FAULKNER

After a thoroughly bad night of sleep in Memphis, I headed out along the back roads toward Oxford, Mississippi, lifelong home of that most brilliant of men, a man who had no answers and wasn't ashamed of telling you that repeatedly, William Faulkner. I had rediscovered Faulkner after re-reading "The Sound and the Fury" in Portland earlier
this year, during a time when I had both the patience and the means to give it its due attention. It is a demanding novel, enough to sway most lurkers from discovering its universal ability to convey the deepest paradoxes of the human emotional range. The first time I had read it I had immense trouble with it, and I did not have the emotional wherewithall to fully understand the import of his allusions. Since Portland, I have been devouring Faulkner in increasing strokes. One of the reasons I targeted the Deep South was due to the intoxicating effect of his words, which go well with Scotch by the way.

I entered Holly Springs, Mississippi early in the morning. This was my first true Mississippi town. It had a patent town square, brilliantly white in the morning sun despite the town's lapse and decay. There was a sizable vacancy rate in the town's sleepy central quarter, but you could tell this was an authentic Mississippi town square. Slow cars, old black men sitting on the steps of the courthouse (always in the center), 20 flags waving, an AM radio from the 1920's era gas station, a gas station that still looked like a gas station (grease, old maps folded wrong, dust, rusted signs). Never so much as a rush hour as a slight increase in the constant slow moving circular traffic. I sat on the central grass's gazebo and did a little writing. Each street corner had either a Coke or Pepsi machine humming silently.

Oxford was a redolent version of Holly Springs writ large. The Lafayette County (or was that Yoknapatawpha Co.?) courthouse stood in the center, perfectly white (and well-cleaned as well). The square was immaculate, wooden, charming, and perfect. A little too perfect. It was obviously more than a little used to the casual traveler. I parked and searched out a place for an iced drink of some kind, temperature having climbed somewhere into the high 80s. I found a perfectly placed, and most literary, bookstore on the corner of the square, appropriately named The Square Bookstore, directly across from the confederate soldier statue. The second floor of the bookstore had of all things a genuine bookstore cafe (of several tables) and a wooden balcony deck overlooking the square.

Finding a little slice of heaven, I sucked down several iced coffees while sitting on the "porch" complete with wicker chair and wooden table, perusing a dozen or so books by Southern Authors. I read the New York Times Book Review and then used it as a coaster. I wrote some of my better words into my journal which I was soon to lose. Finally, having nothing to do, I leaned back and reveled in that nothing to do.

Now closer to that sleepy part of the afternoon better reserved for napping or working, I headed out of the square. I didn't really know where I was going, but I thought I should check out Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) that bastion of Southern culture, so much a bastion in fact that James Meredith had a hell of time trying to attend that school in 1961. It probably didn't help that James Meredith was black. But I was distracted by a small, elegant sign pointing the way to Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home.

I parked the car and headed up the shaded oaks to the approach of the house. The house is simplistically elegant. It is grand in the Southern columnar tradition, but it is far from overstated. Complete with a simple wooden balcony, the house was quite a charm. Within the house, I sat in one of Faulkner's old rocking chairs, peering out of a second floor window at his barn, and started my used copy of "As I Lay Dying." An outline to his Pulitzer prize winning book "A Fable" which I haven't read, was written on the wall of one of his room. I guess even Faulkner had difficulty keeping his plots straight.

After a short tour, I headed out to the Oak trees nearer the woods and planted myself firmly on the shaded hot ground. I continued reading "As I Lay Dying" as I lay dying underneath that Oak had it not been for the approach of night, and maybe the fireflies would help out. Having just attended Heather and Dan's wedding, I thought the following passage was particularly apt:

Now and then a fellow gets to thinking about it. Not often,
though. Which is a good thing. For the Lord aimed for him to do
and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's
like a piece of machinery: it wont stand a whole lot of racking.
It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work
and not no one part used no more than needful. I have said and I
say again, that's ever living thing the matter with Darl: he just
thinks by himself too much. Cora's right when she says all he
needs is a wife to straighten him out. And when I think about
that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man,
he's durn nigh hopeless. But I reckon Cora's right when she says
the reason the Lord had to create women is because man dont know
his own good when he sees it.

I drove out of Oxford reluctantly, but I was already a day behind and I didn't know what N'Orleans held for me (had I had omniscience I would've stayed out my fever underneath the pleasant grass of Rowan Oak). I popped in the tape of Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech as I drove along the country road already starting to lose its sweat. I had read this some time before and was moved by its simple honesty, having gained far more respect for honesty than "courage" as it is currently defined. I think I posted this before, but here it is again:

... the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the
problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone
can make good writing because only that is worth writing about,
worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of
all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it
forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old
verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking
which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity
and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he
labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of
defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories
without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His
griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes
not of the heart but of the glands.

-Tom