That is, that individual people in all walks of life should be given opportunity to speak to their individual opposite numbers all over the earth—laborer to laborer, scientist to scientist, doctors and lawyers and merchants and bankers and artists to their opposite numbers everywhere.
There was nothing wrong with this idea. Certainly no artist—painter, musician, sculptor, architect, writer—would dispute it because this—trying to communicate man to man regardless of race or color or condition—is exactly what every artist has already spent all his life trying to do, and as long as he breathes will continue to do.
What doomed it in my opinion was symptomised by the phraseology of the President’s own concept: laborer to laborer, artist to artist, banker to banker, tycoon to tycoon. What doomed it in my opinion was an evil inherent in our culture itself; an evil quality inherent in (and perhaps necessary though I for one do not believe this last) in the culture of any country capable of enduring and surviving through this period of history. This is the mystical belief, almost a religion, that individual man cannot speak to individual man because individual man can no longer exist. A belief that there is no place anymore where individual man can speak quietly to individual man of such simple things as honesty with oneself and responsibility toward others and protection for the weak and compassion and pity for all because such individual things as honesty and pity and responsibility and compassion no longer exist and man himself can hope to continue only by relinquishing and denying his individuality into a regimented group of his arbitrary factional kind, arrayed against an opposite opposed arbitrary factional regimented group, both filling the same air at the same time with the same double-barreled abstractions of ‘peoples’ democracy’ and ‘minority rights’ and ‘equal justice’ and ‘social welfare’—all the synonyms which take all the shame out of irresponsibility by not merely inviting but even compelling everyone to participate in it.
So in this case—I mean the President’s People-to-People Committee—the artist too, who has already spent his life trying to communicate simply people to people the problems and passions of the human heart and how to survive them or anyway endure them, has in effect been asked by the President of his country to affirm that mythology which he has already devoted his life to denying: the mythology that one single individual man is nothing, and can have weight and substance only when organised into the anonymity of a group where he will have surrendered his individual soul for a number.
It would be sad enough if only at such moments as this—I mean, formal recognition by his country of the validity of his life’s dedication—did the artist have to run full-tilt into what might be called almost a universal will to regimentation, a universal will to obliterate the humanity from man even to the extent of relieving him not only of moral responsibility but even of physical pain and mortality by effacing him individually into any, it does not matter which as long as he has vanished into one of them, nationally-recognised economic group by profession or trade or occupation or income-tax bracket or, if nothing else offers, finance-company list. His tragedy is that today he must even combat this pressure, waste some part of his puny but (if he is an artist) precious individual strength against this universal will to efface his individual humanity, in order to be an artist. Which comes at last to the idea I want to suggest, which is what seems to me to be the one dilemma in which all young writers today participate.
I think that perhaps all writers, while they are ‘hot,’ working at top speed to try to get said all they feel the terrific urgency to say, dont read the writers younger, after, themselves, perhaps for the same reason which the sprinter or the distance-runner has: he does not have time to be interested in who is behind him or even up with him, but only in who is in front. That was true in my own case anyway, so there was a gap of about twenty-five years during which I had almost no acquaintance whatever with contemporary literature.
So, when a short time ago I did begin to read the writing being done now, I brought to it not only ignorance but a kind of innocence, freshness, what you might call a point of view and an interest virgin of preconceptions. Anyway, I got from the first story an impression which has repeated itself so consistently since, that I shall offer it as a generalisation. This is, that the young writer of today is compelled by the present state of our culture which I tried to describe, to function in a kind of vacuum of the human race. His characters do not function, live, breathe, struggle, in that moil and seethe of simple humanity as did those of our predecessors who were the masters from whom we learned our craft: Dickens, Fielding, Thackeray, Conrad, Twain, Smollett, Hawthorne, Melville, James; their names are legion whose created characters were not just weaned but even spawned into a moil and seethe of simple human beings whose very existence was an affirmation of an incurable and indomitable optimism—men and women like themselves, understandable and comprehensible even when antipathetical, even in the very moment while they were murdering or robbing or betraying you, since theirs too were the same simple human lusts and hopes and fears uncomplicated by regimentation or group compulsion—a moil and seethe of humanity into which they could venture not only unappalled and welcome but with pleasure too and with no threat of harm since the worst that could happen to them would be a head bumped by what was only another human head, an elbow or a knee skinned but that too was only another human knee or elbow which did the skinning—a moil and seethe of mankind which accepted and believed in and functioned according, not to angles, but to moral principles; where truth was not where you were standing when you looked at it but was an unalterable quality or thing which could and would knock your brains out if you did not accept it or at least respect it.
