NEW DELTA REVIEW
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Contents
Vieux Carré Exile
Falling
Interview with the Bayou
William Faulkner
De Natura Rerum
Temple Drake’s Revenge
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Vieux Carré Exile
“so it’s the
miscegenation,
not the incest”
—william faulkner,
absalom, absalom
what made me give up—
cosmopolitan new orleans
tres chic big easy?
for this bucolic—
jerkwater little college
in mississippi?
why did she send me—
away from the big easy
my home?
eulalia bon—
my haitian mulatto
exiled dear mother.
my cute mistress—
etienne my handsome son
my delta lifestyle?
how did i get stuck—
with this hick henry sutpen
suave octoroon me?
Falling
“Once I smoked bhang
and I recall that I had
a vertiginous night, for
the sense of space had
shifted and I felt so light
that whenever I wanted
to turn on one side, I
would fall from the bed…”
— Andrei Codrescu,
“Mircea Eliade, India,”
Exquisite Corpse
the first time I smoked—
a joint was in the bayou
with cajun hippies.
they were all cousins—
my dormitory roommate
a handsome frenchman.
we played poker late—
zydeco music plus drank
lots of cheap jax beer.
some dynamite weed—
i became the queen of spades
then andre kissed me.
everything slowed down—
alligator garfish boyz
smiled & laughed at me.
dark old cypress trees—
gnarled hanging spanish moss
creeped into my blood.
ended up in bed—
with a moody boudreaux boy
fell into his arms.
clairvoyante cajuns—
séance under voodoo moon
stoned out in the swamp.
the only problem—
I kept falling outta bed
and it wouldn’t stop.
falling outta bed—
even when i didn’t move
falling not falling.
hold me tight I said—
don’t let me fall further down
andre laughed at me.
falling, oozing down—
deeper & deeper into
delta denouement.
down into the swamp—
stoned like young eliade
down by the ganges.
Interview with the Bayou
poet: “what do you do down there all day & night? just lurk around—moping in the depths?”
garfish: “why don’t you smoke a joint—that way you can ‘grok’ a ‘gar’ a lot better.”
poet: “do you have conversations with big old catfish—hanging around down in the fetid swamp?”
crawdaddy: “why don’t you do what the cajuns do—bite off my head & suck the juice.”
William Faulkner
—for Noel Polk
[Sung to the tune of Stephen
Foster’s “Camptown Races”]
faulkner novels here i come—
doo-dah doo-dah—
sound and fury oh so glum—
oh dah-do-dah day…
benjy compson stupid fool—
doo-dah doo-dah—
dirty panties way up there—
in an old pear tree…
oh all that southern lit!!!
oh all that dixie jive!!!
how i love it when it rots—
oh dah-do-dah day!!!
love that quentin he’s so gay—
doo-dah doo-dah—
him and dalton get it on—
plus caddy compson too…
love those wild palms & those floods—
doo-dah doo-dah—
love those snopes boyz having fun—
oh dah-do-dah day…
oh that faulkner lit!!!
oh that popeye puke!!!
how i love it when it stinks!!!
oh dah-do-dah day!!!
delta bourbon literature—
doo-dah doo-dah—
grows like mold on rotten cheese—
oh dah-do-dah day…
sanctuary here i come!!!
corn cobs!!! corn cobs!!!
ole miss reba has some fun!!!
so do all the girls!!!
oh magnolias!!!
oh those pralines too!!!
how i love that mardi gras!!!
all those frenchy boyz!!!
light in august my oh my—
christmas!!! christmas!!!
how they cut his peter off—
oh mulatto boy…
same with henry’s cute boyfriend—
doo-dah doo-dah—
tall dark handsome charles bon—
fatal tinge of dinge…
oh that land of jive!!!
oh that decadence!!!
delta boyfriends oh so cute!!!
plus the senate too!!!
tallahatchie literature—
snopes boyz!!! snopes boyz!!!
eula’s got a big fat ass—
oh dah-do-dah day…
temple drake she fell in love—
doo-dah doo-dah—
alabama red oh so cute—
bye bye bad boy red…
oh that memphis booze!!!
oh that moonshine glow!!!
surely worth a nobel prize!!!
all those pecan pies!!!
way down south in baton rouge—
huey!!! oh huey!!!
way down south at lsu—
kingfish dynasties!!!
gumbo boyz and garfish too—
doo-dah doo-dah—
cajuns creoles gators too—
that’s where i fell in love…
oh that bayou lit!!!
oh that swamp boy love!!!
cajun boyz can be so cruel!!!
pouty pirogue lips!!!
go down moses was my thing—
doo-dah doo-dah—
how i loved that broussard hall—
oh those quarterbacks…
english major there i was—
doo-dah doo-dah—
how i burned the midnight oil—
tiger jocks so fine…
oh those delta blues!!!
oh those dixie nights!!!
honeysuckle busy lips!!!
oh dah-do-dah day!!!
De Natura Rerum
“I sell myths
not poems.”
—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,”
Great American
Prose Poems
Yoknapatawpha was my apocryphal myth way back then in ‘60s Baton Rouge. I fell in love with Amos Bolton, an editor with the Delta Journal back in the Sixties. He published my first poem “Hitchhikers in the Dust.” It was an awful poem—about tragic, drunk, stoned Jack Kerouac. John Hazard Wildman was my creative writing teacher—he was a poet too. Back then LSU had just become integrated—Amos Bolton was a handsome, smart black poet. He liked one of my gay poems—about miscegenational incest. But he couldn’t get it published. Delta lit was still in the closet back then. Both Amos & Wildman told me to keep publishing tho & I’m still doing it. Faulkner’s mythology was close to me back then—I felt like Henry Sutpen & Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom. I lived the decadent delta myth & slowly became Myth Kelly.
“With each poem
goes a little myth.
This myth is not
in the poem. It’s
in my mind.”
—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,”
Great American
Prose Poems
I spent all day in Allen Hall with Bolton & the English majors. There on the Quad on campus. At night I hung around Middleton Library—reading & writing. My first book came out ten years later—it’s in the stacks there in the poetry section: Chicken: Poems PS3561 E3932 C47 Author: Kelly, Dennis, 1943 Publisher: Gay Sunshine Press 80 pages, illustrated ISBN: 0917342704. It’s hard to realize that it was just waiting to come into existence—there on the shelves between Ginsberg & Kerouac. I was a hippie back then—sandawood incense, sitar music, smoking dope. I checked the box—instead of going to Nam. One look at me—and the army psychiatrist nodded knowingly. He asked me why I thought I was gay? “Because I suck dick,” I told him. “Some times even dinge dick.” And that was that.
