As you approach Oxford, Mississippi, the first thing that greets you, floating on the horizon, is the silver bubble of the water tower, on which, as you draw closer, you may read painted in bold black letters: OXFORD-HOME OF OLE MISS.
Oxford also happens to be the home of William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. But, although he has brought world renown to this small community (population less than 5,000) wherein he has lived most of his fifty-three years, it’s not very likely that the slogan on the water tower will ever be replaced with: OXFORD-HOME OF WILLIAM FAULKNER.
No man is a prophet in his own country; and in our small towns especially, the writer is still looked upon as an eccentric, if interesting, non-productive member of society. So it’s not surprising that William Faulkner, titan of American literature in the eyes of his European admirers, should be of considerably less than legendary size to those who see him almost every day, frequently unshaven, lounging around in front of the county courthouse, talking (or rather listening) to the blue-denimed tobacco-chewing country folk and Negroes. He doesn’t talk much to anybody else, and with strangers—especially literary strangers—he is likely to sit chewing on the stem of his pipe and reply in muttered monosyllables.
I came down to Oxford to find out how the town felt about its famous native son. The collective image that emerged would be startling to French intellectuals. Sartre may discern seeds of his Existentialist philosophy in the works of this odd Mississippian, but it is doubtful if more than a handful in Oxford, outside the University, could tell you what Existentialism is; and it is more than doubtful that Bill Faulkner himself would be particularly coherent in any such discussion. Most subtle of American novelists, a writer whose works are saturated with directions and indirections, rich with overtones of destiny and man’s fate, he is peculiarly ill at ease in the realm of ideas as such.
“All Bill’s tryin” to do,” his brother John, also a novelist, told me,“is tell hisself stories and explain his county to hisself.” Of course, the second half of the remark is most significant; his“explanations” are what lift him so far above the level of a mere yarn-spinner.
But in his home town he is read as a story teller, insofar as he is read at all. His books are not prominently on display at the few shops that sell books. Not until he had become indisputably famous did the good burghers of Oxford pay any attention to that lazy Faulkner boy, the“Count No’count” who had never managed to get his high school diploma and who attended the University in a few desultory attempts at a formal education, working at odd jobs, shoveling coal, selling postage stamps, while he wrote books that didn’t sell and that nobody even tried to read.
During those uphill years there were only a few people in Oxford who had faith in him—most notably, Phil Stone, the lawyer who was Faulkner’s literary mentor in the early days; Mack Reed, who displayed the young novelist’s books and magazine stories in the window of his drugstore on the square; Professor and Mrs. Calvin Brown of the University. Encouragement also came from another famous local son, Stark Young, though the latter had already taken the more traditional pattern of migration to the intellectual nerve center of New York. Spurred by these few friends, but mostly driven by his own demon, Faulkner remained home and“explained his county to hisself.”
Out of the real Lafayette (pronounced Lafayette), he forged his mythical Yoknapatawpha County, symbolic epic of the entire South. Walking these streets, listening to these soft Mississippi voices, one is teased by the life that imitates art, and the art that, like a flower, grew out of this life.
Most of Faulkner’s friends of early days are still in Oxford. I spoke to all of them. One sensed an air of vindication now that“Count No’count” had won the Nobel Prize. I wondered whether Faulkner had ever been embittered by the long years of isolation.
“Not at all,” his wife told me. “That’s what makes Bill great. He is personally indifferent to what people think of him. He never reads any reviews of his books and he’s never been bothered by the fact that Oxford has been totally unaware of his greatness as a writer.” In her tone, however, there was a trace of bitterness. “Why, everyone around here thought he was just no good at all. You know, Bill didn’t work for a living; all he did was write. . . . Outside of the University, I’d say there were only about a dozen people in the whole community who’ve ever read his books; and then maybe they’d taken a crack at Sanctuary because they’d heard it was naughty, or maybe Intruder in the Dust because the movie was made down here. But very few have tried to read any of his good work-like The Sound and the Fury, or As I Lay Dying—and if they did, they wouldn’t understand it.”
