31

End of Days

June–July 1962

Before the Fall

Several reviewers praised The Reivers but considered it off-speed Faulkner: funny and exciting, if not exactly profound and sometimes sententious. The novel had “none of the demonic power and little of the dazzling originality of the half dozen great books that appeared between 1929 to 1943,” concluded Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review (June 2). Others were dismissive: “a boy’s book, and not even a superior specimen of that genre,” declared Stanley Edgar Hyman in the New Leader (July 9). Winfield Townley Scott’s review in the Santa Fe New Mexican (June 3) stood out: “I can only, however awkwardly, record my curious sensation that I was reading a book which had long been classic American literature. I dare say that’s what’s going to happen to it.”

Even the many good reviews calling the novel “truly fine” (Miami Herald, June 3) and a “small, fresh masterpiece” (Atlanta Journal, June 3) and noting that “Faulkner’s Tall Tale Tops Mark Twain’s” (Denver Post, May 27) would not have mattered much to Faulkner. He revealed his deep satisfaction with The Reivers at the West Point press conference: “It’s one of the funniest books I ever read. . . . I wish I hadn’t written it so I could do it again.”1

By early June, the Faulkners had returned to Rowan Oak. Phil Stone spotted him on the street and reported to Carvel Collins: “I have never seen him look so old before. It is not the eyes, but the skin around the eyes; looks like that of an old man, and he looks to me like he has aged about five years since I saw him a few months ago.” Two others, Dr. Chester McLarty and Joan Williams, on a brief visit to Rowan Oak, also noticed the pallor—unusual in McLarty’s observations of his patient. Emily Stone saw him around this time and recalled, “The fire had gone out of his eyes.”2

The Fall

Phil Stone still seemed to be avoiding Faulkner, and apparently at his wife’s urging, he wrote a note thanking Faulkner for dropping off an autographed copy of The Reivers, although Stone once again said there would be some delay in his reading it since “all I have time to read is law books.”3 Stone and Faulkner did meet. “Bill got thrown by another horse and is having trouble with his back again. I told him he was going to break his neck one of these days,” Stone reported to James B. Meriwether.4 A few years earlier Maud Falkner had mentioned seeing a man on a beautiful horse pass by her house. She could not tell who it was. “Did he fall off?,” her eldest son asked. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t me then,” he said with a laugh.5

The fall had occurred on June 10, and for three weeks the excruciating pain did not let up. Faulkner’s niece Dean remembered visiting him near the end of the month. He could not get out of bed. But he promised to be better for the July Fourth celebration picnic. Apparently he had no reason to think he would not recover, as he had always done before. Around June 24, Meta wrote him a letter, and he responded that he expected to come out to her in September.6

On July 3, Faulkner managed to walk into town. He stopped by Gathright-Reed to pick up a copy of the Memphis Commercial Appeal and speak with Mac, who estimated that over four decades Faulkner made something like 120 trips to the drugstore, standing outside the front door visiting with old friends for a half hour and more, talking about how the town was changing. Mac noticed a copy of The Reivers in Faulkner’s hand. He said it was for a Swedish friend (Else Jonsson). Mac filled out the postal form since Faulkner had left his glasses at home and put the book in a carton. Faulkner’s last words to Mac: “I been aimin’ to quit all this.”7

Faulkner took Estelle out for their usual filet mignon dinner. He complained that “things hadn’t tasted right. ‘The meat and bread tasted alike.’ ”8 That night Jimmy Faulkner visited Rowan Oak and found his uncle in bed in his office, drinking gin and taking prescription painkillers. By the next day he was on his second bottle. He agreed with Jimmy that later in the day they would go to Wright’s Sanatorium in Byhalia. But because of the intense heat they agreed to postpone the trip until the next day, by which time Faulkner had deteriorated. He seemed delusional, talking about sergeants and captains and saying he wanted to go home, although he was at Rowan Oak. But Chrissie Price, who helped out in the Rowan Oak kitchen, thought Mr. Bill meant something else by home. He had been behaving “differently.” Late that afternoon (July 5) Estelle and Jimmy checked William Faulkner into the Byhalia “drying out hospital,” his sixth stay since September 1953.9 By Faulkner’s standards, this time was unusual, occurring much earlier than in previous drinking cycles.

