About the Artist

Henry Lawrence Faulkner — Biographical Timeline

Source notation: [H] House · [G] Gift of Color · [P] Phelps · combinations like [H+G] or [H+G+P] indicate sources that corroborate each other. Gift of Color credits House as its foundational source; Phelps is an independent eyewitness to the Taormina periods.

I. The Beginnings (1924–1947)

Birth and Earliest Childhood

January 9, 1924 — Born under a Wolf Moon in a one-room log house at Beech Spring, Simpson County, Kentucky, a few miles north of the Tennessee border. Tenth of thirteen children (one twin had died at birth in 1917) born to Bessie Lee Pursley Faulkner (then 32) and John Milton Faulkner (then 57). Frail and sickly at birth; delivered by his father. Named Henry Lawrence by his thirteen-year-old sister Lois after two of her schoolboy crushes — not, as Henry later claimed, after Henry VIII and the St. Lawrence River. [H+G]

Phelps records Henry’s own version of his origins as he told them at Casa Cuseni: that he was the twelfth child and a twin, born to small farmers in the remotest Kentucky mountains. The accurate genealogical record is in House and Gift of Color; Phelps preserves Henry’s self-mythology.

Early 1924 — Family moves roughly nine miles north to a larger house on the Dalton farm near Franklin, the Simpson County seat. House identifies this as where Faulkner’s defining traits begin to form: insecurity, attention-seeking dramatics, intense love of nature, chronic poor health. [H]

December 1924 — Sister Laura Belle born, eleven months after Henry. [H]

1926 — Bessie pregnant with twins; mother’s health failing. [H]

October 2, 1926 — Bessie Lee Pursley Faulkner dies. Henry is two years, nine months old — “before hewas even three years old.” Phelps later recorded Henry’s own memory of crawling into his mother’s coffin and trying to make her wake up. House calls the day “by far the most traumatic” of Henry’s childhood. [H+G+P]

Mid-November 1926 — Roughly six weeks after Bessie’s burial, John Milton Faulkner commits the twelve surviving children to the Kentucky Children’s Home in Louisville. The court of Allen County formalizes the order on November 17, 1926. The children travel by train. [H+G]

The Orphanage and Foster Years

Late 1926 – c. 1930 — Henry at the Kentucky Children’s Home in Louisville. Over the next four years his siblings are dispersed. Two failed foster placements precede the Whittimores: one in Breathitt County (Eastern Kentucky), another in Western Kentucky. Phelps preserves Henry’s own memory of being expelled from one foster home after accidentally killing a chicken by hugging it too tightly — needing something to love, he had squeezed the life out of the only soft thing he could find. [G+P]

November 1930 — Aged six and a half, Henry is placed with Dan and Dora Whittimore on Falling Timber Branch in Clay County, Eastern Kentucky, in the Sextons Creek area. Dan is a stern fundamentalist; Dora becomes the protective center of Henry’s universe. He is renamed Lawrence Whittimore.

Phelps records Henry’s account of the Whittimore household: when he should have been working in the fields he was making patterns in the clay, decorating them with flowers, shells, feathers, berries, and stones — he had never heard of paintbrushes but had the compulsion. His foster father, at first scolding, eventually joined in with pebbles he had found, and a relationship began to grow. [G+P] House places the Whittimore arrival in the late 1920s without a precise date. Gift of Color fixes it as November

1930. Phelps gives Henry’s own account of how art began here, before he knew it was art.

1934 — Sister Pet returned to the Children’s Home from her foster placement. [H]

September 1938 — At fourteen, after roughly eight years with the Whittimores, Henry runs away. House writes that he “planned his exit well.” Phelps preserves Henry’s own version: he simply set off walking with a small piece of bread, no map, no idea where he was going, slept in a ditch where the first car he had ever heard or seen passed without stopping. In Henry’s telling to Phelps he was twelve and the year was 1936 — a clear softening of fact toward myth. [H+P]

Phelps notes she found the 1936 date implausible but that, in the remote Kentucky mountains of the period, the never-having-seen-a-car detail could plausibly have been true. The September 1938 date and the age of fourteen are the documentary record.

Fall 1938 — Social worker Mary J. Tuttle makes the difficult trip across the ridge to Falling Timber to investigate. [H]

February 1, 1939 — Dora Whittimore accompanies Henry in Willie Bond’s truck to Tuttle’s home; he is taken briefly to Louisville for examinations at the Mental Hygiene Clinic. Returned to the Whittimores in spring 1939 after social worker Betty Neal’s intervention.

Louisville and the Wandering Years

c. 1939 — Dan Whittimore convinces Dora that Henry should be returned to the Children’s Home in Louisville. With only a fifth-grade education, he is placed with his older brother Harvey and Harvey’s wife Ida in Louisville. [G]

October 1939 — Enrolls at the Louisville Junior Art Academy on a scholarship arranged by social worker Betty Neal — Faulkner’s first formal art training. [G] This whole episode is absent from House’s account. Phelps does mention a psychiatric social worker who recurrently helped Henry and “swayed the magistrate in his favour” with her court reports — most likely Betty Neal.