_____________
Perhaps any artist who creates a world and then peoples it must be prepared for terrible aloneness. He sees so keenly, that it is too painful to share his blinding insights in casual conversation with folk of ordinary defective vision. Too painful for him and too painful for them. And so he is most relaxed in“simple company”—children adore William Faulkner. At one time he was a scoutmaster, though hardshell Baptist opinion considered him unfit for the post. Country folk and Negroes talk freely in his presence. But Professor Harry Campbell of the University, who lectures on Faulkner in his course on Southern literature (there is no special course devoted to this most celebrated native son) and who co-authored a scholarly study of his works, has met Faulkner but once in four years. A working farmer, Faulkner is likely to be out“killin’ hogs with the Nigras” when adulatory intellectuals call.
For instance, there were those Russians. John told me the story, expertly rolling cigarettes, flavoring the yarn with his slow Mississippi drawl. John looks so much like his more famous elder brother that you are startled. The same small stature, delicacy of movement, graceful gray mustache and hair. lt seems that when Ilya Ehrenburg and his party phoned for an interview during their American visit several years ago,“Bill said he’d give ’em an hour. He had a date to go huntin’ with Ike Roberts. Well, sir, those Russians got mad. They wanted to spend three days with Bill but he wasn’t interested that much. He wanted to go huntin’.” Angered, the Russians departed without ever meeting the American author whom they most admired.“I think the Russians admire Bill because they just don’t understand him,” John said with a sly grin. John’s own admiration for his brother’s work even outdoes O’Hara’s for Hemingway.“I think Bill is the greatest writer that’s ever lived,” he stated flady,“includin’ Shakespeare. . . . A few years ago Bill told me he was goin’ to win the Nobel Prize. He wasn’t braggin’ or nothin’ He just knows he’s the best writer of them all.”
To his old hunting companion, Ike Roberts, Faulkner’s qualities have nothing to do with literature.“Bill Faulkner,” Roberts wrote in the Oxford Eagle when the big news broke,“is a full hand at anything he does. The rule is, that the hunter stays on the stand from sunup until he hears the three long blows on the horn from the man who is following the dogs. Bill will stay on the stand until after sundown, if he doesn’t hear the horn, and someone will have to go by and get him. He’ll pick up the smutty end of a log as quickly as anyone when the fire needs attention.”
Slowly over the days, as I wandered about Oxford and spoke to friends and acquaintances of the novelist, the collective image took shape—an image of paradox and contradictions. Here was a man of extreme shyness and almost arrogant assurance, a primitive and a sophisticate, an intellectual who didn’t intellectualize (“Symbolism?” he once remarked to a young lady from the University who was doing a thesis on his work.“I’m afraid, miss, I rightly don’t know what that means.”) On some levels, Faulkner’s political ideas are undiluted Dixiecrat. He shares all his townspeople’s prejudices against“Nigger uplift societies from up No’th.” But the same William Faulkner goes far beyond most local opinion when he holds forth the vision of an eventual (if distant) elimination of segregation.
No American writer has been more rooted in his region. None has been less tempted to travel, to escape into the exoticism of foreign lands. None has so successfully violated the ritual pattern of flight from the philistine small town to the bohemian big city. Yet, the most frequently heard local criticism of his works—when, timidly, any criticism is hazarded at all—is that the characters are not typical; that the white country folk and“Nigras” from across the Yokanaw River are hardly representative of the“best” of either race.
Of course the Faulknerian myth is not typical of the reality. Typical is a term that applies to Gallup polls, not to works of art. The artist frequently illuminates the typical by the atypical: the violence, rape, incest, hatred, the baroque patterns of decay in Faulkner may outrage the mild-mannered Southern middle class, but they burn a searching beam into the most obscure, dragon-haunted corners of that same middleclass mind. There are still a few maiden ladies around Oxford who told me severely that they like Mr. Faulkner as a man but as for his literature—”“Well, I just don’t approve of that sort of thing.” The infamous Sanctuary was carried home more than once wrapped in a newspaper.
Today, of course, even Oxonians cannot help but be aware of the fact that a world-famous author has slowly been maturing in their midst. There is a kind of Chamber of Commerce pride about him as if he were a natural wonder, like an underground cavern wondrous with stalactites and echo chambers. You don’t go down there much yourself, but it sure attracts visitors.“Yes sir,” one merchant told me,“I think Mr. Faulkner is a definite asset to Oxford.” The merchant had read only Intruder in the Dust, on the flyleaf of which he had autographs from every member of the movie company—except the author.“Who? Mr. Faulkner?” a waitress said.“No, I’ve never read any of his books. I don’t, fool much with that local stuff.”
