SOUND AND FURY IN MISSISSIPPI

SOUND AND FURY IN MISSISSIPPI BY MARDA BURTON 

     Barreling along the back roads of northern Mississippi, I’m enveloped in green – kudzu green, pine green, turnip green, magnolia green, canebrake green, soybean green, live-oak green, scuppernong green, saw-grass green, swamp green, cedar green. So much green shimmers in the light that it’s hypnotic. So much green it overwhelms the sun, which surprises occasionally by bursting through on the road, and then I feel as if that shiny asphalt ribbon might be taking me off to another planet, or another time…
     Because I’m searching for Yoknapatawpha County, I’m in that kind of mood. I expect to see Dilsey or Flem Snopes or Benjy Compson around every bend in the blacktop, not to mention a dapper little man with a neat mustache flipped up at the corners.
     William Faulkner wrote this land into everlasting fame. When the Nobel Prize winner conjured up mythical Yoknapatawpha, he was really writing about the environs of his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, an antebellum college town seventy-five miles southeast of Memphis – one that borrowed its name from another university town in another country. He called his fictional town Jefferson and peopled it with characters based on the folks he knew, most of them renamed Compson and Snopes: “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”
     Oxford is the place where he hiked in the deep green woods and was said to have climbed a tree naked and was blackballed by the university’s literary club. It’s where he served briefly but disastrously as university postmaster and strolled around the Square dressed in a smart World War I uniform and bought his moonshine at the old Buffalo’s Café. He was buried in the family plot here in 1962, on the side of a hill under shady oaks. Visiting writers have been known to come in the dead of night and ritually pour bourbon on his grave.
     Oxford is the place writers from all over the world come on pilgrimage, hoping to soak up some of his genius or merely to follow in his footsteps. The world took a long time to beat a path to Faulkner’s Oxford, but by now his memory virtually owns the town. Visitors are eager to learn what bits of Faulkner trivia locals are willing to impart – “literary tourism” it’s called, sometimes derisively. But few complain about the very real aura such literary distinction bestows upon a pretty but unremarkable little Southern town, now regarded as a full-fledged writers’ mecca. Following Faulkner, such contemporary wordsmiths as Shelby Foote, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, William Styron, Stephen King, Willie Morris, Richard Ford, and Julie Smith have been lured at one time or another to Oxford – dubbed “the Vatican City of Southern letters” by Pat Conroy.
     Famous writers come here to sign their works at Square books. The University of Mississippi, popularly known as Ole Miss, presents the Conference for the Book in April and a prestigious Faulkner conference in July. Larry Wells, Faulkner’s nephew-in-law, has his own publishing company, Yoknapatawpha Press. John Grisham, who called Oxford home before he moved to Virginia, bankrolled a slick literary magazine, the Oxford American. Everywhere you go the talk is of books and literature and “Mr. Bill.” One merchant grins and says, “We got writers comin’ out our ears.”
     My first visit to Oxford many years ago was anything but literary. I was invited to the traditional Old South Ball at Ole Miss, where coeds wear hoopskirts and one’s escort might even wear a Confederate uniform. Back then I knew about Faulkner, but not much. He had won the Nobel Prize, but so what? Most Mississippians – even members of his own family – disapproved of his dark stories full of racial injustice, miscegenation, incest, rape, and death. They thought he was portraying the state and the entire South in a bad light, Of course, he was making all that stuff up, they said. Real Mississippi life wasn’t that way, at least not anymore. Anyway, those kinds of things didn’t happen to our kind of people.
     I remember the ball as a mystical whirl of dancing, drinking, and flirting with handsome fraternity boys in the soft Mississippi moonlight. Daylight brought another round of parties, and everyone went out to Sardis Lake to swim in the hot sun and drink some more. A lot of the talk concerned who was going to be Miss Ole Miss and where to get the best bootleg booze. If anyone had any literary thoughts, they didn’t voice them. After the weekend was over, I drove the crowd all the way back to Jackson because everyone else was too drunk to drive. I had no driver’s license, it was a pitch-black night, and I’m nearsighted and had nothing to see with but my sunglasses. When I drove the car into town and everybody woke up, my date got out and kissed the ground.
