Chapter One: An Eroding Image Henry Faulkner sat pondering his demise. The intimation of destruction was almost palpable, like that of an animal who knows of an impending earthquake. For several months it had affected his appearance, his personality, his poetry. It worked in league with the worsening pain from his various ailments, with the fears that accompany the loss of youth, with a diminishing capacity for childlike wonder ­ his chief ally till now ­ so that there was an urgency lately to beat the clock, to get all that poetry out before it was too late. He wrote on anything handy: on the backs of feed-store bills, on envelopes and scrapes of paper, on placemats from Le Café Chant in Lexington, Kentucky, where he sat this night of December 3, 1981, with his latest poem. Entering the restaurant, a member of Lexington's café society might have nudged her escort: "Oh look. That's Henry Faulkner. . .the artist." A familiar whisper. There had been a lot of publicity. Especially after the mid-sixties, when he'd finally joined the world after his acceptance by the hippies, who had shown that things were at last getting weird enough for even him to join up. Since then he had been the most ostentatiously visible painter to grace the art scene of a number of cities in the Midwest and up and down the East Coast, a successful and often critically acclaimed artist whose work continued to be in demand with decorators and serious collectors alike, and whose outrageous behavior had made his appearance de rigueur at any gallery opening of his works. Indeed, as work of art, his persona often eclipsed his paintings. He had gotten there the hard way, had overcome years of being at war with a society that looked upon him as "a thing," as he once wrote. He had survived back-alley beatings and hateful slurs and degenerate flings in nearly every bug city in the country, to go on to become a darling of the Kentucky horse set, a pet of the Palm Beach culturati, a friend of the rich and famous from coast to coast. Fey little hillbilly Henry Faulkner, social guerrilla, Key West legend, Taormina troubadour. . . the image had carried him far. But this night at Le Café Chantant it was obvious that the image was tarnished. At fifty-seven, with his half-glasses and tousled hair and his drab, rumpled clothes, Faulkner looked more professorial than artistic. He sat alone at his table, tweedy and frayed, an air of eloquent decay about him-the doomed poet in solitary negotiation with his muse. Perhaps he had acquired some of Ezra Pound's aura back when he'd sat and learned at the master's feet when both were inmates-sly fox crazies-at Washington's St. Elizabeth's Hospital. It had been in painting, not poetry, that Pound had most influenced him. But now, with intimations of death eating at him like the skin cancer on his back, he had turned to poetry more than ever, as if that gloomy medium was better suited to one whose demise was just around the corner. He was not known as a poet. To those who knew him personally, that is, those few who knew anything at all about the man behind the carefully cultivated image, he was a painter who happened to write poetry on the side. Poetry was thought to be just another outlet, like his exuberant blues singing, for the artistic pressure that always seemed about to blow him apart. His two best friends knew better. Tennessee Williams, his friend for over twenty years, thought him a "brilliant" poet, as did James Leo Herlihy, author of such novels as All Fall Down and Midnight Cowboy. It is significant that the two people who best knew the man behind the image were major writers. Books, of course, are written by, and about, the likes of Herlihy and Williams. Rarely do the stories o people like Henry Faulkner, who hover about the periphery of the great, get written about at length. They remain shadowy, vaguely significant figures who sometimes pop up tantalizingly as inside stuff in literary memoirs-Harry Crosby in Malcom Cowley's Exile's Return, and later, when Geoffery Wolf elevated Crosby to a biographer's subject, Alistair, the over-elegant aesthete who graced Paris's expatriate literary community in the twenties, in Crosby's life. But both Williams and Herlihy were so taken with Henry that he became a subject for them as well as a friend. Shortly before Henry died, Williams, whose characters are among the most memorable in American literature, had just finished a play about him, tentatively titled "The Lingering Hour," about "the ultimate artist," in Tennessee's words. Before he stopped writing fiction, Herlihy, one of America's most eloquent chroniclers of marginal man, had begun preliminary research for a book about Henry's life. It would not be an exaggeration to say that none of the characters created by these writers approached the richness, originality, and pathos of the real-life Henry