Sanctuary – William Faulkner, 1931 ★½

Southern Gothic Overdrive

Seeking out an accessible William Faulkner novel is like hunting Bigfoot, except nobody yet has definitively disproved Bigfoot.

I haven’t read every Faulkner novel, but all those I have read present varying degrees of outrageous difficulty. They include this, often touted by lit-buffs as entry-level Faulkner.

Maybe so; just don’t call it easy.

The novel tells the intertwined stories of Temple Drake and Horace Benbow. The former is a college student who likes to go out riding with boys in cars, the latter is a lawyer fed up with middle-class conformity. The two find a common fate in Popeye, a sinister hood working on a derelict farm where illegal moonshine is made.

When the farm owner is arrested for murder, Horace takes his case and soon realizes Popeye is the real culprit. He seeks out Temple, a witness Popeye keeps in a Memphis bawdyhouse after raping her.

In Sanctuary, the moonshine operation where the novel opens is out in the sticks, yet folks keep stumbling into it and thus risking the wrath of those who run it. Less is sold than drunk on the premises. Image from https://www.geni.com/projects/Moonshiners-and-Bootleggers/13634.

Rich-girl Temple spends much time absorbing her new desolate living conditions; so do you in Faulkner’s hands:

There was a defunctive odor of irregular food, vaguely alcoholic, and Temple even in her ignorance seemed to be surrounded by a ghostly promiscuity of intimate garments, of discreet whispers of flesh stale and oft-assailed and impregnable beyond each silent door which they passed.

Faulkner claimed he wrote Sanctuary to stir up a sensation and make himself some money. Fear of an outcry kept it from being published for a couple of years; when it finally was it became his first big success.

Apparently this was less a matter of storycraft than sensationalism. Contemporary critics expressed horror at the book; according to Wikipedia the resulting tumult cost Faulkner his troopmaster scarf in the Boy Scouts. But it sold better than his prior two novels, The Sound And The Fury and As I Lay Dying, so it won a place in the man’s legacy.

But is it good? After reading it, I honestly can’t say I liked it much at all. It has many brilliant passages, enjoyable dialogue, mind-rending descriptions, and unique character studies of Deep South psychosis at rest and in motion. You recognize that distinctive voice of Faulkner’s found in better work in its casual surrealism and the way he plays with time. But as a story it goes nowhere and takes a long while getting there.

While Sanctuary is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, Temple's story moves to nearby Memphis, Tennessee. Above is 1930s downtown Memphis. Image from https://memphislibrary.contentdm.oclc.org/

I’m actually amazed the novel achieved a sensation. Not that what goes on isn’t scandalous; just that it is hard to understand while it is happening. Take Temple’s rape, which occurs in a barn:

Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me.

What that something is is never spelled out; partly because it was published in 1931 and partly because it was written by Faulkner.

Opacity is just part of the problem with Sanctuary; the other big issue is the awfulness of everyone in it when you do kind of get what is going on. Horace is well-meaning but ineffectual; like other likable Faulkner characters (Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying, Quentin Compson in The Sound And The Fury), he seems built to conform to a modernist-existential sensibility, which makes him a drag to care about as he continually contemplates the sick joke that is his life.

A dust-jacket for the first edition of Sanctuary. Faulkner's own take on it was withering: “I saw that it was so terrible that there were two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. I thought again, ‘It might sell; maybe 10,000 of them will buy it.’ So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book.” Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_(Faulkner_novel).

Everyone else we meet are various degrees of depraved. Most obvious in this camp is Popeye, gradually (and unconvincingly) revealed to be a serial-killing sociopath. But the rest of the cast is just as twisted.

Lee Goodwin, the bootlegger on trial for the murder Popeye actually commits, has murdered in the past, and also abetted the situation which led to Temple’s rape. Goodwin’s common-law wife Ruby is nursing a sick infant and normally would elicit our sympathy, except she is quite hateful in the main. When Temple asks her for help getting away from Goodwin’s farm and Popeye, Ruby rips her for being an over-privileged wuss:

“Man? You’ve never seen a real man. You don’t know what it is to be wanted by a real man. And thank your stars you haven’t and never will, for then you’d find just what that little putty face is worth, and all the rest of it you think you you are jealous of when you’re just scared of it. And if he is just man enough to call you whore, you’ll say Yes Yes and you’ll crawl naked in the dirt and the mire for him to call you that…” 

Sanctuary marked the first time Faulkner got the Hollywood treatment when it was adapted in 1933 as The Story Of Temple Drake, featuring Miriam Hopkins. It was so scandalous it helped inspire the Hays Office and the resulting moral constraints filmmakers would observe for decades. It also proved one of the year's bigger cinematic draws. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Temple_Drake. 

Temple herself is a very compelling character in the first half of the book. We see the aftermath of her rape and abduction, how isolated and emotionally distended it has made her. But then she undergoes a disappointing character change that turns her into a villain, too, and in the process makes Sanctuary even more difficult to follow.

