Researching the book

After the publication of "The Outrageous Life of Henry Faulkner" in 1988 I was repeatedly asked how I came to write about Henry. At that time Henry's reputation as an artist had not been made outside a select circle of people in Lexington and Key West, and even smaller circles in cities like New York, Cincinnati, Louisville and Palm Beach. What the general public knew was his reputation as a flamboyant eccentric, an outrageously purplish ambassador from the nether regions that genteel society chose to keep at arm's length. People wondered why I chose to write a serious book about such a character. At book signings people had the book in their hands but hadn't yet read it. They knew of the advanced critical praise, and the fact that a scholarly press chose to publish it, they just didn't know why. And they wanted me to clear this up on the spot.

Invariably, then, I was led to talk, not about the book, but about the making of the book. When I gave it some thought it made sense. Why read from a book the audience members have just purchased the way so many authors are asked to do? Why not give them something that's not in the book? I came to wish that I had written it all up as a sort of epilogue to the book itself, because it does make an interesting story. Here, then, seventeen years later (at this writing), I've done just that to coincide with the publication of the new edition.

I never met Henry in person. What I knew of him is pretty much summed up in the first paragraph above. Then one day I walked into a gallery that was presenting a one-man show of his work and was startled at the display of -- not raw talent as it was so often characterized -- but of a genuinely original vision and a sophisticated grasp of painterly process to pull it off. This grasp of process can't be overstated. For up until then, I came to learn, people, even art writers, considered Henry a primitive artist, a sort of deranged Grandma Moses. This was in no small part because of his persona, and of the fact that he himself went to great lengths to perpetuate the myth. I knew right away something was wrong with that picture. I knew enough about art to know that what I was looking at for the first time was the work of a serious artist, not some weirdo that just happened to paint.

I wrote a review of the show for the newspaper I worked for, but not before finding Henry's telephone number and trying to call him for an interview. I got an answering machine. He called back a bit later, but I missed that call. So, not only did I never meet him, I never talked to him. Then, a short time later, I picked up the Lexington Herald-Leader one morning and a banner headline across the top of the front page announced Henry's death. I can remember all these years later how I felt, that I was somehow involved in something that was meant to be, how his reputation as a pariah, which it seemed almost everyone knew, just didn't jibe with what I had seen on the walls of that little gallery, nor with the unusual treatment the Lexington newspaper was giving the news. As a newspaper editor, I knew that a six column banner headline was something given only to major news events. And I knew, I can remember thinking, that somewhere in all this was a book.

I called Greene Settle, the Lexington art collector from whose collection the gallery show was mounted. That call was the first of countless eyebrow-raisings to come in the following year. I don't remember a single encounter where I wasn't made to feel the skepticism the interviewee felt when told what I intended to do. Simply put, I had no credentials. I was an Appalachian who still lived in a country town, a fish way way out of the water in the circles I was asking to be admitted to. Now, if you're a straight guy from New York, an expert from the coast, as it were, your legitimacy as a would-be biographer of Henry Faulkner might be accepted. But if you are a weekly newspaper editor in London, Kentucky, and are not gay, you are going to have a hard time convincing a lot of the very people you need to convince to take you into their confidence. When I interviewed Bradley Picklesimer, for instance, it was like two aliens from different galaxies warily circling each other. Almost everywhere I went from then on the question that was almost palpable, like a blinking neon sign, was "Why should I trust you?" Another version (sometimes more or less stated outright ) was "Who the hell are you and what makes you think you are qualified to write about Henry Faulkner?"

More about that later. Greene Settle, after all, had warned me. I went to him first because his name appeared more than in other in news accounts of Henry's death and in the initial queries I made. It turned out that not only was he the biggest collector of Faulkner art but also his financial advisor and conduit to the sober world which Henry needed to be a part of if only via an emissary like Settle. I met with him in his downtown Lexington office on the first evening of 1982, the first of countless trips to Lexington --130 or so miles round trip. We immediately agreed that we were on the same page: that Henry was an important artist and the worthy subject of a book. I somehow convinced him that I could pull such a thing off (though I'm not sure I'd convinced myself) and we began to map out a strategy. We talked about what resources were likely to be available, what sort of paper trail there might be. We decided that for a marginal type like Henry Faulkner there wouldn't be much.