_____________
As in most county seats in the South, Oxford’s life centers around its town square, dominated by the handsome, white-columned, pseudo-classic courthouse. In front of the courthouse stands the Confederate soldier you meet in every Southern town, in this case (to the disgust of several of The Unvanquished) with his back to the No’th. Around the square are the two and three-story wooden buildings, the drugstores, the Golden Rule, the Pink and Blue Grocery, the College Inn, Friedman’s Dry Goods, the two banks. Since the movie Intruder in the Dust was filmed almost entirely in Oxford, millions of“outlanders” have been privileged to look upon the courthouse, the square, and the town, over which Faulkner has brooded for more than two decades with a kind of fierce, paternal protectiveness. Saturday mornings the country folk and Negroes come to town for their weekly shopping, dressed in their clean blue overalls and plain cotton dresses, loading up the cars parked obliquely all around the square which is the heart of this town, the streets radiating in all directions like arteries and veins—out to the University, past the neat frame houses in their nests of lawn, and into the roads north to Memphis and south to Jackson.
You are in Oxford for only a few hours when you find yourself promenading in a regular circle around this square. Though the architecture is as grab bag as in most of our small towns, there is a settled quality here that is almost European, the enclosed and focused convergence that all squares and piazze lend, as opposed to the history-less bleak Main Streets that run in and out of circumambient emptiness without the needful moment of self-examination.
“You ought to see Phil Stone,” everyone remarked as soon as I explained my mission.“I guess Phil is just about the most intellectual man in this county.” A prominent local attorney, onetime president of the Mississippi Bar Association, Stone occupies an odd little gabled red-brick building off the square. The office was brown-dingy with dust and legal tomes. On the wall hung an autographed photo of Jim Farley.
Stone is a lively baldish man with shrewd penetrating eyes and a whiplash colloquialsalted tongue. I had learned already about how Stone had helped to finance, and had written an introduction for, Faulkner’s first collection of poems, how the first few novels had been typed by his secretary, how (after the success of Sanctuary) he and the author had resubmitted the earlier rejected short stories with price tags neatly typed on each. I knew that Stone was the acknowledged literary mentor of Faulkner’s fledgling years, although a few Oxonians challenge his too exclusive proprietorship of this title.
We spoke for more than an hour, and all the while, as his sharp and frequently critical literary judgments on Faulkner rolled forth, I was teased by the conjecture that this man might be the prototype of Gavin Stevens, the lawyer who is the intellectual spokesman in several of Faulkner’s books.“Well, I don’t know,” he replied thoughtfully when I shot this embarrassing question at him,“I suppose in a way I am. But no fictional character is ever drawn from one person.”
Stone felt that he had helped shape Faulkner’s early development as a writer. He instilled in him some of his own overwhelming enthusiasm for Balzac, he lent him books on aesthetics to read (“which were returned with the pages as white as when I gave them to him. . . . Bill’s simply not interested in ideas”). He urged Faulkner to take the trip up to New York which led to the publication of his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, but took it for granted that Bill would come back to Oxford.“Oxford is a good town for a writer because there is no dead hand of culture down here. There was no meddling concern with literature which had just been getting born and had still to be walked of nights a-bawling.” As for the town’s attitude, Stone laughed with sarcastic tolerance.“Oh sure, now people notice Bill because he’s rich and famous. But I can’t help wondering where they all were twenty-five years ago.” Like Faulkner’s wife he doubted whether the novelist’s best work was read or appreciated even today.
With the approving sadness of a parent he told me that it was probably“better that Bill got out from under my influence. I don’t see too much of Bill these days; and when I do, we seldom discuss literature. As a man there’s none better. A lot of us talk about decency, about honor, about loyalty, about gratitude. Bill doesn’t talk about these things; he lives them.”
Mrs. Calvin Brown is another Oxonian who has known“Billie” since his boyhood. A white-haired elderly lady whose sense of humor twinkles in her eyes, Mrs. Brown belongs to“all the organizations from A to Z.” Like most other old residents, when she talks about The War, she is not referring to World War II or even World War I. She is herself a leading light in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a DAR, a former instructor in Latin and Greek at the University, and her late husband was head of the Romance languages department at Ole Miss.“I remember,” she said,“when Billie came to Mr. Brown and asked him whether studying mathematics would help him to think more clearly. They sat out there on the gallery all evening discussing it. . . . When I called up to congratulate him about the Nobel Prize, all he did was repeat over and over Well, thank you ma’am, thank you ma’am. He’s a very retiring person.” (Lawyer Stone scoffed at the notion of Faulkner’s shyness:“No such thing as a shy Faulkner.”)
