The Wintering

by Joan Williams

  After graduating from Bard, I went back to Memphis, and we abandoned that summer the idea of meeting in the city. Not only was there more fear of his being recognized, but a city seemed wrong. And we decided upon a town about halfway between our respective towns, called Holly Springs. Sometimes I took my mother’s car there. And sometimes I walked half a block from home to Lamar Avenue and flagged down a Greyhound bus. Once my mother asked what I’d been doing to get one arm so sunburned. It had rested on the car’s windowsill down and back, and I don’t know what I replied. I met him always at the shady courthouse square. We set off down a highway to Pott’s Camp, though I never saw anything but a road sign announcing it ahead. Turning at the sign, we traveled blinding, red, dusty country roads that wound in a maze through emptyish countryside. I suppose in those days I thought all woods belonged to God, and I don’t know if we ever trespassed finding places in them to sit. He brought beer, and a lunch for me; he always thought of me as “young enough to need to eat in the middle of the day.”

  Since it was not the nature of either of us to talk very much, we simply did not talk a lot. It was so hot, and everything so still. And we perspired. That he could smell of sweat made him Bill, rather than Faulkner. I came once with pencil and paper and, sitting on a tree root, said I thought I ought to ask questions about his work, and write it all down, but I didn’t know what to ask. He waved a hand and said I didn’t need to ask those kinds of things; that what I got from the solitude and silence was enough. We agreed there was not enough silence in the world, and that most people wouldn’t understand two people wanting to sit in the woods all day to be together, talking or not. We were soul mates, and if that was sentimentality we were not against it. What’s wrong with sentimentality? I asked. Faulkner said, People are afraid of it.

  Driving along one of these country roads once, and only slowing down, he reached into the back seat and said, I have something for you. He put into my lap the original manuscript of The Sound and the Fury, handwritten. And sitting one day in a one-room apartment I had in Greenwich Village, which was chocolate brown when I moved in, and which he painted white (house-painting was his first profession, wasn’t it?), he asked where the manuscript was. It’s here, I said. It had gotten more and more valuable, and he put it in a safe at Random House, giving his editor, Saxe Commins, a letter saying the manuscript was irrevocably mine, beyond any future claim; though I’ve never seen it again.

  After our second meeting in January, Faulkner had read my story in Mademoiselle. I was touched, and never knew how he had gotten a back issue. The point of writing, he had said, was to make something passionate and moving and true, and the story was moving and true. It made him want to cry a little for all the sad frustration of solitude, isolation, aloneness in which every human being lives, who, for all the blood kinship and everything else, can’t really communicate, touch. I knew if he thought that at his age it would be true always for me, too. And was it not why he wrote, and why I tried to?

  He said that the force and the passion and the controlled heat would come in time. I worried about writing. He said it was good to worry: that was part of it; the suffering and the working, most of all the working, the being willing and ready to sacrifice everything for it—happiness, peace, money, duty, too, if I was so unlucky. Only, quite often, if you are really willing to sacrifice any and everything for it, everything will not be required, demanded by the gods.

  I had all along been trying to write other stories, but none were good enough that he could help them. And it seemed to me that in trying, he was rewriting them. But I wrote now another story set in the same countryside, as my first had been, as innate to me as it was to him. I spent childhood summers in my mother’s Mississippi birthplace, a tiny community of three hundred called Arkabutla. The happiest part of my childhood was staying with my grandmother, surrounded by aunts, uncles, and first cousins. Once, in New York, we were going to a party given by a Random House editor and Faulkner said he was so much more comfortable going with me. I was surprised because he had known these people a long time. But you are my countryman, he said.

  My story was sparked by a retarded man in my grandmother’s town. People teased him by saying, “You’re not crazy, are you?” And he’d reply, “Naw. But me ain’t far from it.” How, I wanted to know, did people not know his feelings were hurt? And so my story began to write itself in my head. I took it to Faulkner in the woods, and after reading it, he said, This may be it.

  He took the story home but found nothing to do to it. It was too good for even him to touch, he wrote. It’s all right this time. I think you can stop worrying, and just write. The next one may not be this good, but don’t let that trouble you either.

  In my story the retarded man was a mute. And I don’t remember my first title, but Faulkner didn’t like it. He said I was writing about a human being, true. But he thought the title should refer to a condition, some applicable quotation, such as “a little child shall lead them,” though that was not quite right. Some word, maybe, like “twilight,” some tender word, or, for emphasis (since the story opened in a traveling picture show), some savage word or phrase out of Hollywood motion-picture slogans about the education or artistic value or the importance of motion pictures.

  When I saw him he suddenly suggested “The Morning and the Evening,” out of Genesis, when God created day and night; because to my mute Jake, all time is the same; it doesn’t matter to him whether it’s morning or evening. In the King James version, the evening and the morning were the second day; whether Faulkner deliberately re-arranged the title or remembered wrongly, I don’t know.

