|
Researching the Henry Faulkner book: the whole strange journey (Written for an alternative weekly August, 2005. This article, and the one following it that appeared in a Key West magazine, were based on researching the book, material covered in the essay by that name elsewhere in this web site.) By Charles House So, it had come to this. The ultra respectable accountant and me wading through a rotting pile of goat and cat piss stained paper and detritus like refugees at a central American dump. Swatting at flies, holding our breaths against the intake of hell spoors, keeping an eye on the broken door lest another cow wander in and add to the malodorous milieu. I'd wanted documents, and with God and Greene Settle as my witness, I was up to my ass in documents. Paper, anyhow. There was, actually, a problem: the stuff wasn't mine. I was just getting started, and hadn't caught the fever that afflicts biographers and turns them into crazed criminals. I let it lie, out there in that little bluegrass house called Sweet Harmonica of the South, exposed to the elements and cow piles and rats, while I struggled in my moral straightjacket. That lasted about a day. I stole back and, bent over like a figure in a Brughel painting, spent an hour sifting through moldy mounds of magazines and vet bills and assorted duns and lists and wads of correspondence with the weird and merely strange. I wore no gloves. Not even a breathing mask hid my identity. I was who I was: a criminal biographer, shifty eyed but defiant. I felt no remorse. If I hadn't rescued those copies of "Esquire" and "Life" with Henry smiling like a mule eating saw briars on Falling Timber Branch (yes, there was such a place; he left it to Tennessee Williams), they wouldn't have lasted a fortnight as we biographers say. Alas, I didn't find what I'd come after. That was locked up in a lawyer's safe, a Lexingtonian who'd suffered through Henry's legal woes for years. The attorney and I eyed each other warily, much the way Bradley Picklesiemer and I had each other when I came down from the mountains to the bluegrass and announced that I, a straight arrow who'd never even met my man, was going to write a biography of Henry Lawrence Faulkner, Lexington's own Peter Pan, or, as a Louisville art critic called him, an "eccentric goat keeper, cafe minstrel, mad leprechaun of high society and ornamental pillar of the gay community." Gay community. Geeze, what have I done? Not to be outdone, I responded with my own gibberish and called Henry "a living, breathing, 24-hour-a-day work of art, a whirling masterpiece who left nearly everyone he encountered coughing in a cloud of aesthetic dust." So there, haughty Courier-Journal art critics. If Bradley was impressed I never heard. Same with Henry's lawyer. No matter. I'd tasted blood. I began a campaign of pestering, stalking, calling and generally worrying the bejesus out of the lawyer until one day, months into my quest, he opened up his conference room and, there to my astonishment and dread were real footnote-worthy paper-and-ink documents, facts and factoids of every conceivable description stacked almost literally to the ceiling. No one had ever been more wrong than me and Greene Settle, who agreed at the start that, since Henry Faulkner would not be the type to have left much of a paper trail, it would have to be an anecdotal biography-what people who thought they knew Henry condescended to tell me. Before a year was over I would determine that the life of Henry Faulkner was documented by more paper than in the Reagan library. My old sparring partner, the lawyer, was key. When he obtained permission from one of Henry's beneficiaries to wade through those documents, and wrote out this high-toned bit of legal flim-flammery practically ordering the federal government to turn over what they had on Henry-ditto the Kentucky child welfare authorities-I didn't need documents, I needed rest. I high-tailed it to Key West, where Lexingtonian Gary Blum and his wife, Cindy, were instrumental in pointing me to the usual suspects who knew Henry. I finagled, through shameless flattery and duplicity, a dinner with Tennessee Williams, who told me tales of his and Henry's adventures in exotic places like Owensboro, Kentucky and Taormina, Sicily. Sicily? Did the lawyer need an investigator? Turns out he did, since a property in Taormina was the only one that Henry left in his will that couldn't be verified. So it was off to Sicily, where things were possibly stranger even than that dinner with Tennessee (whose grotesquely ugly bull dog took an unseemly liking to my pants leg much to the great playwright's amusement). I met staid English lady Daphne Phelps, who Henry actually had lured to Lexington for a party she would later write about in "A House in Sicily," finding the goings on delightfully strange and Faulkneresque, and, to her mind, Kentuckyesque. When I inquired about Henry's property in Taormina, the gentleman I was given an appointment with the next day took the first flight to Austria. Ms. Phelps, in her book written 17 years later, made veiled references to this fellow, whom she guessed had beat her out of the property Henry had left her. At least, she suggested, she'd had a lovely time in Lexington, and that, well, maybe that was enough. Such were the feelings of countless people I met in the year and a half of my research, everyone from Lexington's Sweet Evening Breeze to multi best-selling author James Leo Herlihy: no matter how much trouble Henry was, in the end it seemed worth it just to have known him. (Herlihy called him "one of the most bizarre and gifted men I've ever known.") The writers loved his poetry, the artists his paintings, the general public their Henry sightings. Out there, from LA to Palm Beach, Key West to New York, Henry Faulkner was and is known as an American artist of note. In Lexington, he's remembered as that, too, but more than that, as a work of art himself. But (of course) there's more to it than that. Commenting on the story of Henry's life, perhaps novelist Harry Crews put it best when he said Henry was "an extraordinary man, a man who was either stone crazy or a genius or both. I think probably both. His life makes for great reading if you can stand the pain, for like many great lives, it is filled with hurt clear to the bone."