While today the young writer’s characters must function not in individuality but in isolation, not to pursue in myriad company the anguishes and hopes of all human hearts in a world of a few simple comprehensible truths and moral principles, but to exist alone inside a vacuum of facts which he did not choose and cannot cope with and cannot escape from like a fly inside an inverted tumbler.
Let me repeat: I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing; I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one: Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say: a youth, father to what will, must someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who (he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it) because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass walls of his tumbler until he either gave up or was himself by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed. One thinks of course immediately of Huck Finn, another youth already father to what will some day soon now be a man. But in Huck’s case all he had to combat was his small size, which time would cure for him; in time he would be as big as any man he had to cope with; and even as it was, all the adult world could do to harm him was skin his nose a little; humanity, the human race, would and was accepting him already; all he needed to do was just to grow up in it.
That is the young writer’s dilemma as I see it. Not just his, but all our problems, is to save mankind from being desouled as the stallion or boar or bull is gelded; to save the individual from anonymity before it is too late and humanity has vanished from the animal called man. And who better to save man’s humanity than the writer, the poet, the artist, since who should fear the loss of it more since the humanity of man is the artist’s life blood.
[Faulkner in the University, edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, University of Virginia Press, 1959. The text has b
een corrected from Faulkner’s typescript.]
Address to the
U. S. National Commission for
UNESCO
DENVER, COLORADO, OCTOBER 2, 1950
It is not the part, nor is there any need for any of us. Americans, South, Middle or North, to welcome one another to our country, anymore than to welcome each other into the humanity of man. The fact that we are here at this moment, have come all our various distances, at trouble and sacrifice and expense, to be here at this moment is proof that we have served our apprenticeship to the human spirit and are now full and veteran members in the humanity of man.
That is, we have gathered here from our arduous distances because we believe that “I, Me” is more important than any government or language. We are descendants of people who in the old hemisphere believed that to be possible, and burst the old bonds into a new hemisphere where that belief could be tested. There are times, too many times, when we have failed in that dream. But out of every failure there arises always a new handfull who decline to be convinced by failure, who believe still that the human problems can be solved. As we have met here today, not in the name of races or ideologies, but of humanity, the spirit of man, to try again. We will fail again perhaps, but at least we have learned that that failure will not be important either. That failure will not even have laurels to rest on, since out of that failure also will rise its handfull, still irreconcilable and undismayed.
Mr. Khrushchev says that Communism, the police state, will bury the free ones. He is a smart gentleman, he knows that this is nonsense since freedom, man’s dim concept of and belief in the human spirit is the cause of all his troubles in his own country. But if he means that Communism will bury capitalism, he is correct. That funeral will occur about ten minutes after the police bury gambling. Because simple man, the human race, will bury both of them. That will be when we have expended the last grain, dram and iota of our natural resources. But man himself will not be in that grave. The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade space ship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
[Unesco News press release, October 2, 1959. Faulkner received help in writing this speech from Foreign Service Officer Abram Minell. See Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, New York, 1984, p. 674.]
Address to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters
upon Acceptance of the
Gold Medal for Fiction
NEW YORK, MAY 24, 1962
Miss Welty, Mr. President, Members of the Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen: This award has, to me, a double value. It is not only a comforting recognition of some considerable years of reasonably hard and arduous, anyway consistently dedicated, work. It also recognizes and affirms, and so preserves, a quantity in our American legend and dream well worth preserving.
I mean a quantity in our past: that past which was a happier time in the sense that we were innocent of many of the strains and anguishes and fears which these atomic days have compelled on us. This award evokes the faded airs and dimming rotogravures which record that vanished splendor still inherent in the names of Saint Louis and Leipzig, the quantity which they celebrated and signified recorded still today in the labels of wine bottles and ointment jars.
I think that those gold medals, royal and unique above the myriad spawn of their progeny which were the shining ribbons fluttering and flashing among the booths and stalls of forgotten county fairs in recognition and accolade of a piece of tatting or an apple pie, did much more than record a victory. They affirmed the premise that there are no degrees of best; that one man’s best is the equal of any other best, no matter how asunder in time or space or comparison, and should be honored as such.
We should keep that quantity, more than ever now, when roads get shorter and easier between aim and gain and goals become less demanding and more easily attained, and there is less and less space between elbows and more and more pressure on the individual to relinquish into one faceless serration like a mouthful of teeth, simply in order to find room to breathe. We should remember those times when the idea of an individuality of excellence compounded of resourcefulness and independence and uniqueness not only deserved a blue ribbon but got one. Let the past abolish the past when—and if—it can substitute something better; not us to abolish the past simply because it was.
[Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, second series, New York, 1963. Joseph Blotner wrote a draft of this speech. See Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, New York, 1984, p. 703.]
Foreword
TO
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles
(NEW ORLEANS, 1926*)
FIRST, let me tell you something about our Quarter, the Vieux Carre. Do you know our quarter, with its narrow streets, its old wrought-iron balconies and its southern European atmosphere? An atmosphere of richness and soft laughter, you know. It has a kind of ease, a kind of awareness of the unimportance of things that outlanders like myself—I am not a native—were taught to believe important. So it is no wonder that as one walks about the quarter one sees artists here and there on the shady side of the street corners, sketching houses and balconies. I have counted as many as forty in a single afternoon, and though I did not know their names nor the value of their paintings, they were my brothers. And in this fellowship where no badges are worn and no sign of greeting is required, I passed them as they bent over their canvasses, and as I walked onward I mused on the richness of our American life that permits forty people to spend day after day painting pictures in a single area comprised in six city blocks.
When this young man, Spratling, came to see me, I did not remember him. Perhaps I had passed him in the street. Perhaps he had been one of the painters at whose easel I had paused, to examine. Perhaps he knew me. Perhaps he had recognized me when I paused, perhaps he had been aware of the fellowship between us and had said to himself, ‘I will talk to him about what I wish to do; I will talk my thought out to him. He will understand, for there is a fellowship between us.’
But when he came to call on me, I did not remember him at all. He wore a neat business suit and carried merely a portfolio under his arm, and I did not recognize him. And after he had told me his name and laid the portfolio on the corner of my desk and sat opposite me and began to expound his plan to me, I had a kind of a vision. I saw myself being let in for something. I saw myself incurring an obligation which I should later regret, and as we sat facing one another across my desk, I framed in my mind the words with which I should tell him No. Then he leaned forward and untied the portfolio and spread it open before me, and I understood. And I said to him, ‘What you want me for is a wheelhorse, is it?’ And when he smiled his quick shy smile, I knew that we should be friends.
We have one priceless universal trait, we Americans. That trait is our humor. What a pity it is that it is not more prevalent in our art. This characteristic alone, being national and indigenous, could, by concentrating our emotional forces inward upon themselves, do for us what England’s insularity did for English art during the reign of Elizabeth. One trouble with us American artists is that we take our art and ourselves too seriously. And perhaps seeing ourselves in the eyes of our fellow artists, will enable those who have strayed to establish anew a sound contact with the fountainhead of our American life.
W.F.
* Originally this Foreword was printed entirely in italics. The book was a privately published collection of sketches, “Drawn by Wm. Spratling & Arranged by Wm. Faulkner.”
Introduction
TO THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITION OF
Sanctuary
(NEW YORK, 1932)
THIS book was written three years ago. To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought. But that was all right. I was young then and hard-bellied. I had never lived among nor known people
who wrote novels and stories and I suppose I did not know that people got money for them. I was not very much annoyed when publishers refused the mss. now and then. Because I was hard-gutted then. I could do a lot of things that could earn what little money I needed, thanks to my father’s unfailing kindness which supplied me with bread at need despite the outrage to his principles at having been of a bum progenitive.
Then I began to get a little soft. I could still paint houses and do carpenter work, but I got soft. I began to think about making money by writing. I began to be concerned when magazine editors turned down short stories, concerned enough to tell them that they would buy these stories later anyway, and hence why not now. Meanwhile, with one novel completed and consistently refused for two years, I had just written my guts into The Sound and the Fury though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure. I believed then that I would never be published again. I had stopped thinking of myself in publishing terms.
But when the third mss., Sartoris, was taken by a publisher and (he having refused The Sound and the Fury) it was taken by still another publisher, who warned me at the time that it would not sell, I began to think of myself again as a printed object. I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might just as well make some of it myself. I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks and sent it to Smith, who had done The Sound and the Fury and who wrote me immediately, “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.” So I told Faulkner, “You’re damned. You’ll have to work now and then for the rest of your life.” That was in the summer of 1929. I got a job in the power plant, on the night shift, from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., as a coal passer. I shoveled coal from the bunker into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it in and dumped it where the fireman could put it into the boiler. About 11 o’clock the people would be going to bed, and so it did not take so much steam. Then we could rest, the fireman and I. He would sit in a chair and doze. I had invented a table out of a wheelbarrow in the coal bunker, just beyond a wall from where a dynamo ran. It made a deep, constant humming noise. There was no more work to do until about 4 A.M., when we would have to clean the fires and get up steam again. On these nights, between 12 and 4, I wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, without changing a word. I sent it to Smith and wrote him that by it I would stand or fall.