Lawrence Faulkner. He was one of those rare creatures, who sometimes emerge from art movements-the "happenings" of the sixties, the Dada madness of the twenties come to mind-a living, breathing twenty-four-hour-a-day work of art, a whirling masterpiece who left nearly everyone he encountered coughing in a trail of aesthetic dust. His behavior became his trademark, more so even that the fantastical goats and butterflies and unicorns that made his paintings instantly distinguishable from those of any other artist. Much of his success stemmed from his understanding that his patrons considered the persona of the artist an integral part of the work of art they were about to purchase. There is evidence that he learned this lesson early, back in the late fifties, in shows in Cincinnati, Palm Beach, and New York. At first he drew attention by seeming to personify the graphic dreams that were his paintings. He walked like the levitating rooster of one of his paintings, affecting a transcendental strut that gallery owners and patrons found irresistible; he looked like the goat with the Mona Lisa Smile of another painting. Then came Alice, the real goat who accompanied him and became symbol, and who was well known to patrons at many galleries in the East-both as subject of hundreds of paintings and as bourbon-drinking mascot. For years almost every newspaper review of his openings had, if not a picture of Alice sharing the limelight with Henry, at least prominent mention of her in the article. Artist as art-the Salvador Dali syndrome run amok. Henry hadn't decided to become a painter, at least in a professional sense, until he was nearly thirty years old, at about the time of his encounter with Pound. His serious labors in the conventional arts prior to that had been as a would-be novelist in New York. Then, after four years of art schools, in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Cincinnati, and a year's study in Italy and Sicily, he had attained success with remarkable ease. By the early sixties he was garnering good reviews from newspaper and magazine critics and making enough money in gallery sales alone to live without resorting to the indignity of a job. But if success had come quickly and had allowed him to circumvent the stereotypical fate of the Starving Artist, he had paid his dues in the torments of his role as a Work of Art. His credentials had also been earned at enormous expense in his childhood. Before he was three his sensitive nature, aggravated by a volatile father, had been so intensified by the slow death of his mother as to create pathetic insecurity. Then, he'd been taken crying and terrified to an orphanage where he watched the rest of his large family disintegrate before him, scattered by child welfare placements from coast to coast. After two attempts to place him in foster care failed because the prospective families were unable to cope with his strange behavior and sickly nature, he was exiled to a remote hollow in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. There he struggled to develop an identity in a climate of extreme tension between, on the one hand, the encouragement of an immature mountain woman who acted as if she had gotten a girl at the orphanage instead of a boy-and was glad of it-and, on the other, the taunts of his backwoods neighbors and peers who vilified him for the behavior encouraged by his foster mother. The celebrated bizarre behavior he was to exhibit as an artist was a thinly disguised cry for attention that sprang from those years of insecurity. But for whatever reason-an almost pathological need to rectify the deprivation of his childhood, or a need for hyper artistic expression-his bent for the unpredictable, the dramatic, pervaded every action of every waking hour. Whether he was reading poetry to gape-mouthed high school students enthralled by his dramatics, riding a bicycle down Key West's Duval Street singing the blues at the top of his lungs (in a remarkably good voice), standing on a restaurant table lecturing to an unsuspecting audience on the evils of a meat diet, carrying on loud, disruptive critiques during a movie with an about the actors on the screen (some of whom he knew personally), or acting extremely unconventionally in the most conventional of social functions, he behaved as if he were a missionary of the religion of art who had discovered that the best method for bringing the infidels into the fold was to startle, amaze. Anything he did in Key West, where he lived several months each year, was likely to be the hottest topic on any given night on the cocktail circuit. His arrival for the season was a major event with the artsy/literary crowd. "In winter, there is the explosion of the fantastic painter Henry Faulkner on the scene," Tennessee Williams wrote in his book, Where I live: Selected Essays, "never with