Never has a would-be biographer been more wrong. Before I would finish my research I would be almost literally awash in paper, much of it goat, dog and cat piss-stained, and longing for the simplicity of merely transcribing taped conversations. There were 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, whinings, 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 -- all having to do with my subject. It was dirty, moldy, smelly, generally unpleasant to handle and probably unhealthy. But finding this amazing cache of stuff, and wading through it, would prove to be the most exciting thing I've ever done. Only a biographer who has discovered such utterly unexpected treasure troves of information will know what I mean.

But during that first meeting with Settle such a scenario would have been thought a wild fantasy. Where, we thought, but for a few stories over the years in the local paper, would you go to find out anything about Henry Faulkner? The book, we agreed, would have to be an anecdotal biography, a recapping of an interesting life in the stories of people who knew him. The most likely sources, it seemed obvious, would be people who might not immediately want to open up to an outsider like me. Still, we decided that it might be possible to do. Settle gave me a list of names and I waded in.

One of the first people I interviewed was Lexington artist Bob Morgan, who had lived with Henry and had been his assistant for a time. Bob was one of the few who didn't exhibit any skepticism when I told him my plans and he graciously agreed to introduce me to a number of people I couldn't have met on my own. Little by little I assembled a mosaic of a portrait of Henry from these interviews, albeit a picture colored somewhat by perspective. Lots of people knew the "real" Henry. Trouble was, if I interviewed ten people I had at least six or seven Henrys to choose from. Not only that, I came to find out, but these "group" portraits varied widely, even wildly, from city to city . . . Henry was six different people of a certain type in one city, six of a different type in another city, and so on. The only consistent thing about him was his eccentric flamboyance.

It was obvious, then, that I was going to have to obtain some documentary material to anchor my man, to put all those "real" Henrys in some kind of solid context. Bob Morgan and Greene Settle thought there ought to be plenty of stuff worth looking at in Henry's Third Street home, just down the street from Settle's. That potential gold mine, however, was locked up by the executor of the estate, a tantalizing look-but-don't-touch situation that accounted for no little frustration.

With the 3rd Street house under lock and otherwise off limits Settle had another idea. One day early in the process he drove me to Sweet Harmonica of the South, Henry's small farm he'd managed to acquire out in the bluegrass countryside. Settle thought it might be more accessible. And it was: hyper accessible -- to people, animals and weather. We entered through a door that was not only unlocked but undoored, just as several windows were unglazed. There we were, my amazed self and the patrician, respected accountant and attorney, stepping on and over and through an indescribable assortment of junk, mostly paper, which had been exposed to the elements long enough to resemble exactly a rotting landfill.

How this situation came to be I never found out. Obviously vandals had something to do with it. But the sheer volume of stuff suggested that there had never been much order, that stuff had been strewn helter skelter in the house much as the contents of the other home had been described to me.

We were both only too aware that we were trespassing and that the "documentary material" lying a foot deep on the floor belonged to someone and not to us. It didn't prevent me from peeling back layers of stuff to see what might be salvageable, though. With my heart beating like an apprentice second story man I sifted through all manner of things I would not have thought existed and knew would be valuable for my purposes. Things like copies of Esquire Magazine that had a story and photographs of Henry. And Life Magazine, with a picture of him by a famous photographer.

Nevertheless, I left the stuff embedded in its sticky muck and left with Settle who, when we got back to his house, presented me with a postcard or something that he had surreptitiously picked up without my notice.

I brooded that night over my curious scruples and decided that they were not going to get me into heaven, and might, actually, send me straight to hell for acting like a complete idiot. Next day, then, I drove the 75 or so miles to the farm (from my home) and waded into the indoor landfill like an experienced burglar, grabbing any piece of piss and shit coated paper that might contain some information for a biography. I only stayed a half hour but it was a worthy endeavor: the haul consisted of several sticky magazines and all manner of moldy snippets of mundane records like vet bills, shipping invoices, grocery lists and so on. Nothing major, but enough to let me know I'd been wrong about there not being a paper trail. My only regret was that I was not more thorough; for any material that was left was doomed to sure and quick decay. (How much stuff of actual monetary value remained in that heap can be conjectured by the reader later on in this narrative when he gets to the part about the auction and the dumpster!)

I began to pester Henry's executor, Lexington attorney Gregg Clendenin, about the possible existence of more important papers pertaining to Henry. In many letters and phone calls during the next several months I was able to confirm that there was indeed a paper trail and that it was locked up, not in the 3rd street house, but in the meeting room of Clendennin's office. Not only that, but that it was pretty much piled to the ceiling.

