A Tenderhearted Someone

MY BROTHER BILL by John Faulkner. 277 pages. Trident Press. $4.95.

Who was William Faulkner? Was he that stately novelist who lived in baronial isolation in Oxford, Miss., carving great slabs of novels out of primeval truth? Was he that country squire who had a paneled trophy room and bought English saddles with kickout stirrups and riding outfits from Abercrombie & Fitch? Was he, perhaps, that barefoot gentleman who entered the dining room of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis after depositing a bottle of whisky under the stop light at the intersection of Second and Union?

William's younger brother John-who completed these reminiscences last spring, shortly before his own death at the age of 61--clearly could never decide. He determined "about twelve years ago that if I survived Bill, I would write a book about him as he really was." But how Bill really was eluded not only his brother John but all the other members of that baronial Southern family for whom Novelist Faulkner was sometimes thought to speak. Faulkner, like any writer of genius was an original, and much of the fascination of his brother's memories lies in the fact that the sum of detail never accounts for the man and if John Faulkner furnishes few of the portentous correlations between literature and life that are the delight of graduate students, he splendidly evokes the flavor of boyhood in a small Deep Southern town surprised by the turn of the century.

Sweet Talk & Styleplus. In this curiously tribal world Bill was a natural leader. He could hurl wet corncobs at the neighboring kids with greater accuracy than either of his brothers; he could ride a horse bareback as no other Faulkner could; he could invent tales with such surpassing guile that for one whole winter he sweet-talked a schoolmate into slopping the hogs for him--in return for which service Bill entertained him with stories of madness and murder.

He was 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, he bought a wardrobe of Styleplus clothes so dazzling that he became known locally as "The Count." For the rest of his life, recalls his brother, Bill dressed the part of a country squire with meticulous care, striding the streets of Oxford in trench coat and patched tweeds carrying a hawthorn walking stick. He went back to the great woods year after year, but he was too much of "a tenderhearted someone" to really enjoy hunting.

Iced Tea & Bourbon. Bill's drinking was such common gossip in Oxford that when he tried to organize a Boy Scout troop one winter he was denounced as unfit by the minister of the 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 he had been drinking plain tea for twelve hours; Billie climbed out of bed and went to work.

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.

Bill was never one to talk much about his writing, and his brother has very little to say about it beyond the fact that the critics have read too many complexities into it and 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.

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