Jimmy and a young black orderly helped Faulkner down the corridor, where Dr. Wright examined him. Faulkner seemed to have roused himself. All vital signs were normal, although he complained of heart and back pain. As usual in such examinations, he was “quiet, tractable, humble,” and even joked. The black orderly then assisted Faulkner into bed, undressing him and putting him into pajamas. The on-duty nurse called him a “delightful person,” a remarkable thing to say since she believed he knew he was dying.

Vitamin injections were followed with a half ounce of alcohol every hour until 10:45. This treatment, standard at the time, concentrated on preventing delirium tremens and other adverse reactions to alcohol withdrawal. He also received an “egg flip,” a mixture of eggs, cream, and perhaps alcohol too. By 10:00 p.m., after two more egg flips and an antinausea medication, Faulkner seemed relaxed and sleepy. Estelle bent over his bed and said something Jimmy could not hear and then went out into the hall. Jimmy said, “Brother Will, when you are ready to come home, call me, and I’ll come and get you.” Jimmy remembered his uncle looking up at him, eyes “bright and sharp,” saying in a clear, unslurred voice, “Yes, Jim, I will.”

Near 11:00 p.m., after his last half ounce of alcohol, more antinausea medication, a muscle relaxant, and a sedative, the nurse told him, “I’ll see you in the morning.” He replied, “I don’t think so.” At 12:40 a.m. he awoke with acute intestinal distress and was given a paregoric mixture and a dose of alcohol. Some time after 1:00 a.m. Faulkner sat up on his bed, groaned, fell over, and died of a heart attack.10

An hour later John Faulkner showed up at Rowan Oak and went upstairs to Estelle’s room. Dr. McLarty had given her a sedative, but she paced back and forth clenching her hands. John embraced her. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe it. He’s not gone. He’s not gone.”11 She pushed John away and resumed her pacing. Estelle and her sister Dorothy had another concern. They did not want the press to report that Faulkner had died in Byhalia and disclose his treatment for alcoholism. So the first notices of the death placed him at home.

Jimmy Faulkner called his uncle Jack in Mobile, Alabama. Jack had not seen his brother Bill since their mother had died. The brothers were not close, and Jack, like John, had been upset by Bill’s belief in integration. Jack spoke for the family when he acknowledged their puzzlement. Bill lived just like they did, with black servants, and except for his public statements, never gave a sign that he did not share their segregationist beliefs. “I never knew him to say anything he didn’t mean,” Jack said, but he never heard his brother “say anything to indicate that he wanted or expected the two races to associate otherwise.” Jack still loved his big brother, but race had divided the family in ways that even his brother’s death could not obliterate.12

A Fabled End

Faulkner’s life had stopped as abruptly as old Bayard’s in Flags in the Dust. When Dean learned of her uncle’s death on July 6, she recalled this was the old Colonel’s birthday.13 A reader of Flags in the Dust might think the Player had planned it. So much of these last days seemed of a piece, including The Reivers, which for many readers, and for his family, brought a fitting closure to William Faulkner and his fictional world.

The Faulkners buried their dead quickly, putting them back into the earth as soon as possible—in a plain wooden coffin, as Maud had requested for herself and that was good enough for her son, who, like her, wanted an inexpensive funeral. But Dorothy Oldham and Ella Somerville objected, complaining that Faulkner looked cramped in the cheap-looking box. Back William Faulkner went to the funeral home—this time arriving at Rowan Oak in a more substantial cypress casket, felt-lined and with silver-plated handles.

His black friends, dressed for the occasion, gathered in the kitchen while the closed casket rested in the room where Faulkner had delivered a funeral elegy for Callie Barr. They wanted one last look at him, and Estelle agreed to allow the funeral director to open the casket. They stood looking at him in silence, some in tears, and then the casket was closed again, forever.14

In hundred-degree heat and no air-conditioning—just the way Faulkner, for all his complaints, always wanted it—the funeral in the front parlor of Rowan Oak ended with the Lord’s Prayer. Shelby Foote also seemed a part of the Faulkner plan. “His hoarse, whispery voice with southern rhythms was familiar and reassuring,” Dean said. “It was as if Pappy had sent him.” Businesses on the square, with a few Snopes holdouts, closed for fifteen minutes “in memory of William Faulkner.” A funeral procession went past the Confederate soldier on the square.