“I think Billie is heartbroken about what he sees,” said Mrs. Brown,“heartbroken about the deterioration of ideals. Now you take those occasional interminable involved sentences of his that puzzle so many people. Why, Billie does that deliberately because those sentences express the confusion and mixed-up emotions that all intelligent Southerners feel about the race question.”
I wondered how local Negroes reacted to Faulkner’s treatment of this problem.
Mrs. Brown’s tone changed.“I doubt whether any have read him.”
“Some college graduate?” I suggested.
“I doubt whether there’s a Negro college graduate in the county.”
_____________
I couldn’t help thinking of the good lady’s remark the next morning as I sat talking with Mr. Sydney Gooden, principal of the local Negro school. On the wall hung his diploma from Adanta University. All week, whenever I as an outlander had touched on the race question, there had been a noticeable chilling of the psychological atmosphere.“Nigras” were irresponsible children, they were happy under present conditions, there wouldn’t be any trouble if it weren’t stirred up by Northern“uplift societies,” the“Nigras” wanted to be segregated quite as much as the whites did, etc.
What did Mr. Gooden think of Faulkner’s depiction of Negroes?
He explained that he had had time to read only Intruder in the Dust. Stylistically, he thought Mr. Faulkner was difficult to wade through, he wrote so ungrammatically. Perhaps Mr. Faulkner’s bad grammar was the result of his inadequate formal education. (One of the librarians at the University made the same objection.)
“What about his general ideas on the race problem?”
He eyed me shrewdly, with the faintest suggestion of a smile.“Didn’t everybody around here tell you there was no problem?” He slowly shook his head.“Oh, Mr. Faulkner’s ideas are idealistic all right but I don’t agree we should leave the issue to the Southern whites. Without federal government pressure, nothing would get done.”
Mr. Gooden felt that so far as local courage on the Negro question was concerned, the palm should go to Mr. Krebs rather than to Mr. Faulkner. Krebs was the editor of the college newspaper which had come out boldly for acceptance of Negroes into Ole Miss. The expected storm broke, a cross was burned outside Krebs’s dormitory, but the editor stuck to his guns. Nevertheless, the University of Mississippi still remains one of the Southern colleges that have not acceded to the Supreme Court decision.
“Now, Krebs shot at a specific target,” Gooden said.“He didn’t just speak a lot of vague idealistic words. The best hope is with the younger generation, especially in the colleges. . . . The others. . . .” He shook his head sadly.“We live so close together and we’re so far apart.”
Today, Gooden would probably want to modify this statement. In March, Faulkner demonstrated that he is quite capable of shooting at specific targets. Speaking to a delegation of the Civil Rights Congress, the novelist expressed his belief in the innocence of Willie McGee (the Mississippi Negro subsequently electrocuted on a rape conviction) and authorized public use of his name. Although bitterly attacked by several Southern papers both for this statement, and for the Communist-front aegis under which it appeared, Faulkner stuck to his guns on what he felt was the main issue: the unjust conviction of an innocent man.
Nor was this his first non-auctorial appearance on the Negro problem. A few years ago he published a letter in a Memphis paper castigating a white jury for acquitting several white men charged with murdering a Negro. Any sensitive reader knows that Faulkner’s attitude toward Negroes is a complicated mixture of love, admiration, guilt, and humility; that he considers them—as he does children or very old people—closer to the heartbeat of nature: their wisdom is intuitive, more profound, and beyond intellectualization; they endure. As with any first-rate writer, Faulkner’s political attitudes cannot easily be fitted into topical pigeonholes. Consider how Soviet critics for years have been trying to determine whether Dostoevsky was a“radical” or a“reactionary.”
The day before I left Oxford the square was colorful with fuzzy-bearded college boys dressed in gray Confederate officers’ uniforms with broad-brimmed hats and swords. It was Dixie Week and the boys were waving the Stars and Bars and whooping up rebel yells in preparation for the grudge football game with Mississippi State. A Nobel Prize had come to Oxford but all excitement was about the game. The issue of the Oxford Eagle which announced the Nobel award had contained a brief paragraph:“With the election over and the football season approaching an end we suppose we will have to talk about the weather.”
_____________