Faulkner biography back in print By Mark Howells Back in print is "The Outrageous Life of Henry Faulkner" by Charles House, a book that James Leo Herlihy called "a stunning re-creation of one of the most bizarre and gifted men I've ever known." Originally published in 1988 by the University of Tennessee Press, House's biography of Key West's maddest artist, Henry Lawrence Faulkner, has aged like fine wine. It's a crazy story and it almost drove House (author of the novel "After Captiva") crazy to write it. Faulkner was one of those powerhouse forces of nature that one so rarely meets. A poet and a painter, he was born in 1924 and died in his mid 50s. His bohemian existence in New York, Los Angeles, Key West and Sicily was as flamboyant as his childhood in rural Kentucky was traumatic. He was, said House, "a most peculiar man" who distilled the Appalachian experience as no other Applalchian has, "who hurt from it more than anyone else in literature or in fact." As a child, Faulkner was a ward of Kentucky child welfare agencies. As an adult, his psychiatric stays at St. Elizabeths Hospital introduced him to fellow inmate Ezra Pound. (Author's note: Only one stay.) Faulkner always brought a bourbon-drinking goat named Alice to parties in Key West, which is how he is generally remembered here. But to his friend Tennessee Williams, who made him the subject of his last play, Faulkner was a "brilliant" poet. "Henry was considered a primitive artist, a sort of deranged Grandma Moses, in no small part because of his persona," writes House. "He himself went to great lengths to perpetuate the myth. I knew right away that something was wrong with that picture. I knew I was looking at the work of a serious artist." It was not an easy book for House to research. "If you are not gay and you interview Bradley Picklesimer, for instance, it's like two aliens circling each other." House dug through all of Henry Faulkner's stuff after he died, "the check stubs, parking tickets, sales receipts, notes, poems, thoughts, letters, newspaper and magazine clippings, magazines and books, photos, drawings and studies for paintings and paintings themselves--damaged by piss and water, torn, rotted and smeared--articles, notices, harangues, threats, mea culpas, whinnings, explanations, exultations, prescriptions, directions, bank records, IRS reports, gallery brochures and sales records, shipping manifests, psychiatric records from three major hospitals, police and FBI reports, orphanage records, home placement agency records and narratives, lists and lists of lists. It was dirty, moldy, smelly, generally unpleasant to handle and probably unhealthy, but wading through it proved the most exciting thing I've ever done." Herlihy, author of "Midnight Cowboy," "All Fall Down," and other best sellers, of which several movies were made, knew Faulkner better than anybody, largely through their acquaintance in Key West in the 1970s. Herlihy, says House, "was the only one who had been in Henry's head, even his soul." He had completed a set of notes for a book he planed to write about Henry, but it was never published. Herlihy did, however, send the notes to House, "complete with a long, emotional correspondence with Henry wherein Herlihy asked Henry questions and Henry answered them. When that package came, I felt like I was a witness to something I may not have been meant to see." In researching the biography in Key West, House met with Capt. Tony Tarracino who screened for him a movie of his life (Stuart Whitman played Tony) with a cameo appearance by Henry Faulkner. But, said House, "there was little hard information of the kind I wanted until, sifting through back issues in the office of Solares Hill, I ran across a story that contained a wealth to time-line information about Henry's early days." Thanks to Key West's culture czar and society matron of the time, Floy Thompson, House also succeeded in meeting Tennessee Williams at the playwright's house on Duncan St. "I was standing in Tennessee's living room, sneaking a look at the book titles and admiring a Henry Faulkner painting, when he appeared behind me unannounced, quiet as a cat. He was wearing a floor length brown toga. Tennessee told me that Henry was the subject of his last play, The Lingering Hour. Then he told me about going to the White House two years earlier where President Carter presented him with the Medal of Freedom. He took Henry with him, he said. To the White House? The very same, said Tennessee. 'He behaved splendidly.'" Tennessee Williams would take Faulkner with him to London, then on to Taormina, Sicily, until Faulkner died in December 1981.