Pappy explained that the first beer referendum had lost because “too many voters who drank beer or didn’t object to other people drinking it, were absent in Europe and Asia defending Oxford, where voters who preferred home to war could vote on beer in 1944.”
When the Eagle appeared without his letter, Pappy went straight to editor Phil “Moon” Mullen for an explanation. Mullen told him he didn’t want his newspaper to help “Bill Faulkner in jumping all over the preachers.”
Pappy said, “Strike me some circulars,” and left. When the flyers entitled “To the Voters of Oxford” were printed, Pappy turned them over to Vicki and me. We were enthusiastic about helping him distribute his broadside promoting the legal sale of beer, even though we were much too young to drink. With help from other family members, we went door to door handing out flyers. Our territory, mine and Vicki’s, covered the neighborhoods south of the square. With our best smiles and Sunday manners we delivered broadsides to unsuspecting, often teetotaling, residents. We knocked on the door of the Baptist minister’s home on University Avenue, a southern colonial house that resembled Rowan Oak, and proudly presented his wife, Mrs. Purser, with a copy of our flyer. “Hey, Miz Purser,” we said when she opened the door. “How you doing?”
Some weeks later, Vicki and I were beside ourselves with delight when the Eagle ran a letter to the editor from an irate citizen horrified at “innocents” being used “to encourage drinking,” referring to us by name: “granddaughter, Vicki, and niece, Dean.” We were famous.
In spite of our efforts, Pappy and beer lost by a vote of 480 to 313. After the election, which banned beer sales for five more years, Pappy wrote to the Eagle again, and this time his letter was published. “Oxford should stay dry,” he wrote, because that was far “better than to break up the long and happy marriage between dry voters and illicit sellers for which our fair state supplies one of the last sanctuaries and strongholds.” He also objected to any clergyman using his influence from the pulpit to sway a civil election. The letter was so well received that two months after its original publication it appeared in The New Yorker.
At about the same time, another issue was coming to a vote in a far-off land whose citizenry loved beer almost as much as they loved to read.
ON NOVEMBER 10, 1950, a cold, gray morning, Pappy visited Dean’s grave at St. Peter’s Cemetery. Fifteen years had scarcely blunted his grief over Dean’s death. After he paid his respects he returned to Rowan Oak, went to the pantry where he kept his whiskey, and got out a bottle of bourbon and a shot glass. Then he went into the library to smoke and drink. Aunt Estelle knew not to intrude.
That afternoon, the telephone rang. Aunt Estelle took the call (Pappy never answered the phone) and went to get her husband. “It’s for you, Bill. Long distance.” He sighed and stood up, staggered by whiskey and sadness. He walked stiffly to the telephone in the pantry and picked up the receiver. “William Faulkner speaking.” A voice from very far away said, “Mr. Faulkner, it is an honor, sir, to inform you that you have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
The gentleman on the line explained that the award was for 1949, when no prize had been given, and that Bertrand Russell had received the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature. He expressed hopes of seeing Faulkner and Russell together in Stockholm on December 10 to receive their prizes. Pappy, dreading ceremonies of any kind, especially one where he would be expected to deliver a public address, thanked the caller and hung up. Turning to Aunt Estelle, he said, “That was Stockholm calling. They gave me the Nobel Prize.”
Aunt Estelle scarcely had time to express her delight when he declared that he wasn’t about to go all the way to Stockholm, even to receive a Nobel Prize. She searched her mind for a winning argument. Jill had never been to Europe. This was her chance to fly there courtesy of the Nobel Prize committee. She would go in Aunt Estelle’s place. If Pappy refused to think of himself, she argued, the least he could do was to consider his seventeen-year-old daughter’s dream of seeing Europe. After putting up fierce resistance, Pappy gave in to Aunt Estelle’s suggestion. He didn’t have a leg to stand on, but as he told her, “I still have a full month to drink!”