1940 — Sixteenth birthday. Enthusiasm for the art academy wanes. Drifts in and out of Louisville and the Children’s Home; at least one short stint in the psychopathic ward of City Hospital, Louisville. Routine trouble with police. [G]

January 1941 — Low spirits in winter; House describes the year as “a dry run for his modus operandi” of the decade to come. [H]

Spring 1941 — Tries to enlist in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor; rejected. [G]

May 6, 1942 — Children’s Home custody officially expires. [G]

Summer 1942 — On the road: Birmingham, AL → Shreveport, LA → Dallas → El Paso → Roswell, NM → San Francisco. Catches up with sister Lois in Vallejo, California; works clerking at a radio station and laboring in the shipyards. Phelps preserves Henry’s own version of his California period — he told her he worked as a bell-boy in a Californian hotel. Phelps did not learn how he got there. [G+P]

Late 1942 / early 1943 — Moves with Lois to Los Angeles. Seeks movie-industry work; futile. [H+G]

1944 — Henry and Lois part ways, criss-crossing the country and reconnecting when they can. Meets Beetles, his lifelong correspondent. [H+G]

The David Years and the Road to Key West

1945 — Meets David — a soulmate figure, central emotionally though brief. They correspond constantlycand rendezvous when possible. [H+G]

1945–1946 — Jail in Los Angeles. [H]

Summer 1946 — While Henry is in another part of the country, he receives a letter saying David has died. Circumstances unknown. [H+G]

November 1946 — Caught shoplifting two books from a New York bookstore. The judge exiles him to Kentucky. [H]

Winter 1946–47 — Frozen months with the Whittimores at Falling Timber. Writer’s block, depression, sparse correspondence. [H+G]

May 1947 — Hitchhikes to Key West (hearing his sister Pet is there). Brief jail stint in Miami en route for passing a bad check. [H+G]

Summer 1947 — On the road to Key West, in the heavy Florida air, begins to sketch and paint in earnest. Gift of Color marks this as the true beginning of his life as an artist. [G]

1948–1949 — Sketching and painting around Washington, D.C., before New York. Writing comes to the foreground. [H]

II. The Formative Years (1948–1957)

Berea, Corcoran, and the D.C. Crisis

Spring 1950 — Determines to attend Berea College — the Appalachian school known for educating underprivileged Kentuckians. House notes that a former Berea alumnus helped convince the college to grant Faulkner an interview, remarkable given that he had completed only the first five grades. [H+G]

September 1950 — Admitted to Berea’s preparatory school. [H+G]

October 1950 — One month into the first semester, feeling stifled by his English composition class, asks the dean to be dismissed. [G]

Fall 1950 — Encouraged by social worker Betty Neal, Henry takes his portfolio to Washington, D.C. Wins a scholarship at the Corcoran School of Art under principal Richard Lahey, studying under noted artist Kenneth Stubbs. [G]

Just after New Year’s Day 1951 — Shows work to Georgetown galleries; offered a debut show for October 1951. [G]

Mid-January 1951 — Arrested for propositioning a District of Columbia policeman. Loses the Corcoran scholarship. [H+G]

Spring 1951 — Pharmacy work while preparing for the October show. A subsequent charge involving a minor (later recanted as untrue) leads the court psychiatrist to deem him a “sexual psychopath.” [G]

Summer 1951 — After four months in a D.C. jail, agrees to commitment at St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal psychiatric facility in southeast D.C. He is 27. [G]

Otis Art Institute, 1952–1955

Fall 1952 — Enrolls at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County. Faculty includes Millard Sheets (California School artist, Life war artist), the Barlows — Margaret Montgomery Barlow (who recognized his natural ability) and her husband Jarvis Walter Barlow (poetry) — and post-Impressionist Pierre Sicard. [H+G]

1952–55 — Three years at Otis, living primarily with Lois; at times homeless and living outdoors in a park. Margaret Barlow’s observation, preserved by House: art and poetry were inseparable for him. [H+G]

1954 — Otis reorganized to emphasize academics; enthusiasm wanes. [H] February 1955 — Writing serious poetry; thinking about publication. [H]

Return to Kentucky and the Chagall Epiphany

Fall 1955 — Leaves Otis and returns to Kentucky. Brief stay at Falling Timber; then Lexington. He is 31. Takes up residence with James Herndon, the flamboyant Lexington character affectionately known as “Sweet Evening Breeze.” [G]

Spring 1956 — Heads to New York, ready. [G]

1956 — At Perls Galleries, encounters twenty-eight early and recent Marc Chagalls. House identifies this as the pivotal aesthetic moment — Faulkner immediately recognizes a kindred dreamer who grew up rural with fanciful visions. From here he trusts his inner vision; later, he refers to himself as “the American Chagall.” [H+G]

House says Madison Avenue; Gift of Color says East 58th Street. Perls Galleries was at 1016 Madison Avenue at 78th Street, so House is closer.

Summer 1956 — Wins a scholarship to a summer course at the Cincinnati Art Academy. [H]

Fall 1956 — Returns to Lexington. [H]

November 15, 1956 — Dan Whittimore dies. Henry writes a simple, unaffected poem for him the day after the burial. [H]

Spring 1957 — First sale to a cooperative.

