William Faulkner

Mississippi, and a young man who read everything

Faulkner was born on 25 September 1897 in New Albany, in the hills of north Mississippi, into a family that had been locally prominent for three generations. The looming figure in it was his great-grandfather William Clark Falkner — lawyer, planter, colonel of a Confederate regiment, railroad builder and novelist, shot dead by a former business partner on the day he was elected to the state legislature. The family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, just before the boy turned five, and Oxford was home for the rest of his life.

He was bright, lost interest, and dropped out of high school. His education came instead from Phil Stone, an older, better-read friend — an Oxford lawyer with two degrees from Yale — who from 1914 ran what amounted to a decade-long private tutorial: the classics, nineteenth-century English poetry, the French Symbolists (Mallarmé, Verlaine and the poets who followed them, who worked by suggestion, music and image rather than plain statement), and the living moderns — Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the Irish novelist James Joyce, whose experiments with the inside of a character's mind were remaking the novel. In July 1918 he began pilot training in Toronto with the Royal Air Force's Canadian arm, and it was at this point that he added the 'u' to the family name Falkner. The war ended before he saw service. He came home, took odd jobs, spent nearly three grinding years as postmaster at the University of Mississippi, and kept writing verse.

Late in 1924, just before his self-financed book of pastoral poems The Marble Faun appeared, he went down to New Orleans meaning to sail from there to Europe. He stayed six months. In the French Quarter he met Sherwood Anderson, the older American novelist whose linked story cycle Winesburg, Ohio had shown a generation how to build a book out of one small town, and settled into the circle around him — the architect William Spratling, the writers Lyle Saxon, Roark Bradford and Hamilton Basso — publishing sketches in the Times-Picayune, New Orleans's daily newspaper, and listening. It was, in his biographers' judgement, the only extended stretch of his life spent inside a community of intellectual peers. He sent a novel manuscript to Anderson's publisher and, in July 1925, sailed for Europe with Spratling.

26 rue Servandoni, autumn 1925

They landed at Genoa and travelled up through Switzerland to Paris, where Faulkner stayed for the rest of the year apart from short trips into the French countryside and over to England. His room was at 26 rue Servandoni, a narrow street in the 6th arrondissement running from the flank of the church of Saint-Sulpice down to the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens. The City of Paris put a plaque on the building: ICI A VÉCU À L'AUTOMNE 1925 WILLIAM FAULKNER — 'here lived, in the autumn of 1925, William Faulkner' — with his dates and the Nobel Prize he would not win for another twenty-four years.

He worked. What he produced in Paris was stories and unfinished novels, and he cannibalised the pieces for years afterwards rather than publishing them whole; the longest of the abandoned drafts, a novel about a would-be painter called Elmer, stayed unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime. What he did not do was join anything. Paris in 1925 held Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, the little magazines — the small, short-lived literary reviews in which most experimental writing of the period first appeared — and Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookshop on the rue de l'Odéon that had published Joyce's Ulysses, the novel of one Dublin day that no commercial house would touch, three years earlier. Faulkner walked past all of it. Asked about that at the University of Virginia in March 1957, more than thirty years later, he was unsentimental: at that time, he said, he had not thought of himself as a writer; he was 'a tramp'; he was not interested in literature or in literary people.

With one exception, which he described in the same answer.

I knew Joyce — I knew of Joyce, and I would go to some effort to go to the café that he inhabited to look at him, but that was the only literary man that I remember seeing in Europe in those days.

The story is usually retold with an extra detail — that Faulkner sat in the café night after night and never dared speak to him. That embellishment is not in the recording. What Faulkner actually said is that he would go to some trouble to get to the café Joyce used, in order to look at him, and that Joyce was the only writer he remembers laying eyes on in Europe. He never claimed they spoke, and never claimed they did not. What he did say, plainly, at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in April 1957, was how much the looking had been worth: asked whether Joyce had influenced his work, he answered, 'Yes, a great deal.' A year later he put it more grandly — Joyce was one of the great men of his time, a man 'electrocuted by the divine fire', who had more talent than he could control.

