A Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Liquor

by El Destino

2020-03-31 16:40:06

Journalists Gone Wild

Curled up cozy with a good book? All warm and snuggly and thinking about friends far away? So am I, reading the greatest story by the greatest writer -- when he suddenly starts waxing philosophical about liquor!

See, back when Americans huddled and sheltered during those first months of World War II, many turned to a hunting tale in their Saturday Evening Post. Penned in a small but grand homestead in Oxford, Mississippi, its became the center piece for a seven-story "suite" that the author always later insisted was one single seven-piece novel. (And after he won a Nobel Prize for literature, no one argued with him about anything...)

And yeah, he loved liquor. Whiskeys and bourbons, brandies and wine. Hot toddies, mint juleps... You name it, and William Faulkner drank it...

And he wrote while he was drinking. And on at least one blessed occasion, he even wrote about drinking... in his epic short story The Bear. Within the thoughts of a teenager, hoping to become a man, are the memories of the rituals, the culture, of those rambling gatherings "about the smoky blazing of piled wood."

"There was always a bottle present..."

...so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan's base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. Then it seemed to him on this December morning not only natural but actually fitting that this should have begun with whisky.

This Pigdog journalist wants to add that if you visit Faulkner's homestead -- in Oxford, Mississippi -- all visitors are shown an empty bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. Along with an appropriate quote of appreciation...

burton@pigdog.org