“Would an expectation to read Faulkner be far off?”

“A beautiful voice” (#ReadingKilmeny) “More than I can tell”

“Would an expectation to read Faulkner be far off?”

In Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass & Purveyor of Fine Footwear, by Heidi L.M. Jacobs, Molly isn’t sure if she’s falling in love with a man she has nicknamed “the Penguin Man.” If she is in love with him, she wonders if she’ll have to read the books he likes:

Am I in love with the Penguin Man? Can you just like being with someone and not be in love with them? Could I have fallen in love with him and not known? What does love feel like? Aren’t there supposed to be sparks? Isn’t your heart supposed to race? Might the shared love of an author mean you’re supposed to be with someone? Would he expect me to read Steinbeck? Would an expectation to read Faulkner be far off? Is that what love does to a person?

(I wrote about Molly of the Mall last year: “Oh, novels! What would I do without you?”)

I was thinking of Molly last Saturday when I visited William Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi.

I was in Oxford for a week, visiting my sister Bethie and her family, who moved there last summer after several years in Bonn, Germany. If you were following my blog last year, you might remember that when I visited Bethie there, she and I used to go for “coffee with Beethoven” in the Münsterplatz in Bonn. There’s a lovely café right next to the Beethoven statue. In Oxford, the café we went to was on the opposite side of the town square from the Faulkner statue, but it’s still pretty close, and on Saturday morning, we had “coffee with Faulkner.”

Bethie took this photo of Faulkner and me

In the afternoon, I took my nieces to visit Rowan Oak, and we enjoyed exploring Faulkner’s house and gardens and the surrounding woods. I’ve read very little of Faulkner’s work and, like Molly, I’m not sure I want to start reading more. Nevertheless, I was interested to learn about the house, his office, and his family. I thought you might like to see some of the photos I took at Rowan Oak and elsewhere in Oxford. We also made a quick trip to Tupelo, where we visited Elvis Presley’s birthplace museum, and I’ll include those photos as well.

“… writing is a solitary job—that is, nobody can help you with it, but there’s nothing lonely about it. I have always been too busy, too immersed in what I was doing, either mad at it or laughing at it to have time to wonder whether I was lonely or not lonely, it’s simply solitary. I think there is a difference between loneliness and solitude.” (Faulkner at the University of Virginia, 1958)

Coffee pot with cream and sugar in the kitchen at Rowan Oak

“It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books….” (Foreword to The Faulkner Reader, 1953)

Faulkner liked to write on the walls of his house. Next to the telephone, he recorded phone numbers.

On the walls of his office, he wrote the outline of the plot for his novel A Fable, in graphite and red grease pencils.

“… of course the first thing, the writer’s got to be demon-driven. He’s got to have to write, he don’t know why, and sometimes he will wish that he didn’t have to, but he does.” (Faulkner at the University of Virginia, 1957)

English knot garden at Rowan Oak

I was interested to read that Faulkner hated air conditioning. His wife Estelle had an air conditioning unit installed in the window of her bedroom the day after his funeral. There’s a whole story behind that tiny detail. Makes me think of this famous six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” (often attributed, probably incorrectly, to Ernest Hemingway).

In this case, I’d say: “Faulkner is dead. Let’s get A/C.”

A radio sits on the table next to the bed in Faulkner’s daughter Jill’s room. There’s a story here, too: Estelle gave the radio to Jill after Jill had had a “bitter fight with her father about technology,” according to the description posted on the wall outside the room.

Mississippi Writers Trail plaque for William Faulkner

Flowers in the Square in Oxford

Square Books, Oxford, MS

Framed photos on the wall at Square Books

I had coffee at Square Books twice on this trip, once with Bethie and once with my friend Susan Allen Ford. I was delighted that Susan came to Oxford to see me. We’ve met up over the years at JASNA AGMs all over North America, but had never had the chance to meet in Mississippi, where she taught for many years at Delta State University. Susan’s book What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (And Why) will be published in July and I’m excited to read it. She’s writing a guest post for my blog series “A Summer Party for Sense and Sensibility.”

What Jane Austen's Characters Read (And Why), by Susan Allen Ford

At Square Books, my coffee was served in mugs featuring quotations from Larry Brown and Eudora Welty. I didn’t get the mug with the Faulkner quotation about the tools he relied on to help him write: “paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.”

“… it’s living that makes me want to write, not reading—although it’s reading that makes me love writing.”

– Eudora Welty

I also didn’t buy a Faulkner novel to read on the plane on the way home; instead, on Susan’s recommendation, I bought one of Eudora Welty’s novels. And Bethie bought me the Eudora Welty mug.

It took a long time to get from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Oxford, Mississippi, and back again—I flew to Nashville and then drove for about four and a half hours through Tennessee and Northern Mississippi—but it was worth it and I’m already looking forward to the next trip to see Bethie in her new home.

Flying into Nashville

The bend in the road in Mississippi

There’s so much more I could say about the trip—I haven’t even mentioned the Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival that my niece and I went to last weekend, for example. I could also say more about Parnassus Books, at the Nashville airport, and about the University of Mississippi campus.

Ann Patchett's books on display at Parnassus

In the Nashville airport

Northern Catalpa Tree on the University of Mississippi campus

But this is already a long post, so I will end here with some photos from Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo, and a photo of the sunrise from the airport hotel in Halifax, the night before I left for the long journey to Oxford.