Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on August in Mississippi)

“In August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”—American Nobel Literature laureate William Faulkner (1897-1962), Light in August (1932)

Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on an Unsuccessful Demonstration of ‘Good, Gentle Ponies’)

“ ‘Them’s good, gentle ponies,’ the stranger said. ‘Watch now. He put the carton back into his pocket and approached the horses, his hand extended. The nearest one was standing on three legs now. It appeared to be asleep. Its eyelid drooped over the cerulean eye; its head was shaped like an ironingboard. Without even raising the eyelid it flicked its head, the yellow teeth cropped. For an instant it and the man appeared to be inextricable in one violence. Then they became motionless, the stranger’s high heels dug into the earth, one hand gripping the animal’s nostrils, holding the horse’s head wrenched half around while it breathed in hoarse, smothered groans. ‘See?’ the stranger said in a panting voice, the veins standing white and rigid in his neck and along his jaw. ‘See? All you got to do is handle them a little and work hell out of them for a couple of days. Now look out. Give me room back there.’ They gave back a little. The stranger gathered himself then sprang away. As he did so, a second horse slashed at his back, severing his vest from collar to hem down the back exactly as the trick swordsman severs a floating veil with one stroke.

“ ‘Sho now,’ Quick said. ‘But suppose a man don’t happen to own a vest.’

“At that moment Jody Varner, followed by the blacksmith, thrust through them again. ‘All right, Buck,’ he said. ‘Better get them on into the lot. Eck here will help you.’ The stranger, the severed halves of the vest swinging from either shoulder, mounted to the wagon seat, the blacksmith following.

“ ‘Get up, you transmogrified hallucinations of Job and Jezebel,’ the stranger said.”—Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner (1897-1962), “Spotted Horses,” originally published as a short story, later incorporated into The Hamlet (1940)

A college professor of mine noted that William Faulkner, like James Joyce, may have made enormous demands on readers, but was also one of the great comic writers in the English language. The southerner’s posthumously published The Reivers is the most obvious example of his antic muse, but so, in a more concentrated fashion, was the novella “Spotted Horses.”

In the pre-automotive era in which so much of Faulkner’s work took place, horses took the place of automobiles as all-purpose vehicles of transportation and commerce, and the horse trader was about as trustworthy as user-car salesmen are today in attempting to conceal problems with what they’re selling.

The horse trader in this passage, “the stranger,” intends to pass off some abused and angry horses as “good, gentle ponies.” Naturally, he gets what’s coming to him.

Faulkner himself loved horses only too well. He once admitted to writing Sanctuary, the closest he came to a blatantly commercial novel, because "I needed it to buy a good horse." He kept riding horses and jumping fences into his 60s, even after his doctor and his family had strongly urged him not to.

In a painful irony that Faulkner himself might have appreciated, his own death was precipitated through an equestrian accident from which he never really recovered. Maybe he would have thought it was worth it: For a risk-taker like him, in life as in fiction, no “good, gentle ponies,” thank you very much.

(For those who want a full-scale investigation of the different forms of humor used by Faulkner throughout his career—including Southwestern humor, folk humor, black humor, and classical comedy—a group of scholars contributed to the 1984 book Faulkner and Humor, edited by Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie.)

Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on Speaking Out for 'Honesty and Truth and Compassion’)

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you… will do this…you will change the earth. In one generation, all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins, and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and all the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man's fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.”—American Nobel Literature laureate William Faulkner (1897-1962), Address to the Graduating Class at University High School in Oxford, MS (1952)

Sixty years ago this week, William Faulkner died. It had taken more than two decades for him to achieve recognition from the public, but he had already won the Nobel Prize—and would shortly win the first of two Pulitzers—when he addressed local students in his hometown.

If anything, Faulkner’s influence has only grown since his death, as readers see how he came to grips with racism, greed, the despoliation of the environment, and other sins concerning the Deep South but which, in truth, are also wider American dilemmas.

As I read this speech, I could hear echoes of Faulkner’s more famous Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, in which he spoke of “the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

Faulkner wrote of the innate dignity and courage that enabled people to survive an age of dictators abroad and “politicians and time-servers” at home. I hope today’s teachers, in spite of dangers from every direction, are instilling in students the lesson Faulkner imparted 70 years ago. I hope that we all, despite our failings, reach for the best in ourselves that he recognized in addition to the enemies that beset us still: “injustice and lying and greed.”

For a succinct consideration of Faulkner’s relationship to Hollywood, where he worked as a screenwriter at a time when his books hadn’t yet caught on with a wide reading public, see Laura Alvarez Trigo’s post onthe PopMeC Research Blog.

Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on How He Would Start a Novel)

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is to trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”―American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate William Faulkner (1897-1962), transcript of appearance at West Point, April 19, 1962, in Conversations with William Faulkner, edited by M. Thomas Inge (1999) 

Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, With an Early Version of ‘The Great Resignation’)

“As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.”— Nobel Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner (1897-1962), from an October 1924 letter of resignation from his job as Univ. of Mississippi postmaster, quoted in Conversations with William Faulkner, edited by M. Thomas Inge (1999) 

This Day in Literary History (Viking Fans Faulkner Revival via Anthology)

Apr. 29, 1946—In a project that began as a critical summation but ended as a literary resurrection, Viking Press released The Portable Faulkner, an anthology that not only raised the sales of a Southern writer with at best a cult following, but also sent him on a path to the Nobel Prize in Literature and a secure place in the American canon.

When the literary historian and critic Malcolm Cowley began to plan the anthology, all 17 books by William Faulkner were out of print, so the novelist paid the bills by writing screenplays in Hollywood.

Moreover, he was seen through a relatively narrow lens, with many critics viewing Faulkner’s novels and short stories simply as examples of the “Southern Gothic” tradition of violent plots and grotesque characters, as well as discrete items rather than as a part of what Cowley called the “whole interconnecting pattern” of the novelist’s works.

To counteract this misimpression, Cowley arranged short stories and chapters of books into chronologically arranged sections in which readers could see how Faulkner’s “mythical kingdom” of Yoknapatawpha County developed over 2 1/2 centuries.

Ultimately, Cowley hoped to change perceptions of Faulkner. But when he began the project in 1944, first, he needed simply to reach this novelist who could every bit as elusive as he was eccentric.

“I sent him a letter saying I wanted to write a long piece about his work,” Cowley remembered in a 1978 interview with The New York Times. “I hoped to meet him. After four or five months, he answered from Hollywood, explaining that when he got letters from strangers he first opened them to see whether there was return postage. If there was, he took out the stamps and dropped the letter in a drawer. Then, he said, every six months or so, he'd open the drawer and start reading the letters. Mine had been luckier: It only waited three or four months.”

A further obstacle awaited Cowley: Faulkner’s disdain for biographical intrusiveness: “He wrote me that the idea of finishing his career, having attracted no more attention than he had, was painful and, yes, he would be grateful to have a long essay written about him, but he didn't want to have any personal details included. He wanted to live perfectly anonymously. He said in one letter that he wanted his tombstone inscribed ‘He wrote the books and he died.’”

Under Cowley’s gentle but persistent prodding, Faulkner gradually released information about himself. He even contributed a map of Yoknapatawpha County ("William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor”) and a “Compson Appendix” to the volume, revealing an imagination that spilled well past the temporal confines of one work: The Sound and the Fury.

Although the novel only covered from 1910 to 1928, the appendix starts with the battle of Culloden in 1745, and ends in 1945, when “Sister Caddy” Compson has last been heard of as the mistress of a German general. In this reconsideration, Faulkner revealed a restless imagination that spilled well past the temporal confines of individual works.

“Faulkner at his best — even sometimes at his worst — has a power, a richness of life, an intensity to be found in no other American novelist of our time,” Cowley wrote.

Critical opinion soon swung decisively in this direction. By 1950, Faulkner had won the Nobel, his backlist was back in print, and his newer titles were greeted with due respect. 

The only subsequent critical rescue projects even remotely that successful involved William Kennedy (through Saul Bellow’s suggestion that three of his novels be marketed as “The Albany Trilogy”) and Dawn Powell (through Gore Vidal’s 1987 New York Review of Books essay and Tim Page’s subsequent biography and editing of her novels for the “Library of America” series)

Three-quarters of a century after Cowley called for a Faulkner reappraisal, the collected works of this once-neglected novelist are considered essential in understanding both the bone-deep ties of Southerners to their region and the original sin that overshadows the land to this day: the replacement of its dense forests with baronial plantations, achieved at the cost of the subjugation of Native-Americans and African slaves and the ignorance and greed of many of its history-haunted whites.

Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on How We Must Be Free)

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it." —American fiction writer and Nobel Prize Literature laureate William Faulkner (1897-1962), "On Fear: The South in Labor,” Harper's Magazine, June 1956

Flashback, May 1942: Faulkner’s ‘Go Down, Moses’ Published

With Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, published 75 years ago this month, William Faulkner tested his publisher’s promotional department and readers alike. Like much of the rest of his fiction, the book was set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, with an unorthodox style and plotting that sometimes made extraordinary demands. 