     I recalled those thoughtless, youthful, halcyon days years later when I came back to Oxford on another visit in the white heat of late July to cover an early Faulkner Conference for my arts column. At Rowan Oak, as I watched Japanese fans photograph the doorknobs Faulkner had touched, I realized that the author’s hometown would soon have its own niche in the international hall of literary fame. Since my degree was in motherhood instead of literature, I had devised my own summer enrichment scheme, which involved total immersion in certain authors. A summer spent with Faulkner’s “Balzacian chronicle” – often heavy going, I must admit – and I was hooked.
     But I eventually grew bored with scholarly papers, and a friend and I went off to find Willie Morris of North Toward Home fame, then a writer-in-residence at the university. With his old black lab, Pete, galumphing along with us, we went out in the countryside to an old cemetery whose tombstones were adorned with photographs of those who lay beneath them.
     We picnicked under a spreading oak tree beside a small gravestone sans photograph and date but topped with an exquisite little carved lamb. It bore the name Fairy Jumper.
     “Mr. Bill would have like this place,” Willie said. “Maybe he came here, too.”
     No, we decided, if so, this cemetery would have appeared in his writings. It was too good for any writer to pass up, even Faulkner. (Willie eventually wrote about it in a piece for Parade magazine.) Then we went to Willie’s cottage along “faculty row” where I batted out some ideas for him – an introduction for a cookbook, I think – on his rickety old typewriter. “You’re the only person I’ve ever known who can sit down and write while you’re talking out loud about something else,” Willie told me.
     The evening continued at the home of Dean Faulkner Wells, Faulkner’s niece. We all sat around the kitchen table while Dean told stories about “Pappy” and Willie quoted lengthy passages from his work. After a stop at The Gin, Willie’s favorite hangout, our excursion ended as it began – at another cemetery. Very late that night, in the dark of a fingernail moon, we poured a glass of bourbon on Mr. Bill’s grave, our homage complete.
     Now I’m back in Oxford, more than a decade later, for the Conference for the Book, this year dedicated to Eudora Welty. My traveling companion, Edgar Award-winning mystery writer Julie Smith, is a featured speaker, and the drive from New Orleans is a good chance to reconnect after her move back to San Francisco. Because of her husband’s business, my former neighbor and her popular New Orleans detective, Skip Langdon, will have to solve cases from the West Coast. This time I have a driver’s license, but it has expired. I have an attack of déjà vu, we stop in Magnolia to renew my license, and my photo is awful.
     In Oxford we check into the Downtown Inn and immediately head out for the Ole Miss campus, both of us anxious to see if the town still remains in a time warp. We find that in many ways it has; and in more ways it has not. For example, the sprawling campus is almost unrecognizable to Julie since her days as a journalism major back in 1963 when her very first freshman event was in the Grove getting gassed in the integration standoff between federal marshals and Ross Barnett, Mississippi’s governor at the time.
     The Grove, with its lofty trees, stands green and silent in the sun, giving no hint of its turbulent past. The entire student body – the University Greys – gathered here in 1863; they all marched off to war and all were killed at Gettysburg. (The college went coed in 1885.) A century later students watching the Barnett ruckus were tear-gassed. The Grove’s Confederate scout still stands erect on his pedestal, his cap just about to be doffed. It’s said that he’ll doff it to the first virgin to graduate. Confederate symbols (the Rebels football team, fans waving Confederate flags) are still sacred here, although understandably controversial. Today Ole Miss students (12,000) outnumber townspeople (10,000), and the Grove is the site of events such as tailgate parties, pep rallies, and baton-twirling competitions. Ole Miss is renowned for its pretty coeds (several of whom have gone on the become Miss Americas), a fact certainly not lost on Mr. Faulkner, who pursued his share of lovelies in his day.
     These days the university takes the lead in honoring the homeboy. Faulkner manuscripts and memorabilia, including his 1949 Nobel Prize, are displayed at the university’s John Davis Williams Library. In 1974 the university initiated the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, each year exploring a different scholarly theme. Faulkner mania reaches its peak the last week in July when fans, scholars, and collectors come from all over the world. Besides an orgy of speeches and symposia, the event includes exhibits, films, tours of Faulkner country, and a picnic at Rowan Oak, the circa 1840s home the writer purchased in 1930 for $6,000 (six percent interest with no down payment) and lovingly restored over the years.
     Bringing their preconceived imagery with them, foreign fans who read Faulkner in translation – where most of his humor is lost – expect a dark, morbid land filled with murder and passion. What they find instead is a peaceful, pretty little town with streets lined with handsome homes and pristine yards full of flowers. The little antebellum town still looks much as it did in Faulkner’s day. Since he often sat on the Square, these days his sculptured bronze likeness sits, pipe in hand and hat on head, on a bench in front of City Hall. Echoing the controversy that surrounded Mr. Bill’s doings, that statue has both devotees and detractors. Tourism boosters count it an asset; ecologists are enraged over its displacement of an oak tree; fans fuss that it doesn’t look like him; kinfolks say he would have hated the very fact of it.
     Nonetheless, his bench is a good place for us to sit and watch the Compsons and the Snopses go by. The appealing Courthouse Square with its tall Confederate statue is one of the oldest in the state, continuously in use since 1871 when it was rebuilt after having been reduced to ashes by Union troops in 1864 during what some old-timers still call the War of Northern Aggression.
     Faulkner himself wrote the tribute on the World War II memorial on the north side of the courthouse: “They held not theirs, but all men’s liberty/This far from home, to this last sacrifice.”
     The nice old buildings surrounding the Square have been preserved and adapted for reuse as restaurants, taverns, shops, and offices. Browsing at Square Books and its discount spin-off, Off-Square Books, is actively encouraged by owner Richard Howorth, a leader in the American Booksellers Association and a tireless promoter of literary Oxford. Visitors can dine in several attractive eateries, or lift a glass with college students, writers, and bankers in at least a dozen watering holes. A sign over a walkway is labeled FAULKNER’S ALLEY because, says one citizen, “he used to walk through here all the time and stop to pee on the wall.”
     I can’t help but wonder what Faulkner would think of all the tourist and literary activity his fame has brought to Oxford. Certainly he wasn’t much of a tourist himself. Today his fans think nothing of journeying over oceans to reach Yoknapatawpha County. But when Faulkner was invited to the White House, he declined, saying he was too old to travel that far to eat with strangers.
     When a Life piece was proposed, he answered: “I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents. It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph, too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.”
     Oxford is one of those few towns left where it is still possible – despite the inevitable changes wrought by modern life – to find traces of what inspired the author. “The living and the fictitious are not strangers here,” Willie Morris wrote. “The convergence of fact and fiction from the Faulkner corpus is often eerie, but titillating.”
     One of Faulkner’s most widely quoted lines states: “The past is not dead; it’s not even past.” And in this hilly green enclave, where traditions and tall tales are as thick as the tangled undergrowth, where bears and moonshiners once roamed (and might even now), the statement may be taken literally. Dusty little faming hamlets like nearby Thaxton, Taylor, Yocona (say Yock-ney), Toccopola, Tula, Paris, and Ripley (a town fifty miles away where Faulkner’s great-grandfather is buried under an eight-foot statue) bring back images of earlier times. Droopy weathered gray barns still sag in every seam. If you explore deep enough into the countryside, you still might find old tobacco-chewing men in overalls sitting outside country stores whittling and spitting and playing checkers and dominoes. You might stumble across the remains of one of those palatial private fiefdoms from a past when hundreds of slaves were required to carry out the daily work of the plantation.
     Towns like Oxford, for the past century too poor to tear down and rebuild, are now reaping the benefits of restoration, with many antebellum structures still standing to delight lovers of authentic architecture. Even the “shotgun” houses of yeoman farmers are receiving their share of attention. In their entirety these little towns present a fascinating picture of antebellum Southern life adapted to the last quarter of the 20th century.
     Just as important to Faulkner Country as timeless scenery are customs unchanged by the decades. In this neck of the woods, as they say around here, a good yarn is seldom farther away than a roadside store, and front-porch storytelling fuels Southern novelists today just as it did William Faulkner. The raconteur tradition is based, as least partly, on myths and legends that date back before "The War,” meaning, of course, the aforementioned War of Northern Aggression.