“And when the editors
of magazines ask me
for poems I make them
pay for my work by
passing along these
little myths which I
make up.”—Andrei
Codrescu, “De Natura
Rerum,” Great American
Prose Poems
Could I stand the delta heat & humidity back then? Back when I was young & a chicken—living in the dorms with all the exiled young Cubans? Children of the Cuban doctors, lawyers, engineers—making their espace from Castro? To Miami, New Orleans & LSU? They spoke Spanish so quickly & loudly—I got to know them pretty well late at night. I got to know a pair of twins from Havana—identical Michelangelo Davids there in the showers late at night. The Gulf of Mexico & the vast Caribbean—flowed thru their mable veins into me. The Carib mainlined its way—“Aribba!” all the way. Their myth was dying—I made it mine. I fell in love—with both of them.
“These myths appear
at the end of the magazine
under the heading ABOUT
CONTRIBUTORS or above
my poems in italics.”
—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,”
Great American
Prose Poems
There wasn’t a MFA writing program back then—I barely got outta there alive. After I graduated—I had a choice. Either live the rest of my life in the bayous—with a bunch of crazy Cajun hippies. Drinking JAX & staying stoned—playing Poker & listening to Zydeco music all the time. Turning into an alligator gar fish boy—beneath the Spanish moss Delta moon. Either that—or following a lover like Robert Duncan did. A sophomore gymnast—up to Seattle. With his Boeing father—and family. That’s the myth I chose—Rainier as my Mt. Fuji. Bungalow down by a lake—Basho my teacher. Am still here—going nowhere fast. Seventeen syllables—three lines at a time.
“Very soon there are as
many myths as there are
poems and ultimately
this is good because each
poem does, this way bring
another poet into the world.
with this secret method of
defying birth controls i
populate the world with
poetry.”—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,” Great
American Prose Poems
The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, Son of the Male Muse, The Bad Boy of Erotic Verse, Fag Rag, Gay Sunshine Journal, Seattle Gay News, The Stranger, etc.
Temple Drake’s Revenge
“Instead of endlessly reading Faulkner
into American contexts, why not read
him out of them instead?”
—Andre Bleikasten
A somewhat-distinguished fellow Faulkner scholar and I once got into the most fascinating disagreement over a Faulkner manuscript—it all happened several years ago at one of the usually rather staid Yoknapatawpha Conferences held every summer down there in hot humid Snopesville, Mississippi to honor the man and continue our unrelenting devotion to Faulkner scholarship.
The theme that year was, well, rather controversial—“Faulkner and Deep South Chick-Lit—Postmodern-Antebellum Influences.” I was eagerly looking forward to the conference as I always did—but especially this time since I had discovered in the Faulkner archives an unknown pulp-fiction manuscript along the lines of our “Chick-Lit” literary conference theme.
The book manuscript was entitled—“Temple Drake’s Revenge”… Thus with Temple Drake’s Revenge in my briefcase—and a slight hangover from a dinner party in the French Quarter with some old friends the night before—I arrived that fateful summer weekend on campus—anxious to share with my distinguished colleagues this recently re-discovered ‘30s pulp-fiction detective story by Mr. Faulkner.
It certainly did have a relevant title to the chick-lit conference theme—“Temple Drake’s Revenge”—and I anticipated a lively intelligent discussion about this amazing Faulkner-esque goldmine. Little did I know it was actually a Pandora’s box in disguise instead—full of sound and fury and shocking scholarship revelations. I simply had no idea what was lurking down there for me—down there in the usually quiet hallways and lecture rooms of Delta Bourbon Academe.
As you may recall, I’ve alluded to this mysterious short story in the footnotes of my somewhat boring biography on Faulkner—Delta Days and Delta Nights, University of Mississippi Press, 2007. I must confess that there is perhaps more literary substance and worthwhile scholarship to the footnotes of my lowly enterprise—rather than the biography itself. Footnotes have a life of their own—often more interesting than the book itself. At least that’s what the distinguished NYTimes critic Mr. Waldo Lydecker said about it—my so-called “long awaited” and “thoroughly disappointing” annotated version of Temple Drake’s Revenge recently published by Random House…
The reason for this truly embarrassing literary discrepancy between form and substance—footnotes and text—is fairly simple. Faulkner and the Snopes boys were all rather nefarious characters—it was difficult to get to know them. They had their own Snopesian universe—and no matter how hard I tried to penetrate it, I seemed doomed to fail. On a literary level that is—which I took much too seriously back then. Although later in my modern maturity—I now see it all as playful unreliable narrative at my expense—a kind of Pale Fire summer back then—when I was eighteen, impressionable and naïve—young enough to be tempted but old enough to know better…
My job as Faulkner’s “private secretary” was very interesting—writers are, of course, complex and fascinating people. The ongoing various day to day secretarial tasks, hours of typing and retyping manuscripts, rummaging through filing cabinets and attempting to organize all the paperwork Mr. Faulkner wanted organized—well, all this kept me very busy that long hot summer I spent there at Rowan Oaks. Mrs. Faulkner and the children were visiting relatives—and so I didn’t have an opportunity to meet them. Instead there was just Mr. Faulkner himself—lording over his manor like some proud plantation Delta Bourbon aristocrat—wise and weathered by years of Mississippi maturity.
Faulkner was like Colonel Sutpen—with his ambitious plans for a Snopes Dynasty even before it actually happened. The great literary historian and economist Montgomery Ward Snopes himself has suggested that it was Faulkner who single-handedly created the Snopes Dynasty that now rules the known universe…
But of course—Faulkner had help founding this dynasty. That’s why Weasel and Pretty Boy Snopes were like his right hand—not only procurers of fine whiskey—but also precursors for the New Snopes Man—the vanguard of Faulkner’s dynastic push into the “delta moment”—the power behind the Snopes throne…
I must admit that Faulkner’s metaphysics is completely mysterious to me—I have no idea what the mysterious “delta moment” is—in fact I still have a difficult enough time just reading his novels and short stories. It was extremely difficult for me as a young naïve college undergraduate back then—and it still is now whenever I open one of his books and contemplate a super-sentence a hundred pages long…
Just wading through that first section of The Sound and the Fury—those long convoluted labyrinthine soliloquies written by Benjy the child-idiot—pages and pages seemingly signifying nothing—getting lost in it—sinking into it—the vast intertextual Sargasso Sea that was Yoknapatawpha. I once asked Mr. Faulkner how he wrote a la Barthe—that strange stream of supposed child-idiot consciousness—there in that beginning Benjy section—and he smiled at me. He lit his pipe that evening—looking out the window—like he did sometimes before explaining something to me—that he knew I wouldn’t be able to understand… Then he’d say “Forget it, son.”
The trouble usually was that these so-called off-the-cuff critiques usually ended up just as complex as the actual writing itself. He’d say Mississippi Zen things—like he didn’t write books he lived them. Or things like he wasn’t the author of the book—the child-idiot Benjy wrote it all… And then naturally like the sucker I was—I’d ask how could Benjy be the actual author when Benjy was just a child-idiot and didn’t know how to read or write? How could a child-idiot write a book—when he couldn’t even put his shoes on or go for a walk without getting lost?
