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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939) contains many allusions to the lives and writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. The parallels to A Farewell to Arms (1929), often noted by critics, are more numerous and more meaningful than hitherto shown. They work in context with references to Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925) and with sketches of Anderson and Hemingway and a full portrait of Anderson's second wife, Tennessee Mitchell, who seems to be the model for Faulkner's heroine, Charlotte Rittenmeyer. The background of these allusions is the mid-twenties, when Hemingway and Faulkner both benefited from Anderson's encouragement and aid but lost his friendship, possibly through related incidents. One explanation for the mingling of the Anderson-Hemingway material in The Wild Palms is that it represents a gesture of gratitude and artistic agreement from Faulkner to Anderson set against Hemingway's behavior to the older writer and triggered, in part, by a visit Anderson paid to Faulkner in 1937 when the Mississippian was injured in New York. The allusions also make plain Faulkner's philosophical and artistic differences with Hemingway, provide insight into his view of a major competitor, and show the intricate workings of Faulkner's art.
1 Harry Wilbourne and the convict suffer repeated symbolic enactments of the trauma of death and rebirth on their ways to an understanding of the true nature of reality.
In the end, the convict seeks peace in a Schopenhauerian denial of the will, while Harry discovers Nietzsche's alternative and affirms the will to life, with a paraphrase of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Cf. Harry's “Not could. Will. I want to . . . Yes . . . between grief and nothing I will take grief” The Wild Palms (New York: Random House, 1939), p. 324, with Zarathustra's “and every ‘It was’ to transform, until the Will saith: ‘But so did I will it! So shall I will it—‘ ” Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (London : Allen & Unwin and Macmillan, 1930), p. 242. Harry comes to his understanding in a rank jail cell that has just been purified by a fresh gust of wind (p. 324), a circumstance that reflects Zarathustra's claim, “O my brethren, a fresh blustering wind cometh Zarathustra unto all way-weary ones. . . . Even through walls bloweth my free breath, and in into prisons and imprisoned spirits!” Thus Spake Zarathustra, pp. 251–52. By his act of affirmation, Harry transcends the will-less state with which he began his adventures. His surname, however, still points to the Schopen-hauerian context, and to the debate of suicide which he makes, through its apparent origin in Hamlet: . . . who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, [my italics] (Hamlet iii.i.76–80)
2 Ray Lewis White, “Hemingway's Private Explanation of The Torrents of Spring,” MFS, 13 (1967), 261–63.
3 Publication dates from James B. Meriwether, William Faulkner: A Checklist (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Library, 1957).
4 See Faulkner's 1953 Atlantic essay on Anderson, rpt. in Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 3–10.
5 Letter of 19 April 1926. Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Walter B. Rideout and H. M. Jones (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), p. 155.
6 Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 13–20.
7 Dark Laughter (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925), p. 49.
8 The local reviewer wrote that there was not “a line drawn in malice in the whole collection,” New Orleans Times-Picayune Sunday Magazine, 2 Jan. 1927, p. 4.
9 Achievement, p. 72.
10 Mosquitoes (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), p. 9.
11 Achievement, p. 68.
12 A minor point concerns the “mosquitoes” of Faulkner's title, which harry everyone and drive the runaway lovers back to the yacht, an atmospheric device very akin to the commentary of “dark laughter” in Anderson's novel.
13 Charlotte offers their chops to a cast-iron Saint Bernard on a lawn in a plush Chicago suburb as propitiation to the bourgeois respectability that pursues them ; Oak Park, with its Hemingway association, is invoked (WP, pp. 89, 98). Cf. Dark Laughter, pp. 24–25, 36, 48, 51, 54.
14 Faulkner even borrows from himself. Millgate points out how closely the flight of Charlotte and Harry corresponds to the attempt made by David and Patricia in Mosquitoes. Harry's “Between grief and nothing, I'll take grief” is similar to Gordon's “Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?” (Mosq., p. 329).
15 Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs: A Critical Edition, ed. Ray Lewis White (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 466.
16 Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, p. 10.
