A sleepy sanctuary

When you enter Oxford, Mississippi, home-town of William Faulkner, you step back in time

When you enter Oxford, Mississippi, home-town of William Faulkner, you step back in time. Yes, there's now a McDonald's and a small shopping mall, but the core of the old southern town (an hour's drive south of Memphis) is as hot and sleepy and ante-bellum in its architecture as the days when it stood at the heart of Faulkner's fictional "Yoknapatawpha County".

It's a place I have been visiting since the 1960s. My parents went to university at Oxford's Ole Miss and met Faulkner then. My father, an aspiring actor and journalist, had a part in the film version of Intruder in the Dust (1949) and was the first to interview Faulkner after the author won the Nobel Prize. Our family dog, Carrie, was from a Faulkner litter, while a painting of a sharecropper shack by his mother, the naive artist, Maud Falkner (sic), still takes a central position on my mother's sitting room wall.

But Rowan Oak, the plantation home where, from 1930, William Faulkner did most of his writing, is a far cry from sharecropper roots. Built in 1844 by Colonel Robert Sheegog, a local merchant turned civil war officer, the Greek Revival house barely survived the razing of Oxford by Federal troops in 1964.

Set in a grove of oak and cedar on the edge of town, the house was meant to provide Faulkner with the sanctuary he needed to write. Determined to lay the ghosts of Indian, race and civil wars, the author named the house after a passage from The Golden Bough which stated that the rowan tree was "exceedingly effective" in warding off all manner of evil spirits.

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In the humid heat of a southern summer, the shady walk up to Rowan Oak is sanctuary indeed - and the house is still impressive in a Gone with the Wind sort of way. On your left as you leave the pillared front porch and enter the hall, there's the library where Faulkner's pipe and glasses are on display, along with a portrait of the author by his mother. At the back of the house is the writer's office, added in 1950 using monies from Hollywood contracts and his Nobel Prize. Monastically bare save for his Underwood typewriter, a bed and a fold-up desk, its walls are marked with the plot-line for A Fable, published in 1954 - the most immediate and profoundly moving connection with Faulkner's writing process.

During Faulkner's life, he worked hard to retain the character, both of Rowan Oak and the town of Oxford, through a passion for architectural preservation. Born 32 years after the Civil War, he grieved with his parents over the decimation of southern culture wrought by Yankee soldiers and carpet-baggers.

No surprise, then, that he actively fought to save Oxford's splendid County Courthouse from demolition. Disguised for Intruder in the Dust, you'll find it in the town's central square. Nearby is The First National Bank, founded by Faulkner's grandfather, and fictionalised as The Sartoris Bank in The Unvanquished. And around the corner is the Chandler House on Buchanan Street - inspiration for the Compson Estate in The Sound and The Fury. All maintained more substantially, but with the same care, as the lover's corpse in A Rose for Emily.

In 1962 the 65-year-old Faulkner was out riding across his beloved "Yoknapatawpha County" when he fell from his horse. He died a few days later. Yet his dream of preserving a culture on the brink of extinction can still be felt both in the house he loved, and in the town he celebrated through his life's work in fiction.

Rowan Oak is open all year round, except Mondays and holi- days. Telephone: 00.1.662.234.3284