Bourbon with Bill

I had the honor of auditing (another story for another day, but too many credits) a 400/600 level Faulkner course my final semester of undergrad (and what a charmed semester it was). Margaret Yonce, affectionately known as Peggy, was my professor, and my soul sister Paige audited it with me. Paige and I had Shakes and our French courses together, even ditched French one day to go across the river to Aiken, kidnapping J.R. from another class to see Eastern Carolina’s production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged. I do not digress. If you can talk about Faulkner without mentioning Shakespeare, you’re surface reading.

Back to the Faulkner course (Spring semester, 2001). I think there were six or seven of us, but Paige and I sat in the front, and no one else contributed much to discussion. Peggy was delighted to have us audit her course, although she had “hoped to have both of us as truly enrolled students” in one of her courses. Paige, JR, Richard, and I were coveted students in the English department—having one of us in the room guaranteed that the professor wouldn’t have to carry the discussion alone. Fred Wharton was the lucky one who had all four of us together in his Shakespeare course, which was one of the best classes of my academic career (again, another story for another day).

Peggy had Paige and me together, as audits—we both had the credit limit problem. I can’t tell you how delighted she was the day of the first exam when Paige and I both showed up. I still remember the shock in her eyes behind her glasses. She asked us, in her Mississippi drawl, if we were aware that we didn’t have to take exams. We told her we knew, but we preferred the perspective that she didn’t have to grade our exams. We wanted every bit of her Faulkner knowledge we could get our minds on, and if you’ve ever taken a good upper level literature exam, you know that you can learn just from reading the questions, which are usually a good paragraph long. Paige and I wanted Peggy’s questions. I think that was the day we brought her the peace lily, complete with a “My name is” sticker, where we wrote “Snopes” in red sharpie.

You see, Peggy earned her PhD at Ole Miss, and she’s the author of Garland’s Annotations to Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay, published in 1989, twelve years before she was my professor. She knew more about Faulkner than I thought possible, and her stories and biographical notes about him and his relationships with his editors(especially Harrison Smith), his publisher, the University of Mississippi, Hollywood studios, and, of course, his relationship with Estelle Oldham, his first and forever love, were fleshed out and real. I didn’t feel like I was reading Faulkner; I felt as though I were being immersed into his life, complete with friends, jobs, card games, broken hearts, and bourbon.

The stories Paige and I loved best were her stories about her days at Ole Miss, and we were especially charmed that she and her classmates kept the tradition they started when they were in Oxford: every year on September 25, Faulkner's birthday, they would meet at Faulkner’s grave with a bottle of bourbon (Wild Turkey, if I recall correctly) and drink the whole bottle with him, always pouring the first and last shot into his grave.