Classic Excess

Somewhere under the half-drunk whiskey bottles that fans perpetually leave on his grave, William “Bro Will” Faulkner must be smiling mischievously.

Here we are in the bumper-sticker age, the era of micro-mini-attention spans and sound bites and instant information overload.

And yet on Thursday, for the centennial of Faulkner’s birth, thousands of loyal fans are gathering in Paris, Moscow, Beijing, New Orleans and here in northern Mississippi to pay homage to a man whose opaque prose won the Nobel Prize for literature almost half a century ago.

Writers, scholars and readers around the world will be honoring a man whose works are known for their tantalizing lack of clarity and wicked celebration of grammatical excess. The opening sentence of Faulkner’s 1936 masterpiece “Absalom, Absalom!” for example, has 123 words. The same sentence features one noun that carries six--count them, six--adjectives, as in the “long still hot weary dead September afternoon.”

“Faulkner believed the best way to get to the essence was to tell it all,” historian Shelby Foote said recently about his friend and fellow Southerner.

While others admire Hemingway and E.B. White for their bone-clean prose, Faulkner apparently believed--like one of his minor characters--that “you can’t tell the truth about a man unless you get it complicated up.”

Thus, to those modern readers who avoid Faulkner because he is too complicated, Foote added, “That’s also a very good reason for not reading Shakespeare.”

For a Faulknerian or an educated Southerner, the comparison is not such a stretch. At a recent gathering of Faulkner scholars and readers in Oxford, Faulkner was variously described as the best Southern novelist, “probably” the best American novelist of the 20th century, one of America’s best novelists or one of the world’s great writers in the English language.

At a Faulkner festival in France, an impressive array of American writers is scheduled to pay respects today and talk about how Faulkner affected their lives and their writing. Among them are Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, William Styron, Barry Hannah and Alice Walker.

A four-day Faulknerathon in steamy New Orleans this weekend will star Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Odetta (who played a role in the film version of “Sanctuary”), Faulkner companion Joan Williams, author and filmmaker Ron Shelton, Foote and more than 90 writers who credit some part of their craft to the Mississippi master.

“In some ways, Faulkner is just a very large cult figure,” says Hannah, a short-story writer who also teaches at Ole Miss in Oxford.

Adds W. Kenneth Holditch, professor emeritus of English at the University of New Orleans and a lifelong expert on Faulkner: “I think it’s amazing that he has survived the ravages of idiotic criticism. I’m not talking about good, honest criticism. I’m talking about these crazy theories that deconstruct it and pull it apart. . . . But he’s survived that, and Hemingway has not.”

Indeed, 25 years after his death, Faulkner is Random House’s No. 1 academic author--in part because he wrote so many novels and short stories that have remained classics. Titles like “As I Lay Dying” (1930), “The Sound and the Fury” (1929), “Light in August” (1932) and others have sold more than 7.6 million paperbacks since the 1950s. Even his six books in hardback sell a steady 30,000 a year.

Still, that is not a blockbuster sales level, Random House sales director Bridget Marmion acknowledges. What would it take to bring Faulkner up to the level of a hit classic--say like a Jane Austin? “When Merchant-Ivory does the movie,” Marmion says, “or a really good biography comes out or something scandalous comes out.”

Something else scandalous? About William Faulkner?

*

In the lush hill country around Oxford where Faulkner lived and wrote, there would not seem to be any Faulkner scandals left. Even now, the mists have lifted on many of the town’s terrible old secrets, the whispers about reckless passions and human weakness that Bro Will turned into classic literature. Still, for most tourists, Oxford is so heavy with Faulkner ghosts that Cynthia Shearer, curator of Faulkner’s antebellum home, Rowan Oak, tries to explain to visitors that the residents of Oxford are not too different from ordinary Southerners or even from ordinary Americans.

“I don’t want people to come here and think we’re all characters in one of his novels,” she said with a laugh one airless July afternoon as she took outsiders on a literary tour of the town.

But people do come to Oxford as though they are returning to a place they have known for years. Faulkner made things personal, as though he opened a back door and let you inside to see things that most people hide from the neighbors. Some people whisper the whole time they walk through Faulkner’s house or circle the town square.

“The Russians, lordy,” Shearer said. “The Russians come here and they just cry and cry and cry.”

What comes as a shock to some of these people is that as Faulkner’s stories expanded into literature, they often strayed from the facts at hand.

“A Rose for Emily,” for example, one of his most famous short stories, was about a strange solitary woman who fell in love with a wandering rascal. In the story, she murdered him. In real life, she married him. Shearer shook her head and laughed. “Hello, Freud? Where are you?”

Some of the passion that Faulkner describes is raw and painful, even when cloaked in a kudzu-like layer of prose. He wrote about the rape of a college girl, the miscegenation that created a “shadow” family of blacks who walked behind the old Southern gentry, the new greedy rich, the angry poor, the drunken weaknesses and the seething desires, which in those days could not be described too plainly for public consumption.