At the end of the first week in December, Aunt Estelle took her husband and daughter to the Memphis airport and bade them good-bye and godspeed. They boarded an American Airlines flight to New York, where they would catch a connecting flight to Sweden. As Pappy and Jill boarded the plane, the captain checked the passenger manifest and chatted with a stewardess. The captain was Pappy’s old friend and former Mississippi barnstormer Murry Spain. The last time they had been together was at Dean’s funeral.
The two greeted each other warmly, and Murry invited Pappy to join him in the cockpit after the flight was under way. Once the plane was airborne, Murry sent a stewardess for him. The copilot gave Pappy his seat. It was a bittersweet moment for both men. If Dean had lived, he might well have been sitting in Murry’s place, a major airline captain. Murry explained the control panel to Pappy, the complicated gauges and radar and electronic flying aids, comparing these marvels to the simple flying machines of old.
When dials and instruments and memories had exhausted themselves as conversation topics, Murry paid his old friend the ultimate compliment. He offered him the controls and invited him to see how it felt to fly a DC-10. After a token refusal, Pappy accepted.* After piloting, or steering, the plane for a few moments, he handed the controls back. Murry put the plane on autopilot and asked what occasion had prompted this trip. Pappy replied simply, “Business.” He then returned to his seat next to Jill.
After the plane landed, the passengers exited onto the tarmac. Murry came to say good-bye. As they walked toward the terminal, the captain saw a battery of reporters and photographers waiting just inside the glass doors. He now appreciated the understatement of his friend’s “business” in New York. Pappy took Jill by the arm and led her gently but firmly away from the flashing cameras.
With typical Faulkner reticence, none of my kinfolk said a word to me about Pappy winning the Nobel Prize. Wese and Jimmy and I were living in Little Rock that year. The morning that the news broke I was at school. In my Latin class, the teacher, Miss Mason, announced at the beginning of class that my uncle had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I was so surprised I didn’t know what to think. Few of my classmates believed he was my uncle.
Thirty-five years later I met Doubleday senior editor Carolyn Blakemore, the only person I know, other than Pappy and Jill, who attended the Nobel Prize ceremony. Carolyn, who was an exchange student in Sweden in 1950, recalled that she and her fellow students were agog at the prospect of seeing William Faulkner, who was “respected at home, but in Europe, and particularly in Sweden, revered. The awards presentation ceremony was held at four p.m. in the Concert Hall, a 1920s building that normally housed the Stockholm Symphony. The laureates were seated in a diagonal row at the front of the stage. Behind them were past winners and the Swedish Academy. Members of the royal family occupied the orchestra seats. Faulkner, in white tie, was ramrod straight, high-arched feet—in blindingly polished shoes—at a military forty-five-degree angle. He clutched and clenched a burgundy-colored handkerchief in both hands—the only visible sign of nervousness.”
Dinner was served in the Blue Hall, a vast medieval room that reminded Carolyn of a set for a production of Hamlet. The various courses were announced by trumpeters in sixteenth-century costumes. When the dinner was over, a young Swedish friend of Carolyn insisted that since she was an American, she must introduce him to Faulkner.
“Emboldened by unaccustomed wine,” she recalled, “I approached the great man. ‘Mr. Faulkner, my name is … I am an American student … a great admirer of your work.… These are my Swedish friends who would like to meet …’ Then a flock of handsome young men, impeccably dressed, came forward and in turn shook hands, bowed, clicked heels. Faulkner could not have been more gracious and introduced us to his daughter, Jill. Then, soon afterward, he was gone.”
&
nbsp; When asked the next day about Faulkner’s acceptance speech, Carolyn replied that it was “disappointing, because we couldn’t hear him. His voice was soft and he didn’t speak directly into the mike. Only a phrase here and there came across to the audience: ‘the basest of all things is to be afraid … I decline to accept the end of man … he will endure … when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.’ And yet, by midday it seemed that all Stockholm—or at least the university world—knew that speech. We had it by heart.”
In time, so did the whole world.
LIFE SOMEHOW RETURNED to normal. Back home in Oxford, Pappy played the gentleman farmer, determined not to be affected by his unwanted celebrity. Suddenly, however, he had a lot of new friends in town. It didn’t matter that most of them hadn’t read his work. They wanted to share the international spotlight. From now on they would live in two worlds: Oxford and Lafayette County, cheek by jowl with “Jefferson” and “Yoknapatawpha County.” Eudora Welty summed up the state’s pride in its native son when she declared, “I’m a Yoknapatawphanatic.”
