Wisteria

INTERVIEWER

How much of your writing is based on personal experience?

FAULKNER

I can’t say. I never counted up. Because “how much” is not important. A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination — any two of which, at times any one of which — can supply the lack of the others. With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow. A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can. Obviously he must use as one of his tools the environment which he knows….

INTERVIEWER

Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?

FAULKNER

Read it four times.

[Stein, Jean. Interview with William Faulkner, “The Art of Fiction No. 12.” The Paris Review. No. 12 (1956)]

I have a house in mind when I think of Faulkner. It is from Absalom! Absalom!, but it is not the decaying plantation house at Sutpen’s Hundred. The house is white on a dusty road in a small southern town, covered in wisteria with a wide front porch. I’m sure he describes it at some point, Faulkner, but I also think I invented a lot of it — it is not so different from the Finches’ house my middle-school self imagined while reading To Kill A Mockingbird. This house has a boarded up attic and incoherent flower beds out front, the annuals long gone and the valiant perennials losing their battle with the August heat. There was a big tree in the front yard but it is gone now. It fell two winters ago in a storm when the howling wind threatened to knock it into the house but instead pushed it ferocious out into the street, narrowly missing a neighbor’s dog who was slinking home, unsure if the screen door to the back porch would open for his arrival. Whenever I begin to write, I place my story and my characters within these four walls. If my story stands up inside this house, or out on its front porch, I keep writing. Its survival in this limiting place indicates something sound in my prose and my ideas. But such soundness in plot is in turn reliant on unsoundness in the people and lives that I conceive inside this house.

I can put the world of Absalom! Absalom! into this house, and just easily take out that world and replace it with another one. In goes a third cousin in her middle age somewhere in Georgia, and then out she comes, making way for the cast of a Tennessee Williams play. This house is rooted in the Delta, stuck stalwart in Alabama or Mississippi, but it can also find itself a few miles west over the Louisiana or make it to some little town in Texas. The house can migrate up to Virginia, but there it becomes a refraction of the original — in Virginia the magnolia tree does not grow as tall, but it is still healthy at its stunted height. The dogwood tree and the tulips are happy, the soil not as red and dense as Georgia clay. The house can be transposed there, and someone still lives there, but the house seems to really only thrive south of somewhere. I’ve tried the south of England, though, and some of the plants just won’t take. The whitewashed fence feels foolish and the wraparound porch make-believe — Jane Austen’s characters don’t quite fit, and it is not because the warm Georgian and Palladian homes of 19th century England better suit the drama of her plots. It is because this house, for me, for the stories I can tell through it, is rooted deep in America, in the American south. The warm weather plants of my story house might be able to survive as far up north as New Jersey, but honestly they start getting irritable around about Maryland.

I frequently picture a maiden aunt living in this story house. I have living there a grown up daughter looking after her father, a mother and her three little boys. I imagine a wife mourning a husband, not dead but gone, in the heat of the Delta. I can see two adult brothers on the verge of fratricide, an only child grown up and picking through the refuse of early life, an aging couple with sons gone to war and daughters gone to illness. I can picture invalids and divorcees; I can see Thomas Jefferson recast in the early 20th century wondering when Sally Hemings will come meet him. I can see Wallis Simpson, she who so conveniently hid out in a local hotel, five minutes down my road, while waiting for her divorce and her stolen British royal. I can see abandoned fathers and wandering bachelor uncles and orphans living with great-grandmothers who forget when the biscuits should come out of the oven. But what I cannot see, what I never see, in this house is something whole. I cannot find, no matter how hard I try, families complete, lives in measure. The contents of this house are always broken, always cracked — the only delicate things in tact are the blue and white vases of china, the skulls of little children, and the impressionable beauty of magnolia blossoms, which survive only for that hour after they are cut from the tree.

I sometimes think that I could live in this house, by myself. My family doesn’t seem to fit inside — I can’t put us in there, all together, not matter how hard I try. I haven’t had any conception of my family as entirely whole, at least not in a practical or conventional sense, since sometime around 3rd grade. Our household is a single-parent one, yet not a single-parent one, grandparents and a mother and a dog, multigenerational and old-fashioned in a way that staunchly disregards change in the world, sticking to Emily Post etiquette about thank you notes and place settings that predates the 1960s. It is a household hugs hard and freely says, “I love you,” perhaps so often as to render it meaningless, as a friend once suggested to me, half joking, at the way I ended every phone call.

But “I love you” doesn’t become meaningless, I replied. If you repeat something that you mean with the entirety of your being, it cannot be empty. Those “I love you’s” simply grow fuller, more rounded, even if every gasp and grasp warns of the sorrow that might wait. Those “I love you’s” portend, they know. It is the “I love you’s” of my family that cannot fit into this house of broken things I use for writing. They are whole and complete. They sneak onto the porch, on occasion, but they cannot enter. “I love you” does not pass the porch trellises of wisteria; it cannot slip through that screen door the hound dog chewed a hole in about three years ago now.

