I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about William Faulkner’s reluctance
to attend a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners, complaining it was “a
long way to go just to eat.”
And I know he certainly didn’t want to go to Stockholm to receive the
Nobel Prize, though he did go in the end, and now I’ve been reading a book
titled Faulkner’s Mississippi (text
by Willie Morris, photographs by William Eggleston) which contains an account
of Faulkner’s days prior to his visit to Stockholm.
In honour of the trip he went on a colossal multi-day binge, in and
around his home in Oxford,
Mississippi. The family watched for a
few days and then decided to sober him up.
They and told him it was a few days earlier than it actually was, that
the trip was imminent and that he’d better pull himself together. This was on a Saturday, though they told
Faulkner it was Monday. But drunk or
sober Faulkner was no fool. When he
asked somebody where his stepson was, they replied he was at the football
game. Faulkner’s reaction, “Somebody’s
been deceivin’ me. They don’t play
football games on Monday. I’ve got three
more days to drink.”
When Faulkner was in Hollywood, he drank prolifically at Musso and
Frank (passim in this blog). And I was
just trawling the internet continuing my obsession with the work of William Eggleston, and I
happened to find this photograph of his, which I’d never seen before. My favorite photographer takes a picture of
my favorite bar: does it get any better than this?
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