Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 17, 1955; typescript]
PRESS DISPATCH WRITTEN IN ROME, ITALY,
FOR THE UNITED PRESS,
ON THE
EMMETT TILL CASE
When will we learn that if one county in Mississippi is to survive it will be because all Mississippi survives? That if the state of Mississippi survives, it will be because all America survives? And if America is to survive, the whole white race must survive first?
Because, the whole white race is only one-fourth of the earth’s population of white and brown and yellow and black. So, when will we learn that the white man can no longer afford, he simply does not dare, to commit acts which the other three-fourths of the human race can challenge him for, not because the acts are themselves criminal, but simply because the challengers and accusers of the acts are not white in pigment?
Not to speak of the other Aryan peoples who are already the Western world’s enemies because of political ideologies. Have we, the white Americans who can commit or condone such acts, forgotten already how only 15 years ago, what only the Japanese—a mere eighty million inhabitants of an island already insolvent and bankrupt—did to us?
How then can we hope to survive the next Pearl Harbor, if there should be one, with not only all peoples who are not white, but all peoples with political ideologies different from ours arrayed against us—after we have taught them (as we are doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours.
And not just the black people in Boer South Africa, but the black people in America too.
Because if we Americans are to survive, it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green.
Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.
Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.
[New York Herald Tribune, September 9, 1955]
TO THE EDITOR OF
Life
Since Life printed my “Letter to the North” I have received many replies from outside the South. Many of them criticized the reasoning in the letter, but so far none of them seem to have divined the reason behind the letter, the reason behind the urgency for the widest possible circulation of it, in time; which lends weight to a statement in the letter to the effect that the United States outside the South does not understand the South.
The reason behind the letter was the attempt of an individual to save the South and the whole United States too from the blot of Miss Autherine Lucy’s death. She had just been suspended by the University of Alabama; a day had been set when a judge would pass on the validity of the suspension. I believed that when the judge abrogated the suspension, which he would have to do, the forces supporting her attempt to enter the university as a student would send her back to it. I believed that if they did so, she would possibly lose her life.
She was not sent back, so the letter was not needed for that purpose. I hope it will never be. But if a similar situation bearing the seed of a similar tragedy should arise again, maybe the letter will help to serve.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Life, March 26, 1956]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE Reporter
From letters I have received, and from quotations from it I have seen in Time and Newsweek, I think that some parts of the interview with me which I gave to the London Sunday Times interviewer and which, after notifying me, he made available to you, are not correct; needless to say, I did not read the interview before it went to print, nor have I seen it yet as printed.
If I had seen it before it went to print, these statements, which are not correct, could never have been imputed to me. They are statements which no sober man would make, nor, it seems to me, any sane man believe.
The South is not armed to resist the United States that I know of, because the United States is neither going to force the South nor permit the South to resist or secede either.
The statement that I or anyone else would choose any one state against the whole remaining Union of States, down to the ultimate price of shooting other human beings in the streets, is not only foolish but dangerous. Foolish because no sane man is going to choose one state against the Union today. A hundred years ago, yes. But not in 1956. And dangerous because the idea can further inflame those few people in the South who might still believe such a situation possible.
Oxford, Mississippi WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Reporter, April 19, 1956]
TO THE EDITOR OF Time
In our troubled times over segregation, it is imperative that no man be saddled with opinions on the subject which he has never held and, for that reason, never expressed. In New York last month … I gave an interview to a representative of the London Sunday Times, who (with my agreement) passed it on to the Reporter. I did not see the interview before it went into print. If I had, quotations from it which have appeared in Time could never have been imputed to me, since they contain opinions which I have never held, and statements which no sober man would make and, it seems to me, no sane man believe. That statement that I or anyone else in his right mind would choose any one state against the whole remaining Union of States, down to the ultimate price of shooting other human beings in the streets, is not only foolish but dangerous. Foolish, because no sane man is going to make that choice today even if he had the chance. A hundred years ago, yes, but not in 1956. And dangerous, because the idea can further inflame those few people in the South who might still believe such a situation possible.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Time, April 23, 1956]
TO THE EDITOR OF Time
There is much criticism and condemnation, by individuals and our press, of the recent action of England in Egypt. Whether the act was right or wrong, do we critics always remember that the reasons why England believed she had to do what she did, are not all inside the British Isles? If the act was wrong, do we condemners always remember that twice now Britain has held off the enemy and so given us time to realize at last that we could not buy our way through wars and would have to fight them? Could one reason for our criticism and condemnation be the fear that now even England can no longer afford us an opportunity not to have to fight?