III. The Masterful Years (1958–1969)

Florida Breakthrough

Late 1957 — Returns to Key West “flush with newfound success.” Meets James Leo Herlihy in Key West, whose play Blue Denim will reach Broadway in February 1958. [H+G]

Early 1958 — Meets Stefan and Mary Brecht (Stefan, son of Bertolt Brecht, will become one of Henry’s closest friends). [G] Phelps preserves Henry’s own account of how Brecht came to be a benefactor. Faulkner told her that Brecht found him painting under a railway bridge — where Faulkner was also sleeping — invited him home, fed him, and gave him a bed for nine months.

1958 — At an outdoor group exhibit in Coconut Grove, Tennessee Williams purchases three paintings. This is the founding meeting of one of Faulkner’s most enduring friendships. [G]

Spring 1958 — Diftler Gallery, Coral Gables, gives Faulkner his first one-man show in Florida. [G]

Spring 1958 — Back in Kentucky. Stays a few weeks in the now-vacant Whittimore house at Falling Timber (Dora has remarried — Dora Morgan — and moved with her new husband to Egypt, Kentucky, in Jackson County). Works on a Guggenheim Fellowship application. Unsuccessful. [G]

New York and Palm Beach

Fall 1958 — Apartment on East 34th Street, New York. Roommate thought to be Edward Melcarth (Kentucky-born social realist). [G]

December 1958 — Major one-man show at the Ligoa Duncan Gallery on Madison Avenue — first mention in Art News. Burr Gallery group show, where Faulkner wins first prize. [G]

Late 1958 — Meets Keith Ingerman in New York. Ingerman recommends Mary Benson at Worth Avenue Gallery in Palm Beach (owned by Alice DeLamar). [G]

Winter 1958–59 — Palm Beach debut at Worth Avenue Gallery (DeLamar, with Mary Benson and Emily Rayner co-directing). Inroads among the rich and famous as “the up-and-coming primitive painter-poet from the hills of Kentucky.” [G]

Spring 1959 — Third NYC season. Caravan Gallery one-man (29 new works). ACA Galleries. Poetry readings at Ligoa Duncan. [H+G]

Fall 1959 — Hammer Gallery, Miami. Returns to Palm Beach. [H+G]

December 1959 — Worth Avenue Gallery year-end group show. Front-page coverage in the Palm Beach Daily News. [H+G]

Toward Italy

Summer 1960 — Falling Timber as home base. Exhibits in Miami, Sarasota, Atlanta. [G]

Fall 1960 — First Kentucky exhibition — month-long Louisville Art Center show, 67 paintings, with poetry readings. Caught the attention of the Louisville Courier-Journal art critic. Patrons now include Bette Davis and Marlon Brando. [G]

Gift of Color records this Louisville show as Faulkner’s first Kentucky one-man exhibition — four years before the celebrated November 1964 Lexington Studio Club show.

Late 1960 — Mugged in New York; left with a head injury. Alice DeLamar helps arrange his return. The concussion will trouble him for years. [H+G]

January 9, 1961 — Thirty-seventh birthday (reports twenty-nine to journalists). Both Palm Beach dailies run glowing reviews. [H]

Spring 1961 — Alice DeLamar pays $3,000 for a painting Henry has priced at $300 and tells him to spend the year studying in Italy. Vincent Price becomes another notable patron. [H+G] Phelps records Henry’s own account of Alice DeLamar’s role: she was, in Henry’s telling at Casa Cuseni, of Florida, a patroness of young painters and a friend of Bernard Berenson, and Henry was the second young painter she had sent to Sicily.

July 1961 — First European trip. Books passage on a Tangiers-bound freighter. [G]

First Italian Year

Summer–Fall 1961 — Brief stay at the University for Foreigners in Perugia. Travels south through Rome, Naples, Pompeii, then crosses to Sicily and his ultimate destination, Taormina, perched halfway up Mount Tauro overlooking Naxos Bay. [H+G]

Arrival in Taormina (1961) — Finds Giovanni Panarello, an antiques dealer with a shop on Corso Umberto, who offers him lodging in exchange for working at the shop. Panarello soon asks him to leave (Faulkner not focusing on the job). The owner of Mocambo Bar, Roberto, gives him an apartment — which Faulkner promptly turns into a gallery and entertainment space. That arrangement also ends. [G]

Fall 1961 — Meeting Daphne Phelps — Phelps, expatriate Englishwoman who runs a guesthouse at Casa Cuseni (inherited in 1947 from her uncle, artist Robert Hawthorn Kitson), encounters Faulkner. At only their second meeting she invites him to live rent-free in the small gardener’s flat in her garden, then empty. The flat has two rooms and a view between tangerine trees toward Mount Etna. In return she asks Faulkner to paint the cottage’s exterior, in any color he chooses. He completes a blue wash with warm pinkish-orange surrounds for the three deeply inset windows in under a day — a decor that, Phelps later wrote, still pleased her many years later. [P]

This invitation at second meeting is unusual for Phelps’s own cautious temperament, and she remained surprised at herself for it. Faulkner moved into the gardener’s cottage immediately.