This information of course was like sniffing blood to a shark. I begged, pleaded, cajoled and otherwise demeaned myself. All to no avail. Clendenin insisted that he could share not one iota of information until he had permission from whoever was the rightful owner. In this case, that turned out to be a Palm Beach millionairess named Alice DeLamar. Clendenin was as intransigent as I was hungry. An immovable object had met its like.

On several occasions, when I had an evening appointment with some source, I spent the night as guest of Greene and Mary Edna Settle. The first evening Greene pointed out to me that the guest bedroom had on a couple occasions been occupied by James Leo Herlihy, the writer. "Really?" I said. I had read "Midnight Cowboy" when it first came out, and of course had seen the movie as had half the rest the planet. What, I wondered, was what this big time writer was doing spending the night with the Settles. "He was here to see Henry," Settle said as casually as if he'd been commenting on the weather. My view of my subject was kicked up another notch.

Settle had Herlihy's address and his phone number. When I called, not allowing for the time difference in LA nor the proclivity of the idle famous to sleep in, I learned pretty fast that the telephone was not the way to go. So I followed up with a letter. To my surprise, after the phone call fiasco, he wrote back, a sort of cool, non-committal courtesy reply. And thus it began, a correspondence that started with a wary feeling each other out and grew to a series of witty and sometimes profound letters packed with knowledge and insight such as I hadn't experienced; it was clear that Herlihy knew Faulkner better than everyone else I'd talked to put together. He was the only one who had been in Henry's head, even his soul. The correspondence culminated with his sending me his complete set of notes for a book that he had planned to write about Henry 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 such was the palpable emotion that emanated from the pages. No biographer was ever luckier.

During my haranguing of Clendennin I was keeping up my interviewing with sources as varied as university professors, Henry's wonderfully Henryesque sister, Lois, and, in a nursing home where he was winding down an extravagantly swishy life, Mr. James Herndon -- the legendary Sweet Evening Breeze. My boss, a major player in the politics and culture of the Commonwealth, managed to win over a majority of the Kentucky Oral History Commission members and convinced them to give me a sizable grant to do research in Key West.

In Key West I managed to round up all the usual suspects, including Capt. Tony Tarracino (of the famous Capt. Tony's Saloon), who screened for me and my wife a Hollywood movie of his life (Stuart Whitman played Tony) with a cameo appearance by Henry Faulkner while a group of Limey sailors on their way back from the Falklands showed our eight-year-old son how to shoot pool. No one will be surprised to learn I met a lot of colorful people in Key West, many of whom had a wealth of stories to share about Henry. There was little hard information of the kind I wanted, however, until, sifting through back issues in the office of Solares Hill Magazine, I ran across a story of a few years past that contained a wealth of time-line information in an article about Henry's early days before coming to Key West.

The main quarry I had come to hunt eluded me. For months I had been writing to Tennessee Williams with nary a response to even suggest that he'd got my letters asking for an interview. I sucked up my nerve on the second or third day in Key West and walked up to his door at the famous little house on Duncan Street and announced my presence and intentions to a rather pleasant woman who answered. Tennessee was in New York, she said, and that was that. Sorry.

I made my way to the next name on my list, Key West culture czar and society matron Floy Thompson, who was said to know anyone who was anyone in Key West. During tea on her jasmine scented veranda she asked how my research was coming along and had I talked to Tennessee Williams. Well, no, I had to admit, and hoped we could change the subject quickly. "Oh," she said brightly, "Would you like to see Tom?"

When I got back to the hotel there was a note on the door to the room announcing that a car would come round at six to pick me up and that I was to have dinner with Mr. Tennessee Williams.

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, a bit of weirdness that set the tone for the evening. Somehow he got into his head I was a professor at the University of Kentucky, a notion I was unable to disabuse him of for the rest of the evening. So I was professor House and that was that.

We had dinner at the round table on the patio, next door to the house where The Rose Tattoo had been filmed. Dinner consisted of big mounds of spaghetti and great quantities of Italian table wine served from huge magnums of a size I'd never seen. The woman who'd assured me Tennessee was in New York earlier in the day was also, apparently, the cook and butler. A second guest at the table was a writer who had just flown in from New York that day and who Tennessee took delight insulting throughout the dinner. Off in the shadows, away from the table, sat a sullen young man who seemed to be of a type Tennessee was said to have needed to have around. His function seemed to be that of decoration. At least during dinner.

