Oxford, Faulkner, and Returning Southern

I have been reading and writing most of my life. As such, I’ve been generally aware of where the Greats lived. I knew Mississippi, and Oxford specifically, had a considerable literary tradition, but it was never at the forefront of my mind. I’ve never found myself particularly wrapped up in the personal lives of writers outside of their work. As they would probably prefer, I have always been much more interested in their work itself.

When moving to Oxford from Alabama became a possibility, I thought “that’s neat” and then went about my day. When it became a certainty - the house bought, the jobs acquired - I became a little more interested in Faulkner the man. Before we moved here, I had never read a word of his since high school, (Light in August) which I don’t remember a bit of, anyhow. I knew that he was perhaps the greatest American writer to ever live, and those I respect said so, so I was happy to take that at face value. After we moved, we finally went to visit his estate, which I enjoyed about as much as I enjoy seeing any old large manor which has been maintained well. I was surprised to find that, even on a cold rainy weekday, the parking lot is full of visitors of all kinds. Folks from out in the county, parents with kids, high schoolers, academics. That is to say, I found that Faulkner was -is- as much a person of particular interest as he is a point of pride, even for those who don’t fully ~understand~ his work in the way many academics will claim is necessary for full appreciation.

I began to collect his work and thousands of pages of reference material concerning southern literature and culture. It became clear to me, as my writing endeavors evolved from a hobby to a craft, that it was necessary to understand those that came before me as a presupposition of contributing to a literary tradition.

My in-laws have been in town for a few days to see our seven month old son. They expressed interest in going to Faulkner’s home, so we made the trek. Upon returning, my father in law, who’s known to almost never read fiction, expresses a desire to read some of Faulkner’s work. Prepared for comments such as those, I retrieved from my bookshelf two books: The Bear and a combined volume of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. Both were mass-produced and as such are worth very little, but I am partial to them as I am to all the books I own. The combined volume is from the late 40s, nearly triple my own age. I give them to him and say “happy reading.”

He begins to read The Bear, and I mention that I have begun to amass encyclopedic information about southern fiction. I collect those as well to show him the many thousands of pages they consist of. He looks at them, returns them to the bookshelf, and says “someone probably spent their entire careers writing these, but does anyone even read them?”

The comment makes me want to shout “Yes, me and my friends!”, but I respond with something milder: “You would be surprised.”

Like me, my father in law was born and raised in Florida. Many people don’t understand that Florida has some pretty incredible disparities in both culture and living standards. Between Miami and Tallahassee, there are many counties which rank as some of the poorest and least educated in the country. Hillbilly, Southern, and Redneck in every sense of the words, small islands that still belong to the Deep South despite being surrounded by Hispanics and miserable retirees from New York. I am from the poorest of its parts. Double-wides and dirt yards, rat snakes for friends and longleaf pine forests for adolescent, fantastical worldbuilding. I went off, joined the military, traveled the world, got a STEM degree, and now code for a living, but those are still my people. Perhaps moreso now than they have ever been.

I have read the Florida equivalents of Faulkner: namely Smith and Rawlings. I see marsh tackies, cattle, and endless scrub as much as I see ugly stucco buildings thrown up overnight, and highways that decimate everything unique to make way for GDP-maximizing. The palmetto and rattlesnake and swamp are as much there as they ever were.

Every year, more people move to the South, and every year, there are fewer Southerners. People vaguely understand that it requires a history, a sum of all previous days, in order to arrive at the current one. But the nuance of such facts is frequently lost to such nebulous things as Pragmatism, Need, and Schedules. “Do you really need to know such things”? Well, not need in any sense that you comprehend, Bob. But someone ought to know it. As they do, the old ones die. Things ought not die with them.

To be fair, this can be said of most any region in America. Localism and regional curiosity shrivels on the vine to be subsumed by the corporate kudzu, starved of the light and air required to carry seeds across the days. Even still, some of us are bent on slashing it away, though it may grow faster than we can cut it out.

I don’t expect my son to appreciate history in such ways, or even like reading southern fiction as much as I do, but he will come to understand that history is not a vacuum, that today will at some point be history, too. That “Days gone by” were only yesterday, and have more bearing on the Now than we usually give it credit for.