Essays, Speeches & Public Letters Read online

  2004 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1965, 2004 by Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 1932 by Modern Library and copyright renewed 1959 by William Faulkner Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958 by William Faulkner Copyright © 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1963 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers Copyright renewed 1963 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers Copyright © 1950 by Estelle Faulkner Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1980, 1982 by the Estate of William Faulkner Copyright © 1954 by The Ford Motor Company Copyright © 1956 by The Johnson Publishing Company Copyright © 1973 by Jill Faulkner Summers

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  An earlier edition of this work was published by Random House, Inc., in 1965 in different form.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton, Inc., for permission to reprint “Address upon Receiving the Andrés Bello Award, Caracas, 1961,” copyright © 1988 by W. W. Norton, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Faulkner, William, 1897–1962.

  Essays, speeches & public letters / by William Faulkner ; edited by James B.

  Meriwether.—[rev., 2nd ed.]

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-351-0

  I. Title: Essays, speeches, and public letters. II. Meriwether,

  James B. III. Title.

  PS3511.A86A6 2004

  818′.5208—dc22 2003044278

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  WILLIAM FAULKNER

  William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. His family was rooted in local history: his great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and railroad builder, was assassinated by a former partner in 1889, and his grandfather was a wealthy lawyer and banker. When Faulkner was five his parents moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he was educated in local schools, dropping out of high school in 1915, early in his senior year. Rejected for pilot training in the U.S. Army, he joined the Royal Air Force in 1918, but the war ended when he was still in training in Toronto. After the war, he took some classes at the University of Mississippi and worked for a time at the university post office. Mostly, however, he educated himself by wide reading.

  Faulkner had begun writing poems when he was a schoolboy, and in 1924 he published a poetry collection, The Marble Faun. His literary aspirations were fueled by his close friendship with Sherwood Anderson, whom he met during a stay in New Orleans. Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, was published in 1926, followed a year later by Mosquitoes, a literary satire. His next book, Flags in the Dust, was heavily cut and rearranged at the publisher’s insistence and appeared finally as Sartoris in 1929. In the meantime he had completed The Sound and the Fury, and when it appeared at the end of 1929 he had finished Sanctuary and was ready to begin writing As I Lay Dying. That same year he married Estelle Oldham, recently divorced from Cornell Franklin, whom he had courted a decade and a half earlier.

  Although Faulkner gained literary acclaim from these and subsequent novels—Light in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942)—and continued to publish stories regularly in magazines, he was unable to support himself solely by writing fiction. He worked as a screenwriter for MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Warner Bros., forming a close relationship with director Howard Hawks, with whom he worked on To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Land of the Pharaohs, among other films.

  In 1944 all but one of Faulkner’s novels were out of print, and his personal life was at low ebb. Before the war he had been discovered by Sartre and others in the French literary world. In the postwar period his reputation rebounded, as Malcolm Cowley’s anthology The Portable Faulkner brought him fresh attention in America, and the immense esteem in which he was held in Europe consolidated his worldwide stature.

  Faulkner wrote seventeen books set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, home of the Compson family of The Sound and the Fury. “No land in all fiction lives more vividly in its physical presence than this county of Faulkner’s imagination,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in an essay on Cowley’s anthology. “The descendants of the old families, the descendants of bushwhackers and carpetbaggers, the swamp rats, the Negro cooks and farm hands, the bootleggers and gangsters, tenant farmers, college boys, county-seat lawyers, country storekeepers, peddlers—all are here in their fullness of life and their complicated interrelations.”

  In 1950 Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his later novels—Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962)—he continued to explore what he had called “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself,” but did so in the context of Yoknapatawpha’s increasing connection with the modern world.

  He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962.

  FOREWORD

  James B. Meriwether

  The first edition of this collection was published by Random House on January 7, 1966. Intended to be as complete a collection as possible of the nonfiction prose that Faulkner had published or planned to publish, it contained sixty-three different pieces. Since then, a number of new items have turned up that I would have included in the original edition had I known about them, and still others have become available that belong here. In all, thirty-nine new items are added to this edition.

  The editorial principles of this new edition remain the same, as do the categories of the pieces. To avoid an awkward number of subdivisions, I have stretched the definition of Public Letters to include dust-jacket blurbs and newspaper ads and announcements and have included Drama with the Book Reviews. Several corrections of errors in texts in the first edition have been silently made, and the endnotes of others have been expanded where new information has become available.