My family has a dogwood tree, two cherry trees, and a Bradford pear tree growing in our front yard in Virginia. The Bradford pear is relatively new, maybe six or seven years old — it replaced a maple tree that had sat there for years slowly succumbing to disease. The cherry trees were planted recently, where no other trees had been before — they grow gradually, still spindly and fawnlike even though they should be approaching adolescence. The dogwood is squat and gnarled — it has been here since the beginning. It still flowers pink blossoms in the spring, though fewer every year. My grandfather thinks it might be sick. We cut down the arborvitae that leaned against the corner of the house last year — it had a tree disease, and was, in the words of my mother, “pretty ugly.” We have two healthy oversized holly bushes, a row of boxwood that is slowly going to seed, monkey grass that everyone hates, ivy draped over the mailbox, and azalea bushes under the living room window that light up come late spring, a hot pink with no purple in its hue. We have endless trees out back, maples and pines and oaks that buttress the flowerbeds and willows that extend over the creek, whose branches fall in strong winds.

But we don’t have any wisteria, and there’s no wraparound porch. I wonder if azaleas count, because there are certainly azaleas in front of the wisteria house of Faulkner’s that I always picture. Wisteria and azaleas can match each other step for step, purples and pinks clashing like cymbals, announcing the presence of the front door. Still, even though there are certainly azaleas accompanying my wisteria story house, my real home never quite matches that one. I cannot put my family inside the wisteria story house, cannot find it within myself to craft a plot around them. Our azaleas stay below the front windows; their explosive color in June hides the slight discoloration of the paint where their branches have brushed against the wood.

My mother talks a lot about planting magnolias — last year we finally planted a small one out back. She asks me: do you think we should put an evergreen in the front yard where the arborvitae used to be, or another magnolia? Magnolia, I answer always, automatically. The arborvitae has been gone for two years; I don’t think we’re replanting anything there. But I never say that. In the summer, we bring in the flowers from the little magnolia tree in the backyard. We have to time this perfectly, for they fade in hours. Their glossy cream glory is ephemeral.

After we make peach pie, my grandmother always wants to put the peach pits into the earth. She wants to grow peach trees, even though we already have two peach trees, planted years ago from seeds bought in packets. Sometimes her ambitions extend to plums, to avocados, and, notably, to pineapples. She’s right, of course, you can grow pineapples in your yard, hypothetically, if you lived somewhere with the appropriate climate. When we pass wild redbuds, the tiny ones that grow in the median of the highway, she wants to stop, to transplant them back home.

Any number of conditions precludes the tiny magnolia we planted behind our house last year from becoming the sixty-foot magnolia I imagine shading the wisteria house. It will never be a behemoth: it is too cold here, the soil is not quite right, and it is a “Little Gem” variety, a beautiful tree, but not a large one. Thomas Jefferson wanted to grow, in this part of Virginia where magnolias do not grow to great heights, a special type of rice that could thrive in the dry upland soil. His idea never really took off, and instead we have apple orchards and cornfields and endless tall grass ready to be made into hay. As the land gets flatter to the south and the east, little white houses with wraparound porches are planted in the center of endless green soybean fields, undulating piles of earth wrangled into efficient, though not explosive, cultivation. Virginia is no hothouse for horticulture: I sometimes think of how quickly our magnolia tree might grow in Brazil, or even in Mississippi or Alabama, how fast it would spring up, dwarfing the rose bushes it sits beside. The red soil of our part of Virginia, though, loves those rose bushes, which sit in beds lined by rocks my grandfather carved out with a shovel some twenty years ago. Two hundred years ago, my ancestors dug into that same soil, trying to scrape out a life with crops that struggled in the rising foothills studded with patches of rock. I know there should be a story from this, from this collision of tradition and rose bushes, rock removal across hundreds of years. The confines of the house I imagine, the house of Faulkner and wisteria and of brokenness and struggle, should be acquiescent to a story of family, my family — but they are not.

This summer, I tried to write a story about my family inside the little white house covered in wisteria and redolent of Faulkner’s deep dark Mississippi. My grandmother went to boarding school when she was eight years old. Initially, I tried to wrangle this starting point into the house. When my story failed to crystallize, when my characters and their motivations and interiority and struggle necessary for the story to have any weight or purpose did not materialize, I moved my story outside the house, ignoring my own rule. I began to write in earnest anyways: my story began in a convent school with French nuns, and then traveled to present day Virginia. It ended three terrible pages later: inside or outside the house, I simply couldn’t put our lives together, nor could I take them apart, piece-by-piece. I was too close to the action — perhaps knowing and loving someone deeply means that in some way you cannot subject them to the inevitable reality, the inevitable breaking down of self, the reduction to character from person, that the wisteria house insists upon. Lives are difficult to parse when they are so well connected to your own, when they dictate your own living so entirely. I could not appreciate them, our lives, in the way that wisteria does — wisteria climbs, furrows into slowly decaying walls. Our azaleas do not do this: they are still. They cover the peeling paint.