17 Carvel Collins, “Faulkner and Anderson : Some Revisions,” Talk at the Annual Meeting of the MLA, Dec. 1967, New York.
18 George Sidney, “Faulkner in Hollywood: A Study of His Career as a Scenarist,” Diss. New Mexico 1959, p. 45; Millgate, Achievement, p. 38. Faulkner did not leave Hollywood until Aug. 1937 and was back in Oxford talking about the publication of The Unvanquished in Nov.
19 The Unvanquished (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 272.
20 Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, p. 7.
21 E.g., the passage quoted above, reflecting Dudley's belief that “he might have got” his wife if she had stayed in the room instead of fleeing, is similar to Anderson's remarks about Tennessee Mitchell in a letter written after her death in 1929: “I used to take her sometimes to the very door, put her hand on the doorknob, but she always ran away like a frightened child” (Letters of Sherwood Anderson, p. 220).
22 Letters of Sherwood Anderson, p. 220.
23 William A. Sutton, “Sherwood Anderson's Second Wife,” Ball State Univ. Forum, 7 (Spring 1966), 39–46. Dale Kramer, Chicago Renaissance (New York: Appleton, 1966), covers similar ground less well.
24 Edgar Lee Masters, Across Spoon River (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936), pp. 305–07.
25 Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, p. 442. The Memoirs, first published in 1942, record this about Tennessee, also (p. 551): “The woman Tennessee Mitchell, with whom I once lived (I was married to her but it was a marriage that didn't take), told me of Edgar Lee Masters, whose sweetheart she had been. I could never believe all she told me. How can you believe any woman about a man with whom she has been intimate, after the intimacy has come to an end?”
26 Sutton, “Anderson's Second Wife,” p. 41, quoting from her autobiographical notebook, now in the Newberry Library, Chicago.
27 James Schevill, Sherwood Anderson (Denver, Colo. : Univ. of Denver Press, 1951), p. 125. Anderson did some painting, too, and more successfully than Harry Wilbourne (Schevill, p. 84; see WP, p. 18).
28 Kramer, p. 339; Sutton, p. 44. Sutton says that Anderson's first wife had gifts for Tennessee wrapped that Christmas. It is not clear whether Kramer and Sutton are reporting two sets of facts or differently interpreting a single piece of information. Sutton errs, putting her death “in 1930,” and the editors of Anderson's letters err, placing her death on 29 Dec. 1929. The New York Times reported on 27 Dec. 1929 that she had lain dead in her apartment for a week, perhaps from 20 or 21 Dec.
29 Obviously, the reference “Set, ye armourous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves,” plays on The Sun Also Rises, and perhaps Bill Gorton's talk about stuffed dogs paving the road to hell in that novel has bearing on the talk about a dog in The Wild Palms (pp. 96–98). See also John Howell, “Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Sound and Fury,” Papers on Lang, and Lit., 2 (1966), 234–42. Regarding A Farewell to Arms and The Wild Palms, two French reviewers of Maurice E. Coindreau's translation, Les Palmiers sauvages (Paris : Gallimard, 1952), mentioned similarities of theme (Jean-Jacques Mayoux in Combat, 6 March 1952) and image (Michel Mohrt in La Table Ronde, Nov. 1952). H. Edward Richardson's article in 1958 (MFS, 4, 357–60) was the first to dig out a number of parallels of plot, theme, and dialogue in “Wild Palms” and AFTA. In 1959, W. R. Moses (MFS, 5, 172–74) wrote on parallels with “Old Man.” Dissertations by Joseph Gold (Wisconsin 1959) and George Sidney (New Mexico 1959) and Hyatt Waggoner's From Jefferson to the World (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1959) touched briefly on the subject. William Van O'Connor published three pieces, based largely on Richardson's research, purporting to discern a “dialogue” between F. and H. in the parody (CE, 24, 1963, 208, 213–15, etc.). Edmond L. Volpe's A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York: Noonday, 1964) added a few examples of connections, many specious.
30 Anderson's hero journeys down the river to New Orleans in an open boat; some of his references to Twain have been mentioned, already. Hemingway's debt to Twain is discussed, among other places, in Philip Young's Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harcourt, 1966); Faulkner's is explored in Nancy Dew Taylor, “The River of Faulkner and Mark Twain,” Miss Q, 16 (1963), 191–99.
