Reminiscences Of Wm. Faulkner

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30610, 28 November 1964, Page 4

Reminiscences Of Wm. Faulkner

My Brother Bill. By John Faulkner. Gollancz 277 pp. Not long before his death last year, John Faulkner completed this reminiscence of his brother William, the famous novelist and Nobel Prize winner, who died in 1962. It is a chatty book, rich in anec-

dotes and contains many amusing glimpses of William’s boyhood, which was a perfectly normal and happy time of swimming and hunting, tinkering with machines, and getting into fights. When he grew up, William retained his enthusiasm for the outdoors, and spent a lot of time hunting and yachting, flying aeroplanes, and running a

mule farm. Wisely he seldom moved very far or for very long from Oxford, Mississippi, and the people who provided the stimulus for his writing. John recalls how at country dances William “simply sat by the tub of whisky, taking a drink from a tin cup every now and then and watching and listening.” Years later, the things which he had heard and saw at those dances found their way into many of his books. Similarly, his contact with the wild hill people who distilled whisky from their own corn and settled their disputes by fighting, provided rich material which would have been lost to him if he had made his life in literary or academic circles. John’s remarks about his brother’s writings are frank and down-to-earth: “A great many people,” he writes, “try to read too much into Bill’s writings. It simply is not there nor was it intended to be. If they would read him for the stories he was telling they would realise what a good story-teller Bill was.” And again: “A great deal has been said about Bill in writing about the kinds of people he did, always portraying their seamier side and their most outlandish doings. He himself said that people will believe anything about the South if it is only bizarre enough. He wrote what people will believe, for that’s what they will pay to read, and even a writer has to make money.”

The author is similarly frank in describing Faulkner the man, showing him to have been independent to the point of eccentricity, “stubborn as a mule,” yet at the same time a compassionate and' generous man who seldom refused to share his money with anyone really in need. • Although these reminiscences are casually written, and. do not claim to be serious biography, they are drawn from a lifetime’s close association and contain much information which will be valuable both to future biagraphers and those wishing to known more about William Fauklkner as he really was.