Forget those mythologizers: his talent didn’t need augmentation. Or as if, by making him such a drunken buffoon, they could then pity him. Forget them all.

They saw him drink at conferences, and he drank at conferences because he was abysmal at small talk. He did not small talk. He did not “network” or schmooze. He was private and it was excruciating for him to stand in a cluster of strangers, even if they were complimenting him. Especially if they were complimenting him. Later, when he began to get famous, he attended a party where, he said, “They perched me on a sofa like a redneck savant. Every time I said anything they all hushed and looked at me. I felt like E. F. Hutton.”

He didn’t drink much at home. On our early phone calls he would always get a beer, but later it would be coffee. In the last few years of his life, he only drank booze when he went out, when he would get nervous again.

Once (this from writer George Singleton), William was on the schedule at a book festival. He was in the hotel bar, sitting with George. A woman walks up and introduces herself to William. “You have such fathomless eyes,” she tells him. When she leaves, William leans over to George and says, “You’d think, with such fathomless eyes, I’d get laid more.”

He had his first heart attack at another book festival, while sitting on a panel.

This from William, and from novelist Bev Marshall, who was there, and Sonny Brewer, William’s dear pal, who sat on the panel alongside William:

Someone, a woman, was in the midst of a long, heartfelt question to William, a “question with semicolons” he later told me, when he, William, started to feel shaky. He got cold and began to tremble, began to sweat. Meanwhile, the question was still going on, the woman looking up at the ceiling (I’m imagining now), carefully phrasing each word in the air with her hands while William’s heart is racing and he wonders if he’s going to pass out or vomit. Or worse.

About then the question ended and the woman sat down and waited for her answer.

William tried to even his breath. He cleared his throat, leaned into the mic, and said, “Sometimes,” and the room erupted into laughter.

Sonny, watching William, reported that he lost all color, just went gray. “He looked terrible,” Sonny said. “I mean, he always looks terrible, but now he looked even worse.”

When he had his second heart attack, the doctors told him he needed a pacemaker.

He said he didn’t want it.

“You’ll die without it,” they said.

“Magnetize that motherfucker,” he said.

They did, and it kept him around a while longer. When we’d talk after that, I’d call him an old cyborg and it made him snicker.

Back to Sewanee, 1999.

A bunch of us went skinny-dipping late one night in a pond on a farm somebody knew about. Twenty or so of us clambered into the moonlit water with our drinks, all except my new friend William, whose white shirt glowed on the bank. He paced back and forth, smoking. I’d been talking to Jennifer Haigh for a while when I turned, and there, naked, waist-deep in the moonlight, a Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was William.

“I felt a little creepy,” he said, “just watching.”

Some of these stories have become legend.

How, as a poor kid desperate to write a story, he crushed walnut shells in water to make ink. And wrote the story.

How it got rejected from The Saturday Evening Post, a note that said, “We do not accept handwritten manuscripts.”

How, once he got famous, the woman he was dating asked to see something he’d written and he gave her “The Paperhanger.” He said she would read a while and then look up. Read a while and look up.