Late 1961 — The Casa Cuseni Arrangement — Inside the flat Faulkner paints a black, gold, and blue frieze with a fleur-de-lys motif on the wall. He then persuades the owner of Taormina’s best restaurant to give him one large meal a day in exchange for paintings — freeing his whole DeLamar allowance for antique buying. He scours the town’s antique shops for old frames, pottery, prints, wooden statuettes, and gilded candlesticks, bargaining with what Phelps calls “shrewd, Kentucky-peasant determination.” His acquisitions overflow the flat. He hires a carpenter to build thirteen large packing-cases and seals each with the largest of nails as it is filled. [P]

Late 1961 — The Coma and the Poems — Roughly a week into the intense work, Faulkner collapses unconscious. Phelps and an English friend, working in a Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, hold a watching brief for several anxious hours. He wakes hungry, attributing it to blackouts related to an earlier fractured skull. He then pulls out his poems and asks Phelps to read them; when she asks who has praised them, he names Tennessee Williams and Ezra Pound — Phelps’s first inkling that these three figures had crossed paths somewhere, possibly in a mental hospital. [P]

Late 1961 — The Persian Vase — Faulkner takes a fancy to one of Phelps’s rare medieval Persian vases. He departs for Agrigento for a week or ten days. The vase goes missing during his absence. After a fortnight of no word from him, Phelps prepares to report him missing; he returns at last. Asked about the vase, he proposes that customs will go through everything when he reaches New York. Two months later a letter arrives from him — the vase was not in any of his cases. Phelps eventually concludes the vase had been broken by her cleaner and the traces vacuumed away. The trust extended in this episode, she wrote, was where Henry’s lifelong devotion to her began. [P]

February 1961 — Writing in his journal from a Milan hotel room. [H]

Summer 1962 — Checks arrive from Florida and Cincinnati. Packs crates of his Taormina acquisitions. [G]

Summer 1962 — Travels to Rome, Florence, and Venice; discovered by Galleria XXII Marzo (which also has a Palm Beach gallery). Placed in a group show with other Florida artists. Successful enough that the American consulate in Venice schedules a touring exhibit, “Eight Florida Artists.” [G]

July 1962 — Departs Italy from Naples aboard the SS Constitution, bound for New York. He has been abroad nearly a full year.

Return: Arlington Avenue and the Jessamine County Farm

Fall 1962 — Visits Dora Morgan in Egypt, Kentucky, then goes to Lexington to put down roots. Makes a sizable payment on a small house on Arlington Avenue near downtown. With cash remaining, pays half on a $6,000 tract — a small farm of 11 half-wooded acres in Jessamine County, eight miles south of Lexington, with a three-room shack in disrepair. Plans an Italian style villa. Travels with collie Gentry, Alsatian shepherd Lady, and cat Black Rastas; the legendary goat Alice probably arrives during this rural nesting phase. [G]

December 1962 — Closson’s Gallery, Cincinnati one-man show. Faulkner arrives a day or two in advance with raw materials, paints on the spot — his first works since returning from Italy. The Cincinnati Enquirer critic notes a shift in influence from “Oriental” to “Byzantine” — “doubtless the result of his sojourn in Sicily.” [G]

January 1963 — Heads to Florida with Alice the goat and other animals packed into the car. Featured in Worth Avenue Gallery’s January group show. Show at Miami’s Loft On the Mile (February 1963). [G]

Lexington Recognition and Greene Settle

c. 1963 — The Restaurant Buyer — A Sicilian Phelps does not know arrives at Casa Cuseni asking whether she has any Faulkners for sale: an American buyer has come from the United States and purchased all of the pictures Faulkner had left with the Taormina restaurant. Phelps interprets this as the first sign Henry was fulfilling Alice DeLamar’s hopes for him. [P] 1964 — First New York Show Collectors — Notice arrives in Taormina of Faulkner’s first New York show. Phelps, astonished, reads that the collectors include Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Mrs Ernest Hemingway, herself, Tennessee Williams, Bertolt Brecht, and one or two Bluegrass millionaires. [P]

November 1964 — First Lexington one-man show, Studio Club. The Lexington Herald critic compares him to “a god Pan.” Seven years after his New York professional debut. At this show Faulkner meets Anita Madden (horsewoman; her husband Preston Madden owns Hamburg Place Farm), who becomes a lifelong friend and patron; and Greene Settle (Lexington accountant, attorney, businessman) and his wife Mary Edna. Settle buys five paintings from the first show — the start of what becomes the Greene A. Settle Jr. Faulkner Collection (eventually 225+ paintings, with meticulous record-keeping that became foundational source material). [H+G]

1964 — Reported income over $17,000. Settle becomes Faulkner’s unpaid business agent — bookkeeping, property management, gallery correspondence, tax returns. [H+G]

April 1965 — Purchases winter home in Key West — a large, two-story conch house on Peacon Lane in the center of the old town, with second-floor balcony and large windows. House: “This was to be Henry’s winter quarters for the rest of his life.” [H+G]

Mid-1965 — Takes on Ellsworth “Skip” Taylor as a studio assistant — cutting Masonite boards, applying black gesso, fitting into antique frames. [G]

Summer 1965 — Working in Key West, often painting in an upstairs bathroom for the reflected light off a neighboring tin roof. Alice the goat and her companion Plato. [H]

1966 — Car accidents in Key West cause injuries that will trouble him for years. [H]

September 1966 — Settle presents Faulkner with a contract for a Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation one-man exhibition at Gratz Park, Lexington. [G]

December 1966 — Major show at Closson’s Gallery, Cincinnati. [H]

