Essay by David Wesley Williams
David Wesley Williams is the author of the novels The Coldwater Girl (forthcoming 2027, Regal House Publishing), Come Again No More (2025) and Everybody Knows (2023), both from JackLeg Press, and Long Gone Daddies (John F. Blair, 2013). His short fiction has appeared in Oxford American, The Common, and elsewhere. He lives in Memphis. Visit davidwesleywilliams.wordpress.com.
Old Home Week (The Day Faulkner Met Elvis)
I sometimes wonder what William Faulkner thought of Elvis. I find no record of it.
Maybe it never came up, just never occurred to anyone to ask such a question, despite them being homeboys, so to speak, born twenty-seven miles apart and their lives overlapped by roughly the same number of years. They were sons of the North Mississippi Hill Country who changed the world with their singular voices, bristled at the fame it brought them, medicated entirely too much, were loyal to family, loved women, airplanes, horses, and home. If nothing else, they could have talked of their travails in Hollywood.
They couldn’t have been more different, of course—except that Elvis, dirt poor, whose daddy did time at Parchman for check forgery, could have been a Faulkner character, a Snopes, kin of Flem and them.
Even so, Faulkner, of Oxford, Mississippi, by way of New Albany, might have thought Elvis was from Mars, not Memphis, Tennessee, by way of Tupelo.
Which was not a far cry from true. Because, for all his country dust and innocence, Elvis was from a faraway place: the future. That’s why he had to happen. He was unprecedented yet inevitable—a leap of fate. He was a rocket ship built from found parts (an old blues tune here, a bluegrass number there, thus proving the old Faulkner maxim about the past, eh?), plus some slapback, distortion, and V-8-powered dreaming.
Shudder to think what would follow in the wake of his first Sun Records sessions; not just the likes of Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, beating time to 706 Union Avenue, Sam Phillips’ storefront studio in Memphis, but a whole revolution of sound, style, sex, culture, being, and want—and in some twenty years’ scant time, actual punk rock. Elvis was “a trucker-dandy white boy who must have risked his hide to act so black and dress so gay,” U2’s Bono said in Rolling Stone. “This was punk rock. This was revolt.” A Snopes, got above his raising. Gloriously so.
Faulkner preferred quiet. He didn’t like radios or telephones. He wouldn’t even abide an air conditioner in his home, Rowan Oak, despite those fever-dream Southern summers. “They’re trying to do away with weather,” he huffed, a storm front out of Yoknapatawpha County.
Most of all, Faulkner abhorred the automobile. In 1951’s Requiem for a Nun, he envisioned “the day when all America, after cutting down all the trees and levelling the hills and mountains with bulldozers, would have to move underground to make room for, get out of the way of, the motor cars…” This was three years after he’d already made what might have been a final statement on the subject, in 1948’s Intruder in the Dust, when Faulkner had a character say,
“The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country…”
Born too late, poor Faulkner. For his talk in the Nobel Banquet speech about how man will not simply endure—that most forward-thinking of notions—but indeed prevail, he seemed to live and write and walk in the deep woods of the past. As if everything should be like fine bourbon: well-aged. The future for him was fraught, moving entirely too fast. It was unnatural, hopped up on technology that might kill us all, after it’s made us miserable enough to want to die.
December 1954: An Italian airliner crashed at New York’s Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International) airport. A few days later, Faulkner wrote a letter to The New York Times, absolving the pilot, acting as a sort of one-man NTSB, Jefferson, Mississippi, bureau, calling the pilot and his passengers victims of “that mystical, unquestioning, almost religious awe and veneration in which our culture has trained us to hold gadgets—any gadget, if it is only complex enough and cryptic enough and costs enough.” Yes, Faulkner was fascinated by flight, seemingly one of his contradictions. But he wanted man to fly the plane, not the other way around; one gets the sense he bought a Waco C cabin cruiser only after a good running start and some wild flapping of arms failed to get him airborne.
“We all had better grieve,” Faulkner wrote, concluding his letter to The Times, “for all people beneath a culture which holds any mechanical superior to any man simply because the one, being mechanical, is infallible, while the other, being nothing but man, is not just subject to failure but doomed to it.”
If 1954 technology was too much for Faulkner, imagine him today, when we walk around with plastic growths in our ears, seemingly muttering to ourselves. Imagine his publicist, telling him to get on X and Instagram and TikTok and Bluesky and Substack — except if Faulkner were alive and writing Faulknerian stories and books today, he wouldn’t need a publicist because he wouldn’t have a publisher; his office walls might not be covered with the outline for his next novel but with those mincy, little rejections one gets these days, in which nobody can come out and say no but instead says ,,, at present it does not suit our needs, or … we are unable to use it, or even the hands-in-the-air faux empathy of Writing is hard work, and writers merit some acknowledgment. This note doesn’t speak to that need.
