Life in the 1930s for Faulkner and Estelle was a piling on of complex and blistering life events. The slow recovery after their daughter’s death and the plodding improvements at Rowan Oak continued. It seemed the couple inched toward stability only to have it evaporate. Faulkner’s work in Hollywood introduced the temptation of a lovely young script girl from the South. And there was yet another shattering family tragedy.
Meanwhile, Faulkner’s creative output went unchecked. Every year, stories appeared in national publications: eight in 1932; three in 1933; 11 in 1934, the same year the genesis of Absalom, Absalom! came to him; and five in 1935.
The publication of Absalom in the fall of 1936 was a triumph. An American tragedy in a Southern setting, the novel featured Thomas Sutpen, an unlikely antihero whose merciless quest for a dynasty — driven by a decades-old insult — proved his ruin. The son of a sharecropper, the young Sutpen was sent by his father to a plantation manor on an errand where an African-American butler in fine livery barred the youth from entering, telling him to use the back door, not the front. Stunned by the servant’s hostility and disdain, Sutpen’s naïveté was banished; and, though only 13 years old, this event set his course in motion. He would acquire a grand house, plantation, respectable wife, and father sons. Sutpen’s Hundred was his answer to the butler who refused to let him deliver his message. The challenging novel emerged despite marital difficulties and personal loss, a masterpiece conceived and completed while bouncing between Oxford and Hollywood.
Navigating the contrast between his life in Hollywood — with a room at a trendy hotel — and the Faulkner home, Rowan Oak, tucked deep in the woods, proved challenging. While in Hollywood, Faulkner frequented restaurants and supper clubs popular with actors, movie industry deal makers, and writers: Schwab’s Pharmacy, Lucys’s, LaRue’s, Pig ’n Whistle, Musso and Frank (a haven for screenwriters), and The Players. The Players especially achieved Hollywood notoriety with its assignation tunnel leading to the nearby Chateau Marmont and its convenient location across from the Garden of Allah Hotel, an extended stay place with a legendary guest book including — Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Little of this glitz and glamour extended to Mississippi. Apparently his inclination to socialize did not occur much in Oxford, where he and Estelle, to her displeasure, were mostly homebodies. Faulkner embraced the solitude and would remain silent for unnerving periods of time. His frustrating wall of silence wasn’t easily pierced. Estelle, who had been instructed by her mother as a young girl to be charming since she wasn’t particularly beautiful, enjoyed people, parties, and dinners. She wanted to go out and resented his stubborn streak. It was lost on Faulkner that Estelle didn’t have an alternative to her isolating existence at Rowan Oak.