The country he invented

He was back in the United States by early 1926, and the New York publisher Boni & Liveright brought out that first novel, Soldiers' Pay, a book about disillusioned soldiers coming home from the war. Mosquitoes followed in 1927, a satire of arty poseurs on a boat, most of them recognisable New Orleans acquaintances. Then came a sprawling manuscript called Flags in the Dust, the first book he set in a Mississippi county of his own invention; his publisher made him cut it, and it appeared in 1929 as Sartoris. From that point he stopped writing about the world and started building one.

Yoknapatawpha County is the simplest and strangest thing about Faulkner, so it is worth stating plainly. It is an invented county in north Mississippi, with an invented county seat called Jefferson, closely modelled on the real Lafayette County and Oxford where he lived. Almost everything he wrote after 1929 takes place there. The same families recur across book after book — the Compsons, the Sartorises, the McCaslins, and the grasping, rising Snopeses — so that the novels and stories accumulate into one continuous history of a place from the frontier to the present. Faulkner drew maps of it. On one of them he wrote the credit line that has followed him ever since: 'William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor.' The critic Malcolm Cowley — the editor whose 1946 anthology The Portable Faulkner rescued the books from being out of print and put Yoknapatawpha in front of American readers as one connected story — did the arithmetic and reported its population as 15,611 people spread over 2,400 square miles.

The book that made the method famous was The Sound and the Fury, published in October 1929: the fall of the Compson family told four times over, first from inside the mind of Benjy Compson, who has severe intellectual disabilities and no sense of chronology, so that the reader must assemble the story out of a shuffled sequence of moments. Faulkner said it began as a short story and got away from him. It is the novel that carried the stream-of-consciousness technique — the attempt to put a character's unedited flow of thought directly on the page — into American fiction, and it opened the greatest run of his career: As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942).

Rowan Oak, and the Hollywood years

In 1929 he married Estelle Oldham Franklin, his high-school sweetheart, newly divorced. In 1930 he bought a run-down two-storey house on the edge of Oxford in the Greek Revival style — white, symmetrical, with a columned porch copied from a Greek temple front — — built in the 1840s by a planter named Robert Sheegog and known in Faulkner's day as the Bailey Place — and renamed it Rowan Oak the following year. He lived there until he died, and it is now a house museum run by the University of Mississippi, kept with much of the family's own furniture, and open to visitors.

Reviews were respectful and sales were not, so from the spring of 1932 he went out to Hollywood as a screenwriter — a lucrative, dispiriting second career that ran on and off for more than twenty years, through several studios and finally Warner Brothers. He kept publishing roughly a book a year regardless, moving through the Southern subjects that are the reason he matters: the ruin of the old plantation order, the arrival of the pitiless Snopes family, and above all race, treated in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as the wound that explains the region's violence. It was Intruder in the Dust, a novel of detection and race published in 1948, that finally brought him money and a wide readership.

Stockholm, 1950

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 went to Faulkner 'for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel' — awarded a year late, so that he collected it at the banquet in Stockholm City Hall on 10 December 1950. He spoke for four minutes. He said the award belonged to his work rather than to himself, that the only subject worth writing about is 'the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself', and that a generation of young writers had let a general physical fear of the atomic age — the speech was given five years after Hiroshima — push that subject aside.

I decline to accept the end of man. … I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

The last decade was public in a way the earlier ones had not been: goodwill tours abroad for the US State Department, which sent him as a cultural ambassador to Japan, Europe and South America; two Pulitzer Prizes, America's principal award for a novel, for A Fable (1954) and for his last novel The Reivers (1962); and, from 1957, the post of first Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, where he held office hours six days a week and answered questions in classroom after classroom while a tape recorder ran. Those recordings, which are why we know in his own voice about the café in Paris, are now published online by the University of Virginia Library, which also holds the manuscripts he left it. He died at Byhalia, Mississippi, on 6 July 1962, eleven weeks short of his sixty-fifth birthday.