     Around Oxford many myths concern Faulkner himself, who has been called “the most quotable author in American literature,” although the majority of scholars agree that many of the tales about him are apocryphal. Certainly nobody now alive can admit to seeing Faulkner sitting naked on a tree limb. He was, after all, born in 1897 and would now be more than 100 years old. But the public Faulkner did nothing during his lifetime to refute the stories told about him and true or not, plenty of Faulkner trivia will continue to be retailed long into the 21st century.
     That Faulkner was either ignored or controversial in Oxford during his lifetime is no secret. Beginning his artistic life as a poet and watercolor painter, sensitive and often awkward, he affected an air of haughtiness that earned him the derisive nickname Count No ‘Count. In one old-timer’s version, “No one in Oxford thought he would amount to a durn. It was the biggest surprise this town ever had when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. But we are all basking in his reflected glory now.”
     At the Oxford Conference for the Book his image looms large. One speech refers to Eudora Welty’s statement that writing in the same state as Faulkner is like “living near a mountain.” The speaker, scholar Noel Polk, reminds us “what lives near a mountain is most often another mountain.” Later, a memorable bit of hilarity concerns not literature or Faulkner but how to get a man to do anything. “Promise him a blow job,” author Jill Conner Browne says. As the room erupts into laughter, she adds: “Oh, you never really have to do it. The mere promise is enough for him to be your slave. It could happen. Someone has said his name and blow job in the same sentence.” After that, The Sweet Potato Queen’s Book of Love is a runaway bestseller at Off-Square Books’ autograph party.  But if we think such worldly topics mean sophistication, we realize Oxford is still a small town when the only food we can find after 10:00 p.m. is a Pizza Hut pie.
     The next morning, as we tuck into delicious bowls of cheese grits and prepare to say goodbye to Oxford, Julie and I agree that the weekend has been both entertaining and stimulating; but we have one more important stop to make on the way out of town. We must pay our respects at Rowan Oak, named by Faulkner after the legend of the rowan tree, believed by Celtic people to harbor magic powers of security and peace.
     Now a national historic landmark owned by the university, the stately old house deep in a grove of oaks and cedars remains the way Faulkner left it, complete with his battered chair and old Underwood portable. The outline of A Fable (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1954) is written on the walls of his office.
     We wander around the house in a kind of spell, trying to imagine the great writer living and working here – having a real life with no special favors from fate. Mr. Bill refused to give up his well-used creature comforts even when his wife nagged him about remodeling to befit his celebrity status, so the place is shabby but comfortable. Like all museum houses, Rowan Oak lacks the clutter of reality – no stacks of books or papers or the myriad odds and ends people accumulate – but it offers instead the serenity of simplicity. With sunlight streaming through the alley of cedars, I’m reminded of a line from Sartoris as Bayard stands looking at his house: “The white simplicity of it dreamed unbroken among the ancient sunshot trees.”
     The estate is beautiful and peaceful with outbuildings and broad pastures – horses and dogs all gone now -- surrounded by Bailey’s Woods, a 31-acre tangle of cedars, oaks, and dogwoods. You can see why Faulkner loved it so.  As we amble around, we spot a lovely young bride in full regalia posing for her portrait beneath a rare pink dogwood tree in gardens fragrant with wisteria and magnolia. I stop to take photographs, while Julie walks on ahead to the car.
     Faulkner reportedly loathed trespassers. During his lifetime, he first put up a small sign that discouraged the uninvited. Later he replaced it, according to photographer Jack Cofield, “with a huge one in boxcar letters you could read a block away.”  Wouldn’t this very private man resent strangers traipsing through his kingdom? I remember reading that when Time magazine asked to do a cover story on him, he refused, saying, “I will be dug in to defend what remains of my privacy to the last bullet.”
     As I walk along the curving path back to the car, I’m torn between those uneasy thoughts and the sheer beauty of the surroundings on this spring morning. I look over my shoulder, somehow expecting to see a short white-haired man in English riding togs canter out of the woods on a filly named Temptress. Instead, two deer suddenly appear in the shadows, stand still as marble statues for a moment, then turn and silently disappear into the deep green woods.

New Orleans, August 2, 1999

A version of this essay first appeared in Literary Trips: Following in the Footsteps of Fame, Vol. 2, Editor Victoria Brooks