[American Mercury, November 1935. See, also, p. 328–33.]
Review
OF
The Old Man and the Sea
BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY
HIS BEST. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.
[Shenandoah, III (Autumn 1952)]
TO THE BOOK EDITOR OF THE Chicago Tribune*
It is a difficult question. I can name offhand several books which I should like to have written, if only for the privilege of rewriting parts of them. But I dare say there are any number of angels in heaven today (particularly recent American arrivals) who look down upon the world and muse with a little regret on how much neater they would have done the job than the Lord, in the fine heat of His creative fury, did.
I think that the book which I put down with the unqualified thought “I wish I had written that” is Moby Dick. The Greek-like simplicity of it: a man of forceful character driven by his sombre nature and his bleak heritage, bent on his own destruction and dragging his immediate world down with him with a despotic and utter disregard of them as individuals; the fine point to which the various natures caught (and passive as though with a foreknowledge of unalterable doom) in the fatality of his blind course are swept—a sort of Golgotha of the heart become immutable as bronze in the sonority of its plunging ruin; all against the grave and tragic rhythm of the earth in its most timeless phase: the sea. And the symbol of their doom: a White Whale. There’s a death for a man, now; none of your patient pasturage for little grazing beasts you can’t even see with the naked eye. There’s magic in the very word. A White Whale. White is a grand word, like a crash of massed trumpets; and leviathan himself has a kind of placid blundering majesty in his name. And then put them together!!! A death for Achilles, and the divine maidens of Patmos to mourn him, to harp white-handed sorrow on their golden hair.
And yet, when I remember Moll Flanders and all her teeming and rich fecundity like a market-place where all that had survived up to that time must bide and pass; or when I recall When We Were Very Young, I can wish without any effort at all that I had thought of that before Mr. Milne did.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1927]
* Faulkner was one of a number of authors asked what book they would most like to have written.
TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE LEAGUE OF AMERICAN WRITERS
I most sincerely wish to go on record as being unalterably opposed to Franco and fascism, to all violations of the legal government and outrages against the people of Republican Spain.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Writers Take Sides: Letters about the War in Spain from 418 American Authors, New York, 1938]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
I see by the papers that the G. O. C. Second Army has seen fit to discipline for cause a unit in his command: vide crying “yoo-hoo” at golfers and ladies in shorts. Since which, he has been taken to task by every bloodthirsty civilian, military and personnel expert past draft age in or out of Congress.
I agree with them, being safe from the draft, too, even if not yet in Congress, though probably also bloodthirsty enough to be. The punishment was out of all proportion to the offense. The man who would cry “yoo-hoo” at a girl in shorts is not going to do her any harm, in shorts or in anything else or even out of them; nor, unless his attitude changed considerably, harm to anyone else.
The disciplining of such a man is not the affair of the Army commander. It should have been relegated to the proper staff G. O. I don’t know what her title is, but surely the Nation which will take its generals to task over minor matters of discipline, which has foisted on its drafted troops the designation “selectee” with its feminine ending, will not have failed as grade and rank increases. Corporals, of course, can be hostesses, sergeants can be home room mothers, sergeants major can be matrons, if married; submatrons otherwise; regimental sergeants major can even be madam chairman if desired. Onward from here, into commissioned rank, a gentle veil will be drawn, since no newspaper is going to print what one lady can call another.
The Arkansas Legion Weekly has invoked the names of Captain Flagg and the lady from Armentières. I agree with that, too. I would certainly like to hear what Flagg or Mademoiselle either would call a man in khaki who cried “yoo-hoo” at a girl in shorts.
General Lear was wrong, indubitably. He should be chastised by every naval and Army expert who ever bought or begged or earned a vote. His system (teaching troops that they are soldiers and not village comedians on a hayride) is out of date by 25 years, away back to ’17 and ’18, when it not only failed to teach American soldiers that they might possibly lose battles, it didn’t even teach them to recognize such a word as “strategic retreat.” Incidentally, I wonder how many of the men in that unit complained, beyond the normal and natural grousing which is every soldier’s inalienable right and privilege and which his officers, right up to the general commanding, Lear himself, would defend to the death—nay, past death: to court-martial.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, July 12, 1941]
“His Name Was Pete”
His name was Pete. He was just a dog, a fifteen-months-old pointer, still almost a puppy even though he had spent one hunting season learning to be the dog he would have been in another two or three if he had lived that long.