Thus, reading Faulkner is still seen in some Southern communities as an unsociable act. Mothers frown on daughters absorbing such ungodly stuff. The Snopes stories that made the name “Snopes” a synonym for “Southern white trash” (or “the son of a bitch’s son of a bitch” as Faulkner had one Snopes say in “The Mansion”) was best kept safe under a mattress during much of Faulkner’s lifetime. Even some members of the Faulkner family admit they were not altogether happy about how he described their home county.

*

“Sanctuary?” Murry Cuthbert “Chooky” Falkner II raises both eyebrows at the mention of his uncle’s famous book published in 1931. “If you had a copy of it, you didn’t let anybody know you had it and you hid it.”

Falkner is sitting in an Oxford coffee shop, and as he hands over an elegant business card, he notes that he spells his name the American way, the way it was spelled before William Faulkner changed it to the old European version with the “u.” Falkner is so adamant about the spelling of his name that he has been known to refuse registered mail that gets it wrong.

“It’s ugly, that book,” Falkner continues. “They sold it some places wrapped in brown paper,” he says with a big grin and a drawl that would sound unreal anywhere else in the English-speaking world.

Falkner’s brother Jimmy, a large white-haired man who spells his name with the “u” like the author, has become the family raconteur. Jimmy Faulkner, whose face is a warmer, thicker version of his famous uncle’s, was probably the Faulkner heir the writer liked best. As a result, Jimmy has a proprietary way about the Faulkner legend now, telling the family stories over and over, preferring the oral tradition to his uncle William’s written word.

Like the stories about Faulkner’s drinking. The lore is endless--how his truck made dents in the row of cedars along the path to Rowan Oak, how he once urinated on the car of a pesky tourist who had driven past his gate and his hand-painted no trespassing sign, how even though he taught classes drunk at Ole Miss, many students hung on his every slurred word.

Such stories make Jimmy smile. It doesn’t make sense to deny most of them, he admits. The world already knows, or thinks it knows, about William Faulkner’s excesses--the stories about drinking and womanizing are even on the Ole Miss Faulkner Web site.

But Faulkner, the nephew, has his adaptations, his explanations for why the same uncle who died “not really in a hospital but at a drying-out clinic” could write 20 novels, more than 120 short stories, poetry, essays, speeches and Hollywood screenplays.

“Bro Will would set a date to get drunk,” Jimmy was telling a few stern-looking journalists this summer during the University of Mississippi’s Centennial celebration. “He would say, now ‘I’m gonna get drunk Nov. 10 and sober up on Nov. 14.’ ”

But when the chroniclers came along--the journalists and scholars and the many biographers--he would spin the tales, often ladling his own fictions over the more pedestrian facts. As a result, different biographers have different tales, all from the horse’s mouth.

“He helped some of these legends along himself,” Jimmy said, “but, you know, I never saw him take a drink when he was at the typewriter. When he’d mail the manuscript, that’s when he’d get drunk, one, two weeks drunk, then he’d settle down.” At that point, the writer would ask his young nephew to fix him the get-well cocktail. Jimmy Faulkner winced as he remembered it--two or three raw eggs in a tulip-shaped glass, each one layered with an inch or two of Tabasco.

The Faulkners and the Falkners help keep the lore alive, but in one of his most famous quotes about his work, William Faulkner once said: “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”

*

In that, as in many other things, he was prescient. Oxford is a town where every event seems caught in some Faulknerian cobweb. Like the statue. The scene this year over the statue is vintage Faulkner.

It started last fall when the mayor of Oxford (now ex-mayor) and Faulkner’s retired family physician decided that there should be a statue in front of Oxford’s city hall to commemorate Faulkner’s 100 years.

The Faulkner family protested. They did not want a statue. Faulkner had not wanted a statue. Tacky idea, they told their friends.

Such protests, however, did not stop the mayor and the doctor, and they cut down a magnolia tree to clear a place for the statue in front of Oxford’s historic city hall.

The magnolia “desecration,” some called it, ignited a storm. Within 24 hours, protesters were circling the site, and a cluster of environmentalists held a memorial for the tree that included the placing of a magnolia tree on the stump.

Faulkner family members, including Faulkner’s daughter Jill, who raises horses in Virginia, began searching for legal ways to stop the project. In the end, the law seems to suggest that Faulkner no longer belongs to the Faulkners but to his public. The battle lines hardened, at one point with the Faulkners threatening to pull the Nobel Prize and other Faulkner memorabilia from Oxford’s museums.

“The way they did that tree is the way a Snopes would have done it,” Jimmy Faulkner fumed at one point.

A Snopes? The doctor, an elegant man, a friend of the Faulkners for years, was outraged. He blustered to a reporter from Atlanta, “He called me a Snopes. . . . I’m not going to be rude to him but you won’t see him back at my house.”

And yet, after all the fuming and protesting, next week, as part of the centennial celebration, the bronze statue is set to go into position, a seated Faulkner forever thinking about his mythical Yoknapatawpha County.

Foote remembered the day of Faulkner’s funeral in 1962, when the writer’s brother, John Faulkner, stood over the coffin and said, “ ‘Now he’s ours, but after we put him in the ground, they can have him. He’s theirs.’

“Faulkner belongs, now that he’s dead, not to the family,” Foote said, “but to the town, to the state and to the world.”