In Defense of Faulkner

When asked why she thought so many great writers have come from Mississippi, Eudora Welty said, “Because Mississippians have so much explaining to do.” (Paraphrased)

I am a Mississippian with all of the baggage that the fact entails. I have lived many places, but I have always been first and foremost an American, and then a Mississippian. My parents are Mississippians, and my grandparents, and most of their parents.

William Faulkner is arguably the most accomplished and well known of all Mississippians, much less of Mississippi writers. This despite having been labeled racist, misogynist, drunk, philanderer, etc. We know up front that at least two of those labels are true, and possibly more.

Yes, I know it is hard to believe that Mississippi’s greatest historic and literary figure could be imperfect when so many of us these days are perfect, but there is even more. My grandfather was at Ole Miss at the same time William Faulkner attended. I cannot say that he “knew” Faulkner, but he apparently at least knew “of” him. My grandfather spoke of Faulkner as being a creepy little guy who climbed trees to spy on young couples making out in “The Grove,” which was a rather infamous gathering spot for kids back then. Being very young when he passed away I never spoke to my grandfather about Faulkner, rather this is one of the tales my father says Grampa Bill used to tell about his school days, but my father never would read Faulkner based soley on what Big Bill had to say about him. I am certain that that was the point to those stories, whether or not they actually happened, and they very well may have. We all know that rumor often contains some truth. What I do know is that my father gets a disgusted look on his face every time I even mention Faulkner, as do most Wallace era Southerners.

In fact, you will not find many older southerners (other than liberal writer-friends who knew him personally; ie Douglas Southall Freeman, or Percy Alexander) who speak kindly of Faulkner’s work. Most of Faulkner’s critics were Southern males, while most of his advocates are Northern and female. This fact is itself revealing. Faulkner wrote about the south in a way that was much too real for those Southerners who wished to glorify it. He wrote in a non-flattering way, in a way that strikes close to home. Faulkner’s characters struggle through life in a land razed by war; an unjust war that was started, fought, and lost by themselves. They do it amongst the people who were liberated from them during that war, and in many cases amongst the people they were liberated from by that war. The characters are fiction, but they are also the people Faulkner spied on from his perch in “The Grove” and the ones he lived with every day of his life. You must read the books to see just how very real those characters appear, and to see how Faulkner, a Mississippian who saw it all up close, stripped away the facade of the “mythical south” to expose it’s (and their) vulgarities.

Some wonder how Faulkner created characters who were as progressive as “Absalom, Absalom’s” Quentin Compson, while at the same time Faulkner himself could sound in interviews like a mini-George Wallace, but it should not be that hard to figure out. Faulkner lived in that Southern world. His family and friends were of that world, and it was a world in which anyone would be rightfully frightened to step out of their societal place, be that person black, white, male, or female. After all, his was a land still frequented by late night “ghosts” of that not so distant war. Because of this Faulkner chose to speak his inner thoughts vicariously through his fictional characters in his fictional county, and he did it in the most disturbing and haunting ways, so that every Southerner is forced to look back on his own family with suspicion, and doubt. We are left to wonder, or more personally for me... what is it in those books that is so bad that Big Bill did not want his son to read them?

I had a hunger to know the answer to that question, and I feel I am a better person for having read Faulkner; a more forgiving person, a more understanding person, a more compassionate person (although my Southern temper still sits on a switch ;). It is easy now to sit back in a safe, comfortable place and say that Faulkner should have had the courage to speak out publicly, but forgetting night-riders, what man wishes to estrange all he knows and loves? And yes, Faulkner loved his home and family despite their warts, just as I love mine. He also strove, in his time and way, to make that home a better place for everyone... as most of us still do.

No, I have never had the opportunity to sit down face to face with Faulkner, and I might not like him if I did, but no matter. I believe I have read enough to know who he is, even below face value. When a man sits down to write he does so in order to seek the truth within himself. The typewriter offered Faulkner freedoms that he didn’t possess in real life, and a free man’s words need not lie.

You are free to judge as you will, but try it while looking through Quentin Compson’s eyes instead of your own, and you too might feel differently about our 5’ 5” Mississippi Giant.

( I wrote and posted this a couple of years ago after reading a liberal diatribe from an angry-at-life Proser who blamed Faulkner and Hemingway for all the ails of the physical and literary worlds, but then pulled it down after reconsidering the source of my anger over the piece… just not worth arguing with. I kept it in my drafts though, and think it a decent, stand alone essay. I am adding it here, as TheWolfeDen and I see much more eye-to-eye on the struggles of modern Southerness than me and that Connecticut Yankee ever could, bless her Bryn Mawr heart.)