That’s when Faulkner would just shrug—saying something like Benjy didn’t have to read or write. The important thing was living in the “delta moment”—that the delta moment was a big black Cadillac. Fast enough to take Benjy and me for a long ride thru Yoknapatawpha county all the way down to hell and back—“At least conversationally dontchaknow,” he’d say…
“You see how the delta moment works?” The next question being, of course, well, but Mr. Faulkner—what’s the “delta moment”? Is it like Proust’s moment? Like Joyce’s epiphany? Hemingway’s moment of truth?
Faulkner would just sit there with his eyes closed—sipping his whiskey, shaking his head looking rather fatherly about it all. Knowing I was the studious type—that someday I wouldn’t understand what he was saying even more than now. I’d read too much—too many books. Only to mire myself in what others said—getting dragged down by other writer’s fictions. But that until then there was still hope maybe—I was still somewhat virgin & stupid & idiotic like Benjy. just a another hopeless college boy “basket case”—not having enough experience with the word, the world, the way the world & the word intertexted themselves—the weird way words make worlds within worlds to understand what the Cheshire cat meant. I was kinda like Benjy—finding myself lost down there in the rabbit hole—which is exactly where I should be—in a constant state of naïve bewilderment & innocence—before the obvious & inevitable conscious discursive denouement began…
“Well, kid, we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Faulkner would say to me. Such candid times were rare—looking back on them now—I sometimes think they were the least insightful things he’d say to me—hinting at nothing but the useless sound & fury of words & language & writing. Things that would flummox me more & more—because to be quite honest with you, I didn’t understand myself much then either—which, well, according to Faulkner is exactly where I should be—dealing with such matters I’d find out about sooner or later down the line—were how the unconscious worked or rather didn’t work according to our waking expectations. “There ain’t no hurry,” he’d say.
I never really understood him—how exactly to take what he said or catch onto where he was coming from. Other than he seemed to enjoy flummoxing me with his off-the-wall comments—more than he did enlightening or straightening me out one way or another. Like the quips about Benjy—tidbits coming out of the blue that I’d ponder and pout about for days and nights, thinking his quips had either nothing or everything to do with being an author or famous writer. Almost as if he’d given up on explaining anything to anybody anymore—even himself. Other than writing and talking to himself—entertaining himself & his fellow fictional characters with long rambling conversations late at night—sipping his whiskey in the Rowan Oaks calm, cool evening twilight. His Sutpen mansion looming around him in the dark—the darkness like some Black Hole or celestial Greater Magellanic Cloud—sucking everything & everybody into its Solaris oceanic depths. As if Faulkner was trying to get back to The Sound and the Fury moment way back when—when he gave up on NYC publishers and all that—just writing for himself & what he wanted to write about back then. No tour de force achievement planned & plotted & connived over—not wanting to make a buck on it like Sanctuary—worrying about paying off bills & taking care of niggling finances.
Well, it was like something like that—him trying to remember & enter again some kind of existential denouement not-caring back then—that “delta moment” triggered by Caddy’s dirty, muddy shorts up there in the pear tree that day of the funeral—her leaning & trying to peer into the upstairs bedroom at what the body of a dead person looked like & why all the commotion about such a frail, little old lady asleep on her bed up there?
While down below Quentin, Jason & Benjy were looking up at her—feeling the mixed emotions of death & sexuality, incestuous love & even the hints of miscegenational lust that pervaded all Southern boys growing up in Mississippi post-antebellum days back then—growing up in a society dominated by slave owners, slave labor, slave plantation progeny & planter mixed-blood offspring. Like the Sutpen & the Faulkner families—both imagined & real…
It was like a once-in-a-lifetime genital-genealogical-generational gestalt that had always been lurking in the back of Faulkner’s mind—that it was totally, unforgivably, uncontrollably, involuntarily, unconsciously there—waiting like Proust’s sudden insight triggered by tea, marmalade & hashish—the kind of para-surrealistic moment that comes outta the blue without it being called forth—without any magic talisman, fairytale “Open Sesame” password or key to the kingdom. It was totally unconscious like dreaming—whatever that is & wherever dreaming comes from—and whatever happens when dreaming happens—and whether one remembers that dream or not—whether maybe or not it’s a lucid dream—and you’re sitting at your desk like him—typing away at your Ouija keyboard—trying to get it all down before you forget it?
Something maybe clicked in Faulkner’s head that only he knew about—something lucid & dreamlike & oneric that changed him in ways that maybe turned him into Benjy at that very moment back then—or maybe Jason & Quentin later on—lost in some kind of Yoknapatawpha limpid lucidity? All three of the boys puzzled & wondering what death & sexuality meant to them back then—just like it puzzled Caddy up in the pear tree with her muddy drawers. It was a mystery then & it was a mystery now. Things happen that way now and then if you know what I mean—the reason I say this is the last time I asked Faulkner about how he wrote TSATF, he put down his drink, shrugged and simply said: “Benjy is me—the boy I’ve always been & wanted to be…”
I’d sip my coffee—saying to myself here we go again…
Faulkner would say—“I wanted to be Benjy—I wanted to forget about everything and everybody—I didn’t particularly want to write anymore—not for other people anyway—not even for myself—I’d got stuck with a cement writer’s cinderblock on top of my head—for at least 4 goddamn years trying to please others rather than myself—and I didn’t wanna do that anymore—I wanted to be a recluse—live in my Mansion & mind my own business—but I didn’t wanna just live in a cork-lined bedroom like Miss Proust—I wanted to remember my Family history and do some storytelling about it—I wanted to live inside it & tell stories about it to myself—somewhere where I could create my own genealogy and dynasty or whatever you wanna call it—whenever Yoknapatawpha was & wanted to be—I wanted to live inside its apocryphal moment—the designed Yoknapatawpha moment—not somebody else’s moment—I wanted to live in the Mississippi moment—my own mythic moment and not somebody else’s fictional moment—I wanted it to be totally & completely me like Benjy sitting here—dictating moment by moment his stream of consciousness—I wanted to be a young child-idiot boy like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer again—whether it was discursively totally naïve and impossible or not—my own impromptu Mississippi moment—like Twain’s moment or Proust’s moment —but my moment was gonna begin fresh & virgin & stupid like Benjy’s moment—totally into it whether apocalyptically-awkward like Benjy or sexually-awkward like Quentin or paranoid-awkward like Jason—some kind of drunk & delirious moment outside of myself—wanting to get to know myself better than anybody else ever could—obliviously obliterated by it if necessarily—which can be very lucid and revealing if you give your Yoknapatawpha imagination a decent run for its money. It likes to get into the mind of a child-idiot writer every once in awhile—just to see what a fool like me can come up with…”
I’d nod knowingly—as if I understood what he meant…
