Decades after his death, William Faulkner comes to us with a certain dignity -- a pipe-smoking, Nobel Prize-winner with the courtliest of manners. Except when he did that thing he sometimes did, that getting loaded on bourbon and throwing up on fellow members of the Oxford, Miss., Hunt Club thing. But long before he perfected the persona of gentleman farmer, he tried on another one, in an altogether different Southern city, when he lived in New Orleans in the dress and demeanor of a Bohemian poet.

Faulkner wrote that New Orleans was "the city where imagination takes precedence over fact,” a quote that is wonderfully apt, as Faulkner was a wonderfully accomplished liar. Jay Parini, in the biography One Matchless Time, wrote that the young writer “might say anything that came into his head, more concerned with his image than with paying allegiance to anything one might normally call truth.”

One of the more dramatic lies that he lived was the one of wounded WWI pilot. He wore his uniform conspicuously years after the War had ended, affected an English accent, and limped or leaned heavily on a cane from the injuries he had sustained in a fictional dogfight. While he had been in the Britain’s Royal Air Force branch (he was too short for the American air corps), he never saw action any farther afield than Canada, and never once piloted a plane.

His first visit to New Orleans was a brief one in 1919 when traveling with a gangster named Reno -- it was also memorable for the fact that when drunk he threw all of his clothes out of a window of the Roosevelt Hotel on St. Charles. When he returned to the city in 1925, he had already acquired many of the traits he is known for today. He was arrogant, an amazingly talented and disciplined writer, and a truly prodigious drinker. A friend who knew him at that time told Jay Parini that all of the stories about Faulkner would be exaggerations and make-believe, “with one sole exception -- his addiction to alcohol.”

Sherwood Anderson, whose book Winesburg, Ohio, was already a classic, lived in the French Quarter on St. Peter Street. He took Faulkner under his wing. Together they would dress up and visit Aunt Rose’s, a brothel of the old school, although it seems that Faulkner did little more in the parlor than talk, and listen to stories from the madam, the working girls, bootleggers, and gangsters. The honeymoon with Anderson would last until Faulkner caricatured his mentor in a book, then locked Anderson’s son out of the house naked, after painting the young man’s privates green.

Up until then, most of Faulkner’s work had been highly inaccessible poetry, but he began to write sketches of New Orleans that were published locally. The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune paid him $20 for five stories, and he wrote his mother that, “I am like John Rockefeller. Whenever I need money, I sit down and dash off ten dollars worth of them.”

Early in 1926 his writing was done at 624 Pirate’s Alley, across from St. Louis Cathedral, where he shared an attic flat with painter Bill Spratling. Spratling was gay, but this in no way dampened their friendship, which was based less on sexual preference than a mutual love for absinthe served on ice. When drunk, Faulkner would disdain the stairs, and instead climb the wrought iron-work up and over the balcony.

But his capacity for work was as fierce as his drinking. Every morning, Spratling would find him on that same balcony, a bourbon and water in one hand, a typewriter on in the other. He was working on the novel Soldier’s Pay, and turned out thousands of words a day. A friend in Oxford, worried by Faulkner’s long silence, telegrammed “What’s the matter. Do you have a mistress?” Faulkner replied, “Yes. And she’s 30,000 words long.”

A man that devoted to words would have expected no less than that the Crescent City arts center bearing his name would be one of the first facilities of any kind to open in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina. On Dec. 5, 2005, when most of New Orleans was still searching for food and shelter, the Faulkner House, a bookstore and cultural haven housed in that same flat in Pirate’s Alley, reopened its doors, with food, drink, local writers reading their work, and a belated birthday toast to Mr. Bill.


Click here to read a 1939 Time Magazine article about William Faulkner. It's the one that corresponds to the image on this page.