Fascinating Faulkner: Personal essay from Mollie Smith Waters

William Faulkner in Hollywood, CA, early 1940s. (Alfred Eriss/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Storytelling. It is what makes Southerners, well, Southern. While the South has always been able to boast of great yarn spinners, one of the most famous of those writers is William Faulkner. After all, he won a Nobel Prize for Literature, so his genius is not in question.

Faulkner was truly brilliant at capturing the nuances of the craft, but tales about him are equally intriguing.

Take for example, a story I once heard about Faulkner from one of my favorite college professors, Bev Smith, who was the first curator of Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home.

Having spent much of his youth in Oxford, Bev said when he was a youngster, which would have been in the 1940s and 1950s, he would accompany his grandfather to the town square on Saturday mornings to purchase fruits and vegetables from the local farmers, who would sell their produce from the back of their trucks.

After going so many Saturdays in a row, Bev realized his grandfather and the farmers would fall into a rhythm of telling the same old tales. Bev got bored with their stories, so he took to walking around the town square and looking into the business windows to occupy his time.

One Saturday, he noticed a penny had fallen into a rain grate at the corner of one of the square’s intersections. Being an enterprising young man, Bev took the chewing gum out of his mouth and placed it on the end of a stick, then proceeded to fish out the coin, which he used to buy candy. After that, Bev began searching the rain grates each Saturday to see if any coins had fallen into them.

On a later trip, Bev was once again “fishing for pennies,” as he called it, when William Faulkner came out of Gathright-Reed Drug Store. Bev said Faulkner took an interest in his actions because he was using his stick to churn up the debris in the grates. Faulkner asked Bev what he was doing, and Bev replied, “Fishing for pennies.” Faulkner then asked Bev if he had been having any luck, to which Bev replied in the negative. Faulkner told him to keep looking because he might find something yet.

Faulkner went on his way while Bev continued to dig in the grate. When he looked up a little while later, Bev saw Faulkner standing before the drain of one of the other side streets. Covertly, Faulkner was dropping in coins for Bev to find.

Bev said Faulkner was like that. At times, he could be extremely kind and generous, but he was equally known for his taciturn nature.

William Faulkner has been dead for more than sixty years, and now, many of the people who knew him best are gone, too, which is why it is so important to capture stories like Bev’s and others who knew Faulkner before those memories are lost to time.

Thankfully, that work is being done. Just this year, the University of Mississippi Press released two new Faulkner-related books: Carl Rollyson’s Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism and Sally Wolff’s William Faulkner in Holly Springs.

While the two books reveal new angles from which to study Faulkner’s works, the stories uncovered about him may just be the most engaging parts of these publications.

And now, fortunately for us, those stories will not be lost to time, and who knows, perhaps some future enterprising researcher will go “fishing for” their own “pennies” and uncover even more tales about one of the most complex men to ever set pen to paper: William Faulkner.