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So real was the world of Yoknapatawpha to Faulkner that he sometimes gave the impression of living the life of his county almost day by day. During a bibulous all-afternoon lunch in New York with his last Random House editor, Albert Erskine, Faulkner might ask: "By the way, did you hear what happened to Sarty Snopes?" and then launch into anecdotes (some of them never published) just as if Erskine had lived in the same town but had not been back for a spell. Faulkner once remarked to a friend that Yoknapatawpha Lawyer Gavin Stevens " was a good man, but he didn't succeed in living up to his ideal. But his nephew, the boy [Chick Mallison, the young hero of Intruder in the Dust), I think he may grow up to be a better man than his uncle; I think he may succeed as a human being."
Looking Glass. Yoknapatawpha County and the town of Jefferson resemble closely the Oxford, Miss., area where Faulkner was born in 1897.
(Yoknapatawpha was the original Indian name of the river that runs past Oxford.) Many of its inhabitants, including most of the principal characters of his novels, are closely drawn from his family, his acquaintances, his ancestors. His great-grandfather William Cuthbert Falkner (the novelist added the 'u') was a Confederate colonel and a fiery leader of irregular cavalry; he later turned railroad builder and politician, killed two men in gun fights, was himself finally shot dead in the street by a former business partner. In each larger-than-life detail he has long been recognized as the model for Faulkner's Colonel John Sartoris, progenitor of the Sartoris family, whose family legends, falling fortunes and declining vigor the novelist traced through four generations in eleven novels (principally Sartoris and The Unvanquished). Oxford friends of Faulkner can tentatively identify the real-life sources of several dozen other characters and incidents, including some of the most decadent and grotesque.
But Yoknapatawpha County is far more than antiquarianism and an exercise in skirting the law of libel: it is a looking glass of magical power to enable the patient viewer to see the South whole.
Faulkner was first of all a social historian of matchless accuracy and sweep in capturing the detail of the way life in the Deep South was, and often still is, for whites and Negroes, rednecks and aristocrats, farmers and townspeople. He was also a raconteur of hallucinatory splendor and sudden mirth. But primarily, Faulkner chronicled and explicated the mind and conscience—and something deeper than conscience or even consciousness—of the white Southerner. In effect, his exploration was an exploration of himself. This is one of the most difficult things to do honestly, and one of the most significant if done well.
Black Shadow. For no man could have been more wholly in the South and of the South. William Faulkner was deeply, almost mystically, attached to the land. He was the great-grandson of a man who had owned slaves; his father ran only a livery stable. But Faulkner's concern was spiritual, not economic. His obsession was the region's deepest secret, what he called the curse on the land.
He put it most passionately in Light in August, as the tormented Joanna