But he was just a dog. He expected little of the world into which he came without past and nothing of immortality either:—food (he didn’t care what nor how little just so it was given with affection—a touch of a hand, a voice he knew even if he could not understand and answer the words it spoke); the earth to run on; air to breathe, sun and rain in their seasons and the covied quail which were his heritage long before he knew the earth and felt the sun, whose scent he knew already from his staunch and faithful ancestry before he himself ever winded it. That was all he wanted. But that would have been enough to fill the eight or ten or twelve years of his natural life because twelve years are not very many and it doesn’t take much to fill them.
Yet short as twelve years are, he should normally have outlived four of the kind of motorcars which killed him—cars capable of climbing hills too fast to avoid a grown pointer dog. But Pete didn’t outlive the first of his four. He wasn’t chasing it; he had learned not to do that before he was allowed on highways. He was standing on the road waiting for his little mistress on the horse to catch up, to squire her safely home. He shouldn’t have been in the road. He paid no road tax, held no driver’s license, didn’t vote. Perhaps his trouble was that the motorcar which lived in the same yard he lived in had a horn and brakes on it and he thought they all did. To say he didn’t see the car because the car was between him and the late afternoon sun is a bad excuse because that brings the question of vision into it and certainly no one unable with the sun at his back to see a grown pointer dog on a curveless two-lane highway would think of permitting himself to drive a car at all, let alone one without either horn or brakes because next time Pete might be a human child and killing human children with motorcars is against the law.
No, the driver was in a hurry: that was the reason. Perhaps he had several miles to go yet and was already late for supper. That was why he didn’t have time to slow or stop or drive around Pete. And since he didn’t have tim
e to do that, naturally he didn’t have time to stop afterward; besides Pete was only a dog flung broken and crying into a roadside ditch and anyway the car had passed him by then and the sun was at Pete’s back now, so how could the driver be expected to hear his crying?
But Pete has forgiven him. In his year and a quarter of life he never had anything but kindness from human beings; he would gladly give the other six or eight or ten of it rather than make one late for supper.
[Oxford Eagle, August 15, 1946]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE Oxford Eagle
Bravo your piece about the preservation of the courthouse. I am afraid your cause is already lost though. We have gotten rid of the shade trees which once circled the courthouse yard and bordered the Square itself, along with the second floor galleries which once formed awnings for the sidewalk; all we have left now to distinguish an old southern town from any one of ten thousand towns built yesterday from Kansas to California are the Confederate monument, the courthouse and the jail. Let us tear them down too and put up something covered with neon and radio amplifiers.
Your cause is doomed. They will go the way of the old Cumberland church. It was here in 1861; it was the only building on or near the square still standing in 1865. It was tougher than war, tougher than the Yankee Brigadier Chalmers and his artillery and all his sappers with dynamite and crowbars and cans of kerosene. But it wasn’t tougher than the ringing of a cash register bell. It had to go—obliterated, effaced, no trace left—so that a sprawling octopus covering the country from Portland, Maine to Oregon can dispense in cut-rate bargain lots, bananas and toilet paper.
They call this progress. But they don’t say where it’s going; also there are some of us who would like the chance to say whether or not we want the ride.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Oxford Eagle, March 13, 1947]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal*
All native Mississippians will join in commending Attala County. But along with the pride and the hope we had better feel concern and grief and shame too; not grief for the dead children, but concern and grief because what we did was not enough; it was in effect only a little better than nothing, not for justice nor even punishment, just as you don’t mete out justice or punishment to the mad dog or the rattlesnake; grief and shame because we have gone on record with the outland people who are so quick to show us our faults and tell us how to remedy them, as having put the price of murdering three children at the same as robbing three banks or stealing three automobiles.
And those of us who were born in Mississippi and have lived all our lives in it, who have continued to live in it forty and fifty and sixty years at some cost and sacrifice simply because we love Mississippi and its ways and customs and soil and people; who because of that love have been ready and willing at all times to defend our ways and habits and customs from attack by the outlanders who we believed did not understand them, we had better be afraid too,—afraid that we have been wrong; that what we had loved and defended not only didn’t want the defense and the love, but was not worthy of the one and indefensible to the other.
