From William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, by Daniel J. Singal. The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

From the Introduction

All his life Faulkner would struggle to reconcile these two divergent approaches to selfhood—the Victorian urge toward unity and stability he had inherited as a child of the southern rural gentry, and the Modernist drive for multiplicity and change that he absorbed very early in his career as a self-identifying member of the international artistic avant-garde. Indeed, by the time he reached maturity, both had become so deeply embedded in his being that neither could effectively be suppressed or jettisoned. The tactic he ultimately arrived at for coping with this dilemma, most likely without being consciously aware that he was employing it, was that of “compartmentalization,” in which, as Roy F. Baumeister explains, “one confines the potentially conflicting components to separate spheres of one’s life.” Put simply, there would be two William Faulkners.

In fact, self-division of this sort is not unusual among literary artists, existing as such individuals do partly in reality and partly within their own imagination. “I think that a writer is a perfect case of split personality,” Faulkner once remarked, doubtless drawing on his own experience. “He is one thing when he is a writer and he is something else while he is a denizen of the world.” The syndrome can reach the point, clinicians tell us, where it closely mimics schizophrenia, with the writer cultivating a private “inner self” that, like the true schizophrenic’s, is kept rigorously hidden from public view except in his or her work. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats, to take one instance, maintained what he called his “objective self,” embodying the codes and rituals of his daily existence, and a subjective “antithetical self” that found expression in his inner consciousness and art. In some cases the two selves can become so distinct that they receive different names. One thinks of Charles Dodgson, the meek, retiring mathematician who could indulge his extraordinary gift for fantasy only through adopting the persona and pen name of Lewis Carroll, or Samuel L. Clemens, a thoroughly divided man who simultaneously installed himself as a member of the bourgeois establishment while pillorying its pretensions through the frontier perspective of his alter ego, Mark Twain. Awkward though such devices might be on occasion, the writers in question have been unable to function without them. William Faulkner may not have adopted a separate name for his literary self, but he was profoundly self-divided, as those who knew him well reported again and again. To understand him, his wife once insisted, one had to begin with the fact that he was “so definitely dual,” to the point where there were “two Bills.” In his youth, he experimented with an extensive repertoire of trial identities, ranging from the battle-scarred First World War aviator to the bona fide southern aristocrat to the bohemian writer and small-town derelict. By the late 1920s, however, a pattern of two central selves—old-fashioned country gentleman and contemporary writer—became reasonably well established. On occasion these two Faulkners would appear in startling juxtaposition. “You might see him riding a horse some day, all liveried up as they say—had on the dress like a colonel,” notes an old friend. “Then he’d come out . . . with long whiskers and look like a hippie.” More typically, though, each self retained a favored realm where it held sway. The extensive divide between his dual incarnations even came to astonish Faulkner himself. “I wonder,” he wrote a close acquaintance in the early 1950s, “if you have ever had that thought about the work and the country man whom you know as Bill Faulkner—what little connection there seems to be between them.”

In the words of Michel Gresset, the Modernist Faulkner, with his “malleable or bending self,” was “formed through the act of writing and through nothing else.” He was not often sighted in normal life, though he did surface periodically in places like New York, Paris, and Hollywood in the company of congenial friends (in New York his favorites included the futurist architect Buckminster Fuller and the avant-garde puppeteers Jim and Cora Baird). Rather, this Faulkner existed primarily within the isolated confines of his work space. “Withdrawing into a small room or study (the one at Rowan Oak would be deliberately plain, almost bare, recalling nothing so much as a monk’s cell), taking the symbolic doorknob with him, he entered a world completely his own,” David Minter tells us. There he was free to summon up the most lurid and perilous materials from his unconscious, exploring territory that his Modernist self sought to make its own. Often he would resort to a trancelike state to sustain this self, writing at a “white hot” pace and consuming a fair quantity of alcohol as he worked (though rarely allowing himself to become actually inebriated while writing). Even though his ostensible subject matter remained the South, this was primarily a cosmopolitan William Faulkner whose first loyalty went to his reading audience of all times and places.

The other Faulkner was the one encountered in Oxford, whose actions remained based on nineteenth-century values and who increasingly made his peace with the traditions of his native town. This Faulkner would find it necessary to buy and restore a large antebellum home, as well as a working plantation, take ritual walks to the town square dressed like a country squire, and display a fondness, as one neighbor put it, “for tweeds, pipes, and riding to the hounds.” Perhaps most striking is the way the author of Sanctuary, who dealt more explicitly with sexuality than almost any other American writer of his day, maintained a high standard of Victorian prudery in his everyday public behavior. Repeatedly we are told by those who knew him in Oxford of how Faulkner would take offense at profane language and walk away at the first sign of off-color humor (though he would delight in telling “gamy” tales while in Hollywood and readily employed obscenities in his professional correspondence). “If someone started telling dirty stories, he was gone,” a close friend and hunting companion notes. “He would leave and he wouldn’t come back until you got through with the story.” Nor would he discuss literary topics with his fellow townspeople under any condition, going so far as to refuse to allow the person who helped him wrap and mail his manuscripts to see their titles, and to respond with stony silence when his personal physician made the error of inquiring about a book he happened to find Faulkner reading. Likewise, when the wife of his old friend and mentor, Phil Stone, tried to engage him in conversation about an author she knew he admired, Faulkner, she reports, “did not just fail to reply; his silence was like a mallet on my head.”

