Dead Letters: "The Postmaster"

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent
 

I have, over the course of my career, failed to obtain interviews with some of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Hemingway refused to acknowledge I existed. Christie pretended to be someone else. But William Faulkner is the only author who ever lost my mail.

I first wrote to Faulkner in the spring of 1923 at the University of Mississippi post office in Oxford, where he served as postmaster. I wrote again in June. And again in August. I received no reply. I attributed this to the well-known reluctance of serious writers to correspond with journalists.

It was not until I traveled to Oxford that fall that I discovered the more likely explanation: he had almost certainly thrown my letters away.

Faulkner had been appointed postmaster in late 1921, through the efforts of a local attorney named Phil Stone, who later described the arrangement with the weariness of a man who had built his own gallows. "I forced Bill to take the job over his own declination and refusal," Stone said. "He made the damndest postmaster the world has ever seen."

This was not exaggeration.

Faulkner opened the post office when he felt like it and closed it when he didn't. He read other people's magazines before distributing them, and by "before" I mean days before, and by "distributing" I mean sometimes. He threw mail in the garbage can by the side entrance with such regularity that patrons learned to check the bin before filing a complaint. He hired friends as part-time clerks so he'd have someone with whom to play bridge. He played golf during business hours. He wrote poetry in the back room while customers stood at the window and knocked and eventually gave up.

I arrived at the post office on a Tuesday afternoon. The window was closed. I knocked. I waited. I knocked again. A man's voice from the back said, "We're closed."

I said it was two o'clock in the afternoon.

"That's right," the voice said.

I identified myself as a correspondent and said I was interested in writing a profile of the postmaster.

A long silence followed. Then the window slid open, and there he was. Small. Dark-eyed. A moustache that appeared to have opinions of its own. He was holding a book, which he did not put down.

"A profile," he said.

"Yes sir."

"Of the postmaster."

"Yes sir."

He looked at me the way a man looks at a bill he does not intend to pay. Then he closed the window.

I stood in the lobby for another twenty minutes. At some point I heard the sound of a typewriter from the back room, and I realised, with the particular frustration that has defined my professional life, that I was listening to a future Nobel laureate compose what may have been a lyric poem while I waited to buy a stamp I did not need in order to justify my presence in a federal building.

I returned the next morning. He was not there. I left a note with my hotel address. On my way out, I passed the garbage can by the side entrance — the one the patrons had learned to check for their own mail. I did not look inside. I did not need to.

Eudora Welty described the experience years later, and I can confirm every word: you'd come up to the stamp window to buy a two-cent stamp, but nobody was there. You'd knock. You'd pound. Not a sound. So you'd holler his name, and at last, there he was. William Faulkner. You had interrupted him.

In September 1924, a postal inspector named Mark Webster arrived from Corinth, Mississippi, and put what the rest of us had been living with into official language. The phrase that has stayed with me from his report is "indifferent to interest of patrons." This was, I can confirm, a generous characterisation.

Faulkner resigned before they could fire him. His letter, which has since become one of the most quoted documents in American literary history, read in part: "I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation."

I have thought about this letter many times. I have thought about it in the context of my own two-cent stamps, carefully affixed to three separate letters, each sent to a man who was using the building in which they arrived as a card room, a poetry workshop, and a place to nap. I have thought about it in the context of the United States Postal Service issuing a commemorative stamp bearing Faulkner's likeness in 1987, sixty-three years after he was removed from their employment. As Eudora Welty observed at the time, it was as if the Postal Service had forgiven him for the mail he'd lost in the trash barrel in light of his proven deserts in other fields.

He went on to write The Sound and the Fury and to win the Nobel Prize. He died in 1962, having proved that the worst postmaster in Mississippi was also its finest writer.

I have kept one of the stamped envelopes I sent him in 1923. It was returned to me years later, unopened, from a dead letter office in Jackson. The stamp is a two-cent Washington, uncancelled. He never even processed it.

I never got the quote.
 

— F.M.
 

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.