Sci-Fi’s Benford Also Writes ‘Bad’ Faulkner

For a professor of physics at UC Irvine who is also a noted science fiction author, Gregory Benford admits it’s an unlikely honor.

But the Laguna Beach resident has placed among the top 25 entrants in the first annual William Faulkner Write-Alike Contest.

Benford’s Faulkner parody will be one of 50 top contest entries that will be included in “The Best of Bad Faulkner,” an anthology to be published in 1991 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich--the same house that published “The Best of Bad Hemingway,” a 1989 collection of entries in the now-defunct annual imitation Hemingway contest.

The Faulkner contest, in which entrants had to write their best bad Faulkner in 500 words or less, is co-sponsored by American Airlines’ in-flight magazine, American Way; the English Department and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi; and Yoknapatawpha Press, the Oxford, Miss.-based small trade publishing house named after the fictional county in which Faulkner set many of his books.

Benford, a longtime fan of the Nobel prize-winning Southern author, read about the contest last year and entered it “on a lark.”

“I didn’t think I’d win,” Benford said, adding that he almost threw away the recent notification letter, thinking it was an advertisement. “I was very surprised. I had completely forgotten about it.”

Benford’s 400-word entry, a parody of Faulkner’s famous novella “The Bear,” is titled “The Bore.”

“It’s about a rapacious Southern land developer,” he said with a laugh. “It was written as one long paragraph, Faulknerian style--roughly a page and a half, double spaced.”

It took Benford about two hours to write his entry. But then, as a native Alabamian, he has been reading Faulkner “since I was a kid.”

“The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast--Mississippi, Alabama and so on.”

As a boy in the ‘40s, Benford said: “I heard stories told that same way, with the long rolling sentences, the digressions and the Biblical terminology all the time. I think that is why the South has so dominated American letters in this century, because it’s the region that retains storytelling most strongly.”

As it turns out, the top winner of the Faulkner Write-Alike Contest is anything but Southern.

He is Saul Rosenberg of London, who is working on a doctoral dissertation on Faulkner at Columbia University.

The winner and two runners-up--Jeffrey E. Simpson of Middletown, R.I., and Michael A. Crivello of Flower Mound, Tex.--were selected by three celebrity judges: authors George Plimpton, William Styron and Willie Morris.

Four other Californians were among the top 50 contest entrants: John C. Richards of Los Angeles, Sally Jackoway of San Diego, Don Mangan of San Mateo and Clare A. Simmons of Palo Alto.

Contest officials figured they would be lucky if they received 250 entries in the first year of the contest. Instead, they received more than 650 submissions from 47 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Australia, Brazil, Canada, England and France.

“We were staggered by the response to this,” said contest coordinator Dean Wells in a phone interview from Oxford, where she and her novelist-husband, Larry, are, as they say, “the sole owners, proprietors and janitors” of Yoknapatawpha Press.

The press, Wells said, publishes everything from facsimile editions of Faulkner’s novels to football history books--and “a lot of Willie Morris in between.”

It also publishes the quarterly Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review, which provides information about the author to 285 Faulkner-loving subscribers. (The two contest runners-up will receive a 10-year subscription.)

As the contest deadline neared last February, Wells said it got to the point where there were so many entries stacked on their dining room table that she and her husband couldn’t even eat a meal on it.

“I’d bet next year we break 2,000,” she said. “I think people just had so much fun with it. The entries were just hysterical. They were funny and brilliant parodies.”

“As I Lay Dying,” one of Faulkner’s most famous novels, prompted a string of similarly titled entries: “As I Lay Dieting,” “As I Lay Crying,” “As I Lay Frying.”

Because the three contest judges would not be able to read every single submission, the entries were initially screened by Dean and Larry Wells.

“We had a committee from the university to help us, Faulkner scholars,” Larry Wells said. “And even an old lady friend of Mr. Bill’s--that’s what I call him--stopped by to help us judge them.” With a laugh, he added: “I won’t name which one.”

One entry had only one line: “My fish is a mother”--a play on Faulkner’s famous line in “As I Lay Dying”: “My mother is a fish.”

Most entries were more demanding.

“Faulkner prose is so dense to read, you had to stop after reading an hour or so and clear your mind and do something else,” Larry Wells said. “You got satiated with Faulknerisms and Faulkneriana.”

For Dean Wells the contest is a labor of love: William Faulkner was her uncle. She called him Pappy.

“All the children in the family grew up saying Pappy,” she said. Her father, Dean Faulkner, was William Faulkner’s youngest brother. A barnstormer, Dean Faulkner died in a plane crash before his daughter was born. “So Pappy certainly, in many ways, was a real pappy to me,” she said.

Dean Wells has been having as much fun with the contest as the entrants.

Noting that the winner of the Imitation Hemingway Contest was sent to Harry’s Bar and Grill in Florence, Italy, “where they got exotic Italian food,” Wells observes that the winner of the Faulkner Write-Alike Contest “gets flown into Oxford, Miss., in the worst part of the summer as far as heat is concerned to look forward to a diet of black-eyed peas and grits.”

As first-place winner, Rosenberg and a friend were flown by American Airlines to the weeklong Faulkner Yoknapatawpha Conference held last week at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. (Rosenberg actually landed in Memphis, Tenn. and was picked up by the Wellses, who drove him to Oxford. “We’re so small, we don’t have an airport,” she said.)

The couple can usually count on a lot of people dropping by their house during the Faulkner conference. As Dean Wells explains: “The whiskey’s cheap and we never close.”

During a ceremony last week at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, George Plimpton presented Rosenberg with a first-place contest certificate; a plaque with Rosenberg’s name--and subsequent first-place winners--will be installed at the university’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Wells said the local Holiday Inn also gave Rosenberg five nights of free lodging, and various restaurants in town provided free lunches and dinners.

“On top of all that,” she said, American Way magazine and United Airlines will be flying Rosenberg and a friend anywhere in the United States and the Bahamas for a five-day, free vacation “in any place that has a Marriott Hotel.”

The top 10 contest entries have been published in the August issue of American Way magazine.

Entries are now being accepted for next year’s contest, which has a Feb. 1 deadline. Entries, typed and doubled-spaced, should be sent to The Faulkner Newsletter, P.O. Box 248, Oxford, Miss., 38655.

“Urge your readers to enter,” Wells said. “The more the merrier.”

And what would William Faulkner, her beloved Pappy, think of the write-alike contest?

“I would like to think--and there’s no way to say--but that he would be chuckling somewhere,” she said. “It is such a wonderful tribute to him to have people all over the world not just read him, but to enter this contest and to know his works well enough and let their own wit and creativity turn loose on it.”

Poets Reading: Catherine Spear and John W. Hart III will read at the Poets Reading meeting at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave., Fullerton. $3.