Working a dull job of the public service adapted to your talents does not make you a writer, but many famous writers have worked such jobs. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked in boston customs for a year. His friend Herman Melville spent much more time – 19 years old – as customs inspector in New York, according to the traces of his father and his grandfather. Walt Disney and Charles Bukowski worked at the post office, but not together (can you imagine?), And therefore, for two years, William Faulkner.
After abandoning the University of Mississippi in 1920, Faulkner became his postmaster two years later, a job he found “tedious, boring and uninteresting” ” writes the mental thread: “Most of his time as a postmaster, was devoted to playing cards, writing poems or drinking.” Eudora Welty Characterized Faulkner's mandate as a postmaster with the following sticker:
Imagine that here and now we are all in the old university post office and live in the 1920s. We came to the stamp window to buy a recent 2 stamp, but we don't see anyone there. We hit, then we beat, then we beat again and there is no her there. So we shouted its name, and finally here it is. William Faulkner. We interrupted him … when he should have put the mail and sell stamps at the window at the front, he was out of sight in the lyrical poems by writing.
According to all accounts, she barely overestimates the case. As an author and publisher Bill Peschel says itFaulkner “opened the post office on the days it suited him, and closed it when he did not do it, usually when he wanted to go hunting or on the golf course.
He would throw up the advertising circulars, the university bulletins and other letters he considered. A student publication of the time proposed a motto for its service: “Never put the mail on time.”
Unsurprisingly, the powers that were finally decided that they had enough. In 1924, Faulkner felt the end to come. But rather than bowing quietly, as most people might do, the future Nobel Prize winner Composed a letter of dramatic and unusually succinct resignation to his superiors:
As long as I live under the capitalist system, I expect my life to influence the demand of people in money. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the Beck and the call of each itinerant scoundrel which has two hundred to invest in a postage stamp.
It is, sir, my resignation.
Provocative self-wound, injured pride, change of blame … Perhaps these qualities are, as well as a notorious tendency to exaggerate and lie downright (on its military service for example) which qualified it so much for his late career as words of Ole Miss-“statesman in the world”. Faulkner's gift for the car mode could have adapted a career in politics to him, if he was so inclined. He did it, after all, Receive a commemorative stamp in 1987 (above) of the institution itself, he used so badly.
But like Hawthorne, Bukowski or a number of other writers who have held tedious day jobs, he was forced to give his life to fiction. In a subsequent story of the resignation, says Peschel, Faulkner would revise his letter “in a more spicy quote”, unable to resist the urge to invent: “I think I will be in Beck and the call of people with money all my life, but I thank that I will never have a buffer again.”
Note: an earlier version of this article appeared on our site in
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him to @jdmagness
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