how they appear in Kraken in a Coffee Cup.

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—”The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”

Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.

It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy extant—”it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.

becomes…

My teeth chatter against the curbstone, beneath a dim light not far from the docks. Above the light, a sign swings and upon it rises a tall straight jet of misty spray. The sign’s dilapidated little wooden house, gable-ended and one side palsied, leans sadly over my sharp bleak corner, and poor men with tattered soles step over me in search of golden liquor. I know the poverty which finds its sanctuary in a bottle and have seen the wealthy drunken on the tepid tears of orphans. Honest feet are poorly clad, and the same hard hand drives us under, some to drink and some to die; the time has come I play the latter.

Part of the reason for Kraken in a Coffee Cup was a desire to extract the beauty from the befuddlement of time, to see style, uncluttered. Some of the wording is purely my own, such as: …poor men with tattered souls step over me in search of golden liquor…, I know the poverty which finds its sanctuary in a bottle…, and …Honest feet are poorly clad…; they’re not phrases I’d normally write. As I modify Melville to my own time and taste, so I fill in the gaps by modifying myself to his.

Some style defies modern convention. We saw that with Hemingway, but some carries an unnecessary burden of time and can be relieved of that weight when carried over into our own writing. Every sentence is co-authored by the time in which it was written, and we are no different. Should our work not be swiftly forgotten, other writers might one day seek to distinguish the details of our styles from the demands of the days in which we wrote.

It’s unlikely but not impossible.

I’ll close today with a thought about the study of classic authors. It’s been a couple of years since I wrote Kraken in a Coffee Cup, being unsure what to do with it—which seems a common trend for me. A would-be beta reader emailed me saying he wouldn’t be reading the book after all, and he recommended I publish it without the parts from Moby Dick, as I would be hated for my efforts. Of course, I can’t publish it without the parts from Moby Dick. That’s the entirety of the novella.

I didn’t know what to do with The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh.

I didn’t know what to do with Ritual and Racita, the inspiration for which was to break and thereby challenge every puritanical conceit I’d ever lived under and which haunted every attempt to write about the aspects of our lives that make us blush in church.

I’ve done a lot of writing that has had nothing to do with the marketplace. It’s not an example to follow, but on smaller scales—in short stories, say—it can be worthwhile. Twenty years ago, I wrote another short story inspired by Hemingway but which wasn’t good enough to appear in any best-of collections. The online magazine which published it is gone. The email I used to submit it is defunct. I have no traces of it left but memory, and for the most part, that may be for the best. It taught me the wonder of intentional repetition, however, and the initial description of the puddled train station still lingers with me, an image created through repetition, in a way I’d seen used by Hemingway.

The story itself proved irrelevant, but its impact lingers still.

To Hell with William Faulkner

Faulkner is a southern gothic writer but also a modernist, and we see that modernism in his use of stream of consciousness, capturing a character’s thoughts, often in a disjointed or nonlinear way that reflects the complexity of our mental processes. He also has a tendency to rely on multiple perspectives, providing opportunity of dramatic irony in the way different characters understand the same events. I’ve mentioned before his lengthy sentences. The gothic part of southern gothic is a focus on the dark and macabre, and Faulker is also known for his symbolism. The decaying mansion in A Rose for Emily provides a southern gothic atmosphere, but it also symbolizes the decaying south.

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.

— A Rose for Emily

A little spur-of-the-moment exercise inspired by Faulkner’s style:

My grandfather took a friend and me to the river, and it was his idea we go skinny dipping, leaving our britches on the deck and jumping into that cloudy water the same way we came splashing out of our mothers’ nether regions; and what a funny thought—now that I think it—she being his daughter and all; but all things circle round, and all things are made true in the fullness of time. If there was one regret he might have had that day, it would’ve been that I took to that freedom a little too well. We aren’t forever innocent as I was then, and when innocence passed into the bloom of adolescence, the remembrance of freedom lingered and with it a desire to be naked and free in the wild and open spaces.

Man, to hell with William Faulkner.

— Thaddeus Thomas