Talking about William Faulkner: interviews with Jimmy Faulkner and others

Abstract

In 1970s and 1980s, Sally Wolff and Floyd C. Watkins, both of Emory University, took students of southern literature to Lafayette County, Mississippi, to explore region where William Faulkner lived. They visited Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi; trekked around countryside; and met people who were prototypes for some of his characters. During these excursions, they discovered firsthand how profoundly Faulkner's family, community, and region imprinted themselves on his imagination and then both shaped and enriched his work. Their primary guide was Jimmy Faulkner, who was once described by his famous uncle as the only person who likes me for what I am. Like his uncle, Jimmy is a born storyteller, and his recollections provide profound as well as intimate details about Faulkner as author, father, member of unusual Faulkner clan, and resident of model for what may be most famous county in American literature. In these interviews, and in forty-three splendid black-and-white photographs that accompany them, we move through Faulkner's home territory and encounter sources of his sense of place and its past: antebellum Rowan Oak, with its scuppernong vines and outside kitchen; old plantation homes and dogtrot houses; narrow one-lane bridges and creeks with Indian names; country churches and cemeteries. Jimmy's comments often link specific sites with particular episodes or settings in Faulkner's works, and his humorous stories sometimes mingle fact with fiction. Two colourful local personalities who knew Faulkner, Pearle Galloway, proprietor of a general store near Oxford for over thirty years, and Motee Daniel, owner of various enterprises, including a roadhouse, a general store, and a bootlegging operation, also tell tales about him. Galloway and Daniel provide, in turn, fascinating glimpses of kind of people who intrigued Faulkner and about whom he wrote. While his work was most certainly influenced by his surroundings, Faulkner, through his stories and novels, likewise transformed memories, perceptions, and interpretations of his family, his community, and his readers. Talking About William Faulkner deepens our knowledge of Faulkner's everyday life and our understanding of world in which he lived and of which he wrote.