1967 — One-man show in Naples, Florida. [H]

1968 — Converts to Catholicism, House writes, as an attempt to “exorcise his demons.” Returns to New York that summer. Physical pain (especially hands) increasing. [H]

Spring 1969 — Show at the Hemingway Gallery. [H]

October 19, 1969 — Boards the Federico C in New York bound for Genoa — second Italian trip, eight years after the first. Brings three dogs and six cats. Daphne Phelps later recalled receiving a green-paper letter from him at sea announcing his next-day arrival in Italy, with the postscript that he was traveling with three dogs and six cats but not to worry. He plans to study Italian in Perugia and acquire a car. [H+G]

IV. The Accomplished Years (1970–1981)

Second Taormina Period

Christmas Eve 1969 — Arrival at Casa Cuseni — At 9:40 p.m., Faulkner arrives at Casa Cuseni after his weeks of travel via Perugia. He is accompanied by an American capellone (long-haired companion) with a bushy beard. He has not driven the hired car himself — the companion did. The arriving menagerie: Gentry, a pedigree collie; Lady, a non-pedigree Alsatian-type that had been hit by a car in front of Faulkner’s Lexington house and that he had felt he must take in; Onassis, their enormous puppy son (named, Faulkner explains, because the dog “thinks he’s big”). Cats: Esquire, a pedigree Siamese tied to Faulkner’s wrist by white plastic cord because as the only “unchanged” male he will kill the others; Black Rastas, a black Persian; Gerolomo, a white Persian with one green and one blue eye; Black Sister, a half- Siamese expecting Esquire’s kittens; and two tabbies. Plus a white drake — actually a duck — acquired the day before in the Christmas market in Perugia and named Daphne (Phelps points out the correct name would be Daphnis). [P]

House and Gift of Color give the October 19, 1969 boarding of the Federico C. Phelps’s Christmas Eve arrival means roughly two months between departure from New York and arrival at Casa Cuseni — consistent with the Perugia stop she records. The companion is unidentified in Phelps and unnamed in the other sources.

Christmas Day 1969 — Faulkner insists on Christmas presents despite shops being closed. Returns mid-meal with an arrangement of a passion flower on colored papers on a majolica plate; under the flower is a silver dollar — his last — plus food for the animals in the garage. [P]

Late 1969 / Early 1970 — Massimo — Three weeks after Christmas Eve, Faulkner returns to Casa Cuseni at dusk carrying a three-week-old kid he names Massimo, having rescued him from a country woman who, he claimed, was about to cut the kid’s throat. He proposes to keep him in the bath. That night Massimo develops a high fever. Faulkner, frantic, telephones the Mayor of Taormina (a physician with severe sciatica who otherwise never went out at night except before elections), declaring himself an American with a dying bambino. The Mayor dresses, drives over, gives Massimo an injection, then calls the local vet, who arrives at 4:15 a.m. The verdict: Massimo needs a nanny goat. After three hours’ search through the countryside Phelps locates one whose owner agrees to share her milk — one teat for Massimo, one for the owner’s children — at 400 lire a day. Faulkner had told Phelps that when his goat Alice died he could not paint for a year. [P]

Early 1970 — The Will Dictation — Before departing on a property-related trip to Kentucky, Faulkner asks Phelps to help him write a will. To Phelps: two Lexington houses (one a Southern colonial three blocks from the university, with 1,000 dollars still owing; a smaller one where his foster mother lives). To Alice DeLamar: the Key West house and his pictures. To Stephan Brecht: the two farms in Kentucky. Tennessee Williams to receive two paintings from Alice. Phelps to receive his poems. From memory Faulkner recites three bank account numbers, his social service number, and the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of his lawyers in Florida and Kentucky. Two witnesses are found on the Corso — American hippies making a documentary about Sicily, one from Vermont and one from Chicago. [P]

c. Early 1970 — Kentucky Property Trip — Faulkner departs for what he insists will be three weeks. Phelps doubts this. He is gone six weeks. Gentry the collie loses the sheen of his fur and refuses food; one morning the dog suddenly perks up, leaps to the terrace wall, and watches the road from sea-level all day. Faulkner arrives that evening; he tells Phelps casually that of course Gentry knew — he had been telling him. [P]

1970 — Renewed Taormina Painting and English Medical Trip — After his Kentucky trip, Faulkner reconnects with Giovanni Panarello and becomes close with Giovanni’s brother Carlo and Carlo’s wife Mirella, who run an antique shop along Corso Umberto. Carlo offers to act as Faulkner’s art agent in Italy.

