Miss Maud

Southern Living, Sep 1997 by Wells, Dean Faulkner

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of William Faulkner's birth, his niece Dean pays tribute to William's mother, her grandmother...

Shortly after my grandmother Maud Butler Falkner died on October 16,1960, Time ran a brief obituary that the mother of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner was dead in Oxford, Mississippi, at age 88.

My grandmother, whom I called Nanny, would have loved seeing her name in Time magazine. This token recognition, though belated, would have confirmed what she always knew-that she was a person of note. If only it had been a cover story about her art.

For years she had followed the career of the American primitive artist Grandma Moses, who became an overnight sensation when she was "discovered" at age 76 in 1938. By that time, Nanny had been painting for over 30 years. She was not given to jealousy, but the continued success of her nemesis, Grandma Moses, rankled her entire being, all 4'8" and 89 pounds of her.

This year Nanny finally received her due as an artist with a posthumous showing of her work at the University of Mississippi's Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, honoring her and her son, William, on the centennial of his birth. For Nanny such an event would have been a personal victory, proof that, as she often remarked, "Grandma Moses is not the only old-lady painter in the world."

Maud Butler was born on November 27, 1871, the only daughter of Charlie and Lelia Dean Swift Butler. From her mother she inherited a diminutive stature and dark eyes as well as the artistic talent that she would pass on to her four sons.

Nanny was never far from her easel, set up in the northeast corner of the dining room where the light was best. She worked conscientiously every day of the week in pastels, watercolors, or oils. She took pride in stretching her own canvases, and when she decided they were too costly she used other materials. Any and all flat surfaces were fair game: broken window shades, cut into squares and tacked up on her easel; the cabinet doors of her kitchen safe, on which she painted florals, changing the flowers from roses to violets to black-eyed Susans according to the seasons.

She amused us grandchildren by painting pictures on the bottoms of our glasses, rewards for drinking our milk at mealtimes.

She painted for pleasure and for profit, priding herself after her husband, Murry's, death on being "a selfsupporting artist," perhaps intentionally unaware of the household bills mysteriously paid by an unidentified benefactor (son William). Of the hundreds of florals she painted, magnolias were the most popular. One prominent patron was actress Elizabeth Patterson. She and Nanny became friends during the 1949 filming of Intruder in the Dust. The next year Patterson used a photograph of Nanny's painting of a magnolia on a red background as Christmas cards. Nanny was thrilled.

She painted family portraits, several different poses at different ages, of her sons and grandchildren. She also did portraits on commission, usually charging around $200-working from photographs, not sittings-and endured severe attacks of nerves when presenting them for her patrons' approval. For $25 she decorated wedding invitations with watercolors of rose-covered cottages and mailboxes bearing the newlyweds' names.

She fashioned countless landscapes of county scenes, as well as copies of the Old Masters, whose works she sometimes "improved." For example, if a Degas ballet dancer's pink dress did not suit her fancy, Nanny painted it red. She transformed the owl perched on the shoulder of the tavern maid in Frans Hals's Malle Babbe into a crow-or, once, a truly extraordinary parrot. Her favorite classic model for improvement was William Michael Harnett's Emblems of Peace. For her son Jack's copy, she added law journals, a flight log book, an aerial map, and a pouch of Bull Durham tobacco. Her son William's novels formed the background for another, which also featured his pipe and riding crop. Whether an Audubon or a Rembrandt, each copy bore her distinctive "MFalkner" signature, with the name of the original artist underneath hers.

When other inspirations or commissions were not forthcoming, she would have at her "rogues gallery," the pre-Civil War portraits of family that hung in her living room. I can remember wandering in on a given day and looking at the familiar painting of a great-greataunt with her hair drawn back severely in a bun, wearing a high-necked black gown with long sleeves. The next day that same woman wore a daringly low-cut red dress, her hair down, and the little girl standing beside her transformed from a blond tomboy with braids into a formally dressed little girl with long, lavish curls. Nanny never said a word.

Her hands were rarely idle. In the late forties and early fifties, she began painting ceramic figurines ordered from a catalog-seated ladies in bouffant dresses or young boys in "Little Lord Fauntleroy" suits. She also hooked rugs and-throughout two World Warsknitted untold pairs of woolen socks, vests, and scarves. In the dark of Oxford's Lyric Theater I remember hearing the click of her knitting needles. Once during the war, we were watching Movietone News about the invasion of Sicily. Nanny's son Jack Falkner was an intelligence officer assigned to a regiment of British Gurkhas. Nanny suddenly cried out, "That's my Jackie, stop the film!" The projectionist ran the footage over and over-Jack wading ashore, automatic pistol in hand, retreating backwards at full speed to the landing boat, then forward again into the fray-until Nanny had seen enough. She never dropped a stitch.