Where Faulkner found his inspiration

From short fiction to major novels, William Faulkner drew on residents of the small town of Holly Springs, Miss., to develop his fictional Southern characters and locations. These people and places are anchored in history as much as in Faulkner’s imagination. In William Faulkner in Holly Springs (University Press of Mississippi, 196 pp.), literary scholar and historian Sally Wolff continues her study of Holly Springs and its influence on Faulkner and his literary art.

Wolff says the small town has been overlooked as a significant source of literary inspiration for the Southern author. She focuses on “the how and why of Faulkner’s mingling with its townspeople, the atmosphere, place, and history, and their effects on his writing.” She makes some big claims, such as “the people and places that Faulkner encountered in Holly Springs are unique and their circumstances remarkable enough to qualify for literary immortality—because he viewed them as such.”

Holly Springs was just 30 miles from Faulkner’s home in Oxford, “with a bootlegger, plenty of Civil War history, and people whom Faulkner enjoyed observing.” The place “ignited” Faulkner’s imagination. One of Wolff’s pieces of evidence to push back against skeptics who claim Faulkner didn’t visit Holly Springs often are the speeding and DUI tickets the author received from the local police on the highway to the small town. She also points to numerous accounts of residents who interacted with the prolific writer as he observed their pasts and present, even reading the Leak family plantation journals from the 1800s. The names of characters such as Sam, Moses, and Isaac from Go Down, Moses match names listed in this document. Correlations exist between the people, places, and written records of Holly Springs and works such as The Wild Palms, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, Intruder in the Dust, and Requiem for a Nun, among others. Names, descriptions of homes, train stations, historical references to Civil War figures, terrain, and correspondence are all part of the mosaic of inspirations Faulkner gleaned from the small town and its inhabitants. He found a way to make the history and folklore from Holly Springs endure in his own art.

But the value of this study is more about how Faulkner worked, as he “saw, listened, collected, and then remembered.” Wolff finds a credible source in Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, who reported the visits Faulkner made to his father, Edgar Wiggin Francisco II. According to Francisco III, the two would discuss the stories of the people of Holly Springs over beer or moonshine. Wolff interviewed many “senior inhabitants” of the town, including the chancery clerk at the Holly Springs courthouse, who reported that “I talked. He listened.”

Wolff’s descriptions and history of the town give readers insight into a region as well as a town. The town “imparts to visitors a feeling of stepping into a bygone era”—part of Faulkner’s profound interest in history and the difficulties of getting past the past. Marshall County was thriving economically during the antebellum years, underscoring the dramatic decline of the South that was so important in the author’s fiction.

Faulkner and his family had long-standing connections with Holly Springs, and he was a memorable presence when he visited. Wolff chronicles striking moments, as when Faulkner reveals at a party that some of his favorite authors were “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself.” Oxfordites frequented many social events in Holly Springs. And Wolff even offers a helpful table of Holly Springs inhabitants and the characters in Faulkner’s fiction that they were based on or inspired (with many having the exact same or almost identical names). A juicy appendix provides a timeline of lawsuits between local families the Leaks and the McCarrolls, plus family correspondence that indicates their importance in understanding the creation of Absalom! Absalom!

Faulkner translated the folk and folklore of Holly Springs into characters who take on Shakespearean angst while grappling with the tragedies of slavery, the Civil War, and reconstruction. Wolff’s scholarly sleuthing matters for the historical as well as the literary record, and her book explains a lot about the “where” of Faulkner’s sources. But the miracle of how he translated Holly Springs into great literary art will forever remain a mystery.