The action culminates at a trial where Goodwin faces execution if convicted. Goodwin doesn’t want to testify in his own defense because he’s afraid Popeye will kill him. Is it just me, or does that seem an exaggerated concern under the circumstances? Anyway, Goodwin’s also confident the absence of any real evidence will be enough to exonerate him.

“You’re not being tried by common sense,” Horace warns him. “You’re being tried by a jury.”

Lafayette County Courthouse, in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, is a real-life model for the courthouse where much of the action in Sanctuary culminates. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/josepha/4218672655

The trial then unfolds, but Faulkner doesn’t play it up for drama or tension. The big reveal occurs with Horace already in the know (“she will have on a black hat”) but you the reader as usual being kept a few steps behind. Everything culminates with bogus testimony that closes the case in an abrupt and wholly unsatisfying way.

The overall tone of the story is given early on, by a man with a broom outside a railroad station watching a drunk stumble into a car: “Gret Gawd, white folks.” After that, Sanctuary becomes a series of character studies of people continually living beneath their lowest expectations.

It is depressing, if a little funny. Certainly there are moments of humor, although never without a hard and bitter edge. Miss Reba is the madam at the whorehouse where Temple is kept. In between drunken rages she works off by beating on her terrified dogs, Miss Reba keeps telling Temple what a prize she has landed in the loathsome Popeye, because he buys her things between the rapings.

Popeye rapes Temple while she hides in a crib barn, a scene recreated in the 1933's The Story Of Temple Drake. Not recreated in the film: The impotent Popeye's use of a corncob for the act. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024617/mediaindex. 

It is only when Miss Reba learns Popeye is impotent, and uses surrogates to despoil Temple, that she turns against him:

“Yes, sir, Minnie said the two of them would be nekkid as two snakes, and Popeye hanging over the foot of the bed without even his hat off, making a kind of whinnying sound.”

This is the stuff that shocked people in 1931, as much as for what it said about Southerners as about sex. Sanctuary only really works as an extended lampoon of the American South, with its pretensions of powdered gentility while a lynch mob moils under the kudzu.

Temple’s beau in the first half of the novel is shiftless drunk Gowen Stevens, who styles himself quite an aristocrat for having attended college. “Put a beetle in alcohol, and you have a scarab; put a Mississippian in alcohol, and you have a gentleman…” Horace sighs.

Decades after William Faulkner made the University of Virginia the alma mater of one of Sanctuary's most loathsome characters, he took up residency there as UVA's writer-in-residence. Image from https://news.virginia.edu/content/exhibition-uncovers-many-faces-william-faulkner.

The novel turns on a major coincidence or two: That Gowen and Temple are waylaid at the same bootlegging establishment where Horace finds himself at the novel’s start. Gowen is also romancing Horace’s sister, the excruciatingly mean-spirited and aptly-named Narcissa. When Horace decides to take up the bootlegger’s case, it is without knowing the actual killer is tied up with the guy who was dating his sister.

Such coincidences often happen in crime fiction, which Sanctuary kind of is. There is a crime anyway, and some suspense involving its resolution. The genre it holds to more definitely is Southern Gothic, but one of grotesque caricature in which humor is waylaid by carnage.

It is certainly no mystery, except in figuring out what Faulkner is describing at various points of his surreal narrative:

“And I was smelling the slain flowers, the delicate dead flowers and tears, and then I saw her face in the mirror. There was a mirror behind her and another behind me, and she was watching herself in the one behind me, forgetting about the other one in which I could see her face, see her watching the back of my head with pure dissimulation. That’s why nature is ‘she’ and Progress is ‘he’; nature made the grape arbor, but Progress invented the mirror.”

A map Faulkner drew for a popular collection of his work, 1946's The Portable Faulkner, shows the town of Jefferson, where much of Sanctuary unfolds, and its relationship with the rest of Yoknapatawpha County. At the bottom right is Old Frenchman Place, the moonshiner's farm where Sanctuary begins. Image from http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/william-faulkner-draws-mythological-maps-of-yoknapatawpha.html.

People really talk like that in Faulkner novels, less of a problem in The Sound And The Fury than here, as so many of these characters are uneducated rubes and proud of it. Ever-angry Popeye even sneers at the idea of Horace carrying a book in his pocket.

Late in the novel, when all the action is concluded, Faulkner takes a stab at humanizing Popeye with a sad backstory involving a father who never loved him and a grandmother who loved him so much she set fire to him, destroying his genitals. But by this point everyone has been reduced to human offal that any redemption seems by the boards.

The best thing you can say about the male characters in Sanctuary is that the women in the novel are awful enough to deserve them. Faulkner’s ability to relate the sordidness of the human condition is on display, but without any of those compensatory qualities that make him worthwhile.