“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”
—WILLIAM FAULKNER
William Faulkner (1897–1962) didn’t need to rationalize his drinking—for the southern gentleman, alcohol was a necessity on par with food and shelter. “Civilization begins with distillation,” he once wrote.
Though if that’s the case, it could also be argued that civilization ends with distillation. How else to explain a drunk Faulkner wandering nude through the hallways of a New York hotel during one of his many benders? Or, take the anecdote from his visit to a southern writers’ conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in October 1931, as relayed by Sherwood Anderson: “Bill Faulkner had arrived and got drunk. From time to time he appeared, got drunk again immediately, and disappeared. He kept asking everyone for drinks. If they didn’t give him any, he drank his own.”
“I hear that Bill Faulkner was somewhat in absentia in many ways,” Faulkner’s friend, Stark Young, said after hearing about the conference. “Not a bad move: it will convince most of the authors there that he is all the more of a genius, especially those that live in New York.”
Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in Mississippi, where he lived for most of his life. Like most men of the Lost Generation, he entered the military during the First World War, but unlike most of his American compatriots, he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps—at just over five feet, six inches tall, he was too short for the U.S. Army.
Although he trained at RFC bases in Canada and Britain, he didn’t see any action. This didn’t stop him from affecting a limp and making vague references to his plane having been shot down over Europe in later years. After the war he attended the University of Mississippi but dropped out after three semesters.
Faulkner wrote to his idol, writer Sherwood Anderson, for advice. The two became close friends, even living together at one point in New Orleans. Anderson acted as a mentor to Faulkner and advised him to draw on his personal life for his fiction.
Thanks to Anderson’s contacts in the publishing industry, Faulkner published his first book, Soldiers’ Pay, in 1925. When the typesetter allegedly misprinted his surname as “Faulkner,” he let the error slide. “Either way suits me,” the easygoing novelist said. He was thereafter known as William Faulkner.
He visited New York City in the fall of 1931 and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, where he was introduced to the literati by none other than Dorothy Parker. She was both a fan and a friend, once calling him “the greatest writer we have.” His talent was readily apparent in his bestselling novels, which included The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.
Humble he was not. “I am the best in America, by God,” he wrote in 1939—and he may have been right. Faulkner dared to compare himself to no less than the Bard. As Faulkner’s daughter, Jill, wrote, “Pappy was getting ready to start on one of these bouts. I went to him and said, ‘Please don’t start drinking.’ And he was already well on his way, and he turned to me and said, ‘You know, no one remembers Shakespeare’s child.’ ”
“I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach,” Faulkner said. To ensure that he had enough whiskey to meet the demands of his disease, he was forced to buy it in wholesale quantities from bootleggers during Prohibition. Faulkner once drew a bank draft in the amount of $200 from his publisher, Horace Liveright, to cover a whiskey purchase that had gone sour—he had the money to cover a check he wrote for the booze, he claimed, until he lost it gambling.
Just how much his alcoholism impacted his writing is up for debate. Ernest Hemingway, a contemporary and sometime friend, wrote, “I get sore at Faulkner when he just gets tired or writes with a hangover and just slops. He has that wonderful talent and his not taking care of it to me is like a machine gunner letting his weapon foul up.”
Like Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner followed the trail of money to Hollywood and began writing for the film industry. While in Hollywood, Faulkner hired a male nurse to accompany him around town and, using a prerationed bottle of bourbon kept in a black medical bag, administer Faulkner enough alcohol to keep him tipsy but not drunk. This system didn’t work out for very long because Faulkner would bully the nurse into giving him more than the allotted dose.
He never met a liquor he didn’t like. “There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others,” he wrote. Eventually, Faulkner had worked himself up to twenty-three martinis a day, according to French author Monique Salomon. “Never ask me why. I don’t know the answer,” Faulkner said of his drinking. “If I did, I wouldn’t do it.”
Faulkner’s Hollywood years wouldn’t last forever. One time, he asked director Howard Hawks for permission to write at home. He was having trouble concentrating in the office, he said. Hawks gave him the go-ahead for the day. After Faulkner failed to show up to work for the next several days, Hawks phoned the writer’s hotel. Faulkner had checked out earlier in the week to finish his screenplay—at “home” in Mississippi.
In 1949, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” For someone who was drunk much of the time, he was uncommonly productive in his later years, writing books, screenplays, and plays for the stage well into his sixties.
He continued to embarrass himself among his literary colleagues: at a party hosted by fellow southerner Truman Capote, Faulkner asked the host if he could take a bath. When Faulkner wasn’t seen or heard from for forty-five minutes, Capote checked up on him and found the author in tears. Capote sat on the toilet and kept Faulkner company in silence.
When he wasn’t busy drinking, writing, and crying, Faulkner kept up an active public-appearance schedule. He also taught as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia for two years beginning in 1958, where he clearly enjoyed interacting with students.
He was hospitalized for numerous minor health problems, though, and saw his health decline further after he fell off a horse in 1959.
And another horse in January 1962.
And again in June 1962.
It can probably be assumed that he was drunk when the accidents happened, since there were few times in his adult life he was not drunk. Of course, the horses could have just plain had it in for the old man: “I have been on extremely mean and stupid horses that clearly wanted to hurt me,” Hunter S. Thompson once wrote.
Faulkner refused all pain medication following his last fall, instead killing the pain with alcohol. A few weeks later, on July 5, Faulkner clutched his chest and died of a heart attack. He was sixty-four.
“The great ones die, die. They die,” poet John Berryman wrote after hearing about Faulkner’s death. “You look up and who’s there?”