31 A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribners, 1929), pp. 341–42.
32 Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, p. 193.
33 Perhaps that is what Hemingway meant to say all along. Carlos Baker reveals that H. emphasized the importance of the title of his first great novel. The scriptural paraphrase, The Sun Also Rises, was meant to state the theme that the “earth abideth forever,” a view that might be distilled from the function of the rain in the final scene of AFTA.
34 “They Come Bearing Gifts,” American Mercury, 21 (Oct. 1930), 129. The same anecdote appears, with minor variations, in Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs.
35 See Anderson's obituary in the New York Times, 9 March 1941, and Millgate, Achievement, p. 3.
36 Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, p. 10.
37 “Sherwood Anderson,” in Princeton U. Lib. Chron., 18 (1957), 93; “A Note on Sherwood Anderson,” Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, pp. 3–4.
38 See White, “Hemingway's Explanation.”
39 Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner's, 1969), pp. 159–60.
40 Rpt. in PULC, 18 (1957), 89–94.
41 Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, p. 466.
42 Hemingway wrote, “As I read that chapter over, reader, it doesn't seem so bad. You may like it. I hope you will. And if you do like it, reader, and the rest of the book as well, will you tell your friends about it, and try to get them to buy the book just as you have done ?” The Torrents of Spring (New York: Scribners, 1926), p. 120. He says he wrote the novel in ten days, one chapter in two hours (Tor rents, pp. 107, 141). Faulkner uses the same tongue-in-cheek bravado, revealing that he wrote Sanctuary in “about three weeks” and As I Lay Dying in “six weeks” at night between 12 and 4 a.m. in a powerhouse, “without changing a word,” adding, “I made a fair job and I hope you will buy it and tell your friends and I hope they will buy it too” (Sanctuary, New York: Modern Library, 1932, pp. vi-viii).
43 I am grateful to Lt. Stephen E. Meats of the Air Force Academy for pointing out this correspondence to me.
44 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, pp. 299–324, 619–24.
45 See Pylon (New York: Smith and Haas, 1935), p. 50; Sidney, “Faulkner in Hollywood,” p. 90; Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 154, 156, 159–60. There is perhaps also a small joke in the names “Ernest” Talliaferro of Mosquitoes and “Ernest” V. Trueblood of “Afternoon of a Cow”; both men are milquetoasts.
46 See Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 58.
47 Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random, 1936), p. 129.
48 Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, pp. 181–82.
49 Millgate, Achievement, p. 23.
50 1 May 1927, Sect, iii, p. 4. Helen Baird had gone to a finishing school in Chicago. She married a New Orleanian. Phil Stone's nephew, William Evans Stone v, writes in William Faulkner of Oxford, ed. James W. Webb and A. W. Green (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 79–83, that his family often rented beach cottages in Pascagoula and that “Bill [Faulkner] went with us several summers.” One cottage was the Baird Place. Stone notes that Faulkner dedicated Mosquitoes to Helen Baird and that her brother “Pete” was a New Orleans newspaperman (just like Charlotte's brother), WP, p. 88.
51 Achievement, p. 179.
52 In the typescript at Virginia, the date of the 27-year-old Harry's birth seems to have been changed, by a typing strikeover, from 1900 to 1910. Though there are plenty of specific references to 1937 in “Wild Palms,” the mood and setting is that of the twenties, not the depression; the literary bohemians in Chicago and New Orleans also belong to the earlier decade. In Ch. ix of the novel there is mention of a hulk left over from the war, which fits a date in 1927 better than one in 1937, as does the doctor's statement to Harry, in Ch. i (p. 18), that the building boom “died nine years ago,” an apparent reference to World War i shipbuilding and economic growth in Pascagoula. See Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State, compiled and written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (New York: Viking. 1938), p. 287. For documentation of 1 May as beginning for the “trips” which the lovers and the convict take, see Appendix iiI, “Time and Money in The Wild Palms,” in Thomas L. McHaney, “William Faulkner's The Wild Palms: A Textual and Critical Study,” Diss. South Carolina 1968.
53 Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, p. 180.
54 Sanctuary, p. vi.