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Time, December 10, 1956]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times
Oxford, Miss., Dec. 11, 1956.
If what France, Britain and Israel did in Egypt was a crime, to throw away the fruits of it will be worse: it will be a folly; and I do not believe that nations anywhere any more can afford follies. Crimes, yes; but not follies.
What this country needs right now is not a golf player but a poker player. A good one—bold, courageous, with icewater in his veins, and I never knew a good one of any other kind. With the cards which the Israelis, British and French have just given him free, without his having to pay chips to draw them, he would probably settle not just the Middle East but the whole world too for the next fifty years.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[New York Times, December 16, 1956]
TO THE EDITOR OF Time
Our old foreign policy was like the house policy of the gambling casino: cover all bets, wager everybody he is wrong and depend on the constant and modest profit of the house odds inherent in the dice or deck or wheel. Our new one seems to be the house manager’s a
sking his syndicate to let the bouncer carry a pistol.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Time, February 11, 1957]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
A few years ago the Supreme Court rendered an opinion which we white Southerners didn’t like, and we resisted it.
As a result, last month Congress was offered a bill containing a good deal more danger to us all than the presence of Negro children in white schools or Negro votes in white ballot boxes—danger which apparently only an expert could see.
Congress would have passed the bill, except for the fact that the expert was on hand in time. So we escaped—that time.
We are still resisting that opinion. As long as we continue to hold the Negro second class in citizenship—that is, subject to taxation and military service, yet denied the political right to vote for, and the economic and educational competence to be represented among those who tax and draft him—Congress will continue to be offered bills containing these same or similar dangers, which only an expert can recognize; until some day the expert won’t be there in time, and one of them will pass.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 15, 1957]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times*
The tragedy of Little Rock is that it has at last brought out into the light a fact which we knew was there but which, until it was dragged forcibly out of hiding, we could ignore by pretending it wasn’t there. This is the fact that white people and Negroes do not like and trust each other, and perhaps never can.
But maybe this is not a tragedy after all. Now, by having this fact out where we will have to look at it and recognise it and accept it, maybe we can realise that it is not important for us to like and trust each other. That it is not even [of] prime importance for us to live, rub along somehow, in amity and peace together. That what is important and necessary and urgent (urgent: we are reaching the point now where we haven’t time anymore) is that we federate together, show a common unified front not for dull peace and amity, but for survival as a people and a nation.
It may already be too late; as a nation and a people we may already be on the way down and out. But I do not believe it. I decline to believe that in crisis we cannot rally our national character to that same courage and toughness which the English people for instance did when as a nation they stood alone in Europe for the national principle that men shall and can be free. Ours will be a bigger task not because the threat is greater but because we will have to stand up not as one nation among a continent of nations nor even in a hemisphere of nations, but as the last people unified nationally for liberty in an inimical world which already outnumbers us.
Against that principle which by physical force compels man to relinquish his individuality into the monolithic mass of a state dedicated to the premise that the state alone shall prevail, we, because of the lucky accident of our geography, may have to represent that last community of unified people dedicated to that opposed premise that man can be free by the very act of voluntarily merging and relinquishing his liberty into the liberty of all individual men who want to be free. We, because of the good luck of our still unspent and yet unexhausted past, may have to be the rallying point for all men, no matter what color they are or what tongue they speak, willing to federate into a community dedicated to the proposition that a community of individual free men not merely must endure, but can endure.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[New York Times, October 13, 1957; typescript]
* Written at the height of the high school integration crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.