less than a truckload of dogs and cats." Apart from the obvious striving for attention, his bizarre behavior was the natural expression of an unceasing and unblushing childlike wonder at the world around him, and of an unusual sensitivity to beauty. He could be so overcome by natural beauty that he sobbed like a convulsive mourner before it. Sometimes, after a particularly emotional experience with, say, a flower or a butterfly, his reaction was so strong that he had real convulsions and had to be forcibly subdued. No one thought such behavior affected any more than they did his florid pronouncements of intense mystic and religious ideas, all expressed with a great fervency and seriousness. A person of such sensibilities would not be expected to tarry long among the mediocre. And he didn't. Wherever he was, in Sicily, in Miami, New York, or Los Angeles, he sought out successful, well-known people in the arts, and managed to ingratiate himself with them. It didn't hurt his career that, because of these friendships, he or his work occasionally turned up in national magazines such as Life, Saturday Review, and Esquire. But if he profited from his relationships with some of the movers and shakers of the arts and entertainment world, professional gain was clearly secondary to the spiritual function such people served. In 1979, when Herlihy was researching his planned book about Henry, one of the questions he had asked his subject was, "Do you love your fellow man?" Henry's answer, recalling an outcast of an earlier time, William Blake, helps to explain his predilection for the famous: "I love the fellow man who is on a higher plane in mind and spirit," he had replied, "exceptional types, poets and philosophers-creative people who are gifted and have used their gifts as messengers to the less fortunate. How can I love a creature who hates, who destroys, who pollutes the earth with trash and gas plastic? No, I don't love that man; but he's not my fellow man-my fellow man is one I relate to, as a sound human being, as a child of God, as a 'true' child of God." Since to Henry practically the entire human race fit his description of those who hate, destroy and pollute, the "exceptional types, poets and philosophers" were all he had to choose from. The attraction was not in the least one-sided. These favored children of God were as attracted to him as he was to them. Partly people were drawn to him out of simple admiration for an original person in a world of look-alikes, a modern counterpart of the outrageous Alistair. There is something about people like Henry and Alistair who go to such extravagant lengths to live life as art that is an inspiration to others whose yearnings for unorthodoxy are restricted by a society that feeds them. In relationships with uncloseted social outlaws, artists who behave more conventionally are able to let their spirits soar vicariously. To be sure, part of the attraction Henry held for other artists came from their respect for his gift. His paintings were works of such originality and presence that few people could resist the urge to know their creator. Reviewers were consistently excited about the never-never-land depictions of a strange-but-pleasant mental landscape, in colors that often took first-time viewers by surprise by their uniqueness-as if their were such a thing as new color. From Miami to Italy to New York, Faulkner's work was invariably compared to Chagall, with whom he shared a similar child's dream-vision of whimsical magical symbols and animals. But the similarity was superficial, more a matter of temperament than of influence. To look at one of the rich Sicilian landscapes with a sweetly smiling, seemingly deified Alice dominating the top of a Roman column she shares with a rich array of plants and fruits and fauna, hearts and black quarter-moons and mystical symbols, sprinkled with assorted rococo embellishments, is to be overwhelmed by the transference to a masonite panel of a completely original mind-passionate, satirical, florid, yet sophisticated and profound. This special painterly vision was formed in eastern Kentucky, where Henry grew up in foster care. In his mind he never left his mountain idyll. Its trees and birds and wildflowers, and especially its Aprils, were never far from his consciousness. Remote Falling Timber Branch was the wellspring of his talent, and he returned to it, literally and figuratively, again and again, as a balm for his often-bruised soul. "The moon will spill / White rabbits in the soft lap / Of the young spring night / And you will taste sweet / And bitter the grapes of / Memory. . . in that slow / Sweet drink of spring," he wrote in an early poem about a long-ago mountain April. All this is to paint an image of a most unusual man. It was the tainting of the image, and the feeling that he would not be able to fix it for