(Author's note: Actually Tennessee insisted that he went with Henry, not the other way arond.) After Williams' death in 1983, House tried to find Williams' last play, "The Lingering Hour," supposedly about Faulkner. "I made inquiries about the play but found out little except that one or two other people had heard that a play by that title existed. I didn't think much more about it after my Faulkner book was published in 1988. When I decided to put the book back in print this year, I treid to find out more." Williams scholars including Dr. Allean Hale at the University of Illinois, Dr. Annette Saddick of New York City College of Technology, and Tom Keith, editor of New Directions, confirmed that only a fragment exists and that it is "the most apocalyptic of Tennessee's final plays, reflecting his growing despair," said House, "and presaging his death. This preoccupatrion with death and the sorry state of humanity coincided almost exactly with Henry's own sense of doom." An essay by Linda Dorff, published in a Yale theater magazine and entitled "Babylon Now: Tennessee Williams' Apocalypses," mentions The Lingering Hour. Two pages of the play included in the publication indicate that Tennessee was likely a character called August and Faulkner was Steven. Here's how House describes what those pages say: "People are wandering around in a town square within site of a volcano that is apparently spewing toxic gasses and threatening to blast everyone and thing away. Scientists, who have taken some compound that makes them immune to the gasses, are discussing what to do, how many townspeople and tourists they can save, if any. A few may be vacated from the beach far below the town, or maybe not. "Steven, apparently a painter, in a shimmering gold Sulka robe, is oblivious to the scientists' orders. August tells Steven the whole scenario is quite a show and that the mountain is likely to blow any minute. They discuss an acquaintance who has just had a heart attack after a naked encounter with Steven's apparent friend, Roberto. "The discussion goes on with August suggesting that he is a playwright and it appears that this may be a play within a play, or that life itself is just a play and the audience is fully aware of it. Or maybe not. What we are sure of is that an explosive hell is about to be let loose on humanity." "The Outrageous Life of Henry Faulkner" is available at www.pubthis.com ("edgy books for edgy people"). Says novelist Harry Crews: "Great reading if you can stand the pain, for like many great lives it is filled with hurt clear to the bone."
By Heather Castro The Lexington Herald-Leader (7/24/05) Chasing butterflies, unicorns and goats can be an exhaustive and elusive pastime. For Deborah Miller, owner of Miller Fine Art and Framing, it's becoming a joyfully obsessive project. Organizing an annual Henry Faulkner retrospective can do that to a person. After his death in 1981 at the hands of a drunken driver, Lexington's enigmatic painter evolved into something more of myth than matter. As his works became dearer, and more valuable, to collectors, and the stories of his life and adventures began to gain more momentum, Miller envisioned a show to remind Lexington, and the country, of the talent that accompanied the stories. "I wanted people to look beyond the personality," she says. This is the third year Faulkner paintings have occupied the entirety of Miller Fine Art and Framing, 501 East High Street. After starting the first retrospective with a large assortment of paintings from one collector, Miller has watched the show pick up steam within the circle of Faulkner's friends and patrons. Everyone wants to participate and exhibit portions of his or her collection. This year's show is no exception, opening last month with selections from five collectors. One work in particular, Peaceable Kingdom, brings not only the magic of a whimsical Faulkner painting, but a fairly impressive and complete provenance. Purchased in the 1960s, the painting is owned by the daughter of Franklin Hemingway, a cousin of famed writer Ernest Hemingway. One of the few works in the exhibit that is available for sale, Peaceable Kingdom is displayed with an original copy of the critical review written when the painting was first shown. Also available is the original sales catalog of the exhibit at which the painting premiered. All of which makes this work unique within the muddled world of Faulkner paintings. Miller herself has trouble following the timeline of Faulkner's erratic painting history. "Like any artist who has some success with a certain subject, he repeated whatever sold, several times. I have a show catalog that lists Noah's Ark, but I know from the dimensions listed that this painting isn't the one," Miller says, pointing to the wall and to a piece also titled Noah's Ark. So are there plans for a catalog of Faulkner's works? Miller smiles at the thought. "I would like to see a coffee table book one day. Something with logic or merit for (the order of the paintings) to start making sense. A catalog -- that would be nice, wouldn't it?" (This is one of several article planned for the site. Stay tuned!) |