William Faulkner always wanted to fly. As a child he had looked on with awe as a hot air balloon had crashed onto the family’s henhouse. Growing up, he cobbled together his own flying machines with his brothers, each of them taking turns in the makeshift cockpit.
So in 1918, after his childhood sweetheart Estelle married someone else, a broken-hearted Faulkner left his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi and—having been rejected by the Air Force for being too skinny—eventually made his way to Canada, where on July 9, he joined the Royal Air Force.
Except that you had to be a British subject to join the RAF—so Faulkner faked it. He practiced an accent. He added a Britishy “u” to his surname (which had, fun fact, previously been Falkner). He forged a recommendation from an invented English vicar who he named “Reverend Mr. Edward Twimberly-Thorndyke.” Well, it worked.
He never saw combat—the war ended before he had even finished his training, or possibly even managed to get into a real cockpit. He went back home, bought himself an officer’s uniform and wore it all over town, and told everyone that he had not only flown planes but seen real combat, and also been injured during training, either in the head or possibly in the leg. Soon enough he would start putting that imagination to better use. He published his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, in 1926.
Just over a decade later, he also got a second chance with Estelle—in 1929, she divorced her first husband, and a few months later, married Faulkner. Shortly thereafter he published his first major novel, The Sound and the Fury (though it was not immediately appreciated as such). He learned to fly for real, and he and Estelle remained married until her death in 1972.
“The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good.”
–William Faulkner
In other (old)
news this week
The first issue of The Nation is published (July 6, 1865) • Percy Bysshe Shelley is drowned while sailing in the Gulf of Spezia; his body is cremated on the beach, except his heart, which will not burn (July 8, 1822) • Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, soon to delight and inspire millions, begins serialization in an Italian newspaper (July 7, 1881) • Charles Thomas Wooldridge is hanged at Reading Gaol, inspiring his fellow prisoner Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (July 7, 1896) • James Joyce's collection Pomes Penyeach is published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris (July 7, 1927) • Nella Larsen graduates from the NYPL’s Library School, becoming the first professionally trained Black librarian (July 8, 1923) • Paul Verlaine shoots and wounds his lover Arthur Rimbaud in Brussels (July 10, 1873) • W. E. B. Du Bois founds the Niagara movement (July 11, 1905) • Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is published. (July 11, 1960).
