Not until you're finished

Faulkner Est Mort!
By Alan Flurry

He remembered the headline in Le Monde just as he had happened upon it, walking out of the Louvre on a rainy afternoon in July, 1962. The deeper sense of loss sliced jagged-edged through his heart in French as it would have in his own tongue, though in the French it was a solemn clarion to the loss of a hero, a God among men. And that's how he remembered feeling after emerging exhausted from the museum to be greeted by the one-inch headline emblazoned across five columns.

He had taken a moment in front of the newsstand that day forty years before, a moment that could still run long through his mind and remain. He understood a certain reverence for it that he had little if ever held for the man himself, for at the time, Faulkner's death had been one of those unexceptional tragedies that saddened but did not unsettle him. Over the intervening years what it meant to him had become more clear as it became symbolic, as he imagined himself not the writer he wanted to be, but the journalist he was. Commenting on the tears in the social fabric had become his niche, and when he delved into some of the more misshapen political debates of his time, misshapen by the prevarications and lack of honor he knew signified his country, indeed many countries, he always came back to that announcement of death as the demarcation between one place in time and another.

The death may have been the passing of an ornery good soldier, but it had always been what he had learned about himself and the world in the successive moments following it which had remained with him and peppered so much of the stew in which the theories and moral realities of his milieu were boiling.

The simpler questions were all the more answerable for their lack of conspiracy and his country could not pretend to be a land of anything other than it was despite the high-handed art of history book writing. He had learned as a veteran journalist that the companies would never admit any wrongdoing and the leaders would never proceed in a bipartisan fashion, even to the WC. What colored this was the new era which had begun, not with a political gesture or event, but in his own mind, where things mattered most. Maintaining that posture over the course of a career had become unconscious to the point he eventually had begun to question why these issues were so clear to him. The reasons were apparent and the differences were so immutable that he no longer felt the need to harbor excuses. The standing of other, supposedly lesser republics had quietly but regularly transcended sympathy out into the open air of admiration. He had learned to disguise his enthusiasm with the artful peddling of advice, his patronizing tone unable to surmount that combination of vigor and naïveté common to the teenager that is the most enviable. He sided with his country in wars but not sports, leading to an objectivity leftover for his craft which won him many admirers, as well as attributable sources.

But the sense of inferiority grew and as a patriot he could not cast away his concerns outright. It weighed on his nostalgic impulses like a eulogy; trading on this objective wit to do his job confirmed the knowledge of the lesser standing among the civilized notions of his mind. He was part of a philistine menagerie of whirling rhetoric and big stick machismo beneath which nations trembled and men shook their heads in feigned ignorance about things they understood well. To the extent that he did nothing to stop it, he kept it going by playing his part. And even this role as an accomplice becomes unconscious over time, even to the objectors. Not absolving oneself but burying the complicity beneath layers of rationale that willingly peel themselves off in acts of transparency and self-effacement merely running interference for a passive superiority. Proof of his further proof clouded his mind now in its sixties and the journalist had taken to gruff generalizations that spoke to a fear rather than the courage with which he and his nation had once viewed the world. This small place they occupied seemed incapable of defending itself from any one thing, and so found itself under siege from all things.

"What's wrong with this country?" he would periodically ask himself in the private study of his thoughts. Along with the question came the sensation that he knew the answer but was unable to put his finger on exactly what had gone awry on such a grand scale. 'This country' being his country, he had always turned a microscope on its indiscretions to match what he considered the overblown hyping of its checkered past and divine disguises provided its misdeeds.

The question was not if he remembered, but would he. He had realized what was wrong with America on a morning in Paris when he was twenty-three years old, and had been girding himself ever since as though confronting something imminent that had already struck like lightening.
It had been unmistakable, the solemnity of the announcement and its place above, for one moment, all other things. A newspaper headline, perfectly natural and normal, perhaps expected, not about the passing of a man but the death of a hero. But he knew right then, and every time he had thought about it since, that such an announcement would have no place in his and the deceased's home country. The departure may not have been unexceptional there but it would not be received with the importance of tragedy, as the headline screamed about other things unworthy of the sadness death had created in a far away land. The ink required to obfuscate and reassure had become its own rationale, and it mattered little if anyone else had noticed this, because he had. The headline had been seared into his mind in another tongue for a different reason. Its sadness then had grown into a greater melancholy in him now. Walking hand in hand at a disturbing, leisurely pace with his country away from that place where literary matters commanded a nation's imagination had left him, like his country, triumphant but with nostalgia rather than the purer adultery of glory.

The wars of myth connoted greatness but, produced under cynical regimes, filled only stadiums of fear to cheer on the material advance; he realized how much troubling goodness had gone unclaimed when ink was auctioned instead of given freely in exchange for merit. As a citizen of that society he had "invested himself in many battles where nothing of value was won or lost"* and accordingly counted among its ranks. But remembering the headline energized this impotence, his own mind in thirst for another moment yet created to soothe not his fellow man but his conscience as a conspirator. "Less be to those willing to accept it," he noted to himself and smiled beneath the suspicion that for once, he quoted no one, and the next moment after the death of another hero quietly arrived.

* William Faulkner, Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, 1960.