William Faulkner: "And the Madam had literary aspirations and the three of us would sit in the courtyard and she would supply the whiskey..." (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)

In 1957-58, William Faulkner was the University of Virginia’s first writer-in-residence. The University has done a great thing by putting its many hours of Faulkner audio archives online. You can listen to entire lectures or search for pieces of audio by keyword. Once you start playing around with it, time slips away.

In one segment, Faulkner describes the unusual events that led to his first novel being published. It seems like it could be partly a tall tale, but who knows? (Oddly, it’s not the first time this site has mentioned Faulkner and brothels in a post.) A transcript of his amusing story:

“I was running a launch for a New Orleans bootlegger then down across Pontratrain down Industrial Canal into the Gulf to an island where we would pick up the sugar cane alcohol that came up from the Caribbean and bring that back to his kitchen and he would turn it  into scotch and gin and bourbon, whatever he wanted.

Sherwood Anderson in Central Park in NYC in 1939. (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)

I met Sherwood Anderson who lived in New Orleans at the time and I liked him very much just as you meet a man and you know that you’ll get along with him. We would meet in afternoons and sit in parks and he would talk and I would listen. We would meet again in the evening and go to a well-known, very elegant brothel then. And the Madam had literary aspirations and the three of us would sit in the courtyard and she would supply the whiskey and we would drink and he would talk and she would talk and I would listen. And the next morning I went to see him. He was in seclusion working.

That would go on day after day, afternoons and evenings, he would sit over whiskey and talk and I would listen. I thought that if that was the life it took to be a writer that was the life for me. And so I wrote my first book and when I finished, Mr. Anderson said, ‘I’ll make a trade with you. If I don’t have to read it, I’ll tell my publisher to take it.’ So I said ‘done’ and he told his publisher to take it.”