  My opening was, “The owner-manager did not take his first customer for a looney.…” And Faulkner suggested a few words to capture instantly, he said, the owner’s character. He wrote: “The owner-manager (everything else too, with the exception of the licensed projectionist which union regulations forced him to hire).…” But he crossed that out, and rewrote: “(and ticket seller and -taker and everything else too, with the exception of the licensed projectionist whom labor union regulations compelled him to hire) did not take the first customer in the line beyond the window for a looney, and tried to charge him full admission.” However, youthful perversity, and a desire to have it as much mine as possible, made me write finally: “The owner-manager was also the ticket seller and ticket taker and would have been his own projectionist, too, if labor regulations had not forced him to hire a licensed one. He did not take his first customer for a looney and tried to charge him full admission.” Always Faulkner and I spoke of Benjy and Jake in the same breath; but suddenly I wrote him a letter that began: “My God! I’ve just been re-reading The Hamlet. And Jake is not Benjy. He’s Ike Snopes!” Though at the time I wrote the story I was not consciously thinking of characters or situations in either The Sound and the Fury or The Hamlet.

  Years later a young professor in South Carolina said to me he did not believe he could have understood The Sound and the Fury when he was twenty. I said nothing, but began a long drive back to Connecticut, and somewhere in the southern landscape suddenly thought, Of course, I did not understand it then. I felt it, and only Benjy’s section. I knew that what had moved me was his inarticulateness, because I felt it to be my own; and so many years later I could write convincingly about a mute’s desire, and inability, to communicate.

  Faulkner sent the story with a covering letter to Harper’s, which rejected it. He sent it then to his agent, Harold Ober, to save himself postage and time. The day the story arrived, a young man just beginning to work for The Atlantic Monthly stopped in to introduce himself to Mr. Ober and to ask if he had any material. Mr. Ober gave the story to Seymour Lawrence, and it was published as an “Atlantic First.”

  Contrary to Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography, Faulkner had nothing to do with this story’s expansion into my first novel, by the same title and using the original story as the first chapter. I sent him the novel with the inscription: For Bill. At long last. I w
as thirty-one then. In January 1961 he wrote that he had read the book with a great deal of expectation and hope, and he had not been disappointed in either. It is all right. It is a good first book and will be a bad last one. So you must continue, go on, write another one. Not only because the more you write the more you will learn to correct the faults, all minor in my opinion, in this one. It is a good story in concept because it is not regional nor topical, but universal. Next time, if you still keep your sights high, you will do it better since the more you write, the more you will learn how to express, milk dry, the love and hatred you have to feel, not for man in his behaviour, but for man in his condition. Get at another one right away. Dont write this one again. Write another one. By the time I did, he was gone.

  He added that he still thought anyone who wanted to be a serious and honest artist should get away from the entire East north of the Potomac and east of the mountains, and stay away until he or she was old enough to resist them. But then I was living in Connecticut, married and the mother or two children.

  In July 1962, I was visiting in the South and spent a day with my cousin Regina. She urged me to call Faulkner, though I felt reluctant about seeing him at home. I had seen him in May at the awards luncheon given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I received a grant for The Morning and the Evening. I had sat in a front row as a recipient and Faulkner sat on the platform just above me, and dozed. When I walked past to receive an envelope from Malcolm Cowley, I thought Faulkner asleep.

  In Oxford Mrs. Faulkner answered the phone and said of course I must see Bill, and to come right away. After greeting me, and calling him, she ushered her mystified sister off the porch where they had been sitting, and left us alone. I wish we had said something momentous, but we did not. He asked if there had been money in that envelope they gave me. And I said no; they gave me the money later.

  He walked me to the car; I thought he looked pale. Ten days later he was dead.

  I had thought he would live to be an old man. In Connecticut I had daydreamed of going back to Mississippi when he was eighty and sitting in a rocker; I would put a brightly colored afghan over his knees and sit by them, and listen again. But I was glad to be, that July, in those blue hills where, though he was dead, the earth that held him fast would find him breath: his own elegy.

  I had seen the last; and if I had not seen the real first, I had seen a beginning of another kind, in his middle age. Someday, Joan, he said, you will know that no one will ever love you as I have.

  I know that now, passing my half-century mark.

  He gave us Dilsey to teach us about enduring: grief and regret and whatever comes our way. He always worried about being too old for me. Tell me if I’m too old. You will tell me, won’t you? And I said, You are not too old. Thank God. I think I can cope with, maybe not beat, but cope with anything but that.

  I would never have said he was too old. I was taking care of him for the whole world, remember.

  About the Author

  Joan Williams (1928–2004) was an acclaimed author of short stories and novels, including The Morning and the Evening, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Wintering, a roman à clef based on her relationship with William Faulkner. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Bard College in upstate New York, Williams was greatly influenced by the legacy of her mother’s rural Mississippi upbringing and set much of her fiction in that state. Her numerous honors included the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author᾿s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Twenty Will Not Come Again” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in May, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by Joan Williams

  Copyright © 1971, 1980 by Joan Williams

  Cover design by Angela Goddard

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-9464-4

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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