Readers are thrown into the middle of this world with no prior hints; all the information they need to know is present but scrambled, often in sentences that never seem to end. Faulkner intended readers to be confused, much like his characters who are forced to negotiate the moral ambiguities of today from long-ago incidents of racism, violence, and violations against nature.

But above all, how was a reader to regard this fiction? Its title at the time of its publication provided one answer: as a group of short stories that could be read in or out of sequence. But, with many of the same characters reappearing throughout—and with the whole constituting a kind of fictional, century-spanning history of one southern family and its significant offshoots—it could also be seen as a unified novel.

Faulkner himself felt this way. In a 1949 letter, he offered marketing advice to his editor, Robert Haas: “Moses is indeed a novel. I would not eliminate the story or section titles. Do you think it necessary to number these stories like chapters? Why not reprint exactly, but change the title from Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, to simply: Go Down, Moses, with whatever change is necessary in the jacket description.” Random House followed that advice in subsequent editions.

Whether considered as a series of stories or as the novel Faulkner intended, Go Down, Moses finds the writer amply demonstrating his gifts as a versatile, experimental and even brilliantly pyrotechnical craftsman. To start with, readers familiar with the tragic events of novels like The Sound and the Fury, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom are likely to be astonished by the comic spirit of the first section of Go Down, Moses, “Was,” featuring Miss Sophonsiba Beauchamp, an aging spinster looking to catch the confirmed bachelor Uncle Buck. As if her aristocratic pretensions aren’t off-putting enough (she calls the family plantation “Warwick” because she is convinced her brother Hubert is actually the Earl of that English estate), the initial sight of her is not edifying:

“Presently there was a jangling and swishing noise and they began to smell the perfume, and Miss Sophonsiba came down the stairs. Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat and a little nigger girl carrying her fan and he stood quietly a little behind Uncle Buck, watching her lips until they opened and he could see the roan tooth.”

Sophonsiba’s “hunt” for a husband is a comic counterpart to other, more serious hunts, both in “Was” and Go Down, Moses as a whole. Uncle Buck and his twin brother, Uncle Buddy, are supposedly hunting an escaped slave, Tomey’s Turl, but their heart is not really in it; they leave slaves run free at night. Later, the central consciousness of Go Down, Moses, Isaac (Ike) McCaslin, will engage a magnificent if dangerous animal close-up—and consider how much of nature has been lost through the encroachment of white settlers—in “The Bear.”

That novella may, in fact, be regarded as Ike's initiation into an almost religious order of hunters (Ike even puts a dab of deer blood on his forehead), adulthood, and the all-engulfing morass of racism. 

When he becomes an adult, Ike discovers commissary ledgers regarding how the McCaslins secured their property and exploited their slaves. The horrors perpetrated by his grandfather (impregnating one slave, then committing incest with the child of that union, producing another baby) leads Ike to reject his inheritance.

But one of the animating beliefs behind that renunciation (“the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as light and air and weather were”) becomes an act of futility amid the monstrously complicated history of his family and region: “that record which two hundred years had not been enough to complete and another hundred would not be enough to discharge; that chronicle which was a whole land in miniature, which multiplied and compounded was the entire South."

For all his righteousness and decency, Ike has also given up any attempt to create a new life for future generations. True, he has abandoned any opportunity to profit from the land, but he has also forsaken any chance to improve the land and those who might otherwise benefit from it. Moreover, his wife becomes angry over his refusal to claim the inheritance, leaving him in an unhappy, childless marriage.

Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on ‘Truth and Justice’ in the Old South)

" ‘I'm interested in truth,’ the sheriff said.

‘So am I,’ Uncle Gavin said.  ‘It's so rare.  But I am more interested in justice and human beings.’

‘Ain't truth and justice the same thing?’ the sheriff said.

‘Since when?’  Uncle Gavin said.  ‘In my time I have seen truth that was anything under the sun but just, and I have seen justice using tools and instruments I wouldn't want to touch with a ten-foot fence rail.’" ― William Faulkner, “An Error in Chemistry," in Knight's Gambit (1949)

This Day in Literary History (‘Intruder’ Film Premieres in Faulkner’s Hometown)

October 10, 1949—William Faulkner had spent a sizable portion of his most creative years in Hollywood, but it was a different experience for him to be attending the hometown premiere of a movie adapted from one of his novels. Yet, though the screenplay was written by others and he had only showed up at the opening at the insistence of one of his aunts, Intruder in the Dust overwhelmingly reflected his influence—including choices for location shooting, suggestions on the content and acting of key scenes, even a behind-the-scenes defusing of locals’ resentment over his treatment of an issue gaining in urgency with each passing day: racism.