No, if Faulkner were living and writing today, he could damn well do it in peace. It wouldn’t be like 1954, when in anticipation of his forthcoming novel, A Fable, the editors of
Time magazine, damn pests, wanted to put our man on the cover. Faulkner balked, even if it might have sold a few more copies of his latest. His private life was his own and the public could sate itself with the book. He griped about “one of the most fearful things in modern American life: the Freedom of the Press,” and vowed to be “dug in to defend what remains of my privacy to the last bullet.”
Faulkner’s publisher balked, being in the business of selling books. So the author offered to pay back whatever this blasted publicity would cost in sales. Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner tells us the whole thing was then called off — only to have Newsweek send a reporter to Rowan Oak, to do its own cover story. Faulkner didn’t shoot the man from Newsweek, named Bill Emerson, but he didn’t say much to him, either. The silent treatment — a reporter would rather the bullet. “Emerson put together his story as best he could,” Blotner writes.
That was Faulkner’s professional summer of 1954.
Elvis’s was better. Nobody’s ever had a summer quite like Elvis in 1954, when he cut those two songs that made up his first Sun single, the juiced blues of “That’s All Right,” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the sound of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe being shot into space.
A few months later, Elvis bought his first pink Cadillac.
I can imagine him in those heady days, driving south out of Memphis, crossing the Mississippi line, headed for the Hill Country. Maybe some unknown force drew him that way.
Maybe he just wanted to show off his new wheels, and all that pink.
I can imagine him driving up to Rowan Oak, a little too fast, raising dust and some ruckus, skidding to a stop, the car almost shuddering as he killed the engine. Maybe he needed directions. Maybe he, or that car, needed a drink of water. Maybe he heard a famous man lived in that big, white house. And I can imagine Faulkner, inside writing, or drinking (but never both at the same time, we’re told, despite what you think when you read him), but ears perked as ever for the sound of the encroaching future. So then Faulkner, rushing to the front door and seeing what he saw, thinking … what? This was no mere car, couldn’t be. Maybe it was a time machine.
Must be, to look like that. And I can imagine Faulkner walking up to the thing, taking its full measure, and then Elvis’s, and asking what any self-respecting, tax-paying, gun-carrying, flag-waving, letter-to-the-editor-writing, proud citizen of the past would:
“Does that thing go in reverse, too?”~
So that would have ended it, my imagined meeting of the Hill Country homeboys. It would have ended before it began, really; before Elvis, with his inherent shyness and Southern- bred manners, could have managed so much as a “Yes, sir” or “No, sir” or “I don’t know, sir.”
Elvis would have dropped his head and backed slowly down the drive, in pretty much the same way the verb slink loses its pluck in the past-tense slunk. Faulkner would have gone back inside to write, or to drink. And that would have been it; the future not dead, but perhaps its feelings hurt a little.
Or not.
Because I think Faulkner would have recognized something in the young Elvis, something familiar—that inherent shyness that didn’t quite mask his audacity, the loneliness one can feel even when the whole world knows you, or thinks it does. He would have recognized a fellow Mississippian, even one by way of Mars—this riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a pink Cadillac.
I believe Faulkner would have invited Elvis inside, perhaps to the parlor. They’d have talked into the evening, about a good many things, about art (though neither of them calling it that) and fame, about the desire of the self and the want of other people. About growing up in Mississippi and stealing away to big-city Memphis, the pleasures and temptations there. About horses. Women. But not so much about football — Elvis loved the game, but Faulkner was like that character of his in The Hamlet: “I hear it aint much different from actual fighting.” Abour dreams and how they cost more even than a fleet of Fleetwoods.
The younger would mostly defer to the elder, but Elvis would talk of Hollywood, and Faulkner, wanting to warn him off, would instead see the yearning in the young man’s eyes, and only say, “Well.”
It would be getting dark about now. Time to head back to Memphis, Elvis would say.
Back home. And so a handshake that seemed to go, like a fine Faulkner sentence, for days. A goodbye that was mostly just eye contact, intense and knowing, hopeful, a little scared, for both of their sakes. Then Elvis would climb in behind the wheel of his pink Cadillac, his time machine set for the future, and peel away.
And Faulkner, twenty years beyond his greatest work but still with a few books in him, good ones, too, would stand and watch until the car became nothing but taillights, and the taillights nothing but red dots in the distance, and then nothing at all. Then he’d head back inside Rowan Oak, thinking about how close the future was getting to be; it was practically there already, the future in such a rush it was leaving the present in its dust, its wake.
Dust. Wake. That’s death talk. Which he would chase with bourbon. And Faulkner drinking, and thinking, as always, how it was better in the past, though the past was getting further and farther away, every day, seemed like. Such a long way back there, to those deep woods of gone days. But then he’d smile and raise his glass.
A long walk, sure. The best kind.
Or better yet, take the horse.