“So, kid, that’s how it happens—during a brief moment of complete and utterly oblivious lucidity you’re sitting here at your desk just like I’m doing—sitting right here where I’m sitting now—that’s when Benjy Compson leaned out of Time and said to me—the things that got me writing again—starting with his naïve sexual version Caddy’s dirty drawers—then the more sophisticated sexual feelings Quentin had for her & Dalton Ames getting in his two-bits—the things Quentin wanted to happen there on the bridge—whether he knew it or not—and then Quentin’s young undergraduate love affair séances in the Harvard dorm with Shreve McCannon—the two of them becoming four & the four becoming two back then in the Civil War—Miss Rosa & what was up there in the attic of the old Sutpen mansion—the feelings Henry Sutpen had for his octoroon half-brother Charles Bon the Beautiful at Ole Miss—the sex Judith Sutpen was denied but then later consummated with Bon’s handsome young View Carré son Etienne when both his father & mother were gone—what Henry did up there in the attic making love with Jim Bond (Bon)—the way Clytie made sure that Henry survived up there after losing Charles Bon the Beautiful—the whole decadent, perverted Sutpen soap-opera that I acted-out for myself apocryphally—performing it philoprogenitively here at this desk—as if I were Thomas Sutpen himself designing my own Delta Dynasty here at my own mansion—just like you see me now—sitting here, looking at you & telling you the story of my so-called Southern Garden of Eden—and how the Deep South ended up East of Eden—losing the War Between the States—enduring Snopesian Reconstruction—becoming who we are now—and what I am sitting here tonight talking with you…”
I blushed and looked away—I knew Faulkner had a penchant for young pussy—it was the “bone” of contention in his unhappy marriage—the uneasiness of marrying Ellen & having a young Caddy step-daughter around the house—the reason for his love affair with all the young beautiful woman that came into his life—back when he was screenwriting in Hollywood—and then later when he was sought out by Carpenter & other young lady writers seeking professional guidance—who got courted by him, seduced & later some of them becoming his lover. All of which was fairly well-known even then—with all the various psycho-biographies like Frederick Karl’s and studious MLA & Yoknapatawpha conferences about him. Sanctuary with Popeye, Temple & Miss Reba’s whorehouse up there in Memphis—they weren’t too subtle giveaways about Faulkner’s lifestyle & sexual proclivities. Weasel Snopes telling me all about it & then some—when he’d come over to Rowan Oaks with the booze & dope. And sometimes with a cute chick—to sweeten the pot.
Weasel Snopes was the Huckleberry Finn in the Faulkner entourage—his twin brother Pretty Boy was a little more sophisticated but not much. Weasel was always hanging around somewhat intoxicated and always willing to talk about his girlfriends—that’s why Faulkner liked him… Weasel was a kindred lost soul in the Mississippi libidinal wilderness—very stream of consciousness about it like Benjy Compson—with Weasel always slightly loaded most of the time—with lewd lava-lamps for eyeballs—making me dizzy just looking at him…
Weasel was always bringing over his girlfriends to Rowan Oaks—to impress the great Southern writer with their big tits—letting him get a whiff of modern Southern teen spirit—something Faulkner still got off on & enjoyed having around—not bad for a shambling old drunken wreck like he was by then—burned out like Schigolch in Pandora’s Box—one would never think this rambling shy man—could or would or would want to be—anything other than what he did so well—being a writer, staying drunk as a skunk all the time in between Novels—enjoying what Popeye did with Alabama in bed with Temple—hanging tightly onto the brass-bed railing—as Weasel lewdly & athletically banged his girlfriend in Faulkner’s upstairs bedroom…
That’s how our conversations usually ended—they always ended up in the air like that. I didn’t know until later about a lot of things—I was so caught up in my own Mississippi mise-en-scene melodramas—pondering the facts of life like every young college kid does—thinking that next semester I’d surely understand more about life—and then when that next semester would come around—I’d usually understand less than the one before—all of which was just a waste of time—the whole logical dumb discursive progressive month-by-month day-to-day hope for enlightenment that higher education is supposed to bring about to young men like me—some kind of calm, slowly-evolving generous gift of the gods—a cool cerebral Athenian intellectual understanding of the world—rather than, of course, the unknowable Memphis Sphinx it really was…
I wanted it to be a literary thing—despite the dog-eat-dog Darwinian beasts howling at the edge of campus with careers waiting in the wings & all those important employment responsibilities—while I hid in halls & closets of academe with its politics of departmental publish or perish & all that—while out there the real world something else waited for me with its plans—but that was all in the meantime & the nebulous future—I’d surely become a truly enlightened human being after awhile—surely that was one of the gifts academe would bestow on me—for all my studying and working hard—like down here in Jefferson all those summers working for Mr. Faulkner…
But already I knew too much about Caddy—and about mythical beautiful young Persephone really wasn’t—but I still simply couldn’t imagine an adolescent Angel of Paradise with dirty-drawers—whether up there in some old twisted mythical Garden of Eden tree—or some ancient troubled, cursed Mississippi Family—Negro-rooted with a deeply ingrained slavery past—which supposedly begat Faulkner’s shadow family—some ancient all-knowing, forbidden Tree of Knowledge—that given birth to this shambling little Mississippi man sitting in front of me—this wise old man sitting there drunk full of seemingly senseless sound and fury—this great writer with his Nobel Prize sitting on top of the refrigerator—this sad somewhat useless sack of Mississippi delta mud—that decided one day to get up and walk around—and see what the world was like…
Faulkner wasn’t exactly the loquacious type—unless he was intoxicated & feeling loose—even then he seemed constantly bored with himself—enjoying instead what others were saying or doing—especially Weasel and Pretty Boy—vicariously & unnaturally enjoying the cute young Mississippi things like Theodosia Snopes who loved to come over to Rowan Oaks and party—plus all the younger hippie versions of Popeye who came over, of course—as well as the moody Mississippi ménage-a-trois of Roth Carothers Edmonds, Butch Broussard and Butch’s bewitching twin sister—the lovely threesome living down there by Frenchman’s Bend—in a dilapidated old fishing shack by the river—sometimes visiting them during their summer soirees—secretly enjoying the intense soap-operas of all that incestuous mixed-up love-affair stuff that only three-ways seem to keep going…
Other young denizens of the delta like Creole Snopes from New Orleans would visit—renewing their decadent Mississippi roots—returning to romance or reminisce about old delta boyfriends and girlfriends like Alligator Boy did every once in awhile again & again—Desperate Housewife Snopes—as well as Jimmy Dean & Billy Budd Snopes the sexy Siamese Delta Twins—incestuously conjoined together at the hip living out their kinky life down there by the Tallahatchie River—down there in the dingy rundown Yazoo Trailer Court—built on the ruins of Sutpen’s Hundred—a fitting place for a continuing chicken pulp fiction melodrama—the ongoing never-ending sullen southern Novel—the white-trash dinge déjà vu Southern story—that goes so well with Temple Drake’s revenge…
______________________________
Contents
Vieux Carré Exile
Falling
Interview with the Bayou
William Faulkner
De Natura Rerum
Temple Drake’s Revenge
______________________________
Vieux Carré Exile
“so it’s the
miscegenation,
not the incest”
—william faulkner,
absalom, absalom
what made me give up—
cosmopolitan new orleans
tres chic big easy?
for this bucolic—
jerkwater little college
in mississippi?
why did she send me—
away from the big easy
my home?
eulalia bon—
my haitian mulatto
exiled dear mother.
my cute mistress—
etienne my handsome son
my delta lifestyle?
how did i get stuck—
with this hick henry sutpen
suave octoroon me?
