Faulkner's Last Days

m HIS essay is an effort by William Faulkner's physician and his I biographer to reexamine the last days of his life in the context of his attitudes toward death as a man and an artist. It was prompted by conversations last year in an attempt to reexamine and reinterpret available data. Faulkner appears to have had an unusual awareness of death from childhood onwards. In the strongly autobiographical story, Sepulture South: Gaslight, he described his four-year-old protagonist's reaction to the knowledge that the hearse he had seen contained a body. It is a terrifying vision of premature burial, the victim 'tricked into that helpless coma for some dreadful and inscrutable joke until the dirt was packed down, to strain and thrash and cry in the airless dark, to no escape forever. So that night I had something very like hysterics, clinging to Sarah's legs and panting: 'I won't die! I won't! Never!' ' Death constituted an almost constant motif in his writing as a young, little-known poet and as a mature artist in fiction. One thinks of early poems such as A Dead Dancer, or Moon of Death, or Mississippi Hills: My Epitaph, written before he was out of his twenties. At about the same time, Carvel Collins tells us, he wrote a friend that for a year he had felt a powerful presentiment that he would die before he was thirty.2 In the same essay Professor Collins says of another early work, Mayday, that its main

Art · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · History