Johnson & Faulkner at the Crossroads

Essay


Johnson & Faulkner at the Crossroads


“I went down to the Crossroads and fell down on my knees, asked the Lord up above for mercy, save poor Bob if you please.”

Robert Johnson


“My subject is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

William Faulkner in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech



Visualise the father of rock n roll, a prince of the jook-joint, a womanising latter-day king of the Blues. Go back further and think of him as just another tattered poor black playing tricks on his guitar in the dirt. Now picture the future Nobel laureate, the mayor of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, scratching away unheralded as he works the night shift at the local power plant. Note that the Blues-man recorded just 29 songs with 13 of them in an alternate version: 42 tracks in all, during two recording sessions, and was paid about $10 a song to do so. Accept also that the Nobel laureate to become had 17 of his books out-of-print for lack of sales in the 1940s, when he was in his prime, already a famous champion of the dispossessed. What do these two have in common besides the Mississippi delta? After all, to be a musician and a man of “race” is one thing. To be a writer and genteel white is clearly another.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938), was a self-taught musician who played and played, everywhere, anywhere. That’s how he got to be so good, playing the base string and a different melody line at the neck, making it sound like there was someone else playing along with him as he sang his alliteration in a high tight voice. Some say that there really was. Others say it was the gift of his really big hands that helped Johnson invent riffs and chords and slides nobody else had heard of till then. That’s why he’d turn his back on stage so you couldn’t see his action. Legend won’t give him the credit though. It says that he went down to the crossroads (of US Highway 61 and US Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi), and sold his soul to the Devil in return for virtuosity and fame. But Johnson didn’t get to enjoy it much, not for long anyway, because there were just 27 years for him – he was killed with rat poison, administered in his whisky by a jealous husband a year after his second recording session. But the fame kept growing, unhampered now by the disadvantages of “race” in the Mississippi delta. It grew to legendary proportions, Johnson’s songs covered by an astounding range of famous musicians: Muddy Waters, Cream, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Grateful Dead, BB King, Led Zeppelin, Bonnie Raitt, The Rolling Stones….

William Faulkner (1897-1962) was the white writer, celebrated in Europe, resented at home for offending his own kind with his anti-slavery and his contrary take on the Civil War. Faulkner, ever the writer, added the “u” in Faulkner to sound more English and fraud his way into the RAF during the war. And even though he won the Nobel in 1950, Faulkner had to make a living, once he was known, by writing commercial screenplays in Hollywood, often without credit. Faulkner raged away in his novels though, occasioning modest print runs of a 1,000 or sometimes 2,500. These were dark works, incorrigibly dense, highbrow, obsessed with violence, insanity and incest, loaded with biblical allusions, written in stream-of-consciousness and cooked in lashings of despair. The state of Mississippi, the poorest in the US was apparently no picnic! He was called “The Paradoxical William Faulkner” by The Christian Science Monitor in 1951, a year after his Nobel, for insisting he was celebrating the ultimate triumph of mankind all the while he was relentlessly degrading the lives of his characters, piling calamity upon calumny on them to test their spirit.

So what do these two southern folk have in common? Mr. Johnson’s struggles and innovations, it is amply clear, have borne substantial posthumous fruit. Today his memory lives on in the toniest echelons of blues and rock iconography with a place in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and his face on a 1994 US Postal Service Stamp. His fans in the musical stratosphere make sure the royalties that go to his heirs flow like the river that bred him. Some even think Eric Clapton is Bob Johnson reincarnated, rich and white and long-lived and criss-crossed with enough tragedy to qualify him as the genuine article…

And Faulkner? One of the greatest writers of the 20th century they now say, a Nobel and two Pulitzers worth, but just as neglected as Marcel Proust or James Joyce who occupy the high pedestal too. Well, Faulkner’s heirs are in for a windfall, in the sudden nature of the beast. His books, at least 3 of them, including the one written in the power plant, have turned into instant best sellers for the first time! On Amazon.com, the June 05 demand for Faulkner is second only to the new Harry Potter expected soon. There are 500,000 of an inexpensive ($29.95) three-book box set in paperback on order from the publishers (Vantage) as of June the 4th. Why, you might well ask? Because Oprah, on June 3rd, (born poor too and surprise, surprise, in Kosciusko, Mississippi), has chosen to name As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and The Light in August as her Oprah Book Club (OBC) selections for June, July and August respectively. She even rubbed it in on her show and said you’re not a “serious” reader unless you’ve read Faulkner. And so, the millions of Oprah viewers want to make sure they fit the description this summer!


PS: And if you care to go there, to the crossroads, just before midnight of a night, you’re likely to meet a big black man with a sly smirk on his face. If you’ve taken your guitar he’ll be happy to tune it for you and if it’s a book you’re carrying, why he’ll likely grin in your face and just scrawl in his name…

(1,036 words)

Title: Johnson & Faulkner at the crossroads
By Ghatotkach
Wednesday, 29th June, 2005



This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.