This assemblage was rounded out by a huge slobbering bull dog who was present throughout the evening and spent much time slobbering on my new white pants legs. Served me right, Tennessee said, wearing those splendid white pants which he was sure I only did to impress him. And they wonder why he was America's greatest living playwright.

Getting usable information about Henry was like pulling hen's teeth except for two things. Tennessee told me that Henry was the subject of his last play, "The Lingering Hour." "The play is about Henry?" I asked. He assured me that it was. 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. At the White House? Henry, the person everyone in Key West had been telling me couldn't go five minutes without causing some sort of uproar? The very same, Tennessee said and added that he behaved splendidly. From there, Tennessee said, they went to London then on to Taormina, Sicily, to rest and paint. Tennessee assured me that he went with Henry to Taormina, and not the other way around.

I came away from the dinner with a different picture in mind than that which had been formed in all my interviews in Lexington.

Back home one day, out of the blue, came a letter came from Clendennin announcing that Miss. DeLamar had given him permission to show me the cache of Henry's papers. I won't dwell on what that meant, or how I fell upon them. A bit later came permission for me to take all manner of materials for research and, still later, to use all the photos left to her, of which there were hundreds. Miss DeLamar's relationship with Henry is well documented in the book; no need to go into it here except to say that, without her signed permissions, and later letters to me, the book would have been substantially less than what it turned out to be.

Another windfall came to me in the form of a shocking document (the result of a signed letter from Clendennin to whom it concerned) obtained through the Freedom of Information Act: the entire record of Henry's incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. I read this book-size document with mouth agape because of the wealth of material included, material I would have thought not to be available to anyone, even family members. Not only were the psychiatric reports intact in all their wordiness, but, also, the thoughts of the examining doctors, including the eminent Dr. Winfred Overholster, Ezra Pound's doctor, who was incarcerated in the same building and on the same ward as Henry. The thick document was as close as it was possible to get inside the mind of Henry -- his thoughts about almost everything, followed by the doctor's thoughts about those thoughts. No biographer was ever luckier. Included in the record was an FBI document that laid out Henry's complete arrest record from coast to coast, which allowed me to check the accuracy of the Solares Hill article on his travels during the time.

But wait, there's more! A bit later came a similar document from the psychiatric hospital of Columbia University in New York, obtained the same way: through the Freedom of Information Act which Clendennin had made possible for me to use. And then there was the complete record of Henry's time as a ward of the Kentucky Children's Home -- obtained the same way. To my great surprise and extraordinary luck Henry had a social worker there who seemed to be a frustrated novelist. Her reports, year after year, were written out in narrative form, with great feeling and drama, and detailed everything about Henry's years in the mountains with his foster parents from his social adventures with the neighbors to scrapes with the law to his deepest thoughts as expressed to the caring social worker. These documents contained the guts of a novel in themselves, needing only extensive organization and a narrative voice to put it into story form.Other documents of exceptional value were school records, especially from the Otis Art Institute in LA, (I was even able to track down one of his favorite teachers who wrote me and gave me valuable information) and from the art school of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

As the months passed Clendennin, up to his eyeballs in Henry stuff and with no clear mandate with what to do about it decided to hold an auction. This would solve two problems: whittling down the unmanageable pile of stuff in his office and in the Third Street house (apparently the stuff at the farm was left to the cows, rogue biographers and the elements); and raising cash with which to settle numerous unpaid bills and debts Henry had left. On the day of the auction I drove up from London with no clear idea of what to expect other than that I wanted to experience a Henry Faulkner event. The auction house was filled with Faulkneresque stuff and with an amazing crowd of people who had come to buy it. I think Clendennin was as amazed as I was. Every single snippet of anything that had anything to do with Henry -- picture frames, lamps, furniture, clothes, books, everything -- was snapped up as soon as it was put on the block. Before long Clendenin started nervously eyeing the big metal dumpsters out back where he'd had workers throw the pure junk. As the auction was winding down he sent some of the workers to dive the dumpsters for the junk and that, too, was put on the block and promptly snapped up. I knew then that I had a ready market for the book if I could ever sort everything out.

