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The Ding-Dong of Doom h Postage stamps, those quaint and colorful vestiges of a vanishing twentieth-century mode of communication, ‹gure conspicuously in the strange career of William Faulkner. If a whaling ship, as Herman Melville famously claimed, was Melville’s Yale College and his Harvard, Faulkner’s Ivy League was the tiny post of‹ce at the University of Mississippi, in his hometown of Oxford, population 2,250 in 1921, the year Faulkner was named university postmaster. There, in a job he cynically treated as a sinecure for a man of leisure, Faulkner sat for days at a time reading issues, borrowed from faculty mailboxes and haphazardly returned, of the Atlantic Monthly, the Dial, and the New Republic— “a vast hoard of material,” as Jay Parini remarks in his sturdy and well-researched new biography of Faulkner, “where he would have found much of the best in contemporary writing and thinking .” Faulkner, a high school dropout whose foppish and idle ways about town earned him the nickname “Count No ’Count,” held the post of‹ce job for nearly three years—steeping himself in Swinburne, Mencken, and the French symbolist poets—before being ‹red, in the fall of 1924, when he was nearly twenty-six. The letter of dismissal—perhaps a forgery, as Parini notes, perpetrated by Faulkner—was curt and to the point: “Neglects of‹cial duties; indifferent to interests of patrons; mistreatment of mail.” Faulkner made it sound as though the decision was his own: “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son-of-a-bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.” Faulkner later tried to minimize his reliance on all he had 135 learned during those years at the post of‹ce at Ole Miss, insisting instead that his truly formative education was intensely local, a matter of conversations overheard rather than magazines read. According to his own myth of himself as backwoods Balzac—a myth aided and abetted by a generation of southern critics and northern biographers—Faulkner had summoned his vision from his “little postage stamp of native soil” in Mississippi. This claim too was a forgery, of course, though Parini—a novelist and poet as well as a biographer—‹rmly subscribes to it. “A sense of place was everything to William Faulkner,” he writes, “and more than any other American novelist in the twentieth century, he understood how to mine the details of place, including its human history , for literary effects. His novels, from the outset, are obsessed with what T. S. Eliot once referred to as ‘signi‹cant soil.’” Parini compares Faulkner to the Greek mythological hero Antaeus, who needed to touch the ground to regain his powers: “Like Antaeus, Faulkner derived his strength through contact with the soil, a particular and ‘signi‹cant soil,’ evoked in his ‹ction with a ‹erce particularity.” This man-of-the-soil fantasy had enormous appeal for William Faulkner since—as Parini’s opening chapters make clear—he was something of a deracinated drifter himself. He was born William Cuthbert Falkner, on September 25, 1897—he later added the u to make the name seem more aristocratic. A steady declension in fortune and status from generation to generation had left him with little “soil” to call his own. His great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, a legendary ‹gure known as the “Old Colonel,” had fought bravely but recklessly at the ‹rst Battle of Bull Run; he returned to Mississippi to oversee a plantation worked by slaves, eventually becoming, as Parini puts it, a “writer–railroad entrepreneur–lawyer–Civil War hero.” His son, J. W. T. Falkner, the “Young Colonel,” was an attorney and smalltime politician, a University of Mississippi trustee, and a drunk— “the loneliest man I’ve ever known,” according to one of his grandsons. The Young Colonel’s son, Murry, William Faulkner’s father, was a feckless depressive—“a dull man,” according to Faulkner—who was happiest when drunk or on a hunting party or both. Faulkner was much closer to his mother, Maud, who had 136 artistic tastes, liked books, and encouraged her son’s slowly evolving literary aspirations. As Murry downshifted from one absurd job to another—running a livery stable as automobiles were supplanting horses, then a gaslight business as electric lighting was coming into vogue— the family’s fortunes declined...

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