In 2010, I drove to Oxford, Mississippi to research William Faulkner.  The only thing I remember about the long drive down was a yellow tabby cat at the truck stop in Texarkana, catching bugs, happy, sleeping a bit on the grass where pets can walk, a bit fat, alone, apparently dropped off and left, no aware of its plight. I said a prayer for it as I headed off towards Little Rock. Knowing I would not be back that way. It was hard to drive away.

Arriving in Oxford, I went to the Faulkner sites: the the Anne Chandler house (Compson house), the Murray Faulkner house where he lived as a child, the bank his grandfather ran, the 1834 Nielson Department Store (the Snopes and Sartoris hardware store), the Rowan Oak mansion he purchased in 1933, after sale of Sanctuary, with cypress trees lining the walkway and with outbuildings, and his grave site at the cemetery. I also spent time at the University of Mississippi, where he lived in the Delta Psi dorm near ‘the Grove.” The Civil War was still present, in the cemetery at the University where seven hundred dead from Shiloh are buried, and the statue of the Confederate soldier in the city square, dedicated “to honor their patriotism.” I also travelled outside Oxford, the the area around Batesville, where Faulkner hunted deer every year, and Frenchman’s place and the northern suburbs where the fictional Sartoris Plantation was set. Yokanapathanawa County.

Downtown, on city square, I had shrimp and grits at City Grocery restaurant, tables lining the walls in the long, narrow room, brick walls, overhead fans, white tablecloths, bent wood chairs, and wooden floors. I spent some time in the Faulkner alcove, upstairs at Square Books. I walked around the central square, lined with two story wooden buildings, most with plantation shutters and some with wrought iron balconies and tables for eating. There was a calico cat sitting on the wooden walkway connecting the shops and buildings, Fortunes Ice Cream, Roosters Blues House, and Ajax Diner.

I am thinking of the Faulkner message, as he put it in his Nobel address. What is important is to re-discover the old universal truths. We have to find deep within ourselves the love, pity, and compassion, which make us human. By finding love, we can endure. Those who don’t find it, like the Snopes in The Hamlet, Mrs. Compson in The Sound and the Fury, and McLendon in “Dry September,” are doomed.

Faulkner also taught us about the importance of courage, another traditional value, illustrated best in “Odor of Verbena,” “The Bear,” and “Barn Burning.”

Faulkner taught how to write, to forget style and get it all down in a sort of stream of consciousness, run on sentences and all, the emotion coming through, the moments of illumination and inspiration coming with fast paced writing. Get it all down, on the head of a pin, the whole story and don’t worry about plot. Just string together myths, southern history. And Faulkner, the failed poet, taught the value of lyrical paragraphs. Write from the heart, about the heart and internal conflict, portraying a slice of life. It’s more about characters anyway, with images strung together.

Hemingway wrote about characters, but not in depth, just about how to live life in a violent world where things have lost their meaning. Faulkner goes into more depth. His characters were round. He is like Tim O’Brien, laying out how we feel inside, seeing our own weaknesses and the pathos we all feel, how we empathize when we see something sad happening to an individual, an outcast.

Critics have pointed out that there is a lot of social and economic determinism in Faulkner.  Plantation owners and slave descendants are tapped by their past and by “roles.”  There are sad endings and the bitterness of defeat and loss which began on Cemetery Ridge. There are few happy endings or examples of individuals overcoming adversity. Instead, we see a world of racist police, ineffectual white males, abused females, cynical parents, mixed race outcasts, and unenlightened  poor whites. African Americans suffer in trying to escape this society where judges are corrupt and the law perverted and ministers are hypocrites

But Faulkner is not a nihilist. The way to overcome this world is through elemental Christian virtues of self-restraint and mutual respect which involves forgiveness of others and oneself,  One needs a proper balance between pride and humility and a lot of charity.

Hemingway left us with wonderful characters: Santiago fighting the Marlin in the Gulf Stream, Catherine Barclay, dying heroically in Monreaux, Jake Barnes living stoically in Paris, and the old man in a clean, well lit, Madrid cafe.

Faulkner left us Quentin and his wonderful, tragic sister Caddy Compson, taking care of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, Ellen the Fox in Sartoris, Drusilla Hawk in “Odor of Verbena,” Will Mayes in “Dry September,” Uncle Buddy in Go Down Moses, Bayard and Ringo in “Ambuscade,” Mrs. Armistad in “Spotted Horses,” Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, Nancy in “That Evening Sun,” and Jack Houston in The Hamlet.

I wish I had gone back to check on that cat in Texarkana.