“Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure.”
Considered America’s preeminent Southern writer (many feel the qualifier could be dropped), William Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi. As a young man, his neighbors nicknamed him “Count No ‘Count” because they reckoned he didn’t have a steady job. Setting most of his novels in the surrounding area, his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, between the years of 1928 and 1941 Faulkner would write ten novels—including his masterpieces The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and ending with perhaps his last work of distinction, Go Down, Moses. It was a feat of astonishing creative output, unmatched in American literature before or since, and made even more astonishing by the fact that, following the publication of Faulkner’s fifth novel, Sanctuary, he would make intermittent trips to Hollywood, working at first for MGM, then Twentieth Century–Fox and later Warner Bros. Much more important than the studios was his lifelong collaborative friendship with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner’s most important films were To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), both adaptations directed by Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart. In 1949, after decades of financial instability, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and thereafter became an international celebrity.
WILLIAM FAULKNER PUT A good deal of faith in bourbon. In addition to its medicinal benefits, bourbon, he felt, provided creative benefits, too: “I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach.”
Although writers are generally known to knock it back, few of them actually drink while they write. Hemingway made it a point to keep his drinking separate, saying “[I] have spent … all my life drinking, but since writing is my true love I never get the two mixed up.” Eugene O’Neill, who drank everything from wood alcohol to absinthe to his own urine (this on a binge in Provincetown), declared, “I never write a line when I’m not strictly on the wagon.” Raymond Carver, who also knew how to bend an elbow, confessed he “never wrote so much as a line that was worth a nickel when I was under the influence.”
Faulkner, it seems, was the exception. But then given his feelings about Hollywood and the amount of time he would be forced to spend there (four years total), maybe that was understandable. Hailing from Oxford, Mississippi, he didn’t like Los Angeles, “that damned West Coast place.” He didn’t like the film business, that “place that lacks ideas.” And he didn’t like screenwriting, “It ain’t my racket.” But by 1932 sales of his first four novels (including The Sound and the Fury) had averaged only two thousand copies each, and so off to Hollywood he went.
Picture a small man wearing worn but neatly pressed tweeds with a pipe between his teeth. Faulkner didn’t belong on a studio lot and he knew it.
Picture a small man wearing worn but neatly pressed tweeds with a pipe between his teeth. Faulkner didn’t belong on a studio lot and he knew it. He knew it so clearly that he fled almost immediately upon arriving, running in panic from the MGM offices out into the scorched and desolate wasteland that is Death Valley. (How about that?!) He returned a few days later, but is it any wonder he kept his whiskey close?
What made doing that that much easier was, first, by the time Faulkner arrived in Hollywood his abiding passion for alcohol was already well known and, second, Faulkner didn’t care a whit about keeping his drinking a secret. A perfect example is the time Faulkner began work on the screenplay The Road to Glory for director Howard Hawks. This was at Twentieth Century–Fox, and one of the producers was the highly respected Nunnally Johnson (Grapes of Wrath, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit). Soon after arriving at Johnson’s office for what was to be the very first script meeting, Faulkner pulled a pint of bourbon from his pocket. Unfortunately, the bottle happened to be sealed with heavy tinfoil and Faulkner, in his eagerness to uncork it, sliced his finger. He started to bleed. Not to be dissuaded, Faulkner began to suck on the wounded finger while he continued to open the bottle. Having accomplished that, Faulkner sat down with one hand dripping blood (some say over a wastebasket, others into his own hat) and the other hand swigging whiskey. Then the work began. It was 1936.
Almost a decade later, Faulkner would find himself back in Hollywood, again writing for Hawks, though now at Warner Bros. This time, taking a page out of W. C. Fields’s playbook, Faulkner employed a different strategy for getting through the workday. He hired a male nurse, named Mr. Nielson, to accompany him around the lot. Carrying a bottle in a black doctor’s satchel, Mr. Nielson would ration out drinks of whiskey and Faulkner would write. In fact, over the next two years at Warners, he would write The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not.
Maybe his faith in bourbon was well placed.
LIKE MANY WRITERS, William Faulkner felt little affection for Hollywood. After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and, consequently, leaving Tinseltown town for good, he would say, “I have never learned how to write movies, nor even to take them seriously.”
There is one story about him working for director Howard Hawks and suffering from mal de Hollywood. He asked Hawks if he might write from home, as opposed to the studio lot where, in those days, screenwriters actually wrote. Hawks agreed, but after a number of days had passed, the studio called to check on Faulkner. Nobody answered. Apparently, by home, the novelist had meant two-thousand miles away in Mississippi. Faulkner was back in Oxford eating watermelon on the porch and watching the rain.
Still, whenever he was in Hollywood, his favorite watering hole was Musso & Frank’s. Known for their martinis, they let Faulkner behind the bar to mix his own beloved Mint Juleps. That recipe, if ever known, has been swallowed up by time. But one can only imagine that to Faulkner, at least, it tasted like home.
MINT JULEP
3 OZ. BOURBON
½ OZ. SIMPLE SYRUP
7 MINT SPRIGS
Crush six mint sprigs in the bottom of a chilled Old-Fashioned glass. Pour in simple syrup and bourbon. Fill with crushed ice and stir. Garnish with the remaining mint sprig and serve with two short straws. Add a splash of club soda if you like.