  Included here are the six reviews that Faulkner contributed to the University of Mississippi undergraduate newspaper, The Mississippian, in 1920, 1921, and 1922. Carvel Collins republished them in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, Boston, 1962, a volume long out of print. Collins also edited William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, New York, 1968, which included as an appendix Faulkner’s 1925 essay on Sherwood Anderson. Although that volume has recently been reprinted by the University Press of Mississippi, the Anderson essay has been included here because it so obviously belongs with Faulkner’s other 1925 critical pieces.*

  Readers of William Faulkner’s fiction know its extraordinary variety. To take only three examples from among his best work: Could three great novels, written by one author, over a span of less than a decade and a half, differ more from one another than do The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses? On a much smaller scale, the same variety is to be found in his nonfiction prose. Such major pieces as the essays “Mississippi,” “On Privacy,” and “On Fear,” and the Foreword to The Faulkner Reader, are small-scale masterpieces—and are strikingly different from one another. Or take the speeches: the Nobel Prize, Pine Manor, and Delta Council addresses are probably the best and, again, are very different. One can also learn a great deal about William Faulkner’s intelligence, knowle
dge, imagination, talent, and sense of humor by observing in the differences of any one speech from all the others not only the variety of his interests and the strength of his beliefs but also how aware he is of his particular audience and of how he appears to that audience. Even the most minor pieces, like many of his letters to the editors of various periodicals, display the same variety, the same sorts of differences—for example, see the letters to the editors of the New York Times, December 26, 1954, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 20, 1955, and the Oxford Eagle, October 15, 1960.

  This collection is indeed a highly significant part of Faulkner’s oeuvre. As the novelist and critic George Garrett emphasized in his review of the original edition of this book, Faulkner’s essays were “written like everything else he wrote, as a part of his whole life’s work.…” And he goes on to say that these essays, and many of the other pieces in the volume, “are couched in his own style and vocabulary, one which was designed not to sound like a great deal of other contemporary criticism and certainly not to partake of the accepted and debased jargon of any critical school.… Moreover, one must be aware of the relationship of one piece to another and to the whole of his work.” (Shenandoah, Spring 1966; another excerpt from the review is quoted on the front cover of this book. More of Garrett’s distinguished Faulkner criticism appears in the “Southern Literature and William Faulkner” section of Garrett’s The Sorrows of Fat City: A Selection of Literary Essays and Reviews, University of South Carolina Press, 1992.)

  In 1976, the novelist and critic Warren Beck published one of the finest, most massive, and—inexplicably—most neglected of all the books of Faulkner criticism, entitled, with misleading modesty, Faulkner: Essays (University of Wisconsin Press). His scattered remarks about the Nobel Prize address stand out as a superb example of what can be learned about Faulkner, the writer of fiction, from his nonfiction prose, and how closely related his nonfiction is to his novels and stories. He called it “Faulkner’s profound humanistic declaration … an artist’s credo that could have stood as a preface to any of his novels.…” This speech, he said, “defined in large and lasting terms … the artist’s role in the modern world, according to the august concepts upon which he based a dedication to his calling,” and it declared “what his fiction had implied throughout, his position as committed humanistic realist.” Carefully choosing his audience, Faulkner addressed younger writers, and did so “with concern not just for literature’s future but for his ongoing service … by warning and heartening, linking courage and compassion as proved human values in a formidably restive world,” speaking “out of his gathered convictions and invincible stamina.…” The phrasing of the address “echoes his lifetime fictional attempt to present the subjective existential reality of human beings in their struggling toward self-possession and integrity, still tempted to indifference, slackening into ambivalence, yet rousing themselves to moral assertion based on ‘the old verities.’ ”

  Everything in this collection of his nonfiction prose, then, is revelatory of Faulkner the artist and Faulkner the man. The pieces, in showing us some of what this immensely dedicated, immensely complex, and deeply secretive writer chose to reveal about himself publicly during the last four decades of his career, permit us to understand, a little better, the man and his work.

  * In Selected Letters of William Faulkner, edited by Jospeh Blotner, New York, 1977, there are six public letters that would have been included in this collection had they not been available there. In order to make this volume as comprehensive a record as possible of Faulkner’s nonfiction prose writings, I list here the recipients and page numbers of those letters: Sven Ahmen, pp. 308–309; Random House, p. 371; Bob Flautt, pp. 389–390; W. C. Neill, pp. 390–391; Secretary of Junior Chamber of Commerce, Batesville, pp. 401–402; selected writers, pp. 403–404.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My most grateful thanks are due to Jill Faulkner Summers, executrix of the estate of William Faulkner, for her permissions, and her encouragement. To my editor at Random House, Danielle Durkin, thanks are also due for her encouragement, her patience, and her copyediting skills.