From Chapter 7: “The Making of a Modernist Identity: Light in August”

Aside from his revision of Sanctuary toward the end of 1930, that year was to mark a relatively fallow period for Faulkner. Newly married, with a baby expected early in 1931, he spent most of his work time producing short stories for sale to popular magazines in order to meet growing family expenses. These efforts need not detain us. As Frederick Karl observes, Faulkner regarded this kind of writing as “strictly a business proposition” and took a highly “mechanical approach” to it. Though a few of the resulting stories were noteworthy from a literary standpoint, most simply served to pay the rent.

What did engage Faulkner during 1930--and also gave rise to much of the financial burden he now fell under—was his purchase of an antebellum home located just a few minutes from the town square in Oxford. Built in 1844, the old Shegog place could not properly be called a mansion but did partake of the pretensions of its time and place. A moderate-sized wood frame house, it sported four impressive columns in front and was set at the end of a classic cedar-lined drive. The house was decidedly more bourgeois than aristocratic in character—closer to the solid, comfortable Benbow home described in Flags in the Dust than the elegant plantation dwelling of the Sartorises. Still, Rowan Oak (a name derived from Frazer’s The Golden Bough referring to an old Scottish charm for staving off witches) was just grand enough to put the community on notice that this eldest member of the rising generation of Falkners intended to carry on the clan’s proud traditions. Faulkner was, of course, highly ambivalent about those traditions, but Rowan Oak was perfect in that regard as well. Decades of neglect had left it in extreme disrepair, from its rotting foundation beams and leaking roof to peeling paint, broken windows, and a total absence of plumbing and electricity. Faulkner did most of the work himself, allowing him to balance his new role as lord of the manor with that of journeyman carpenter, to be a country squire with dirty clothes and hands. Even after the house was restored, visitors would continue to remark on the contrast between its imposing facade and the often shabby appearance of its master.

That need for compensatory balance between conflicting selves was more evident still in the layout of the ground floor at Rowan Oak, which was divided by a spacious main hallway into two separate worlds. To the right as one entered was the world of the Victorian Faulkner and his traditionalist wife, consisting of a formal parlor and dining room that could have graced any respectable American home during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The wallpaper with its large floral print, the full-length draperies, the ornate, sculptured furniture, the baby grand piano, the long dining table where meals were served by a butler—all conspired to create an aura of decorum and taste. But on the other side of the hallway one found a very different ambience in the large room designated the “library” or “study.” There, surrounded by books and various artifacts (including several pieces of primitive or abstract art, along with his mother’s portrait in oils of the Old Colonel), in a setting that by all reports was usually cluttered and chaotic, the Modernist Faulkner would plunk himself down in a comfortable chair, take up a fountain pen, dig deeply into his subconscious, and pour out all he had dredged up onto paper. Just as his two personae dwelled side by side within the same mind, each appearing at different times and fulfilling different functions, so the two halves of Rowan Oak were to coexist, each part of the same structure but configuring vastly different styles of culture and being.

Sitting in that study, his Modernist self very much in command, Faulkner on August 17, 1931, took up a piece of paper and inscribed the title “Dark House” at the top. Though the exact meaning of the phrase was probably still unclear to him, it was indisputably true that large, decaying antebellum homes held a special resonance within his imagination, symbolizing not only the glory of the mythical Old South but also something hideous and hidden, a forbidden secret lurking just beyond reach in the region’s past. A few days later, the title was suddenly changed, apparently as the result of Estelle’s casual remark while they were sitting outdoors just before dinner about how “the light in August is different from any other time of year.” Faulkner seems to have sensed immediately that the metaphor implicit in her comment was just the one he was searching for. In his text he would speak of that “lambent suspension of August into which night is about to fully come,” marking not only the late summer twilight but also the precise time of year when the season of growth and life first gives way to the following seasons of death and dissolution. Counterbalancing imagery of light and darkness would pervade the new novel, supplying a perfect vehicle for expressing the dynamic polarities rapidly coming to the fore in his consciousness—polarities of culture (Victorian/Modernist), history (past/present), gender (male/female), experience (innocence/corruption), and, above all, race (black/white). Light in August would be about these warring tensions.