MFS Modern Fiction Studies

In Gay Faulkner, Phillip Gordon offers an engaging sustained exploration of the importance of gay men in William Faulkner’s life and the pervasiveness of queer—though not necessarily overtly gay—presences in his writings across the entirety of his career. Gordon leaves incontrovertible that Stark Young, William Alexander Percy, William Spratling, William Odiorne, Lyle Saxon, and especially Ben Wasson impacted Faulkner’s early adulthood and career. Gordon likewise surveys Faulkner’s later variegated interactions with gay and bisexual men as diverse as Alexander Woollcott, Carl Van Vechten, and Clark Gable; documents Faulkner’s homophobic responses to Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, Thornton Wilder, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams; and explores Faulkner’s tangential relationships with less prominent younger gay writers such as Charles Jackson, Thomas Hal Phillips, and Hubert Creekmore. Especially in the first half of this discussion, drawing on Joseph Blotner’s papers and performing a masterful close reading of Wasson’s memoir, Gordon details how Faulkner’s biographers—and Blotner in particular—systematically minimized these queer men’s significances.

The heart of Gay Faulkner, however, is Gordon’s wide-ranging queer readings of Faulkner’s texts, readings that pass over the major novels of the 1930s (except for As I Lay Dying) to focus on early works, including “Jealousy,” “Out of Nazareth,” “Divorce in Naples,” “A Portrait of Elmer,” Mosquitoes, and Soldiers’ Pay, and on late works, including “Golden Land,” “A Courtship,” and the Snopes trilogy. For Gordon, who is critical of “the anxiety model of Faulkner and sexuality” (70) that Minrose Gwin, John Duvall, and I, among others, have deployed, the earliest works frankly celebrate recurring gay presences. Things become more complicated in texts centralizing soldiers attempting to reintegrate into small-town civilian life after World War I. Gordon argues that it is because Faulkner self-consciously sought “to muddle the two personae—the soldier and the homosexual” (99) that his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, which “starts among men with their mutual idolization, jealousies, and sympathies for each other” (122), interrogates postwar struggles to discipline stateside queerness.

For Gordon, As I Lay Dying closely resembles Soldiers’ Pay in that the Bundrens’ tale “is really just a novel about a wounded soldier returning home from war” (115). Gordon reads this soldier, Darl Bundren, as not merely queer—as others within the novel repeatedly [End Page 605] designate him—but also as a gay man desperate to bond with like-minded others. The aftermath of Darl’s setting the Gillespies’ barn on fire is thus a failed opportunity to cruise the owner and his teenage son in their nakedness: “We are not over-reading, however, to imagine that he [Darl] is crying because, ever so briefly, he might have forged a connection with Mack, or with any other man in this rural environment” (166). Working against Darl’s desires is his family’s inexorable and ultimately successful removal of the disruptive “homosexuality embodied in their queer brother” (151). To bolster this reading, Gordon characterizes the novel’s ending as saturated with procreative normative heterosexuality and minimizes other queer presences, such as Jewel’s homoerotically inflected near-bestiality and own disinterest in heterosexuality.

If Darl is the sacrificial queer man who cannot be culturally integrated, V. K. Ratliff from the Snopes trilogy (and other texts) is the triumphal queer man who crafts for himself a meaningful small-town existence and is empowered by his mobility. He is “a recognizable gay figure in the mid-1950s Cold War context and serves to critique the extreme conservatism of the cultural moment” (250). The study’s last scrutinized figure, Ratliff prompts Gordon to claim that “this cosmos of Faulkner’s own is a gay cosmos and the heart of Yoknapatawpha is a gay voice still talking beyond the end of its world and into ours” (232).

Biographical influences and literary representations are springboards for Gordon’s provocative arguments about Faulkner’s life: He considered himself such an outsider that he not only embraced queer companions and culture...