Falling
“Once I smoked bhang
and I recall that I had
a vertiginous night, for
the sense of space had
shifted and I felt so light
that whenever I wanted
to turn on one side, I
would fall from the bed…”
— Andrei Codrescu,
“Mircea Eliade, India,”
Exquisite Corpse
the first time I smoked—
a joint was in the bayou
with cajun hippies.
they were all cousins—
my dormitory roommate
a handsome frenchman.
we played poker late—
zydeco music plus drank
lots of cheap jax beer.
some dynamite weed—
i became the queen of spades
then andre kissed me.
everything slowed down—
alligator garfish boyz
smiled & laughed at me.
dark old cypress trees—
gnarled hanging spanish moss
creeped into my blood.
ended up in bed—
with a moody boudreaux boy
fell into his arms.
clairvoyante cajuns—
séance under voodoo moon
stoned out in the swamp.
the only problem—
I kept falling outta bed
and it wouldn’t stop.
falling outta bed—
even when i didn’t move
falling not falling.
hold me tight I said—
don’t let me fall further down
andre laughed at me.
falling, oozing down—
deeper & deeper into
delta denouement.
down into the swamp—
stoned like young eliade
down by the ganges.
Interview with the Bayou
poet: “what do you do down there all day & night? just lurk around—moping in the depths?”
garfish: “why don’t you smoke a joint—that way you can ‘grok’ a ‘gar’ a lot better.”
poet: “do you have conversations with big old catfish—hanging around down in the fetid swamp?”
crawdaddy: “why don’t you do what the cajuns do—bite off my head & suck the juice.”
William Faulkner
—for Noel Polk
[Sung to the tune of Stephen
Foster’s “Camptown Races”]
faulkner novels here i come—
doo-dah doo-dah—
sound and fury oh so glum—
oh dah-do-dah day…
benjy compson stupid fool—
doo-dah doo-dah—
dirty panties way up there—
in an old pear tree…
oh all that southern lit!!!
oh all that dixie jive!!!
how i love it when it rots—
oh dah-do-dah day!!!
love that quentin he’s so gay—
doo-dah doo-dah—
him and dalton get it on—
plus caddy compson too…
love those wild palms & those floods—
doo-dah doo-dah—
love those snopes boyz having fun—
oh dah-do-dah day…
oh that faulkner lit!!!
oh that popeye puke!!!
how i love it when it stinks!!!
oh dah-do-dah day!!!
delta bourbon literature—
doo-dah doo-dah—
grows like mold on rotten cheese—
oh dah-do-dah day…
sanctuary here i come!!!
corn cobs!!! corn cobs!!!
ole miss reba has some fun!!!
so do all the girls!!!
oh magnolias!!!
oh those pralines too!!!
how i love that mardi gras!!!
all those frenchy boyz!!!
light in august my oh my—
christmas!!! christmas!!!
how they cut his peter off—
oh mulatto boy…
same with henry’s cute boyfriend—
doo-dah doo-dah—
tall dark handsome charles bon—
fatal tinge of dinge…
oh that land of jive!!!
oh that decadence!!!
delta boyfriends oh so cute!!!
plus the senate too!!!
tallahatchie literature—
snopes boyz!!! snopes boyz!!!
eula’s got a big fat ass—
oh dah-do-dah day…
temple drake she fell in love—
doo-dah doo-dah—
alabama red oh so cute—
bye bye bad boy red…
oh that memphis booze!!!
oh that moonshine glow!!!
surely worth a nobel prize!!!
all those pecan pies!!!
way down south in baton rouge—
huey!!! oh huey!!!
way down south at lsu—
kingfish dynasties!!!
gumbo boyz and garfish too—
doo-dah doo-dah—
cajuns creoles gators too—
that’s where i fell in love…
oh that bayou lit!!!
oh that swamp boy love!!!
cajun boyz can be so cruel!!!
pouty pirogue lips!!!
go down moses was my thing—
doo-dah doo-dah—
how i loved that broussard hall—
oh those quarterbacks…
english major there i was—
doo-dah doo-dah—
how i burned the midnight oil—
tiger jocks so fine…
oh those delta blues!!!
oh those dixie nights!!!
honeysuckle busy lips!!!
oh dah-do-dah day!!!
De Natura Rerum
“I sell myths
not poems.”
—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,”
Great American
Prose Poems
Yoknapatawpha was my apocryphal myth way back then in ‘60s Baton Rouge. I fell in love with Amos Bolton, an editor with the Delta Journal back in the Sixties. He published my first poem “Hitchhikers in the Dust.” It was an awful poem—about tragic, drunk, stoned Jack Kerouac. John Hazard Wildman was my creative writing teacher—he was a poet too. Back then LSU had just become integrated—Amos Bolton was a handsome, smart black poet. He liked one of my gay poems—about miscegenational incest. But he couldn’t get it published. Delta lit was still in the closet back then. Both Amos & Wildman told me to keep publishing tho & I’m still doing it. Faulkner’s mythology was close to me back then—I felt like Henry Sutpen & Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom. I lived the decadent delta myth & slowly became Myth Kelly.
“With each poem
goes a little myth.
This myth is not
in the poem. It’s
in my mind.”
—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,”
Great American
Prose Poems
I spent all day in Allen Hall with Bolton & the English majors. There on the Quad on campus. At night I hung around Middleton Library—reading & writing. My first book came out ten years later—it’s in the stacks there in the poetry section: Chicken: Poems PS3561 E3932 C47 Author: Kelly, Dennis, 1943 Publisher: Gay Sunshine Press 80 pages, illustrated ISBN: 0917342704. It’s hard to realize that it was just waiting to come into existence—there on the shelves between Ginsberg & Kerouac. I was a hippie back then—sandawood incense, sitar music, smoking dope. I checked the box—instead of going to Nam. One look at me—and the army psychiatrist nodded knowingly. He asked me why I thought I was gay? “Because I suck dick,” I told him. “Some times even dinge dick.” And that was that.
“And when the editors
of magazines ask me
for poems I make them
pay for my work by
passing along these
little myths which I
make up.”—Andrei
Codrescu, “De Natura
Rerum,” Great American
Prose Poems
Could I stand the delta heat & humidity back then? Back when I was young & a chicken—living in the dorms with all the exiled young Cubans? Children of the Cuban doctors, lawyers, engineers—making their espace from Castro? To Miami, New Orleans & LSU? They spoke Spanish so quickly & loudly—I got to know them pretty well late at night. I got to know a pair of twins from Havana—identical Michelangelo Davids there in the showers late at night. The Gulf of Mexico & the vast Caribbean—flowed thru their mable veins into me. The Carib mainlined its way—“Aribba!” all the way. Their myth was dying—I made it mine. I fell in love—with both of them.
