‘To the Ramparts of Infinity: Colonel W.C. Falkner and the Ripley Railroad’
By Jack D. Elliott Jr.
University Press of Mississippi, 408 pages

Virtually every biographer of Willliam Faulkner quotes what young Willy is supposed to have said while in school: He wanted to grow up and be a writer like his great-granddaddy, the Falkner of this biography who spelled his name without a “u.” 

W.C. Falkner, or the Old Colonel, as he was often called, had a dashing career as a Mexican War and Civil War soldier, a celebrated author of the melodramatic “White Rose of Memphis,” a railroad entrepreneur, and, finally, a successful politician before being gunned down on the street of his hometown, Ripley, Mississippi, by his disaffected business partner.

William Faulkner heard about these events from family members and townspeople, but to him the tales were the stuff of legend that he transformed into the character of Colonel John Sartoris in several novels and stories. 

Faulkner gave the impression that his great-grandfather was a rather tough, humorless character, and the Old Colonel’s first biographer, Donald Duclos, and subsequent Faulkner biographers — entranced with Faulkner’s fiction — tended to take the legend for fact.

Jack D. Elliott Jr., a historical archeologist and a native Mississippian with deep roots in a family settlement hardly more than an hour’s drive from the Old Colonel’s Ripley, is the kind of scholar who goes looking for material evidence that, in many instances, does not square with the legend Faulkner and his biographers have perpetuated.

In Mr. Elliott’s account, Falkner got into trouble because of his sarcastic tongue and outsize ambition that overrode many failures and got a railroad built his way, which nettled that business partner who probably, in Mr. Elliott’s estimate, had had enough of the Old Colonel’s taunting remarks.

Whereas many in Ripley might have contented themselves with a spur line, the Old Colonel went for a hook-up to a transcontinental railroad. In short, Falkner thought big. He was a well-traveled visionary who wrote a comical, self-deprecating travel book, “Rapid Ramblings in Europe,” which gives the lie to stories that the man had no sense of humor. 

Falkner enjoyed eccentricity, as he revealed in “The White Rose of Memphis,” set on a Mississippi riverboat with a cast of characters in different disguises who exchange views of life somewhat reminiscent of an early William Faulkner novel, “Mosquitoes.”

Yet it is not so much plot elements or characters that Faulkner took from his great-grandfather, but rather a grand vision of what life and fiction, and fiction and life, could be. It did not matter what the neighbors thought, or that a Falkner or a Faulkner might not fit the conventions of his society. 

Mr. Elliott’s title is derived from a passage in Faulkner’s novel “Sartoris,” in which the Old Colonel’s 19-foot statue in the Ripley cemetery is transformed into Colonel John Sartoris’s monument: “He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty pride which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran and the blue changeless hills beyond and beyond that, the ramparts of infinity itself.”

“Sartoris” is the first novel in the Yoknapatawpha saga that made Faulkner world famous and a Nobel Prize winner. It is a work in which the writer, just entering his 30s, has taken to heart Sherwood Anderson’s advice that all his protégé needed — in Faulkner’s later words — was his own “little postage stamp of native soil” to make his reputation. 

The Old Colonel, so firmly rooted in Ripley, nonetheless dreamed of worlds elsewhere. Could there be a better description of the visionary William Faulkner himself, so at home in his native Oxford and yet intent on creating a fictional world that would stand like the ramparts of infinity itself?

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “William Faulkner Day by Day,” and a forthcoming collection of essays, “William Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism.” His interview with Jack D. Elliott, Jr. can be accessed here.