posterity, that occupied him and his poetry this December evening of 199981 at Le Café Chantant. Nothing could have hurt him more; he hadn't waged a flamboyant lifelong, often painful war against mediocrity so that he would end up with a mediocre image. "I'm convinced Henry's chief ally was self-image," Herlihy wrote after Henry died. "I don't think I ever witnessed a flicker of self-doubt in anything he ever did or said in my presence. If God had burst through a cloud and told Henry he was a reincarnation of Whitman, Van Gogh and Christ Himself all rolled into one little goatman-like package, Henry would have asked to have that in writing, please, so he could take an ad in the World Tribune and properly publicize the testimonial. Because among his heaviest burdens was this absurd and accursed and intolerable lack of fame that plagues him all his life long. . .[a] gargantuan blunder of destiny that Henry bore with such stylish rage right up to the end." So he labored at his poem this evening to set the record straight, before it was too late. "I am the one who sings / when all singing is impossible," he scribbled in the long Whitmanesque effort. "I am the one who sings / when the birds go south / I am the one who sings / when the dead need entertainment / In the song of bones / I cry-but my cry / is in the Byzantine connections. / The stars hold concert in the sky / the whiskey eyes if sad birds / wear longing and grief. . . ." The next day, December 4, probably was devoted mostly to painting. He had a show scheduled barely more than a week away, but typically, there were more paintings unfinished than finished. Such procrastination had often resulted in a kind of hysterical race to get done in time, and no small number of paintings had been completed on a kind of assembly-line basis, with an assistant preparing masonite boards, brushing on the black ground-instead of white-and, in the case of one assistant, doing some of the actual painting. This frenetic activity sometimes continued right up to the opening of the show, and he was known to have painted in an acrylic lemon or butterfly or two after a painting was hung and the doors open to the public. The public accepted this, of course-it was, after all, a Henry Faulkner show. Adding to the hectic nature of this particular day were the preparations he had to make for his move in a few weeks to Key West, where he would hear Tennessee Williams read to him the play about "the ultimate artist." There would be no death-steeped poem on the evening of the 4th. Instead of going to Le Café Chantant as usual, he had agreed to attend a fund-raising auction for the Lexington Art League. The poem would have to wait until the following evening, December 5. That day was given to the myriad details of attending to his animal "family," seeking herbal medicaments for various physical ailments, preparing for the upcoming show and, following the show, for the annual-final, as he had told a relative-retreat to Key West. At day's end, before heading for Le Café Chantant for supper and poetry, he stopped at a supermarket and purchased a large quantity of animal food. He then drove straight to his house on Third Street, where he stopped for a while before going on to the restaurant. While he was busy in the house, across town a trio of revelers was leaving the scene of a party. Nineteen-year-old Joyce Bird, a fast-food worker, drunk and without a driver's license, got into a borrowed 1966 Dodge with two companions and took off on the first leg of a wild joy ride. At the corner of New Circle Road NE and Meadow Lane, Miss Bird struck a parked car, but she kept driving. A few moments later, headed south, she struck a north-bound car whose driver turned his car around and gave chase trying to get the license number of the speeding Dodge. Henry got into his car just after 9 p.m. and headed east on West Third Street, on his way to the restaurant. As he approached an intersection a block from his house, the traffic light was green. His thoughts may well have been on the latest poem in the making, the latest grim, fore-shadowing of the dissolution of a life o intense sadness and beauty, and some such vision may have distracted his attention. His car continued into the intersection and over the threshold into actual death as Joyce Bird sped under the red light. So, with an ordinary, albeit violent act, it ended-a lifetime as art. Ten days after he died, the midwesternly conservative Lexington-Fayette County Metro Government, averting its gaze at least for a moment from two decades of newspaper accounts of the antisocial antics and misdeeds of its most visible pariah, passed Resolution No, 398-81, an unprecendented an dimpressive-looking documents that contained among its accolades the following: "Whereas, he was a man who lived his own legend." This is the story of that legend.