William Faulkner is Phil Stone's contribution to American
literature, once remarked a mutual confidant of the Nobel laureate
and the Oxford, Mississippi, attorney. Despite his friendship with
the writer for nearly fifty years, Stone is generally regarded as a
minor figure in Faulkner studies. In her biography Phil Stone of
Oxford, Susan Snell offers the first complete critical assessment
of Stone's role in the transformation of Billy Falkner, a promising
but directionless young man, into William Faulkner, arguably the
greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. In the first
decades of their friendship, Stone served Faulkner in many ways as
mentor, muse, patron, editor, agent, and publicist. Later, Stone
was among Faulkner's first biographers and was a source of
archival, biographical, and critical information for such Faulkner
scholars as James B. Meriwether and Carvel Collins. Ironically, the
most intriguing aspect of Stone's relationship with Faulkner has
until now been the least studied. Stone was one of Faulkner's
principal character studies, and from his life came the raw
material out of which Faulkner constructed a good part of his
fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Stone's Ivy League education, his
friendships with gamblers and prostitutes, his family's hunting
excursions, even his family's antebellum mansion only begin to
suggest the borrowings from Stone's life found in books ranging
from The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses to the Snopes
trilogy. Faulkner also appropriated Stone's personality and
profession to mirror and sometimes mask his own insecurities. Such
characters as Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren, Horace Benbow, and
Gavin Stevens owe much to the author himself but also recall Stone
in often subtle ways. The fraternal rivalries for their mother's
love that consume Darl Bundren and Quentin Compson, for example,
are based on Stone's own unhappy family life. Bundren's and
Compson's mothers more closely resemble Stone's mother than
Faulkner's. In Stone, Faulkner saw the Old South confronting its
twentieth-century crucibles the teeming, rapacious white lower
classes; the Great Depression; and the first stirrings of the civil
rights and women's movements. In the 1930s, Faulkner recurrently
dealt with the region's decadence and the fall of old patriarchies
like the Compson and Sartoris families. During these years,
Faulkner's fortunes rose steadily as Stone's declined, but it is
Stone's story not his own that he chose to tell. Snell says that in
a sense Faulkner usurped Stone's place in the South's social order,
building his reputation and acquiring real estate as personal and
financial failures nearly overwhelmed Stone. Stone's transparent
jealousy of Faulkner, personality flaws, and mental instability in
his final years have engendered skepticism about his claims
concerning the years he had spent "fooling with Bill." But, to
hastily relegate Stone to the marginalia of Yoknapatawpha County,
Snell suggests, is to leave untapped a rich source of information.
Phil Stone of Oxford tells the tragic story of a talented, complex
man, bred for power in the declining era of southern patriarchy,
yet compelled to pursue the Muse vicariously.
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