  —September 30, 2003

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  FOREWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EDITOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

  ESSAYS, SPEECHES & PUBLIC LETTERS

  I ESSAYS

  A Note on Sherwood Anderson, 1953

  Mississippi, 1954

  A Guest’s Impression of New England, 1954

  An Innocent at Rinkside, 1955

  Kentucky: May: Saturday, 1955

  On Privacy, 1955

  Impressions of Japan, 1955

  To the Youth of Japan, 1955

  Letter to a Northern Editor, 1956

  On Fear: Deep South in Labor: Mississippi, 1956

  A Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race, 1956

  Albert Camus, 1961

  II SPEECHES

  Funeral Sermon for Mammy Caroline Barr, February 4, 1940

  Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950

  To the Graduating Class, University High School, 1951

  Upon Being Made an Officer of the Legion of Honor, 1951

  To the Delta Council, 1952

  To the Graduating Class, Pine Manor Junior College, 1953

  Upon Receiving the National Book Award for Fiction, 1955

  To the Southern Historical Association, 1955

  Upon Receiving the Silver Medal of the Athens Academy, 1957

  To the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Presenting the Gold Medal for Fiction to John Dos Passos, 1957

  To the Raven, Jefferson, and ODK Societies of the University of Virginia, 1958

  To the English Club of the University of Virginia, 1958

  To the U. S. National Commission for UNESCO, 1959

  To the American Academy of Arts and Letters upon Acceptance of the Gold Medal for Fiction, 1962

  III INTRODUCTIONS

  FOREWORD TO Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles, 1926

  INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITION OF Sanctuary, 1932

  FOREWORD TO The Faulkner Reader, 1954

  IV BOOK REVIEWS

  The Road Back, BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE, 1931

  Test Pilot, BY JIMMY COLLINS, 1935

  The Old Man and the Sea, BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY, 1952

  V PUBLIC LETTERS

  TO THE BOOK EDITOR OF THE Chicago Tribune, JULY 16, 1927

  TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE LEAGUE OF AMERICAN WRITERS, 1938

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, JULY 12, 1941

  “HIS NAME WAS PETE,” Oxford Eagle, AUGUST 15, 1946

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE Oxford Eagle, MARCH 13, 1947

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, MARCH 26, 1950

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, APRIL 9, 1950

  TO THE SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS, JUNE 12, 1950

  “TO THE VOTERS OF OXFORD,” SEPTEMBER 1950

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE Oxford Eagle, SEPTEMBER 14, 1950

  TO THE EDITOR OF Time, NOVEMBER 13, 1950

  STATEMENT TO THE PRESS ON THE WILLIE MCGEE CASE, MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, MARCH 27, 1951

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times, DECEMBER 26, 1954

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, FEBRUARY 20, 1955

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, MARCH 20, 1955

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times, MARCH 25, 1955

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, APRIL 3, 1955

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, APRIL 10, 1955

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, APRIL 17, 1955

  PRESS DISPATCH ON THE EMMETT TILL CASE, SEPTEMBER 9, 1955

  TO THE EDITOR OF Life, MARCH 26, 1956

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE Reporter, APRIL 19, 1956 />
  TO THE EDITOR OF Time, APRIL 23, 1956

  TO THE EDITOR OF Time, DECEMBER 10, 1956

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times, DECEMBER 16, 1956

  TO THE EDITOR OF Time, FEBRUARY 11, 1957

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal, SEPTEMBER 15, 1957

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times, OCTOBER 13, 1957

  NOTICE, Oxford Eagle, SEPTEMBER 24, 1959

  “NOTICE,” Oxford Eagle, OCTOBER 15, 1959

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times, AUGUST 28, 1960

  New Material for This Revised Edition

  VI ESSAYS

  Verse, Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage, 1924

  On Criticism, 1925

  Sherwood Anderson, 1925

  Literature and War, 1925

  And Now What’s To Do, 1925

  The Composition, Editing, and Cutting of Flags in the Dust, c. 1928

  Mac Grider’s Son, 1934

  Note on A Fable, c. 1953

  VII SPEECHES

  Funeral Sermon for Mammy Caroline Barr February 5, 1940

  Address to the Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture, 1952

  Address at the American Literature Seminar, Nagano, 1955

  Address upon Receiving the Andrés Bello Award, Caracas, 1961

  Address at the Teatro Municipal, Caracas, 1961

  VIII INTRODUCTIONS

  Two Introductions to The Sound and the Fury

  Oxford, Mississippi, August 19, 1933

  Oxford, Mississippi, 1946

  Prefatory Note to “Appendix: Compson, 1699–1945,” 1946

  IX BOOK AND DRAMA REVIEWS

  In April Once, BY W. A. PERCY, 1920

  Turns and Movies, BY CONRAD AIKEN, 1921

  Aria da Capo: A Play in One Act, BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, 1922

  American Drama: Eugene O’Neill, 1922

  American Drama: Inhibitions, 1922

  Linda Condon—Cytherea—The Bright Shawl, BY JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, 1922

  Ducdame, BY JOHN COWPER POWYS, 1925

  Test Pilot, BY JIMMY COLLINS (The uncut text), 1935

  X PUBLIC LETTERS