Weekly Column: The Man from Oxford, Mississippi

William Faulkner was one of the greatest novelists in American history. He became a world famous man of letters and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. He also won two Pulitzer Prizes and had a stamp issued in his honor years after his death. Along with Hemingway and Capote, he helped create the best American literature of the 20th century.

Though Faulkner was also a successful screenwriter and spent considerable time in Hollywood, he lived off and on throughout his life in the small city of Oxford, Mississippi. Today, the town of 17,000 still celebrates its most famous son. Rowan Oak, his home, is now owned and operated by the University of Mississippi and is a National Historic Landmark. Visitors regular arrive for tours.

But Faulkner didn’t just live in Oxford; Oxford lived in him. The values of that community informed his writing and his thinking. He later admitted that Oxford was the basis for his fictional town of Jefferson.

At times he downplayed the influence of the town on his writing. But beneath the surface, his words could not hide the reality. Read his response to a question during an interview with The Paris Review in the 1950s:

“INTERVIEWER
How much of your writing is based on personal experience?

FAULKNER
I can’t say. I never counted up. Because “how much” is not important. A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which—can supply the lack of the others. With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow. A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can. Obviously he must use as one of his tools the environment which he knows. I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, since it came first in man’s experience and history. But since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better. That is, music would express better and simpler, but I prefer to use words, as I prefer to read rather than listen. I prefer silence to sound, and the image produced by words occurs in silence. That is, the thunder and the music of the prose take place in silence.”

The key phrase in this passage in Faulkner’s admission that a “story usually begins with a single memory….” And from where did his memories come? From Oxford.

And so it is with all Americans from small and mid-sized cities. They are shaped by their pasts. They carry with them the memories and the values of those places. Oxford, Mississippi is one such town. In addition to Faulkner, it is rich in Civil War and civil rights history. Today, Oxford remains a vibrant college town and in the fall of 2008 hosted the first presidential debate between Senator Obama and Senator McCain.

But it perhaps will always be best known by its most famous product. One cannot read a Faulkner book without reading about the influence of Oxford, Mississippi.