“These myths appear
at the end of the magazine
under the heading ABOUT
CONTRIBUTORS or above
my poems in italics.”
—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,”
Great American
Prose Poems
There wasn’t a MFA writing program back then—I barely got outta there alive. After I graduated—I had a choice. Either live the rest of my life in the bayous—with a bunch of crazy Cajun hippies. Drinking JAX & staying stoned—playing Poker & listening to Zydeco music all the time. Turning into an alligator gar fish boy—beneath the Spanish moss Delta moon. Either that—or following a lover like Robert Duncan did. A sophomore gymnast—up to Seattle. With his Boeing father—and family. That’s the myth I chose—Rainier as my Mt. Fuji. Bungalow down by a lake—Basho my teacher. Am still here—going nowhere fast. Seventeen syllables—three lines at a time.
“Very soon there are as
many myths as there are
poems and ultimately
this is good because each
poem does, this way bring
another poet into the world.
with this secret method of
defying birth controls i
populate the world with
poetry.”—Andrei Codrescu,
“De Natura Rerum,” Great
American Prose Poems
The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, Son of the Male Muse, The Bad Boy of Erotic Verse, Fag Rag, Gay Sunshine Journal, Seattle Gay News, The Stranger, etc.
Temple Drake’s Revenge
“Instead of endlessly reading Faulkner
into American contexts, why not read
him out of them instead?”
—Andre Bleikasten
A somewhat-distinguished fellow Faulkner scholar and I once got into the most fascinating disagreement over a Faulkner manuscript—it all happened several years ago at one of the usually rather staid Yoknapatawpha Conferences held every summer down there in hot humid Snopesville, Mississippi to honor the man and continue our unrelenting devotion to Faulkner scholarship.
The theme that year was, well, rather controversial—“Faulkner and Deep South Chick-Lit—Postmodern-Antebellum Influences.” I was eagerly looking forward to the conference as I always did—but especially this time since I had discovered in the Faulkner archives an unknown pulp-fiction manuscript along the lines of our “Chick-Lit” literary conference theme.
The book manuscript was entitled—“Temple Drake’s Revenge”… Thus with Temple Drake’s Revenge in my briefcase—and a slight hangover from a dinner party in the French Quarter with some old friends the night before—I arrived that fateful summer weekend on campus—anxious to share with my distinguished colleagues this recently re-discovered ‘30s pulp-fiction detective story by Mr. Faulkner.
It certainly did have a relevant title to the chick-lit conference theme—“Temple Drake’s Revenge”—and I anticipated a lively intelligent discussion about this amazing Faulkner-esque goldmine. Little did I know it was actually a Pandora’s box in disguise instead—full of sound and fury and shocking scholarship revelations. I simply had no idea what was lurking down there for me—down there in the usually quiet hallways and lecture rooms of Delta Bourbon Academe.
As you may recall, I’ve alluded to this mysterious short story in the footnotes of my somewhat boring biography on Faulkner—Delta Days and Delta Nights, University of Mississippi Press, 2007. I must confess that there is perhaps more literary substance and worthwhile scholarship to the footnotes of my lowly enterprise—rather than the biography itself. Footnotes have a life of their own—often more interesting than the book itself. At least that’s what the distinguished NYTimes critic Mr. Waldo Lydecker said about it—my so-called “long awaited” and “thoroughly disappointing” annotated version of Temple Drake’s Revenge recently published by Random House…
The reason for this truly embarrassing literary discrepancy between form and substance—footnotes and text—is fairly simple. Faulkner and the Snopes boys were all rather nefarious characters—it was difficult to get to know them. They had their own Snopesian universe—and no matter how hard I tried to penetrate it, I seemed doomed to fail. On a literary level that is—which I took much too seriously back then. Although later in my modern maturity—I now see it all as playful unreliable narrative at my expense—a kind of Pale Fire summer back then—when I was eighteen, impressionable and naïve—young enough to be tempted but old enough to know better…
My job as Faulkner’s “private secretary” was very interesting—writers are, of course, complex and fascinating people. The ongoing various day to day secretarial tasks, hours of typing and retyping manuscripts, rummaging through filing cabinets and attempting to organize all the paperwork Mr. Faulkner wanted organized—well, all this kept me very busy that long hot summer I spent there at Rowan Oaks. Mrs. Faulkner and the children were visiting relatives—and so I didn’t have an opportunity to meet them. Instead there was just Mr. Faulkner himself—lording over his manor like some proud plantation Delta Bourbon aristocrat—wise and weathered by years of Mississippi maturity.
Faulkner was like Colonel Sutpen—with his ambitious plans for a Snopes Dynasty even before it actually happened. The great literary historian and economist Montgomery Ward Snopes himself has suggested that it was Faulkner who single-handedly created the Snopes Dynasty that now rules the known universe…
But of course—Faulkner had help founding this dynasty. That’s why Weasel and Pretty Boy Snopes were like his right hand—not only procurers of fine whiskey—but also precursors for the New Snopes Man—the vanguard of Faulkner’s dynastic push into the “delta moment”—the power behind the Snopes throne…
I must admit that Faulkner’s metaphysics is completely mysterious to me—I have no idea what the mysterious “delta moment” is—in fact I still have a difficult enough time just reading his novels and short stories. It was extremely difficult for me as a young naïve college undergraduate back then—and it still is now whenever I open one of his books and contemplate a super-sentence a hundred pages long…
Just wading through that first section of The Sound and the Fury—those long convoluted labyrinthine soliloquies written by Benjy the child-idiot—pages and pages seemingly signifying nothing—getting lost in it—sinking into it—the vast intertextual Sargasso Sea that was Yoknapatawpha. I once asked Mr. Faulkner how he wrote a la Barthe—that strange stream of supposed child-idiot consciousness—there in that beginning Benjy section—and he smiled at me. He lit his pipe that evening—looking out the window—like he did sometimes before explaining something to me—that he knew I wouldn’t be able to understand… Then he’d say “Forget it, son.”
The trouble usually was that these so-called off-the-cuff critiques usually ended up just as complex as the actual writing itself. He’d say Mississippi Zen things—like he didn’t write books he lived them. Or things like he wasn’t the author of the book—the child-idiot Benjy wrote it all… And then naturally like the sucker I was—I’d ask how could Benjy be the actual author when Benjy was just a child-idiot and didn’t know how to read or write? How could a child-idiot write a book—when he couldn’t even put his shoes on or go for a walk without getting lost?
That’s when Faulkner would just shrug—saying something like Benjy didn’t have to read or write. The important thing was living in the “delta moment”—that the delta moment was a big black Cadillac. Fast enough to take Benjy and me for a long ride thru Yoknapatawpha county all the way down to hell and back—“At least conversationally dontchaknow,” he’d say…
“You see how the delta moment works?” The next question being, of course, well, but Mr. Faulkner—what’s the “delta moment”? Is it like Proust’s moment? Like Joyce’s epiphany? Hemingway’s moment of truth?
