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.