Gift of Color records a separate trip to Manchester, England, seeking a hip joint replacement (declined by the specialist); Phelps joins him in London, where they tour the National Gallery. [G]

Fall 1970 — Departure from Taormina — Faulkner prepares to return to the United States from Naples. He buys a huge American station wagon from a diminutive Sicilian barber who had brought it from nine years in New York. The first cheque bounces; Phelps writes a stern letter and a valid cheque arrives. Faulkner finds a doctor willing, in exchange for a painting, to sign false health certificates for the menagerie. The drake and the now-large mountain goat Massimo are left behind — the drake on Phelps’s pool, Massimo released to the hills with the promise of “a lovely valley with a lovely stream and lots of beautiful nanny goats.” Two cars and two drivers are needed to get all the belongings to Naples; one driver stops mid-trip demanding more money and only proceeds when Faulkner hands over a painting from the luggage. The freighter must be delayed; in the hold Faulkner discovers a missing kitten and threatens to throw an epileptic fit until the captain orders the station wagon retrieved from the lift. The kitten is found. [P]

Browns Mill Farm, Williams, and the 1970s

1971 — Partners with a printmaker to produce a commercial offset lithograph of the Kentucky Derby Winner’s Circle in an edition of 2,500. The result disappoints him. [G]

1971 — Acquires a seven-acre tract on Browns Mill Road where the bridge over South Elkhorn Creek crosses into Scott County. Bordering Saxony Farm’s polo barns. Sells the Jessamine County farm; the Browns Mill move is completed by early 1972. [G]

November 1971 — Phelps Visits Lexington — Faulkner finally pressures Phelps into accepting one of his pressing invitations to stay “for a summer, for a year.” She flies to Lexington in the summer. The station wagon meets her at the airport, the windscreen with a large round bullet hole at center (sustained, Faulkner explains, while the car was parked at night three months earlier; the safety belts dirty and not working). Faulkner drives blowing kisses to policemen and crossing other lanes through red lights; “lovely people,” he calls the drivers who wait. The Lexington house is a Southern colonial with white wooden columns, on a valuable plot, filled with antiques and stinking of unaltered male cat — Faulkner has scrubbed until four in the morning with two helpers Phelps calls “Larry and Kenny” (Larry’s chest stamped PROPERTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY; Kenny a “mountaineer” from near Egypt). Her bedroom: huge mahogany bed without a mattress (a cat had borne kittens on it), three vast oval gold-framed mirrors, a Tiffany lamp, ferns, a trumpet, a violin, dolls, a Paul Klee bought from Clifford Odets, antique chemists’ jars, an INDULGENZA PLENARIA wall piece. She sleeps in her dressing gown. [G+P]

November 1971 — The Lexington Party — Faulkner gives a party in Phelps’s honor. The hot water system has just failed; plumbers are still digging by the front door as guests arrive. Hippies with two guitars settle on the gold Regency chairs and barely drink; a couple from Picasso’s blue period (cadaverous in dark green, lanky, felt-hatted; his partner in black with a pallid baby in her arm); two well-tailored homosexual men led by a black miniature poodle; a girl in a crimson maxi who worships Henry’s poems and has brought her elderly lawyer father; a bepearled and metallically smart woman journalist; the accountants who field the bouncing cheques; the lawyers; their wives. At seven o’clock precisely Faulkner claps his hands and announces the party is over. The guests file out without protest. Phelps stays three days; “could never have endured a summer or a year.” [G+P]

Winter 1971–72 — Key West for the season. Bob Morgan accompanies him on the road trip. With Morgan as a sort of manager, Faulkner returns to producing and delivering paintings. Modest success with Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings. [H+G]

1971 — Williams in Taormina — Tennessee Williams arrives at the San Domenico Hotel in Taormina. Faulkner wires Phelps to call on him. Phelps phones and finds Williams leaving for London the day after next because of a hotel staff strike. She invites him for a drink; he arrives with his secretary — “a tall, handsome footballer of little brain” who makes Williams laugh. The initial conversation falters. The next evening they dine in Taormina; Phelps arranges the meal via Nino, a waiter she describes as an artist to his fingertips. Conversation breaks open when Williams asks how Phelps sleeps — the two are both insomniacs. Williams talks at length about his sister, his brother, the snake pit, his recent failures. Williams complains that Faulkner’s long phone calls are made from his place because Faulkner’s lines are cut for non-payment. He leaves Phelps a parcel of books: Ezra Pound’s Cantos; The Night of the Iguana; and The Glass Menagerie inscribed “To Daphne, who shares forgiveness of Henry, from Tennessee 1971.” [P]

Spring 1973 — Shows in Palm Beach and Naples, Florida. Williams and Herlihy join him as special guests for the Naples exhibit; sales and reviews superb. Williams hosts a reception at his Key West home; more than 100 attend. [G]

c. 1973 — Relationship with Williams becoming tenuous. Williams drinking heavily; Faulkner’s theatrics increasingly bother him. [G]

July 4, 1972 — James Hunt Barker Gallery, Nantucket, one-man show opening. [G]

November 1972 — Gala one-man show at Spindletop Hall, Lexington. Vincent Price attends as Faulkner’s special guest. Opening night: a fire engine arrives with a nude man and woman posing on its ladders. [G]

June 1974 — A street incident in Lexington (congratulating three elderly people). House marks this period as the beginning of Faulkner’s more philosophical phase. [H]

Summer 1974 — Faulkner is 50. Frequents the Robertson Clinic in Owensboro for holistic care under Dr. Clifford Houston Robertson. James Herlihy begins preliminary research for a book on Faulkner’s life (an epistolary biography Q&A — never completed). [G]

Summer 1974 — Doctors Park exhibition in Lexington (with Settle): 160+ pieces. Smaller works for the Bar Complex and Levas’ Restaurant. The Toyota truck loaded with animals; painting in Gratz Park. [G]

January 1975 — Writes Tennessee Williams a brooding nine-page prose letter. Meets the astrologer who becomes important. [H]