Faulkner would just sit there with his eyes closed—sipping his whiskey, shaking his head looking rather fatherly about it all. Knowing I was the studious type—that someday I wouldn’t understand what he was saying even more than now. I’d read too much—too many books. Only to mire myself in what others said—getting dragged down by other writer’s fictions. But that until then there was still hope maybe—I was still somewhat virgin & stupid & idiotic like Benjy. just a another hopeless college boy “basket case”—not having enough experience with the word, the world, the way the world & the word intertexted themselves—the weird way words make worlds within worlds to understand what the Cheshire cat meant. I was kinda like Benjy—finding myself lost down there in the rabbit hole—which is exactly where I should be—in a constant state of naïve bewilderment & innocence—before the obvious & inevitable conscious discursive denouement began…
“Well, kid, we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Faulkner would say to me. Such candid times were rare—looking back on them now—I sometimes think they were the least insightful things he’d say to me—hinting at nothing but the useless sound & fury of words & language & writing. Things that would flummox me more & more—because to be quite honest with you, I didn’t understand myself much then either—which, well, according to Faulkner is exactly where I should be—dealing with such matters I’d find out about sooner or later down the line—were how the unconscious worked or rather didn’t work according to our waking expectations. “There ain’t no hurry,” he’d say.
I never really understood him—how exactly to take what he said or catch onto where he was coming from. Other than he seemed to enjoy flummoxing me with his off-the-wall comments—more than he did enlightening or straightening me out one way or another. Like the quips about Benjy—tidbits coming out of the blue that I’d ponder and pout about for days and nights, thinking his quips had either nothing or everything to do with being an author or famous writer. Almost as if he’d given up on explaining anything to anybody anymore—even himself. Other than writing and talking to himself—entertaining himself & his fellow fictional characters with long rambling conversations late at night—sipping his whiskey in the Rowan Oaks calm, cool evening twilight. His Sutpen mansion looming around him in the dark—the darkness like some Black Hole or celestial Greater Magellanic Cloud—sucking everything & everybody into its Solaris oceanic depths. As if Faulkner was trying to get back to The Sound and the Fury moment way back when—when he gave up on NYC publishers and all that—just writing for himself & what he wanted to write about back then. No tour de force achievement planned & plotted & connived over—not wanting to make a buck on it like Sanctuary—worrying about paying off bills & taking care of niggling finances.
Well, it was like something like that—him trying to remember & enter again some kind of existential denouement not-caring back then—that “delta moment” triggered by Caddy’s dirty, muddy shorts up there in the pear tree that day of the funeral—her leaning & trying to peer into the upstairs bedroom at what the body of a dead person looked like & why all the commotion about such a frail, little old lady asleep on her bed up there?
While down below Quentin, Jason & Benjy were looking up at her—feeling the mixed emotions of death & sexuality, incestuous love & even the hints of miscegenational lust that pervaded all Southern boys growing up in Mississippi post-antebellum days back then—growing up in a society dominated by slave owners, slave labor, slave plantation progeny & planter mixed-blood offspring. Like the Sutpen & the Faulkner families—both imagined & real…
It was like a once-in-a-lifetime genital-genealogical-generational gestalt that had always been lurking in the back of Faulkner’s mind—that it was totally, unforgivably, uncontrollably, involuntarily, unconsciously there—waiting like Proust’s sudden insight triggered by tea, marmalade & hashish—the kind of para-surrealistic moment that comes outta the blue without it being called forth—without any magic talisman, fairytale “Open Sesame” password or key to the kingdom. It was totally unconscious like dreaming—whatever that is & wherever dreaming comes from—and whatever happens when dreaming happens—and whether one remembers that dream or not—whether maybe or not it’s a lucid dream—and you’re sitting at your desk like him—typing away at your Ouija keyboard—trying to get it all down before you forget it?
Something maybe clicked in Faulkner’s head that only he knew about—something lucid & dreamlike & oneric that changed him in ways that maybe turned him into Benjy at that very moment back then—or maybe Jason & Quentin later on—lost in some kind of Yoknapatawpha limpid lucidity? All three of the boys puzzled & wondering what death & sexuality meant to them back then—just like it puzzled Caddy up in the pear tree with her muddy drawers. It was a mystery then & it was a mystery now. Things happen that way now and then if you know what I mean—the reason I say this is the last time I asked Faulkner about how he wrote TSATF, he put down his drink, shrugged and simply said: “Benjy is me—the boy I’ve always been & wanted to be…”
I’d sip my coffee—saying to myself here we go again…
Faulkner would say—“I wanted to be Benjy—I wanted to forget about everything and everybody—I didn’t particularly want to write anymore—not for other people anyway—not even for myself—I’d got stuck with a cement writer’s cinderblock on top of my head—for at least 4 goddamn years trying to please others rather than myself—and I didn’t wanna do that anymore—I wanted to be a recluse—live in my Mansion & mind my own business—but I didn’t wanna just live in a cork-lined bedroom like Miss Proust—I wanted to remember my Family history and do some storytelling about it—I wanted to live inside it & tell stories about it to myself—somewhere where I could create my own genealogy and dynasty or whatever you wanna call it—whenever Yoknapatawpha was & wanted to be—I wanted to live inside its apocryphal moment—the designed Yoknapatawpha moment—not somebody else’s moment—I wanted to live in the Mississippi moment—my own mythic moment and not somebody else’s fictional moment—I wanted it to be totally & completely me like Benjy sitting here—dictating moment by moment his stream of consciousness—I wanted to be a young child-idiot boy like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer again—whether it was discursively totally naïve and impossible or not—my own impromptu Mississippi moment—like Twain’s moment or Proust’s moment —but my moment was gonna begin fresh & virgin & stupid like Benjy’s moment—totally into it whether apocalyptically-awkward like Benjy or sexually-awkward like Quentin or paranoid-awkward like Jason—some kind of drunk & delirious moment outside of myself—wanting to get to know myself better than anybody else ever could—obliviously obliterated by it if necessarily—which can be very lucid and revealing if you give your Yoknapatawpha imagination a decent run for its money. It likes to get into the mind of a child-idiot writer every once in awhile—just to see what a fool like me can come up with…”
I’d nod knowingly—as if I understood what he meant…
“So, kid, that’s how it happens—during a brief moment of complete and utterly oblivious lucidity you’re sitting here at your desk just like I’m doing—sitting right here where I’m sitting now—that’s when Benjy Compson leaned out of Time and said to me—the things that got me writing again—starting with his naïve sexual version Caddy’s dirty drawers—then the more sophisticated sexual feelings Quentin had for her & Dalton Ames getting in his two-bits—the things Quentin wanted to happen there on the bridge—whether he knew it or not—and then Quentin’s young undergraduate love affair séances in the Harvard dorm with Shreve McCannon—the two of them becoming four & the four becoming two back then in the Civil War—Miss Rosa & what was up there in the attic of the old Sutpen mansion—the feelings Henry Sutpen had for his octoroon half-brother Charles Bon the Beautiful at Ole Miss—the sex Judith Sutpen was denied but then later consummated with Bon’s handsome young View Carré son Etienne when both his father & mother were gone—what Henry did up there in the attic making love with Jim Bond (Bon)—the way Clytie made sure that Henry survived up there after losing Charles Bon the Beautiful—the whole decadent, perverted Sutpen soap-opera that I acted-out for myself apocryphally—performing it philoprogenitively here at this desk—as if I were Thomas Sutpen himself designing my own Delta Dynasty here at my own mansion—just like you see me now—sitting here, looking at you & telling you the story of my so-called Southern Garden of Eden—and how the Deep South ended up East of Eden—losing the War Between the States—enduring Snopesian Reconstruction—becoming who we are now—and what I am sitting here tonight talking with you…”
I blushed and looked away—I knew Faulkner had a penchant for young pussy—it was the “bone” of contention in his unhappy marriage—the uneasiness of marrying Ellen & having a young Caddy step-daughter around the house—the reason for his love affair with all the young beautiful woman that came into his life—back when he was screenwriting in Hollywood—and then later when he was sought out by Carpenter & other young lady writers seeking professional guidance—who got courted by him, seduced & later some of them becoming his lover. All of which was fairly well-known even then—with all the various psycho-biographies like Frederick Karl’s and studious MLA & Yoknapatawpha conferences about him. Sanctuary with Popeye, Temple & Miss Reba’s whorehouse up there in Memphis—they weren’t too subtle giveaways about Faulkner’s lifestyle & sexual proclivities. Weasel Snopes telling me all about it & then some—when he’d come over to Rowan Oaks with the booze & dope. And sometimes with a cute chick—to sweeten the pot.
