Sadly, Dean Faulkner Wells died last year shortly after
publishing her delightful memoir about her uncle, famed Southern
novelist William Faulkner.
Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of
Mississippi was favorably reviewed. It would be hard to write
an uninteresting book about her colorful, eccentric family. She did
several media interviews and then was felled by a stroke, age 75,
appropriately expiring in the Mississippi Faulkner hometown of
Oxford, which was the fictionalized backdrop for many Faulkner
novels. Wells was partly raised by the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize
winner, her father, William’s younger brother, having died before
her birth in a plane crash. She assumed her uncle was long plagued
by guilt, having given his brother the plane, which her father
piloted in the 1930s as a stunt flyer for Southern rural audiences.
Wells was the last of Faulkner’s immediate family, his daughter and
step-daughter already deceased.
A recent visit to Oxford, home to the University of Mississippi,
fulfilled expectations of a gentile courthouse town full of
ghostly, Faulknerian memories. In Faulkner’s novels, it became the
thinly veiled 19th century and early 20th century town of
Jefferson, county seat to Yoknapatawpha County, where generations
of Snopses, Bundrens, Sartorises, and Hightowers roamed across the
pine studded landscape. Many of the characters were loosely or not
so loosely based on Faulkner’s own family, ancestors, and
neighbors. In her book, Wells laments the town’s recent
gentrification, its charm and literary celebrity having made it a
tourist destination and a home for well-heeled retirees. The town
square still looks much as Faulkner would remember it, except there
is a seated statue of him, plus an assortment of nouveau cuisine
restaurants catering to a more upscale clientele. Wells remembered
one New Year’s Eve when the one option for her family was a diner
serving only cheeseburgers and peach pie. Doubtless frustrated by
Oxford’s limited social, cultural, and dining choices, Faulkner in
his later years lived part time in Charlottesville, Virginia. But
he always returned to his antebellum home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford.
The Confederate statue outside the court house, an iconic symbolic
of Southern timelessness in his novels, still looms over the town
square.
Faulkner had his vices. As a young man and under-employed World
War I veteran who never saw combat, he visited Memphis brothels,
often accompanied by his underage younger brother, Wells’s father,
who waited in the parlor while Faulkner was behind closed doors. He
had numerous adulterous affairs with ever younger mistresses who
revered and exploited Faulkner’s fame. He was also a frequent
inebriate, frequently hospitalized across the decades for alcoholic
excess. Wells claims she never saw him drunk. Faulkner seems to
have been most of the time a thoughtful father and uncle. He drove
the children to school, hosted their parties, paid for their travel
and education, and presided over their weddings. Faulkner provided
for not only the children but siblings, in-laws, and his long-lived
mother, with whom Wells also lived. He was nearly always courtly to
friends and strangers though was partly a social recluse who was
indifferent to his celebrity. He brushed off a phone call from CBS
journalist Edward R. Murrow once when Wells answered the phone. And
he avoided Vincente Minnelli when the Hollywood director was
filming a Faulkner story in Oxford. When Clark Gable professed not
to know Faulkner was an author, he reciprocated by asking Gable’s
profession. Wells recounts she did not appreciate her uncle’s fame
until a movie based on his novel Intruders in the Dust,
debuted at Oxford’s only movie theater. Faulkner attended the
opening night but declined to address the audience. When a later
Faulkner-based novel appeared on screen, he curtly told the
audience it bore no resemblance to his work and walked out.
Faulkner seems not to have been conventionally religious. He was
raised sort of Methodist, married in a Presbyterian church, and
later became an infrequently church-attending Episcopalian. But
intrinsically as a Southerner, religion permeated his works. His
fictional religious characters were often absurd or despicable.
Calvinists were especially mocked, and he liked to assert that
there was no music in a Presbyterian hymnal. Rev. Hightower of his
novel Light in August infamously is driven into seclusion
by the predestinarianism of his faith, hauntingly obsessed with his
grandfather’s role in a Civil War skirmish in Jefferson decades
before his birth. But religion itself was for Faulkner enduring and
inescapable. A sort of faith permeated his 1950 Nobel acceptance
speech in Stockholm, where he insisted transcendent humanity would
prevail against the threat of nuclear war.
Wells recounts her sadness when Faulkner died in 1962 at age
only 65. The funeral was at Faulkner’s estate. Writer Shelby Foote
afterwards joined Wells on the front porch, telling her of first
knocking on Faulkner’s door as a stranger 30 years before, with a
young and slightly embarrassed Walker Percy waiting in the car.
Only a few months later in 1962, Oxford became globally infamous
when thousands of rednecks descended on the University of
Mississippi campus to prevent enrollment of the school’s first
black student, James Meredith. Several hundred law enforcement
officers and rioters were wounded in the ensuing riot, and two
persons were killed. Wells watched and welcomed federal troops
marching down the street. She also witnessed an elderly black man
wrung from his car, which attackers then set on fire. Her uncle,
she remembers, was the family’s nearly lone racial progressive, his
novel Intruders in the Dust having foreshadowed To
Kill a Mockingbird by featuring an innocent black man charged
with a felony and under threat of lynching.
The fiftieth anniversary of Faulkner’s death and the Ole Miss
riots over Meredith passed relatively quietly this year. Having
dramatized in literature the old, pre-desegregation South for the
whole world, Faulkner left this world just as a new more racially
enlightened South was born. Wells doesn’t directly comment on the
symmetry but must have recognized it. She died before enjoying the
full reception of her book. But at least she survived to produce
the final memoir about her uncle, the South’s most famous
novelist.
