Long Time Leaving (23 page)

I want to believe that Blotner's witness has this slightly wrong. No one can be fonder than I am of Ms. Pitts's performance as Charles Laughton's love interest in one of my favorite movies,
Ruggles of Red Gap,
so it's not that she strikes me as an unworthy opponent for a man who happened to be putting the finishing touches
on Absalom, Absalom!
at the time. I don't like to think of Faulkner, mean as he could be sometimes, being uncourtly enough (so to speak) as to pit himself one-on-one against such a sweet lady, especially one who was probably taller than he was. Or maybe I just don't like to think of either of them cleaning the other's plow.

I like to think Pitts was Faulkner's mixed-doubles partner. Against Clark Gable and Dorothy Parker.

Gable, who once asked Faulkner, “Oh, do you write?”

Parker, who, according to Blotner, found Faulkner vulnerable and took—for all her acerbity—a maternal interest in him.

I have a feeling that neither of these reactions to Faulkner set well with Faulkner. Especially, as we shall see, because of a certain property known as
Gone with the Wind.

And this is how the game went.

Pitts is wearing something filmy but unrevealing, topped off by a maid's cap. Faulkner is in impeccable grey flannel trousers, a necktie, and a tweed jacket but no shoes, because he took his highly shined wingtips off to ease his feet during the drinking and now can't find them—can't find the shoes. In the feet he still has some feeling, so he has a pretty good general idea where they are. He also has the certain knowledge that his feet are small, size 6 1/2 B. Visibly far smaller than Gable's.

Parker, at a well-worn forty-three (four years older than Faulkner
and Pitts, eight older than Gable), no longer has anything of the coquette about her, but she is little and quick, and her feeling toward Gable is
not
maternal. She's kind of peppery in a black tennis skirt with something obscurely magenta worn under. Gable, having come straight from the set of
San Francisco,
is dressed as a raffish turn-of-the-century saloonkeeper.

Now. Consider the cultural-historical context. It is 1936, remember, the year not only of
Absalom, Absalom!
which would get mixed-to-scathing reviews and sell poorly but also of
Gone with the Wind—
the novel, already a blockbuster. The movie is a couple of years away. The trades are reporting that Gable is under pressure from the studio to play Rhett Butler, a role he for some reason resists. Faulkner, although he would rather die than admit this, has read
Gone with the Wind,
twice. Why? Because he would love to
be
(a much better written version of) Rhett Butler. And Faulkner is under the impression—there is some resemblance—that Parker is Margaret Mitchell.

“Backhand or forehand?” the mannerly Faulkner asks Pitts.

“Oh, my word, I hardly have a hand at all,” she replies. “If it were up to me to get us back to deuce when it was their ad, why I don't know, ohhhh, I just don't know, that's all.”

Faulkner bows stiffly, in more ways than one, and takes the backhand side.

“Up or down?” rasps Gable brusquely, twirling his racket to see who gets first serve. Faulkner watches it twirl and cannot help asking himself whether he
wants
to serve:

You would toss it up and at the top of its arc you would reach back into the past with your stringed saber and you would know as your father would have known and your father's father would have known that you could hit it,
Faulkner thinks
, but you would not want to hit it, because it would not be it, not what you wanted to hit; that when you hit it you would just be hitting a child's toy balloon with a celluloid face on it, a face mustached and rugged and about to burst into laughter, and so you would not dare strike it because it would merely burst and you would rather let it drop all null and unserved than to have stood there in the irredeemable knowledge of a fault, and then the dread, the primordial…

The racket clatters down.

“Down,” Faulkner says in his aristocratic but, let's face it, rather too-reedy-to-be-Rhettian voice.

“Up,” Gable growls. “We'll let the little lady here get us under way.” He gives Parker an impersonal sort of wink.

Parker tucks one ball into her waistband and rolls the other one around in her fingers reflectively. “The fuzz,” she cracks, with a sly look at Gable, “is familiar, but, hmm …Funny, I seldom blank out on a testis.”

Gable winces. This is not the kind of dame he goes for. In fact, he doesn't go for Scarlett, that's why he's been resisting the part of Rhett, he likes 'em cheerful and forbearing, is currently dating Carole Lombard but has had two wives who were considerably older than he, and maybe, just maybe, Gable is jealous that Faulkner (younger than his own wife back home) is the one who brings out Parker's motherliness.

Parker, a bit unsteady on her feet, looks across the net. Faulkner is swaying under the influence, Pitts in the wind.

“They also swerve,” cracks Parker, “who only stand and wait.”

She delivers, crisply, to Pitts. Who emits a high-pitched wail,
Ooooooohhhh,
and slaps the ball right at Gable, at the net. He puts it away,
zing,
between Faulkner's feet. Whose nakedness all behold. Parker says, “Aww.” Gable gives Faulkner an alpha sort of wink. Faulkner's only reply is internal:

More than a Snopes perhaps yet more than abysmally less than a Sartoris this man not of the South who disdains to stand for the manhood of the South yet probably will win the Distinguished Flying Cross in the looming war Sartoris will be too old to serve in—

“Five-love,” says Gable.

“Mm,” cracks Parker, “but will even one or two call the next morning?” “Oooh, glory be,” says Pitts, “I'm afraid my whole game is pitty-pat.”

