PEOPLE: NEPHEW TO SHARE HIS MEMORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER

Southeast's Center for Faulkner Studies is one of the world's three major repositories of information about the life and writing of novelist William Faulkner. But M.C. "Chooky" Falkner has something much rarer -- first-hand memories of the Nobel Prize winner.

Tuesday at Southeast, Falkner will present "Remembering Brother Will: A Nephew's Impressions of William Faulkner." The talk will be given at 7 p.m. at the University Center Party Room. Admission is free and the public is invited.

Retired both as an insurance man and brigadier general in the Mississippi National Guard, Falkner retains the original spelling of the family name and a deep-fried Mississippi accent. In a telephone interview from him home outside Oxford, Miss., Falkner often began his answer of a question with the exclamations "Good Lord!" or "Good night!"

Falkner spent part of his childhood growing up on Greenfield Farm at a time when the novelist had decided to raise mules there. That decision coincided with the advent of the John Deere tractor and was unsuccessful, Falkner said.

As an adult, Falkner often would run into his uncle on the square in Oxford. The experience could be unpredictable.

"Sometimes he'd talk your ear off. Then you'd seem him and he wouldn't say nothing," Falkner said. "Those days he wasn't talking he was in Jefferson (the county seat of Faulkner's fictional "Yoknapatawpha County"), his own Jefferson. That didn't bother me."

Falkner's father, John, nicknamed him "Chooky" the day he was born. John also was a writer and titled his first novel "Chooky." John Faulkner's last book, "My Brother Bill" An Affectionate Reminiscence," was written after William Faulkner's death.

The lesser-known John is Falkner's favorite writer, not William.

He yields to his father's assessment of William's temperament. "He said, My brother Will is the most level-headed person around. He's mad as hell all the time."

But the writer of "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying" and "Absalom, Absalom!" has an exaggerated reputation for drinking, his nephew said. "I like a drink, too ... If he drank as much as everybody said he did, how could he write?"

How the "u" got into William Faulkner's name is a story with at least five different explanations, Falkner said, and wouldn't swear any of them is the truth.

"All Falkners tell tales," he said.