1975 — Blue Blast (40″ × 30″) brings $5,000 in Lexington. Begins selling earlier works from the late 1940s and early 1950s saved from his art school years. [G] c. mid-1970s — Faulkner and Williams Return Together — A few years after Williams’s solo Taormina visit, Faulkner and Williams arrive together at the San Domenico. Faulkner has declared himself Williams’s “manager,” trying to organize his finances and revive his writing. They have flown by Concorde (Williams paying for both; Faulkner has hated the air conditioning). Dinner with Phelps at the San Domenico is sparkling — the only animated table among the morgue-like luxury. The next day Faulkner brings Phelps a high-quality double wool blanket and writing paper, both visibly liberated from the Berkeley Hotel, London. Within days Faulkner returns to Phelps in despair: his “management” has failed. Williams will not leave his room and is drinking; Faulkner must paint potboilers quickly for a local shop to pay their way home. This is the last Phelps will see of either. [P]

1976 — Settle, after twelve years as business and legal adviser and de facto art agent, begins to withdraw from Faulkner’s affairs — his record-keeping ends around this time. Lexington lawyer J. Gregg Clendenin steps in. Paranoia growing; mystical leanings deepening. [H+G]

1976–77 — Faulkner works with Gary and Cindy Blum on the “Henry Faulkner Israeli-Holy Land Art Association” plan — a pilgrimage to produce ~200 new paintings, 60-40 profit share. On the eve of departure his astrologer advises against it; Faulkner pulls out despite the Blums’ investment. [G]

Hemingway Painting, Hatfield Show, and the Dora Crisis

1977 — Commissioned to paint the Ernest Hemingway Home in Key West — the work hangs above Hemingway’s bed. [G] Phelps later received a postcard from a friend visiting the Hemingway museum showing this painting; she recognized Henry’s unmistakable style at once.

May 16, 1977 — Completes Ecce Homo “at 14 minutes past noon” in Miami. Considered for the cover of Richard F. Leavitt’s The World of Tennessee Williams (1978). [G]

November 1977 — One-man exhibit backed by the Hatfield Clan, with Rodney Hatfield on harmonica. Two and a half hours of poetry, name-dropping, and falsetto blues. [G]

1977 — Records the tape that becomes a major source for House’s reconstruction of his early life. [H]

Spring 1978 — Dora Morgan is 88 and confused. Faulkner takes her from her farm in Egypt to Lexington— arguably against her will. She escapes, tells police she is being held against her will, and is placed in a nursing home. Clay County authorities press unlawful-imprisonment charges; J. Gregg Clendenin prepares Faulkner’s defense. The case is never tried, but a circuit judge bans Faulkner from Clay County. [G]

Summer 1978 — Sketches Kentucky scenes. Meets young photographer John Stephen Hockensmith, co-owner of Frame House of Georgetown, who will eventually produce The Gift of Color itself. [G]

Last Years

1979 — Letters to James Leo Herlihy speak of death’s familiarity. Enters what House calls his “philosophical phase.” [H]

Fall 1979 — Onassis the shepherd mix dies. Faulkner holds a wake at Frame House of Georgetown — four-fold Italian carved wood screen, plaster and bronze cupids, Sicilian panel paintings, roses, baby’s breath, eucalyptus. Daily wailing hour with company brought to join him. [G]

1980 — Hollywood arrives in Key West to film. Faulkner and Williams sit together for a Solares Hill interview at Williams’s Duncan Street house. Williams writes the unfinished script The Lingering Hour, set in Taormina, with a Williams character and a Faulkner character. [H+G]

Summer 1980 — Travel for holistic medical care. [G]

Fall 1980 — Skin condition returns. Visits veterinarian Dr. Maury Offutt; she lovingly reminds him she is an animal doctor. [G]

Summer 1981 — Time with Orella Stuart, mother of Anita Madden, painting together at the Madden farm. Conducts workshops for the Lexington Art League. Writes Margaret Montgomery Barlow of her Otis kindness thirty years before. Subdued in crowds. [G]

November 1981 — Brother John dies. At the funeral, Faulkner’s demure manner is noted — “he moved about like an aged man.”

Last Days

December 3, 1981 — Working on the play “about the ultimate artist” with Williams; preparing for the move to Key West “in a few weeks.” [H]

December 4, 1981 — Skips Le Café Chantant for the Lexington Art League fundraising auction. Donates a small but exceptional painting, Keeper of the Garden. Sits in the front row bantering with auctioneer Tom Gentry. The painting fetches a little over $400 — to his disappointment. [G]

December 5, 1981 — Morning — Visits Dr. Maury Offutt’s vet clinic on Euclid Avenue to report that the spots he had feared were skin cancer turned out non-malignant. Borrows from Offutt a 39″ × 60″ linen-canvas Taormina Terraces to include in his Christmas exhibit. [G]

December 5, 1981 — Evening — Near 9:00 p.m. heads out for Le Café Chantant. At 9:05 p.m., a block from his West Third Street house, turns his small Toyota truck onto North Broadway. The light is green. Without warning, his vehicle is struck by a large Dodge driven by Joyce Bird, 19, drunk and without a driver’s license, who has already that night struck a parked car at New Circle Road NE and Meadow Lane and another car, fleeing. She ran the red light at Faulkner’s intersection. Faulkner’s neck is broken. He dies instantly — “a month and four days shy of his 58th birthday.” [H+G]

