Tree Falls, Tempers Rise Over Faulkner Memorial

There’s a sound and fury in William Faulkner’s hometown these days, all because the mayor cut down a magnolia tree to make room for another symbol of the Deep South: a statue of the author.

“Outside looking in, it beats worrying about drive-by shootings and things,” said retired physician Chester McLarty, Faulkner’s personal doctor. “People do take things serious around here.”

Even some relatives of the Nobel Prize-winning author have turned against the plan by Faulkner’s hometown, a model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, to honor the 100th anniversary of his birth.

“I’m against it particularly since they cut down that magnolia tree,” Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, wrote in a letter presented to city officials by Faulkner’s nephew, Jimmy Faulkner. “Tell them I do not want the statue of my father put on the square or anywhere else.”

Mayor John Leslie persuaded the city aldermen to contribute $25,000 to the project last fall and then helped raise another $25,000 in private funds. He insists that the life-sized bronze statue be placed in front of City Hall and nowhere else.

City Hall was formerly a post office frequented by Faulkner, and it overlooks the picturesque square where the author used to sit or stand alone in contemplation. Faulkner died in Oxford in 1962.

“My position: Either put it there or I will refund all of the money raised,” the mayor said.

Leslie ordered the flowering tree cut down in January, saying he had the right since he planted it there 21 years ago. Besides, “it was a fairly scrubby tree,” said Alderman David Magee. At 25 feet, it was 5 to 10 feet below average.

“I think Faulkner would scoff at it and say it was much ado about nothing, and something he could have predicted would have happened,” said Bill Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi a few blocks away in this town of 10,000.

Ferris said he is appalled because a magnolia was sacrificed in the name of an author “who wrote so eloquently about nature and about the beauty of the woods and life within the woods.”

“It was as if the one place it shouldn’t be, the mayor insisted on trying to put it there,” Ferris said.

Although the tree is gone, the statue doesn’t yet exist.

It’s supposed to be installed Sept. 25, which would have been Faulkner’s 100th birthday, but sculptor William Beckwith said last week that the design has only just been decided: Faulkner sitting.

“I need more time than I have. It is going to really be pushing it. All of this should have been done a long time ago,” Beckwith said.