There was one area of Henry's life that it looked as if I were going to have to pass over -- his seeral trips to Italy and Sicily to paint. I had turned up this information in letters from Miss DeLamar but didn't see how I could obtain more than what she told me. Then Clendenin, who at long last had become to accept me as Henry's bona fide biographer, had an idea. He, too, needed information from Taormina because Henry had left a house there to one Daphne Phelps, an English woman who had befriended him. Since all the other property Henry left to people in his will turned out to be real, Clendennin had a problem on his hands with a piece of property he could find no information about. As we (and others, including Daphne Phelps, who later wrote about this phantom property in her widely praised book "Sicily Enough") found out the Sicilians were exceedingly stingy with their information. The upshot was, Clendennin arranged to send me to Taormina as his emissary with the thought that any other information I could turn up couldn't hurt.

My wife (without whose organizational and secretarial skills, not to mention the ability to make out passages of writing the same color as goat piss stains, the book could not have been written) and I left as soon as possible. We were warned by the travel agent and others not to try to go to Sicily by ourselves. (Even there, when we talked to a bus tour group of Italian Americans from New Jersey, we got the same advice.) We ignored the advice. As soon as we landed at the Cantania airport we began to have reservations. We almost had a Carabinieri experience trying to get onto the autostrata at Catania. In Naxos, at the bottom of the mountain on which Taormina is precariously perched, the bar tender literally laughed at me when I ordered a second ice cube for my scotch.

Up in Taormina itself things were better. The first thing we noticed was that the town was a Henry Faulkner painting. It is almost uncanny how much a place can look like one of Henry's flower choked paintings with the buildings jammed together and haphazardously stacked on each other like a child's building blocks.

We met with Daphne Phelps, the English woman who had befriended Henry over twenty years earlier, and who, Sicilian like, was sparing with her information. (In 1999 Miss. Phelps published a book, "A House in Sicily," in which a chapter titled "Henry Faulkner" is the longest in the book. It wasn't until 17 years after I talked to her that I knew why she was so miserly with her information about Henry: she wanted to save it for her own book. I won't quibble here but much of her biographical information seems obviously taken from "The Outrageous Life of Henry Faulkner," a copy of which I sent to her in 1988 . . . without attribution.) Nevertheless there was a wealth of other characters to talk to about Henry, including Roberto, the major character in Claire Rabe's minor classic, "Sicily Enough," who I had hoped to find and was surprised to discover that he was Henry's first benefactor in Taormina. And there were others, all of whom had warm and colorful stories to tell of the impish Americano . . . until I asked about the property.

The gentleman who was said to have been Henry's financial advisor there, a Sicilian version of Greene Settle, agreed to see me the next day. When I showed up for the appointment I was told that he had taken the first flight to Austria! His apologist explained that the gentlemen had forgotten about a musical festival he had meant to attend. Sorry. Much later Phelps speculated in her book that Henry had paid someone some amount of money for property but that the property probably wasn't registered in his name. "In all foreigners' dealing in Sicilian property," she wrote, "there must be a go-between, especially when there are language difficulties, and Henry had doubtless had one. If any other than the seller had benefited from the deposit, it must have been the go-between."

For whatever reason an air of suspicion hovered around the place like a fog. I found myself looking over my shoulders and seeing Mafia ghosts in every shadow. We were, though, treated very well by the Sicilians we met who had known Henry, gracious, often courtly people who wanted to make sure I knew that they respected Henry. Despite the air of exaggerated politeness on both sides, we managed to communicate quite well and we felt our fact finding trip was well worth it. And, later, when I learned that Daphne Phelps herself, a long time and well known resident of Taormina, couldn't track down her own property, I didn't feel so bad about coming back empty handed on that account.

Back home research continued steadily and I was able to fill in gaps of information little by little. One day I got a letter from the writer Donald Newlove, who had written a sort of gonzo article about Tennessee for "Esquire Magazine" back in 1969. In the article was a long passage about Henry, and Newlove furnished more useful information in the letter. I had no idea how he'd got my name. Then, the next day, I got another letter which cleared up the matter -- the New York Times Book Review had given birth to my author's query almost exactly nine months after I had written it. This fellow, an editor and writer, wrote a good long letter with a word portrait about Henry in Key West in the mid-Sixties. Then, more letters. One particularly welcome one came from a fellow who knew Henry when he was in Perugia, Italy in 1969, the one place and time I had no real information on. And this fellow knew Henry then and only then! Pure luck. By the time I finished my research and started writing, I was amazed to look back and see how much luck had played a part in it all. What I ended up with bore no resemblance to what I though when I started. I was lucky indeed.