Word: faulknerisms
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...artist must be honest. Few would disagree with them. But proportion, gentlemen, proportion. The artist can be honest about other things as well. Exhibitionism is quite as distasteful in literature as anywhere else. If the undergraduate writer cannot do more than parade neuroses across the printed page, he fits Faulkner's definition of failure: "He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart...
...also a consummate actor -like his grandfather Faulkner, who strolled the Oxford town square in a white linen suit with an overcoat and a cap with ear muffs, or like his greatgrandfather, the Old Colonel, who wrote an early bestseller, The White Rose of Memphis, before he was gunned down by a neighbor suspicious of the colonel's intentions toward his wife. After he became "tired of a formal education" and quit school in the tenth grade, Bill decided to transform himself into a dandy; with the money he earned as a teller in his grandfather's bank...
...Baptist Church. But most of his drunks, says Brother John, were just play acting. He would go for weeks without taking a drink and then a call would come from his wife Estelle that it was time to come and "sober Billie up." That job usually fell to Mother Faulkner, a tiny, fiercely energetic woman who understood Billie's desire to be waited on. Once she devised the ruse of serving him iced tea laced with whisky in gradually diminishing amounts. When he mumbled that he could not get up because he was drunk, she told him that...
Long before Father Faulkner settled into retirement after a random career as farmer, freight agent, owner of a livery stable and finally treasurer of the University of Mississippi, Bill had become the patriarch of the clan. The role suited him ideally. He cultivated a patriarchal mustache, dispensed eggnog to his cousins every Christmas morning and justice to a flock of Negro family retainers (including a hunting companion known as "Right Now For Bear" Doolie) the year round...
...that Bill wrote about "the worst side of the South" only because "he wrote what people will believe, for that's what they will pay to read, and even a writer has to make money." His father was deeply disappointed in Sanctuary, John adds: the elder Faulkner had always hoped that Bill would write westerns...