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Robert Brackman
Robert Brackman
	Sculpture of Robert Brackman, published in the book Labor Sculpture by Max Kalish, ©1938 Comet Press.

William Faulkner
William Faulkner
	Faulkner in 1954

Today is the birthday of William Cuthbert Faulkner (New Albany, Mississippi; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962 Byhalia, Mississippi); writer and Nobel Prize laureate. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.

Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel winner. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

As a teenager in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner dated Estelle Oldham (1897–1972), the popular daughter of Major Lemuel and Lida Oldham. Estelle dated other boys during their romance, and in 1918 one of them, Cornell Franklin, proposed marriage to her before Faulkner did. Estelle’s parents insisted she marry Cornell, as he was an Ole Miss law graduate, had recently been commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian Territorial Forces, and came from a respectable family with which they were old friends. Estelle’s marriage to Franklin fell apart ten years later, and she was divorced in April 1929. Faulkner married Estelle in June 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian Church just outside Oxford. They honeymooned on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford. In 1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that time as The Shegog Place from Irish planter Robert Shegog. After his death, Estelle and their daughter, Jill, lived at Rowan Oak until Estelle’s death in 1972. The property was sold to the University of Mississippi in 1972. The house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in Faulkner’s day. Faulkner’s scribblings are still preserved on the wall there, including the day-by-day outline covering an entire week that he wrote out on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in the novel A Fable.

The quality and quantity of Faulkner’s literary output were achieved despite a lifelong drinking problem. He rarely drank while writing, preferring instead to binge after a project’s completion.

Faulkner is known to have had several extramarital affairs. One was with Howard Hawks’s secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter, later known as Meta Wilde. The affair was chronicled in her book A Loving Gentleman. Another affair, from 1949 to 1953, was with a young writer, Joan Williams, who made her relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971 novel, The Wintering.

When Faulkner visited Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the Nobel Prize, he met Else Jonsson (1912–96) and they had an affair that lasted until the end of 1953. Else was the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson (1910–50), reporter for Dagens Nyheter in New York, who had interviewed Faulkner in 1946 and introduced his works to Swedish readers. At the banquet in 1950 where they met, publisher Tor Bonnier referred to Else as widow of the man responsible for Faulkner being awarded the prize.

Prose

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

The Wild Palms (1939)

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [first published as The Wild Palms] has ten unnumbered chapters. The odd chapters are titled “Wild Palms”, the even ones “Old Man”. Page numbers from the Vintage Books (1966) edition.

… the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I had never actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the sum of love is what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.
- Harry Wilbourne to Charlotte Rittenmeyer, in (Ch. 3) “Wild Palms”; p. 48

… not sin, he thought, I dont believe in sin. It’s getting out of timing. You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with the teeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death.
- Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 3) “Wild Palms”; p. 54 (Faulkner’s italics)

They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the one that dies.
- Charlotte Rittenmeyer to Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 5) “Wild Palms”; p. 83

I told you once how I believe it isn’t love that dies, it’s the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn’t deserve the chance any more to love.
- Charlotte Rittenmeyer to Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 7) “Wild Palms”; p. 218

… when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.—Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.
- Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 9) “Wild Palms”; p. 324 (Faulkner’s italics)

Requiem for a Nun (1951)

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
- Act 1, sc. 3;

… maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it.
- Act 2, sc. 1

… so vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
- Act 3

Today is the birthday of Robert Brackman (Odes’ka Oblast, Ukraine September 25, 1898 – July 16, 1980 New London, Connecticut); artist and teacher of Ukrainian origin, best known for large figural works, portraits, and still lifes.

Gallery

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