Most Oxford, Miss., residents ended up enjoying the film when it opened that day at the local Lyric Theater. (After all, so many knew family members or friends who had acted in it—or had even done so themselves). The problem was that not enough Americans as a whole did so. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer had predicted this outcome nearly a year before, and now it seemed that events would be proving him right: the film underperformed at the box office.

Mayer thought that Americans would not turn out for a socially conscious film implicitly critical about the American political system, but the truth was a bit more complicated. Veteran MGM director Clarence Brown, who came from Tennessee, had been haunted by race riots he had witnessed in 1906 in Atlanta, and he had wanted to purchase the rights to Faulkner’s novel of a racially-charged murder trial even before publication.

But Mayer’s point-blank refusal to secure the rights meant that, by the time another studio champion of the project, Dore Schary, had been installed as head of production, three other films on racial issues were well on their way to release: Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave, Elia Kazan’s Pinky, and Alfred Werker’s Lost Boundaries. The U.S. public, perceiving a glut of movies devoted to this one issue, may have simply decided to stay home.  

Contemporary reviewers, as well as historians of film since then, hailed the movie for its feel for the region and its fine acting, particularly by Juano Hernandez in the pivotal role of defendant Lucas Beauchamp. 

Even so, most who saw Intruder in the Dust could not have been aware that the adaptation could only begin to suggest the experience of reading Faulkner’s complex novel—a work with extraordinarily vivid description that nevertheless challenged at every turn with its long sentences; characters that, like so much of his other fiction, harked back to other novels and short stories in his loose ongoing saga about “Yoknapatawpha County”; and a treatment of race as complicated as its current state in the Deep South (e.g., the film never indicated that Beauchamp, with black and white ancestors, tended to identify with the white ones, because Brown, who could accept the idea of political equality for African-Americans, found miscegenation to be beyond the pale).

Faulkner’s own personality and struggles make him the equal of anything that sprang from his fecund imagination. The Coen brothers’ movie Barton Fink exploits this persona through a character, W.P. Mayhew, strongly suggested by Faulkner in the early Forties: a Southern novelist moonlighting in Hollywood, carrying on an affair with a script assistant when he is not falling-down-drunk. It is an exaggeration of his actual situation (there are no indications in the novelist's real life, unlike in the film, that a script assistant with whom he was carrying on an affair wrote any of his works).

While in Hollywood, Faulkner, while called upon to adapt the works of others (notably, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, which had virtually nothing to do with the original), had only been called upon to translate one of his own for the big screen: his first screen credit, Today We Live, from his World War I short story “Turn About,” done during his short stint in the early Thirties at MGM. The original had been short enough to allow him space to expand, including an invented part for one of the studio’s principal female stars at the time, Joan Crawford. It is hard to say whether he could have done a better job of streamlining the vastly larger canvass of his novel than the screenwriter who got the job, Ben Maddow.

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner had little invested emotionally in film as a medium; he simply regarded his screenwriting assignments, even the ones he did in partnership with the understanding Warner Brothers director Howard Hawks, as jobs to pay the bills. (That last phrase was literally true in his case: in January 1941, he couldn’t afford to pay a $15 electricity bill.) While pleasantly surprised that Brown did such a good job with Intruder in the Dust, he was also thrilled to receive extra remuneration from one of his works.

As it turned out, this film adaptation came at a time when his financial situation, though not his health, was about to undergo a dramatic improvement. A couple of years before, a volume that critic Malcolm Cowley edited, The Portable Faulkner, had led American reviewers to raise him higher in the pantheon of native writers, to the point where it approximated his long-lofty position abroad. A month after the premiere of Intruder in the Dust, 15 of 18 members of the Swedish Academy had voted to award him the Nobel Prize in Literature, and though he did not receive the award immediately (rules required a unanimous vote), that showing had put him in a strong position to win the following year. Within the next five years, he would not only win the Nobel but also the National Book Award (for his Collected Stories) and the Pulitzer (for a novel, ironically, regarded as among his weakest, A Fable).

All this came at a time when alcoholism, long a powerful influence in his life, would now affect his work. Like Hemingway, poor health, with drinking a significant contributing factor, had begun to cloud his creative power. Faulkner didn’t experience Hemingway’s extreme inability to finish work, but in a way, it might have been better if he had: the novels he wrote in the last dozen years of his life did not measure up to his extraordinary output from 1929 (The Sound and the Fury) to 1942 (Go Down, Moses).