[NOTICE]
Mrs. Faulkner and I wish to thank the Mayor, Alderman Sisk, City Engineer Lowe and the City Attorney’s office for the removal of the commercial signboard at our front gate on Old Taylor Road.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Oxford Eagle, September 24, 1959]
“NOTICE”
The posted woods on my property inside the city limits of Oxford contain several tame squirrels. Any hunter who feels himself too lacking in woodcraft and marksmanship to approach a dangerous wild squirrel, might feel safe with these. These woods are a part of the pasture used by my horses and milk cow; also, the late arrival will find them already full of other hunters. He is kindly requested not to shoot either of these.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Oxford Eagle, October 15, 1959]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times*
Regarding U-2 Pilot Powers: Now the Russians will parade him about the non-Western world for the next ten years like a monkey in a cage, as a living example of the sort of courage and fidelity and endurance on which the United States must now desperately depend. Or better still, set him free at once in contemptuous implication that a nation so desperately reduced is not worth anyone’s respect or fear, the agents of its desperation no longer dangerous enough to be worth the honor of martyrdom nor even the cost of feeding them.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[New York Times, August 28, 1960]
* Faulkner’s letter was written five days after pilot Francis Gary Powers had been convicted in Moscow of espionage and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. In 1962 he was set free and returned to the United States, where he was officially cleared of any charge of misconduct.
Verse, Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage
At the age of sixteen, I discovered Swinburne. Or rather, Swinburne discovered me, springing from some tortured undergrowth of my adolescence, like a highwayman, making me his slave. My mental life at that period was so completely and smoothly veneered with surface insincerity—obviously necessary to me at that time, to support intact my personal integrity—that I can not tell to this day exactly to what depth he stirred me, just how deeply the foot-prints of his passage are left in my mind. It seems to me now that I found him nothing but a flexible vessel into which I might put my own vague emotional shapes without breaking them. It was years later that I found in him much more than bright and bitter sound, more than a satisfying tinsel of blood and death and gold and the inevitable sea. True, I dipped into Shelley and Keats—who doesn’t, at that age?—but they did not move me.
I do not think it was assurance so much, merely complacence and a youthful morbidity, which counteracted them and left me cold. I was not interested in verse for verse’s sake then. I read and employed verse, firstly, for the purpose of furthering various philanderings in which I was engaged, secondly, to complete a youthful gesture I was then making, of being “different” in a small town. Later, my interest in fornication waning, I turned inevitably to verse, finding therein an emotional counterpart far more satisfactory for two reasons: (1) No partner was required (2) It was so much simpler just to close a book, and take a walk. I do not mean by this that I ever found anything sexual in Swinburne: there is no sex in Swinburne. The mathematician, surely; and eroticism just as there is eroticism in form and color and movement wherever found. But not that tortured sex in—say—D. H. Lawrence.
It is a time-honored custom to read Omar to one’s mistress as an accompaniment to consummation—a sort of stringèd obligato among the sighs. I found that verse could be employed not only to temporarily blind the spirit to the ungraceful posturings of the flesh, but also to speed onward the whole affair. Ah, women, with their hungry snatching little souls! With a man it is—quite often—art for art’s sake; with a woman it is always art for the artist’s sake.
Whatever it was that I found in Swinburne, it completely satisfied me and filled my inner life. I cannot understand now how I could have regarded the others with such dull complacency. Surely, if one be moved at all by Swinburne he must inevitably find in Swinburne’s forerunners some kinship. Perhaps it is that Swinburne, having taken his heritage and elaborated it to the despair of any would-be poet, has coarsened it to tickle the dullest of palates as well as the most discriminating, as used water c
an be drunk by both hogs and gods.
Therefore, I believe I came as near as possible to approaching poetry with an unprejudiced mind. I was subject to the usual proselyting of an older person, but the strings were pulled so casually as scarcely to influence my point of view. I had no opinions at that time, the opinions I later formed were all factitious and were discarded. I approached Poetry unawed, as if to say; “Now, let’s see what you have.” Having used verse, I would now allow verse to use me if it could.
When the co-ordinated chaos of the war was replaced by the unco-ordinated chaos of peace I took seriously to reading verse. With no background whatever I joined the pack belling loudly after contemporary poets. I could not always tell what it was all about but “This is the stuff,” I told myself, believing, like so many, that if one cried loudly enough to be heard above the din, and so convinced others that one was “in the know,” one would be automatically accoladed. I joined an emotional B.P.O.E.