December 1981 — The Final Will — The lawyer’s letter to Phelps encloses Faulkner’s last will. Phelps is named first beneficiary, with “my house in Taormina” left to her. Phelps had never been told he owned a Taormina house and surmises he had paid a deposit on one but the accident prevented the next installments — the thoughtful gesture mattering more than the property. The dictated 1970 will, with its two Lexington houses for Phelps, had been replaced. [P]

c. December 15, 1981 — Front-page news in Lexington and the Bluegrass. Body laid out for visitation at Whitehall Funeral Home, tuxedo lapel pinned with a butterfly brooch. Ten days after his death, the Lexington-Fayette County Metro Government passes Resolution No. 398-81. Among its accolades: “Whereas, he was a man who lived his own legend.” [H+G]

February 25, 1983 — Phelps’s premonition borne out: Tennessee Williams dies in a New York hotel room after choking on a medicine bottle cap. Phelps had told herself when Faulkner died that Williams would not last long without his “manager.” [P]

V. Critical Discrepancies and Open Questions

Three independent sources — House (1988), Gift of Color (2017), and Phelps (1999) — now triangulate the major chapters of Faulkner’s life. Gift of Color leans on House as foundational; Phelps is the independent Taormina eyewitness. Where they conflict, the discrepancies tend to reveal either Faulkner’s own self-mythology (Phelps preserves what Henry told her, often softened or romanticized) or the gap between documentary and remembered fact.

Faulkner’s Self-Mythology in Phelps

Phelps records that Henry told her he was the twelfth child and a twin; House and Gift of Color: tenth of thirteen, with a twin sibling who had died at birth in 1917 (not Henry himself).

Phelps records that Henry told her he stayed with the Clay County foster family until age twelve and ran away in 1936; documentary record (House, Gift of Color): ran away in September 1938 at age fourteen.

Phelps records Henry’s account of David’s death visit and his California bell-boy job — details consistent with but additional to the other sources.

Phelps’s December 1981 vehicle account follows what Henry had told her over the years — the Italian station wagon — rather than the actual small Toyota truck recorded by House and Gift of Color. By 1981 the Italian wagon had likely been replaced or junked.

Datable Conflicts

St. Elizabeths release: House gives June 13, 1952 (psychiatrist’s release); Gift of Color gives October 24, 1952 (court dismissal of charges).

Chagall venue: House says Madison Avenue; Gift of Color says East 58th Street. Perls Galleries was at 1016 Madison Avenue at 78th Street — House closer to right.

First Kentucky one-man show: Gift of Color records a 67-painting Louisville Art Center show in fall 1960, four years before the November 1964 Lexington show.

December 1969 arrival: October 19, 1969 boarding the Federico C (House, Gift of Color) reconciles with Phelps’s Christmas Eve arrival at Casa Cuseni if Henry spent two months traveling via Perugia (which Phelps records). The companion she calls a capellone is unnamed in any of the three sources.

December 5, 1981 vehicle: House and Gift of Color: small Toyota truck. Phelps: the Italian station wagon. Police report would resolve.

Major Phelps Additions

The 1961 Casa Cuseni arrangement: gardener’s cottage at second meeting, painted blue with pinkish-orange window surrounds; the restaurant trade for daily meals; the thirteen packing- cases.

The 1961 coma/blackout episode and the immediate reveal of Henry’s poems with Williams’s and Pound’s named imprimatur.

The Persian vase incident (1961–62) — the foundational moment of trust between Phelps and Faulkner.

The Christmas Eve 1969 arrival with full menagerie inventory — the most complete enumeration extant of Henry’s traveling companions.

The Massimo/Mayor/vet crisis (early 1970), with the specific lire-per-day for shared goat milk.

The 1970 will dictation with hippie witnesses from Vermont and Chicago — a complete inventory of Henry’s property holdings and intended legacies before Gift of Color’s recorded changes.

The 1971 Tennessee Williams Taormina visit, including the inscriptions on the three Williams books he left her.

The mid-1970s Faulkner-Williams Concorde trip to Taormina and Faulkner’s attempted “management” of Williams’s affairs — the last time Phelps saw either.

The final will leaving Phelps “my house in Taormina” — a property Phelps was never certain existed.

Bibliographic Notes

Charles House, The Outrageous Life of Henry Faulkner: Portrait of an Appalachian Artist (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988). Reissued by Pub This Press, Sarasota, FL, 2005.

John S. Hockensmith et al., The Gift of Color: Henry Lawrence Faulkner — Paintings, Poems, and Writings, His Years as an Artist 1948–1981 (Georgetown, KY: Fine Art Editions, 2017).

Daphne Phelps, A House in Sicily (London: Virago, 1999; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999). Especially the chapter “Henry Faulkner” (pp. 213–248).

University of Tennessee Library Special Collections holds a large store of Faulkner papers and manuscripts.

Greene A. Settle Jr. Faulkner Collection — Settle’s record-keeping, now held by Howard and Mickey Settle, partly purchased by First Southern National Bank, Stanford, KY.

Faulkner-Morgan Pagan Babies Archive — photographs cited in Gift of Color.