Response to the Film William Faulkner: a Life on Paper

Response to the Film William Faulkner: a Life on Paper

While I was watching the documentary William Faulkner, a Life on Paper I found it striking how the different people that were interviewed talked about two different sides of the author William Faulkner. His daughters, Jill Faulkner Sommers and his stepdaughter, spoke mainly about his alcohol abuse and his moodiness whereas Faulkner’s contemporaries from Oxford underlined Faulkner’s generosity and kindness. The documentary shows Faulkner not only as father of Jill and his stepdaughter but also as a father figure for many others. He had to take care of several families at once. At one point Faulkner had seventeen dependents to provide for. Many of the people that were interviewed describe Faulkner as being very generous and always willing to help others even when he had almost nothing himself. One special example is his brother Dean who died in an airplane accident and because Faulkner had bought the plane he apparently felt guilty about the death of his brother for the rest of his life as his sister-in-law says in the interview.

The interviews with Faulkner’s daughter Jill and his stepdaughter show a different side of the Nobel Prize-winning author. Jill speaks about her father (whom she calls “papi”) and his alcohol habits in an objective, distanced way and seems to have accepted the fact that her father was a man who cared about many people, but sometimes “would have walked on her.” One incident she talks about struck me especially. She remembers that at a party her father was drinking once again and when she asked him to stop he said to her: “No one remembered Shakespeare’s child…” Even when we take the fact into account that he was drunk at that point, this seems to me a rather cruel thing to say to one’s daughter.

Other women, however, seem to have been of great importance in Faulkner’s life among them Joan Williams, a young, aspiring author from Memphis. Talking about her Jill Faulkner Sommers says that her father liked the idea of having a “protégé.” Other women Faulkner seems to have been greatly attached to were his mother and his grandmother. Faulkner dedicated Go Down Moses to another woman he apparently cared about very much, the family “mammy.” The dedication runs: “To Mammy Caroline Barr, who was born in slavery and gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love.