Faulkner: Recovering the Past and Reconsidering the Present

Two recent books on William Faulkner add very different, but very useful, pools of knowledge to the field. The more unusual of the two, Ledgers of History, recounts a series of interviews between Wolff and Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, the son of Faulkner’s close friend, Edgar Wiggin Francisco, Jr., and the great-grandson of Francis Terry Leak, who owned a plantation in Mississippi in the mid-19th century and kept a detailed diary of plantation life. Now at the University of North Carolina, the Leak diaries were formerly in the hands of Francisco, Jr. at his home in Holly Springs, Mississippi. A regular visitor, Faulkner reportedly spent many hours studying the ledgers, often pulling names and even events out of them to be incorporated into his fiction. Over the course of these interviews, Wolff elicits additional personal information about Faulkner’s response to the diary as well as speculation about how he employed his considerable knowledge of the material.

This was clearly a family history that Faulkner mined extensively. Dr. Francisco remembers not only that Faulkner always had a pad of paper with him while reading the ledgers and “was always scribbling,” but also that he had considerable knowledge of the material, often asking to see a specific volume. Not surprisingly, Dr. Francisco also recalls Faulkner’s anger at the contents and astutely realized that each of Faulkner’s visits had two components: telling stories with his father and “a study of and angry confrontation with Leak.” The anecdote reinforces our understanding of Faulkner as a conflicted man; it is no accident that his most powerful novels challenge the ethics of the history laid out in the ledgers.

The book is a compelling read. Wolff’s interviews provide a personal glance of Faulkner not often encountered, and the information provided is interesting as Mississippi history as well as what it offers in terms of better understanding Faulkner. There is some repetition; the first part of the book summarizes the intersection of the ledgers and Faulkner’s work, information that also emerges in the interviews themselves, which comprise the second part of the text. Wolff asserts that understanding the source of some of Faulkner’s inspiration “suggests new paths of literary inquiry,” but does not follow through very thoroughly with this, so that the value for advancing Faulkner scholarship remains to be seen. One can see potential. For example, pointing out that Leak notes the purchase of “pantaloons,” Wolff speculates that the title of “Pantaloon in Black” may owe as much to slave history as to Judith Sensibar’s suggestion that Faulkner was drawing on commedia dell’arte. This debate illustrates a classic Faulknerian tension between literary and cultural influences on his work. Faulkner’s questioning of Francisco, Jr. as to the possibility of African American descendents of family slaves being, literally, family, also highlights his longstanding interest in miscegenation and its repercussions.

Overall, this is an engaging and often moving historical record not just of Faulkner’s study of the materials he would employ with such power in his fiction, but also of a Mississippi family. Dr. Francisco’s honest acknowledgement of the pain of confronting his family history reminds us that Faulkner was certainly not alone in his conflicted relationship to southern history. While Wolff’s suggestion that in employing some of the names and details of former slaves “Faulkner intended to raise these souls from their resting places to tell their stories and thereby honor their lives” may be a bit of a stretch, her account of these conversations with Dr. Francisco make it clear that Faulkner, though frequently called a myth-maker, was dealing with the actual.

While Ledgers of History adds new information to the mix of Faulkner studies, Faulkner...