William and Dean and Mark and Joey (Part 1)

I spent much of our recent trip to Oxford and Memphis reading the latest issue of the Oxford American, a magazine to which Kate subscribed shortly after we moved here - during the Southern Festival of Books, in fact, which we visited with my father and Joey - but which I hadn't been reading that often. The OA (which is published in Conway, AR) is often called the South's New Yorker, and I can see why - it has a mix of long-form nonfiction and fiction pieces written by prominent Southern writers, mostly of very high quality - but somehow I never found much in it to interest me. I think it's because I want magazines to give me the sort of in-depth reporting that you don't get in a newspaper, and the OA is more a collection of short stories and essays than a magazine of journalism.

So it was unusual for me to be reading the OA at all, and even more unusual for me to be reading this particular issue since, as Kate subsequently pointed out, our subscription had run out some time ago. When she mentioned this after I described to her the story that I'm about to describe to you, I began to think that I was being led - by whom or what I don't care to speculate (this is why I'm using the passive voice) - specifically to this story.

The story is "Dean's Crash: A Short History of the Flying Faulkners," by Joshua Clark. It's not online, so I'm unable to link you to the article, but if you hurry you might be able to find the issue still at your local newsstand (provided they still have local newsstands by the time you read this). It's about William Faulkner and his brother Dean, younger by ten years, who admired and emulated his famous older brother and occasionally flew airplanes with him (William had trained with the Royal Air Force in Canada during WWI and always afterward claimed, falsely, that he had flown missions in Europe). William paid for Dean's flying lessons and sold him his first monoplane. In air shows they were known as the "Flying Faulkners," and, as William's writing career blossomed, Dean became the better pilot and began flying on his own. In 1935, just before an air show in Pontotoc, MS, Dean's plane crashed with four people aboard; one of the passengers survived, but it wasn't Dean.

William Faulkner's brother died at the age of 28. He took it hard, blaming himself for selling Dean the plane and for not being in the plane with him. He also blamed himself, more broadly, for stimulating his brother's interest in flying, for leading him into the kind of lifestyle that had brought about his death. He had nightmares for years afterwards, once telling Dean's wife, years later, that he dreamed about the crash every night.

He (William) dealt with the pain by drinking (he dealt with many things, including the onset of evening, by drinking) and by writing. When the crash occurred, he was working on Absalom, Absalom!, a novel whose central mystery (as Clark points out) concerns one brother killing another. He also dealt with it by raising Dean's daughter, not yet born at the time of the crash, as his own. Her name was also Dean.

William chose the epitaph for Dean's grave. It is:

    I Bare Him on Eagles'
    Wings and Brought Him
    Unto Me.

It's the same inscription he had used for the titular character in his 1929 novel Sartoris, and it comes from Exodus.


When I read this story, sitting in a pungent hotel room in Tupelo, preparing the next day to travel to Faulkner's home in Oxford, I knew there were two things I needed to do. I needed to visit the cemetery where Dean and William are buried, and I needed to buy and read Absalom, Absalom!. 


The article describes the cemetery in some detail, mentioning that William is buried at some distance from the rest of the Falkner family (Falkner is the correct spelling - William added the u when he went to Canada to join the RAF, because he thought it made him sound more British - he also adopted a British accent), whose plot sits atop a hill, while William's is at the bottom. Kate and I asked the docent at the Faulkner house (a Jamaican kid from Ole Miss who's hoping to study public history at my university someday) to point us to the cemetery, and we had little trouble finding the place, but it took some time to find the Falkner/Faulkner plots. It was a raw and windy early-March day in northern Mississippi, we were both improperly bundled, and many of the old marble tombstones had been worn smooth to illegibility, but after some alert wandering across the damp, spongy grass we managed to locate the Falkner plot and Dean's grave.

Also buried here is William's daughter Alabama, who died in infancy while William and Dean were traveling to Memphis to get an incubator for her. It's the smallest grave in the family plot.

At the bottom of the hill is William's grave. It's is better-marked, with flowers and empty Jack Daniels bottles on it. William died at the age of 64, early on the morning of July 6, 1962, shortly after he finished his final book, The Reivers. His death was a result of complications from a fall from a horse several years earlier. Neither brother died a natural death.

I can't say I had any great epiphany at the cemetery in Oxford, but I can't say that I was expecting any, either. What initially struck me when I read the story were the parallels between Dean's death and Joey's: they were the same age, they both died in accidents, they were both younger brothers of writers (of a sort). William's feelings of responsibility for his brother's death seem to have been much more tormenting than my own. I have, of course, thought about how my own choices helped to enable Joey's - how my leaving Oklahoma for college probably encouraged him to do the same (or at least made such a thing thinkable for him), how my lust for travel fed and fed upon his own, how the examples I set and the things I've done might have served as a challenge and a provocation and a template for his own life - but I don't believe he was living in my shadow, nor that he was trying to emulate or ape me, and I don't feel especially responsible for creating the circumstances in which his death happened, as William felt about Dean's. Still, I can imagine many decisions of my own which, had I made them differently, might indirectly have led to Joey's being somewhere else in the early morning of July 4, 2010. I imagine everybody connected to him could say the same thing.

It's in the way that he dealt with Dean's death that William Faulkner might have something to tell me. I'm not talking about the drinking (that's not going to be a problem of mine, I don't think); I'm talking about the writing. William's impulse after Dean's death was to write. First, he turned to one of his own books to find an appropriate epitaph for his brother's grave. Then, he returned to Absalom, Absalom! and produced what many believe to be his masterpiece. I don't have time to talk about Absalom, Absalom! today, but I will do that soon (I finished reading it last night). Like the grave, the book didn't provide any real epiphanies, but it did give me some hints about how I might go on from here.

Another parallel between the William/Dean story and the Mark/Joey story - the detail, indeed, that compelled me to seek out Dean's grave - lies in the fact that I also chose the inscription for my brother's grave. It's not biblical, as Dean's is, and it suggests a downward trajectory instead of the upward course of Dean's eagles, but it is literary and stirring and has provided one of the images that I most frequently conjure when I think about Joey's life. It's from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Death":

    O Shooting Star
    That fell into my eyes and through my body --:
    Not to forget you. To endure.

This image of a shooting star reminds me of a song I recently heard, which, in some wondrous future when we're able to embed multimedia elements into our tombstones, I will add to Joey's grave. It's by Lucinda Williams, and it's named after a city I visited (for the first and, probably, only time) with Joey and Tina several years ago. It's called "Copenhagen," and it has nothing at all to do with Faulkner but everything in the world to do with my brother. I hope you'll find time to listen to it.