A few months later Pappy made a far less publicized speech. Jill’s high school graduation exercises were to be held May 28, 1951. Weeks before the event, while Pappy was in New York, Jill’s principal convinced her to ask her father to give the commencement address. When she told him by telephone that her class wanted him to “come talk to them,” he agreed. By the time he found out that the “talk” was to be the graduation speech delivered at Fulton Chapel at Ole Miss to the class of 1951 and their parents and friends, it was too late to back out. He would never have disappointed her, anyway.
At the graduation ceremony he was introduced as “Oxford’s most distinguished citizen.” His speech began by paraphrasing Henri Estienne—“If youth knew, if age could”—and ended with a solemn appeal: “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth, and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.” If young people came together as one, they could in their lifetime alter the world, freeing it from “tyrants [who] will have vanished from the face of it.”
The speech lasted a little over four minutes and was very well received in spite of an early complaint by one of Jill’s classmates that they could have chosen a better speaker—“somebody important.”
In 1953, Jill graduated summa cum laude from Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Thereafter she and Aunt Estelle spent several months in Mexico so she could improve her Spanish. I don’t know when she met her West Point cadet, Paul Dilwyn Summers, Jr., but when she introduced me to him in 1954 she was as happy as I had ever seen her. Their engagement had been announced in June. About that time, Pappy wrote his Random House editor Saxe Commins, “I will need money, probably a ghastly amount. Jill and her mother seem bent on making a production out of this, and her trousseau wedding stuff, bridesmaids’ dresses, champagne, etc., will run to quite a piece of jack I fear.”*
Shortly before Jill and Paul’s wedding in August, I was sent along with them to pick up Pappy at the Memphis airport. He was returning from a State Department-sponsored tour of Venezuela. My job was to serve as comic relief and a conversational buffer between Jill and Paul and Pappy. Everything went smoothly. In Memphis, we went out for barbeque and were waiting on the tarmac when Pappy’s plane touched down. He was glad to see us, hugged Jill and me, clapped Paul on the back, and chatted all the way home. A good sign.
That summer both Vicki and I were in Oxford for the wedding and the round of parties preceding it. We slept in Pappy’s bedroom upstairs. At seventeen, Vicki was far more sophisticated and worldly than I. She had lived all over the world and introduced me to gin and tonics and cigarettes. I had tried—really tried—to learn to smoke when I was in high school in Little Rock but could not inhale without getting sick. While the grown-ups were downstairs we closed the bedroom door and opened the windows as wide as they would go. Sitting cross-legged Indian style on Pappy’s bed, an ashtray between us, we lit our Pall Malls and puffed away, swinging a wet towel to get rid of the telltale smoke whenever we heard footsteps. I finally learned to smoke that summer of ’54. By the time the wedding rolled around I was a pro. Vicki was a good teacher. It took me fifty years to kick the habit.
Our mischief did not end with cigarettes. Left to our own devices, Vicki and I spent many a late night sewing together the hems of Jill’s lingerie trousseau—gowns and peignoirs, exquisitely beautiful in every color.
Her white satin wedding gown was trimmed with heavy lace at the neckline and sleeves, and had lace panels inset in the cathedral-length train. It was an elegantly simple, princess-style gown with so many satin-covered buttons at the wrists and from the neckline to below the waistline that Miss Kate Baker had to use an old-fashioned buttonhook to get Jill into the gown, which showed off her eighteen-inch waist to perfection.
Pappy and Paul and Paul’s groomsmen were turned out splendidly in gray morning coats, while the bridesmaids, Vicki and Mil’Murray and I among them, wore silvery green tea-length dresses with forest green satin high heels and small wreaths of ivy in our hair. We carried bouquets of gardenias. I know Pappy paid for at least two of the dresses and two pairs of shoes: one for Jill’s maid of honor, Vicki, and one for me. I thought we were perfect, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that we could have marched down the aisle stark naked and no one would have noticed. All eyes were on Pappy.
