For more than a decade Stone conducted a literary tutorial with the young high school dropout, exposing him to everything from the classics to the contemporary, with particular emphasis on nineteenth-century British poetry, the French Symbolists, and the recent poetry and fiction of Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. One source of that familiarity was an Oxford townsman, Phil Stone, who took Faulkner under his superbly educated wing in 1914. This family history, combined with a Lost Cause mentality prevalent among southern white males born at the turn of the century, gave Faulkner what Nietzsche called the inclination to “monumentalism.” Fortunately for Faulkner’s writing, he also acquired the capacity to distance himself from or at least radically complicate his inheritance, largely through his growing familiarity with modernist thought.
Falkner, whose extravagant life and career-lawyer, planter, decorated Civil War officer, politician, railroad builder, and novelist-seemed to impose on all his descendants, even the most successful, a sense of inevitable decline. Born in 1897 in New Albany and moving to Oxford in 1902, Faulkner was the eldest child in a family that had been prominent in the area for three generations, highlighted by his paternal great-grandfather, William C. That dual perspective-backward to the antebellum South and the Civil War, forward to the modernist revolution in Western thought and the arts-invested Faulkner’s fiction with a perpetual tension, the depth of which was great enough to convert an oeuvre largely confined to a tiny portion of the US South into an expression of national, hemispheric, and world relevance. When Allen Tate described the generation of writers that produced the Southern Renaissance as having a “double focus, a looking two ways,” he doubtless was including William Faulkner.
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