Pittypat the fluttery aunt,
thinks Faulkner,
and Ashley Wilkes the vapid cavalier and the silly Prissy and the doddering father and the cloying Melanie, these cheap confectioner's figments so easy to swallow that even I cannot get them out of my—

“Are you ready?” Parker asks Faulkner solicitously. He does not deign to answer, except in his teeming imagination:

Implacable in the black which she wears whether for sister, father, or not-husband none know, standing bolt upright on the hard dusty vivid clay with an air of static rage and cheaply won popularity and talking in that brittle
commercial voice of unwanted concern until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the unwilling object of her attention be avatar of all frustrated blood-longing of poets immemorial constrained to churn out incidental dialogue in a colony of wiseacres lest the old home place of the fathers and the fathers’ fathers escheat to—

Having taken Faulkner's silence for assent, Parker taps one over to him, softly.

And Faulkner swings, wildly and yet with astonishing narrative drive, and the ball hums with unaccountable spin as it ticks off the tape at the top of the net, shoots over Gable's racket, glances off his widow's peak, and sails way, way up into the evening zephyrs, into the blue yonder where Gable a few years hence will indeed become the air hero Faulkner has claimed to be but never was: banking now this way, now that way; Gable racing back, back, whirling, scrambling to get his bearings; no such trajectory has been seen hereabouts; it's coming down, Gable goes for the volley, misses entirely, the ball lands behind him, just in, and then it rises again, in all its unprecedented transcendent English, way, way up and backspinning over the lurching Gable, who re-reverses course in pursuit, but the ball flies all the way back over the net, bounces on the Faulkner-Pitts side, and then goes back again over to Gable, who angrily whacks it into the net.

“Oh, my stars,” says Pitts. “Does that make us 30-5?”

“Pretty to think so,” cracks Parker, but her eyes are on Faulkner, with an expression speculative, urgent, and intent.

Faulkner is just standing there, glassy-eyed. Though this is his high-water mark in Hollywood, his inner voice is relentless in parabolic extrapolation:

It's because she wants it told,
he thinks,
so that ages hence people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her once-famous name nor succumbed to her overcelebrated prose will read of this and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of this film-figment hero to whom is proffered our bled-for manhood by not-even-American moguls and the tears of the very harlot herself who has composed that massive pretense of a history which vouchsafes this insouciant interloper the opportunity to toy with the role of a lifetime can he stay this demon and efface his name and lineage not to mention the tacky spawn of the very soap-operatic mythos which she herself has wrought and now must see the treason of—

•••

“Are you feeling well, Bill?” says Parker, flipping her skirt. “As the Lady said to Peeping Tom, you look a little peek-ed.”

Faulkner winces.

Pitts picks up her maid's cap, which has fallen off and gotten dirty. Faulkner has a nostalgic vision of a different soiled item of clothing, the limb of a tree—

Then, then it was that I was really cooking,
he thinks,
and will my flame ever burn like that again, or has the tale told by this she-idiot usurped the myth that is spirit and material, bloodright and birthright and all, her Mammy blotting out my Dilsey her Scarlett expunging—

“Do you think he's all right?” Parker asks Gable.

“Frankly, my dear,” says Gable—but you know what he says.

A
t a recent gathering of Southern writers at Vanderbilt University, my alma mater, I missed the panel on religion. For reasons impossible to reconstruct at this late date—they were not easy to reconstruct, in fact, that morning when I woke up—I overslept. Too bad, because I had prepared two limericks dealing with religion and Southern higher education:

I did attend the panel on race, however, because I was on it. And at one point during that discussion, I took a step that has somehow failed to attract widespread attention. I came out as a white writer.

I did so in response to a challenge laid down by the leader of the panel, Natasha Tretheway, a poet and a professor at Auburn University, who is African American. Black writers, she said, are always having to talk about being black. It was time, she said, for white writers to confront their whiteness.

Well, I usually confront my whiteness, with regret, in the context of dancing or basketball. Or by thinking of song titles like “I Got the All-I-Got-Is-the-Right-to-Remain-Silent Blues.” Never before had I stood up in public and stated, with simple dignity, “I am a white writer.”

It felt okay. A relief, in many ways. Now, when someone asks me what I do, and I say I am a writer, and he or she asks me what kind, I can say, “White Southern.”

Why is this good for me? Well, the other night I was in the midst of a
congenial group of white non-Southern persons of literary and artistic bent. They started laughing about having heard someone on television pronounce the word
longitude
with a hard
g.

“What's wrong with that?” I said. “That's the way I pronounce it. That's the only way I've ever heard it pronounced.”

They looked at me as from a great height.

I went to the hostess's dictionary. The preferred pronunciation was
lonjitude.
I honor dictionaries. So there I was, hung out to dry, the only person in the room who pronounced
longitude
unpreferredly. And I had been doing it for some fifty years, ever since I encountered the word as a child and naturally assumed…

“Of course, this dictionary isn't American,” I said, it being the Shorter Oxford one. (As it happened the American ones I consulted when I got home failed even to acknowledge any pronunciation but
lonjitude.)

“Well, neither are you,” said the most outspoken member of the company (a native and lifetime resident of Manhattan). “You're Southern.”

There were no sharp intakes of breath.

All primarily in fun, of course, and although I did say yes, I was American, there was no point in getting on my high horse. For one thing, I might start yelling, which brings a horse down. For another, when I tried to summon my high horse, he looked at me as if he had no dog, so to speak, in this fight. I did take the position that the letter
g
was usually hard before the letter
i.
An argument readily refuted by both
logic
and
magic.

I thought of
pig in a blanket,
and cited it, but I knew it wasn't really apropos, particularly since I thought of it and cited it somewhat later, with an unwinning suddenness, long after the conversation had turned to other matters. I thought about
longing,
but that would have been an
ng
as in
stringiness.
It was the next day before it hit me, what I should have thrown up to the New Yorkers present:
Longisland.
They would have disavowed Long Island as part of their heritage, but the necessity to do so would at least have put them slightly on the defensive.