Saturday, October 10, 1998

Desperately seeking William Faulkner

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

RIPLEY, Miss. -- Count the stone books stacked behind the 8-foot effigy of Col. William Clark Falkner in the town cemetery, and you'll go blind.

That's the legend, one of many told about William Faulkner's great-grandfather, the Colonel, whose resume really didn't need the help. Falkner fought in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. He started a railroad, wrote an 1881 best-seller called The White Rose of Memphis and transformed his plain Ripley house into an Italian-style mansion. He killed two men on the streets of this town in self-defense, more or less, and finally was gunned down by a rival businessman.

"Ah, how appropriate that the train is going by," librarian Tommy Covington says. Covington is something of a local legend himself, a man of many talents and ideas who collects, tinkers, paints and has executed exquisite needlepoint versions of primitive artist Theora Hamblett's work.

Covington knows as much as anybody does about the Colonel, and, after the train rattles by on cue, he reads from the Faulkner novel Sartoris: "He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty pride which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran, and the blue changeless hills beyond, and beyond that, the ramparts of infinity itself."

William Faulkner lived here for a few of his boyhood years before his family moved down to Oxford. Ripley shares claim for inspiring the fictional Jefferson, same as Oxford. As Faulkner himself said of his Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County, "I move them around to suit my purposes. If it will help me to move them 40 miles to the north, I just pack up and move them. I'm the sole owner and proprietor."

The scholars and writers and civic boosters in Oxford, of course, have been milking the Faulkner cow for years. And Ripley residents had their own Falkner giant to revere, the one who spelled the family name without a "u."

But it took the great writer an entire century to impress most of those in his birthplace, New Albany. About halfway between Ripley and Oxford, New Albany is a bustling, unpretentious little town that only this decade got around to applying for a historical marker recognizing itself as the birthplace of William Faulkner. The first day held in his honor was in 1991. New Albany watched quietly as the world beat a path to Oxford, desperately seeking Faulkner.

"It's our fault, really," Betsey Hamilton says. "It took his 100th birthday last year to make most realize that, whether we enjoyed reading him or not, millions did."

Hamilton and other local history buffs started a museum that will give Faulkner pilgrims a place to visit. And the town now toasts Faulkner on his birthday as part of its annual Tallahatchie Riverfest.

The house where Faulkner was born served as the Presbyterian manse for 40 years, then in 1953 was either torn down or sold at auction depending on which account you believe. The auction version has the house being moved in two parts.

"It's hard to believe that it's still out in the county somewhere, what with all the attention Faulkner's gotten the last couple of years," Hamilton says.

You never know.

Faulkner may be the best illustration ever of an unsung local prophet. The Faulkner birthplace could well be full of hay. And Oxford may be gung-ho now, but it only woke up after Faulkner won the Nobel Prize.

"Bill never became beloved in his hometown because he committed the sin of being an individual," Faulkner friend James D. Nunnally said of Oxford in 1975.

Maybe so, but his great-grandfather wrote the book on individualism. And they say grown men cried when the Colonel was shot and carried on bedsprings to his son-in-law's house. The largest crowd ever to gather in Tippah County attended the Colonel's funeral, when they laid him next to the noble statue he had commissioned himself.

King Features Syndicate