Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
William Faulkner and Southern History, by Joel Williamson, is primarily an elaborate biography of Faulkner. Since it is written by an historian, however, the subject of Faulkner’s life is approached in a different way than it might be by a literary expert. Williamson uses the story of Faulkner’s ancestors to discuss key themes found in the Old South, while also showing how the Faulkner family exemplified the ideas of the Old South. The book is divided into three sections: ancestry, biography, and writing.
The section on ancestry traces several of Faulkner’s family lines, beginning with his great-grandfather, William Falkner. The first Falkner was nearly as typical a Southern gentleman as there could be. While he was not a plantation owner, he owned some slaves, engaged in many duels, and had a number of mulatto children who claimed him as their father. Additionally, he was a colonel in the Civil War. However, for all of his conformity to Southern ideals, Colonel Falkner also “alienated himself from his community by his independence, his willfulness, and his egoism.” (p. 60)
This is, perhaps, the most lasting sign of William Faulkner’s inheritance from this branch of his family. However, Faulkner is noted to have been more Butler than Falkner, or displaying more of the characteristics of his mother’s side than those of his father’s side. However, Williamson is not particularly clear as to what characteristics William Faulkner inherited from his mother’s side of the family.
In the biography section, much more of Faulkner’s character is revealed. He emerged early as a great story teller, frequently exaggerating parts of his own life or adopting parts of other’s lives as his own. For example, although he did join the British Royal Air Force during WWI, he never saw any combat action, and the school at which he was to learn to fly closed before he would have seen any significant air time. But after the war, he often passed himself off as an injured pilot who had attained an officer’s rank.
Even people who knew him well often believed his convincing story, despite the fact that most of it was a lie. Turning away from his story telling capabilities, however, we learn that Faulkner, like many members of his family, was an alcoholic, and had to enter sanitariums periodically in order to help with his drinking problem. Additionally, he had many problems with women, including an extravagant wife whom he grew to care for very little, a few affairs, and several attempted but unsuccessful affairs.
The most difficult section of this book was the one dealing with Faulkner’s writing. Williamson offers little in the way of plot synopses, so any information about the books mentioned here must be drawn from the sporadic mentions of each. Williamson notes some of the themes which are prevalent throughout Faulkner’s body of work: normal and/or abnormal varieties of sex, community in a changing world, nature vs. modernity, and biblical references. As opposed to other Southern writers who glorified their region of birth, “Faulkner demurred from the great consensus on the unflawed South. His work was, essentially an exhaustive critique of Southern society and thorough cataloguing of its failures to bring the human values inherent in man, evident in the natural setting, into the modern world. … His objective as a critic was, of course, not to damn the South but to save it.” (pp. 358-59) Faulkner was aware of the many problems of Southern culture, many of which he wanted to see repaired.
One of the major problems of the South in Faulkner’s lifetime, with which he dealt extensively, was that of the Civil Rights movement. Initially, Faulkner believed that in order for this problem to be resolved, the North needed to let the South take care of its problem without any outside intervention. One of his many interesting comments on the topic of desegregation was that opposing it was “like living in Alaska and saying you don’t like snow.” (qtd., p. 303) In other words, desegregation was inevitably going to happen, and the great mass of Southerners was going to have to like it, or at least learn to like it. However, Williamson also notes that “[t]he history of Faulkner’s participation in the Civil Rights movement is full of contradiction and confusion.” (p. 310) For example, he admitted in an interview that if the North attempted to force desegregation on the South, “if it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” (qtd., p. 306) He later attempted to atone for this statement by using his drunkenness as an excuse, but Williamson finds that “[i]n the end, he did what some Southerners who were progressive in matters of race in such circumstances have always done: he abandoned the cause and blamed the blacks.” (p. 311)
His frequently vacillating position on the issue of race is seen by many as a major character flaw, but Williamson believes that it was related closely to the fact that Faulkner so often included the race question in his writing. His empathy with his characters, regardless of race, hampered his consistency in dealing with race.
Overall, this book is a very interesting evaluation of Faulkner’s family, life, and work. While certainly colored by Williamson’s insistence on examining all possible psychological justifications for people’s actions, it offers great insight into the mind of an unusual author and person, a man who wanted both his obituary and epitaph to read “He made the books and he died.” (qtd., p. 271)