Weasel Snopes was the Huckleberry Finn in the Faulkner entourage—his twin brother Pretty Boy was a little more sophisticated but not much. Weasel was always hanging around somewhat intoxicated and always willing to talk about his girlfriends—that’s why Faulkner liked him… Weasel was a kindred lost soul in the Mississippi libidinal wilderness—very stream of consciousness about it like Benjy Compson—with Weasel always slightly loaded most of the time—with lewd lava-lamps for eyeballs—making me dizzy just looking at him…
Weasel was always bringing over his girlfriends to Rowan Oaks—to impress the great Southern writer with their big tits—letting him get a whiff of modern Southern teen spirit—something Faulkner still got off on & enjoyed having around—not bad for a shambling old drunken wreck like he was by then—burned out like Schigolch in Pandora’s Box—one would never think this rambling shy man—could or would or would want to be—anything other than what he did so well—being a writer, staying drunk as a skunk all the time in between Novels—enjoying what Popeye did with Alabama in bed with Temple—hanging tightly onto the brass-bed railing—as Weasel lewdly & athletically banged his girlfriend in Faulkner’s upstairs bedroom…
That’s how our conversations usually ended—they always ended up in the air like that. I didn’t know until later about a lot of things—I was so caught up in my own Mississippi mise-en-scene melodramas—pondering the facts of life like every young college kid does—thinking that next semester I’d surely understand more about life—and then when that next semester would come around—I’d usually understand less than the one before—all of which was just a waste of time—the whole logical dumb discursive progressive month-by-month day-to-day hope for enlightenment that higher education is supposed to bring about to young men like me—some kind of calm, slowly-evolving generous gift of the gods—a cool cerebral Athenian intellectual understanding of the world—rather than, of course, the unknowable Memphis Sphinx it really was…
I wanted it to be a literary thing—despite the dog-eat-dog Darwinian beasts howling at the edge of campus with careers waiting in the wings & all those important employment responsibilities—while I hid in halls & closets of academe with its politics of departmental publish or perish & all that—while out there the real world something else waited for me with its plans—but that was all in the meantime & the nebulous future—I’d surely become a truly enlightened human being after awhile—surely that was one of the gifts academe would bestow on me—for all my studying and working hard—like down here in Jefferson all those summers working for Mr. Faulkner…
But already I knew too much about Caddy—and about mythical beautiful young Persephone really wasn’t—but I still simply couldn’t imagine an adolescent Angel of Paradise with dirty-drawers—whether up there in some old twisted mythical Garden of Eden tree—or some ancient troubled, cursed Mississippi Family—Negro-rooted with a deeply ingrained slavery past—which supposedly begat Faulkner’s shadow family—some ancient all-knowing, forbidden Tree of Knowledge—that given birth to this shambling little Mississippi man sitting in front of me—this wise old man sitting there drunk full of seemingly senseless sound and fury—this great writer with his Nobel Prize sitting on top of the refrigerator—this sad somewhat useless sack of Mississippi delta mud—that decided one day to get up and walk around—and see what the world was like…
Faulkner wasn’t exactly the loquacious type—unless he was intoxicated & feeling loose—even then he seemed constantly bored with himself—enjoying instead what others were saying or doing—especially Weasel and Pretty Boy—vicariously & unnaturally enjoying the cute young Mississippi things like Theodosia Snopes who loved to come over to Rowan Oaks and party—plus all the younger hippie versions of Popeye who came over, of course—as well as the moody Mississippi ménage-a-trois of Roth Carothers Edmonds, Butch Broussard and Butch’s bewitching twin sister—the lovely threesome living down there by Frenchman’s Bend—in a dilapidated old fishing shack by the river—sometimes visiting them during their summer soirees—secretly enjoying the intense soap-operas of all that incestuous mixed-up love-affair stuff that only three-ways seem to keep going…
Other young denizens of the delta like Creole Snopes from New Orleans would visit—renewing their decadent Mississippi roots—returning to romance or reminisce about old delta boyfriends and girlfriends like Alligator Boy did every once in awhile again & again—Desperate Housewife Snopes—as well as Jimmy Dean & Billy Budd Snopes the sexy Siamese Delta Twins—incestuously conjoined together at the hip living out their kinky life down there by the Tallahatchie River—down there in the dingy rundown Yazoo Trailer Court—built on the ruins of Sutpen’s Hundred—a fitting place for a continuing chicken pulp fiction melodrama—the ongoing never-ending sullen southern Novel—the white-trash dinge déjà vu Southern story—that goes so well with Temple Drake’s revenge…
You're doing some great stuff here.
ReplyDeleteI hesitate to comment on your Camptown Races riff in light of all the other more serious stuff you have here, but oh it's too funny!
The other stuff is probably too serious. Parody tho needs a sense of humor as Faulkner sayz. The endless dark humor of "As I Lay Dying" is like Camptown Races...funny & satirical. Each of the more than 50 short chapters has its own POV dishing the nightmare black comedy that dead Addie Bundren puts her so-so family thru. And she's no saint either. :-)
ReplyDelete