Will, Appetite, Alchemy, Faulkner, and Two French Poets: Fred Chappell's The Inkling

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Clabough, Casey

"Just love me, protect me and trust me. I am very weak, and very much in need of kindness."

-Letter from Verlaine to Rimbaud (Rimbaud 170)

"What I mostly ripped off from Rimbaud was the notion of fire, / As symbolic of tortured, transcendent-striving will."

-Fred Chappell (Bloodfire 31)

ALTHOUGH FRED CHAPPELL'S SECOND BOOK, The Inkling ( 1965), is a more challenging and complex novel than his first, it is, in several fundamental ways, cut from the same aesthetic stone. At one point in Chappell's debut work, It is Time, Lord (1963), the protagonist James Christopher confesses, "But now I keep two bloody red apes chained to myself. Named Will and Appetite, these beasts tear and bite me. When my heart is at last eaten away, they will quarrel and fight over my bones" (103). As R.H.W. Dillard and John Lang have adroitly acknowledged, will and appetite constitute the dominant, though buried, conflict which fuels Chappell's second novel. In an autobiographical essay Chappell comments at length on the development of his second book while tracing its roots to his first:

My larger ambitions for the novel were the same as for the first: to produce a daring and even experimental novel which would not look or feel experimental, and to keep a story going with such force that a reader would be led on from first paragraph to last whether he actually liked the book or not.

The Inkling was another, and almost the last, work that came to me as a whole, almost as a vision. In my mind's eye, I could see the book in print, a perfect novella, and even the words on the pages. Short and savage and serious, a book that took no prisoners. ("Fred Chappell")

Beyond Chappell's similar ambitions for his first two books-constructing gripping narratives accompanied by disguised experimental techniques-the novels have many of the same literal characteristics. Both narratives, for example, contain settings in rural western North Carolina, involve dysfunctional families, include central violent acts, and follow confused and tortured male protagonists. One practical reason for the close surface similarities is that Chappell simply did not have time between the books to research and devise new background materials. Having published his first novel in 1963, written a mammoth concordance of the poems of Samuel Johnson for his Duke University master's thesis in 1964, and accepted his first teaching position at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro the same year, Chappell admits he had little space in which to prepare his second book: "With The Inklingl was under real pressure to get it done in a hurry. It was my last summer before I came to teach at UNC-G, my last summer of graduate work. I had no other choice but to write it in six weeks" (Palmer 404). In terms of its composition then, as well as its literary form, the novel is decidedly "short and savage and serious."

Whereas The Inkling possesses many literal and surface similarities with Chappell's first book, it remains very much its own novel, especially in terms of the deep, hidden symbolic structure it contains. In 1985 (before he had written the Kirkman sequence), Chappell fondly labeled it his preferred work of extended fiction: "I tend to favor my second novel, The Inkling, because it's kind of neatly done and because the intentions are hidden; it's kind of a secret novel in a way, one nobody ever bothered or should bother to figure out" (McDowell 34). Ignoring Chappell's counsel, this essay attempts to make some headway in "bothering" to figure it out, investigating the book's hidden symbolic intentions and various levels of meaning. I begin by identifying the novel's central obscured historical allegory, its relation to the lives and work of the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Ignorance of this oblique allegorical distinction led to the host of misreadings with which the book was greeted when it initially was published, and I go on to consider several of the misguided reviews that conveniently dismiss the novel as a reductive Faulkner imitation and a Southern cliché. I then turn to the book's central symbolic tension, its meditation on the forces of will and appetite, discussing the multiple ways in which it shapes the novel's literal and metaphysical agenda. Finally, I consider the book's identical beginning and conclusion, its foiled symbolic union via alchemy, disclosing its implications for the philosophical concerns of the novel.

Allegorical Shadows: Rimbaud and Verlaine

Very few readers and none of the book's initial reviewers recognize The Inkling as a heavily disguised historical allegory. Chappell recalls, "The Inkling was very experimental because it was my first attempt at doing the kind of Thomas Mann kind of thing, using historical characters as prototypes for fictional characters" (Ragan 109). Although Chappell has published numerous short stories involving diverse historical figures, The Inklingwas his first attempt at historical fiction, which partially explains why the historical narrative remains buried to the point of nearly going unremarked. As Chappell notes, there were specific reasons for why he did not flesh out the historical dimension of the book: