Dean Faulkner Wells, the last surviving immediate family member of William Faulkner passed away on Wednesday in Oxford, Mississippi. She had stroke complications according to one source. Mrs. Wells was 75 years old and in March had just published her autobiography titled “Every Day By The Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkner’s of Mississippi”. The book is about her memories of Oxford and growing up as a Faulkner.

St. Peter’s Cemetery will be putting on a grave side service on Friday, July 29th.

Rest in Peace Dean Faulkner Wells.

From time to time, we like sharing pics from around the Oxford area. This is one of those times : )

Because I am a dedicated journalist, I am finishing this series the way I said I would, despite the fact that I am being haunted by Faulkner. That was not unintentional hyperbole or a misprint. This weekend, I moved into a new house on North Lamar. It is the culmination of all things real estate: location, location, location. I now find myself single-handedly combating gas prices and walking, running, or biking to the square multiple times a day. Sunday, I found myself at Faulkner’s grave in search of the 4^th site that I made reference to in the first article of this series. My apparently unreliable research claimed that this 4^th site on the Faulkner lot contained a headstone for “E.T.” which was rumored to be Faulkner’s dog. Alas, there is no such thing. Twenty-one steps from the graveyard’s landmark lie only William, Estelle, and her son Malcolm. Oh yeah, and Faulkner’s ghost.

Their graves were covered in coins, and a seemingly new lighter. Earlier in the day, I discovered that I had nothing to light my new candles with. So, for the sake of frugality, I took the one on Faulkner’s grave. On the way home, in a fit of pyromania, I was flicking the lighter over and over again, only to burn myself. I thought nothing of it until my lighter-lit candle was overturned and nearly burned my new house down.

This new house came furnished with a great desk that contained a copy of a letter written by none other than Faulkner himself. It was upon this discovery that I almost forfeited this series, in the name of dispelling the ghost. The letter, which I believe to be a complete representation of all Faulkner correspondence, said this (complete with the typos within the letter):

J.E. Lewison Co., Oxford, Miss.
City. 31 January, 1941

Dear Will:

I’m not going to sign these checks anymore than I ever signed the checks and notes you have filled out and sent to me in the past. Attached is my own check for ten. I will send more on the account when I can. I make no promise as to when that will be.

I tried last summer to explain to you about $1600.00 additional 1937 income tax which I was trying to pay, two years after my Hollywood income had cease and wehn for two years my income had been reduced about 95%, but naturally I did not expect you to listen to it much, since J.E. Neilson cant be anymote interested in Wm Faulkner’s hard luck stories than Wm Faulkner can be interested in J.E. Neilson’s. But that’s the situation. I am trying not to meet the last $853.00 payment, for which demand (also with threats) was made Dec. 20. So if I were going to give anyone a series of signed checks, I would give them to the grocers and fuel people who in their kindness have supplied myself and my dependents with food and heat during this time, and to whom I owe a lot more than even Estelle et al managed to get into you for.

If this dont suit you, the only alternative I can think of is, in the old Miltonic phrase, sue and be damned. If you decide on that step, be assured that I shall do my bet to see that the people who have fed me and my family will be protected, and after Uncle Sam gets through with his meat-cutting, J.E. Neilson can have what is left. You may even get an autographed book. That will be worth a damn sigh more than my autograph on a check dated ten months from now.

Wm Faulkner

You can now find the Faulkner gravesite occupied by William, Estelle, Malcolm, maybe a dog, and certainly a black lighter.

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.”

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”

“Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.”

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

“Perhaps they were right in putting love into books… Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”

“The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.”

“If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything. never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

Next week is the end of the series on Faulkner trivia. I may even talk Two Stick into making it a category for Two Stick-Trivia-Tuesday. (Tuesdays @ 10 @ 2 Stick, FYI.) My team is unstoppable. Not really. But “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” needs competition.

This is a link to an interactive website to Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, MS. Now a museum operated by the University of Mississippi, Rowan Oak is open 10-4 Tuesday through Saturday and 1-4 on Sunday. The grounds are open from dawn til dusk every day.

P.S. It’s not only his grave that is haunted. Faulkner told his children that an old maid flung herself from the balcony of Rowan Oak. She is supposedly buried under the Magnolia tree near the garden.

So, first, the bones: rumor has it that Faulkner’s dog is buried next to him in Oxford Cemetery. The Faulkner cemetery plot contains 4 graves: one for Faulkner, his wife Estelle, and stepson Malcolm. The 4th plot was filled by a smaller stone for “E.T.” who was described as “an old family friend who came home to rest with us.” The identity of “E.T.” is a carefully guarded secret; no one seems to know who “E.T.” is, except for Faulkner’s nephew, Jimmy Faulkner. Rumor = it’s the dog. Or the extra-terrestrial.

Faulkner served as the University of Mississippi’s postmaster from 1922-1924. Despite neglect of his duties, and accusations of even throwing away mail, he was ultimately fired for drinking on the job. “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.” He was also “fired” from a volunteer position with the Oxford Boy Scout Troop for, well, drinking on the job. Tisk tisk.

Until 2005, United Airlines sponsored the “Faux Faulkner” awards. Contest entries were attempts at writing the way Faulkner would have written about certain people and situations. Winners of the contest had their piece published in United’s in-flight magazine. (You know you all read those things. Sky Mall was simply a brilliant idea.) That year, 2005, a parody of the Bush Administration modeled after Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury, entitled, “The Administration And The Fury,” written by Sam Apple, attracted a great deal of controversy in both its subject matter and United’s decision to publish it on their website, rather than the magazine itself, which led many to believe United was practicing corporate censorship of freedom of speech.

Faulkner condemned racial segregation in the 1950’s. However, he was against federal intervention. Perhaps this was his attempt at being politically correct.

If you mailed a letter on August 3, 1987, your 22-cent stamp was a tribute to William. (And his negligent postmaster duties. I find the stamp highly ironic. Commemorating a bottle of whisky would have made much more sense.)

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Faulkner (then spelled Falkner) tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps as a pilot. When he was rejected for being too short, he decided to spell his name “Faulkner” and adopted a British persona, and English accent, hoping to join the Royal Air Force in Canada. He was accepted and reported for duty in Toronto on July 9, 1917. He enrolled in months of pre-flight training, lasting until the end of the war in November 1918, and never got to fly. But that didn’t prevent him from suggesting that he had. He returned to Oxford in his R.A.F. uniform sporting wings that he had purchased in New York City and a limp he claimed he had suffered in a crash.

One afternoon in August, Faulkner’s wife Estelle remarked, “Bill, does it ever seem to you that the light in August is different from any other time of the year?” Thus an alteration of the title Dark House to Light in August.

Benjy’s section in The Sound and the Fury is marked by italics that represent shifts in time periods. Faulkner attempted to have these time shifts marked by changes in ink color, but the publishing industry was not advanced enough to support his idea.

Years after his death, an online phenomenon known as “blogging” was developed, which allowed for the creation of this website, in honor of Faulkner’s hometown, and this article, which will be featured in two installments. This would all be impossible, of course, without Al Gore’s invention of the internet. Gore, like Faulkner, is a fellow Nobel Prize winner. Stay tuned next week for Part 2.