Which fear, at least, it is to be hoped that the two members of the jury who saved the murderer, will not share.
It is to be hoped that whatever reasons they may have had for saving him, will be enough so that they can sleep at night free of nightmares about the ten or fifteen or so years from now when the murderer will be paroled or pardoned or freed again, and will of course murder another child, who it is to be hoped—and with grief and despair one says it—will this time at least be of his own color.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 26, 1950]
* In March 1950 three white men were convicted of the killing of three Negro children in Attala County, Mississippi. Two received sentences to life imprisonment, the other a sentence of ten years.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
I have just read Clayton Stevens’ letter in your Sunday issue, re my letter about the Turner trial.
The stand I took and the protest I made was against any drunken man, I don’t care what color he is, murdering three children or even only one child. I don’t care what color they are or it is.
It seems to me that the ones who injected race issues into this tragedy, were whoever permitted or created a situation furnishing free-gratis-for-nothing to all our Northern critics, the opportunity to have made this same statement and protest, but with a hundred times the savagery and a thousand times the unfairness and ten thousand times less the understanding of our problems and grief for our mistakes—except that I, a native of our land and a sharer in our errors, just happened to be on the spot in time to say it first. This should be some satisfaction to a Southerner.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 9, 1950]
TO THE SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
Oxford, Miss.
12 June 1950
The medal received, also the transcription of Mr. MacLeish. It’s very fine indeed to have these concrete evidences—the gold and the voice—of the considered judgment of one’s peers. A man works for a fairly simple—limited—range of things: money, women, glory; all nice to have, but glory’s best, and the best of glory is from his peers, like the soldier who has the good opinion not of man but of other soldiers, themselves experts in it, who are themselves brave too.
Though it still seems to me impossible to evaluate a man’s work. None of mine ever quite suited me, each time I wrote the last word I would think, if I could just do it over, I would do it better, maybe even right. But I was too busy; there was always another one. I would tell myself, maybe I’m too young or too busy to decide; when I reach fifty, I will be able to decide how good or not. Then one day I was fifty and I looked back at it, and I decided that it was all pretty good—and then in the same instant I realised that that was the worst of all since that meant only that a little nearer now was the moment, instant, night: dark: sleep: when I would put it all away forever that I anguished and sweated over, and it would never trouble me anymore.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, second series, 1951]
“TO THE VOTERS OF OXFORD”
Correction to paid printed statement of Private Citizens H. E. Finger, Jr., John K. Johnson, and Frank Moody Purser.
1. ‘Beer was voted out in 1944 because of its obnoxiousness.’
Beer was voted out in 1944 because too many voters who drank beer or didn’t object to other people drinking it, were absent in Europe and Asia defending Oxford where voters who preferred home to war could vote on beer in 1944.
2. ‘A bottle of 4 percent beer contains twice as much alcohol as a jigger of whiskey.’
A 12 ounce bottle of four percent beer contains forty-eight one hundreths of one ounce of alcohol. A jigger holds one and one-half ounces (see Dictionary). Whiskey ranges from 30 to 45 percent alcohol. A jigger of 30 percent whiskey contains forty-five one hundreths of one ounce of alcohol. A bottle of 4 percent beer doesn’t contain twice as much alcohol as a jigger of whiskey. Unless the whiskey is less than 32 percent alcohol, the bottle of beer doesn’t even contain as much.
3. ‘Money spent for beer should be spent for food, clothing and other essential consumer goods.’
By this precedent, we will have to hold another election to vote on whether or not the florists, the picture shows, the radio shops and the pleasure car dealers will be permitted in Oxford.
4. ‘Starkville and Water Valley voted beer out; why not Oxford?’
Since Starkville is the home of Mississippi State, and Mississippi State beat the University of Mississippi at football, maybe Oxford, which is the home of the University of Mississippi, is right in taking Starkville for a model. But why must we imitate W
ater Valley? Our high school team beat theirs, didn’t it?
Yours for a freer Oxford, where publicans can be law abiding publicans six days a week, and Ministers of God can be Ministers of God all seven days in the week, as the Founder of their Ministry commanded them to when He ordered them to keep out of temporal politics in His own words: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Private Citizen
[Broadside distributed in Oxford about September 1, 1950]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE Oxford Eagle
Essays, Speeches & Public Letters Page 17