The wedding at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church was big and beautiful, and the reception at Rowan Oak was even bigger. Champagne flowed long after Jill and Paul left for their honeymoon. Vicki and I sat on the stairs, a magnum of champagne between us, and watched Cho Cho and photographer Bern Keating dance the tango. I barely made it upstairs to bed.
Jill and Paul settled in Charlottesville, Virginia, a happy, comfortable place for them, and for Pappy and Aunt Estelle, too, after Pappy later accepted the position of writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Jill became master of fox hounds at the Farmington Hunt in Virginia. Pappy, whose horsemanship could not compare with his daughter’s, was thrilled for her and for himself. He rode to hounds every chance he got. When he was invited to wear the Farmington Hunt colors he was delighted. On several hunts, however, he was thrown. One fall in particular was serious and received far too much publicity to suit him. But then again, any publicity was too much. His picture appeared in many newspapers with a wire report that he’d broken his collarbone.
“How painful is it, Mr. Faulkner?” a reporter asked.
“No worse than a hangnail!”
He would return to Oxford full of tales of the excitement and beauty of the hunt, the countryside, the admiration and esteem he felt for Virginians. He loved the formality and ritual of the hunt—from the blessing of the hounds to the splendid bloodlines of the horses and dogs, to the Pinque coat, top hat, and black riding boots. One Christmas he gave away color photographs of himself in his foxhunting attire.
*I wonder what those passengers would say, now, if they knew that for a few precious minutes they were in the care and keeping of William Faulkner, pilot.
*I’m sure it did run to quite a piece of jack, but it was worth every penny. And to think that within weeks of the wedding Pappy made the first of many payments to send me to college.
PAPPY SHOULD HAVE WON A PULITZER FOR ANY NUMBER OF HIS earlier novels, but this award came almost six years after he’d won the Nobel Prize. He was awarded the Pulitzer in 1955 for his novel A Fable, the one that he outlined on the walls of his “office” at Rowan Oak.* As if storyboarding a movie, he wrote short plot summaries under the headings of days of the week: “MONDAY” through “SUNDAY,” with “TOMORROW” hidden behind the door that opened onto Aunt Estelle’s music room.
Pappy’s “office,” a term he borrowed from southern plantation owners, was a bedroom/study with a single bed, a fireplace, a
nd a large oil painting of an angry mule over the mantel. There were bookshelves that held paperback whodunits, the top shelf covered with his bottle-top collection. (Get one out of place while cleaning the room and there would be hell to pay!) His small writing table that Nannie had given him years before held his Underwood portable typewriter and a crooked-neck brass lamp. A ladder-back chair sat at the table in front of a window facing west. Pappy could look out through white cotton sheers at the stables. It was an ideal place to work.
Two years after Jill married and moved away, Rowan Oak was getting awfully quiet. Aunt Estelle began to complain that they didn’t have a lot of friends in Oxford, though over the years they had thoroughly enjoyed the company of Ashford and Minnie Ruth Little, Ross and Maggie Brown, Hugh and Mary Evans, and Ella Somerville. Perhaps Aunt Estelle was already lobbying for them to move to Charlottesville to be close to Jill and Paul. The offer from the University of Virginia for Pappy to be writer-in-residence must have fallen on their ears like the call of the wild.
It was true that Pappy lacked literary companions in Oxford. No doubt his sense of isolation had a lot to do with the fact that he had traveled widely and that he missed his friends and colleagues the world over. He had no one to talk to about contemporary fiction. He and Phil Stone had had what southerners call a “falling out” and were avoiding each other. His mother was the most sophisticated reader in town, but she could only do so much.
This was the man who knew everybody who was anybody, anywhere. He had even had tea with Albert Einstein in Princeton, several years before. When he came home he told Aunt Estelle that after exchanging pleasantries he and Einstein had little to talk about. I could imagine the two men sitting in silence, with absolutely nothing in common but genius. Pappy could hold on to an endless silence with anyone.
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