Jimmy described Estelle as “shaken,” but, as Dean said, “the Faulkners do not cry in public.” That included Jill, who had held back graveside tears by concentrating on the “most garish wreath” she had ever seen. “Ever. Gold and purple plastic grapes sprinkled with gold glitter and tied together with yards and yards of gold ribbon. Pappy would have found it patently absurd.” Estelle sat next to her son Malcolm, who held her right hand, encased in a long black glove, in both of his, her face obscured by a large black hat and her bowed head. She did break down at one point. Phil Stone, never fond of Estelle, commented: “Stelle and Bill loved one another in spite of their difficulties their whole lives.”15 In 1972, she came to rest beside him.

A solemn John Faulkner sat right behind Estelle and Malcolm. Phil Stone and Mac Reed were among the pallbearers who brought William Faulkner to his grave. Novelist William Styron, there to cover the funeral for Life, felt like an interloper, knowing full well how William Faulkner detested invasions of his privacy. Donald Klopfer had suggested Styron for the assignment. The family welcomed the novelist, whose books were in the Rowan Oak library. The heat made it seem to him that everyone was moving in slow motion. This was the “unholy weather” of Faulkner’s novels, Styron thought, as he listened to Shelby Foote’s advice to move sideways in the heat. It was Saturday afternoon on the Oxford square, the time for farmers and townsmen to mix, just like all those Saturdays that Faulkner relished by watching and talking to so many who never read a word of his writing, if they even knew that he wrote. To Styron, John Faulkner looked like the ghost of his brother, and Murry (Jack) “sad-eyed” and, like brother Bill, soft-spoken. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer were there to represent Random House. Ben Wasson and Linton Massey rounded out the gathering of his first and last friends.

Cerf really didn’t know Faulkner very well. Jim Silver liked to tell the story about the time Faulkner autographed a book for Bennett Surf. When Cerf tore out the page, on the next one Faulkner misspelled the publisher’s first name.16 But Klopfer was another story. He called Faulkner “a marvelous man. Strange, involuted, but a great, great human being.” The publisher often saw Faulkner in New York. Over the years the drinking and drying-out cycles became less frequent. He spent weekends at Klopfer’s farm in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Next to Faulkner’s guest room, the library had a bar table, well stocked, including one of Faulkner’s favorites, Jack Daniels. Klopfer never mentioned the bar, and during his stays Faulkner never got drunk. “Ever,” Klopfer emphasized. Faulkner enjoyed wine at dinner, a cognac afterward, and then he would walk right past the bar to his room at the other end of the house, where he certainly could have liquored up alone. This was the same man who in the city drank himself silly, becoming an incomprehensible idiot, Klopfer remembered. A vivid moment Klopfer declined to have recorded was Faulkner’s upset over a young lover who had married. Whether it was Joan or Jean, Klopfer did not know or did not want to say. Another time Faulkner came on crutches after a fall from a horse. He said to Klopfer’s wife, Pat, “You’re always sympathetic to me, whether I’ve been thrown by a dame or a horse.” Later, after reading Faulkner’s biography, a dismayed Klopfer said: “The way we treated him—oh well. His books were out of print and we couldn’t send him more money. We didn’t have it and he didn’t have it. I feel ashamed of myself.” Not even with his publisher would Faulkner talk about literature. “He was the only author I’ve known who didn’t give a damn what anybody said about his books. He didn’t read the reviews,” Klopfer said. “He knew what he wanted to do.”17 Estelle Faulkner called him “the one man I’ve ever known who dared to be himself.”18

Earl Wortham, the blacksmith who had shod Faulkner’s horses, was there to see him off. Earl had been there from the beginning, delivering wood to the Oldham house with a “little pair of oxen” yoked to a wagon. Estelle and her sister Dorothy would hop on as Earl assured their mother they would not get hurt. He had watched Callie Barr walking with little William on the plank sidewalks before the streets were paved. He would break away and run into the square. Later Earl asked him why he did that. “I like to be in the dust,” William told him. Earl thought it a mistake for Faulkner to ride “that big grey horse Stonewall”—the last horse to throw him to the ground. Earl had told him, “You don’t need this horse.” The horse startled easily and reared up at unpredictable times when he seemed quite still. But Stonewall was a good jumper, and Faulkner could not bear to part with him. Perhaps in memory of those livery stable days, Faulkner always stopped and spoke with Earl, who said, “I suppose it is not very common for one man to love another one, but I loved William Faulkner.”19