The Wintering (51 page)

Faulkner sent the story with a covering letter to
Harper's
, which rejected it. He sent it then to his agent, Harold Ober, to save himself postage and time. The day the story arrived, a young man just beginning to work for
The Atlantic Monthly
stopped in to introduce himself to Mr. Ober and to ask if he had any material. Mr. Ober gave the story to Seymour Lawrence, and it was published as an “Atlantic First.”

Contrary to Joseph Blotner's
Faulkner: A Biography
, Faulkner had nothing to do with this story's expansion into my first novel, by the same title and using the original story as the first chapter. I sent him the novel with the inscription: For Bill. At long last. I was thirty-one then. In January 1961 he wrote that he had read the book with a great deal of expectation and hope, and he had not been disappointed in either.
It is all right. It is a good first book and will be a bad last one. So you must continue, go on, write another one. Not only because the more you write the more you will learn to correct the faults, all minor in my opinion, in this one. It is a good story in concept because it is not regional nor topical, but universal. Next time, if you still keep your sights high, you will do it better since the more you write, the more you will learn how to express, milk dry, the love and hatred you have to feel, not for man in his behaviour, but for man in his condition. Get at another one right away. Dont write this one again. Write another one
. By the time I did, he was gone.

He added that he still thought anyone who wanted to be a serious and honest artist should get away from the entire East north of the Potomac and east of the mountains, and stay away until he or she was old enough to resist them. But then I was living in Connecticut, married and the mother or two children.

In July 1962, I was visiting in the South and spent a day with my cousin Regina. She urged me to call Faulkner, though I felt reluctant about seeing him at home. I had seen him in May at the awards luncheon given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I received a grant for
The Morning and the Evening
. I had sat in a front row as a recipient and Faulkner sat on the platform just above me, and dozed. When I walked past to receive an envelope from Malcolm Cowley, I thought Faulkner asleep.

In Oxford Mrs. Faulkner answered the phone and said of course I must see Bill, and to come right away. After greeting me, and calling him, she ushered her mystified sister off the porch where they had been sitting, and left us alone. I wish we had said something momentous, but we did not. He asked if there had been money in that envelope they gave me. And I said no; they gave me the money later.

He walked me to the car; I thought he looked pale. Ten days later he was dead.

I had thought he would live to be an old man. In Connecticut I had daydreamed of going back to Mississippi when he was eighty and sitting in a rocker; I would put a brightly colored afghan over his knees and sit by them, and listen again. But I was glad to be, that July, in those blue hills where, though he was dead, the earth that held him fast would find him breath: his own elegy.

I had seen the last; and if I had not seen the real first, I had seen a beginning of another kind, in his middle age. Someday, Joan, he said, you will know that no one will ever love you as I have.

I know that now, passing my half-century mark.

He gave us Dilsey to teach us about enduring: grief and regret and whatever comes our way. He always worried about being too old for me. Tell me if I'm too old. You will tell me, won't you? And I said, You are not too old. Thank God. I think I can cope with, maybe not beat, but cope with anything but that.

I would never have said he was too old. I was taking care of him for the whole world, remember.

About the Author

Joan Williams (1928–2004) was an acclaimed author of short stories and novels, including
The Morning and the Evening
, a finalist for the National Book Award, and
The Wintering
, a roman à clef based on her relationship with William Faulkner. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Bard College in upstate New York, Williams was greatly influenced by the legacy of her mother's rural Mississippi upbringing and set much of her fiction in that state. Her numerous honors included the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author᾿s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Twenty Will Not Come Again” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in May, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by Joan Williams

Copyright © 1971, 1980 by Joan Williams

Cover design by Angela Goddard

ISBN: 978-1-4976-9464-4

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