Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

by William Faulkner

  To blame this man on the Russians! Or anybody else. One of his closest friends called him “the Phallic Checkhov.” He is American, and more than that, a middle westerner, of the soil: he is as typical of Ohio in his way as Harding was in his. A field of corn with a story to tell and a tongue to tell it with.

  I can not understand our passion in America for giving our own productions some remote geographical significance. “Maryland” chicken! “Roman” dressing! The “Keats” of Omaha! Sherwood Anderson, the “American” Tolstoi! We seem to be cursed with a passion for geographical cliche.

  Certainly no Russian could ever have dreamed about that horse.

  [Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1925; reprinted in Princeton University Library Chronicle, Spring 1957; reprinted in William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, ed. Carvel Collins, New York, 1968. The text printed here incorporates several minor corrections of errors in the newspaper text and the standardization of book titles.]

  Literature and War

  Siegfried Sassoon moves one who has himself slogged up to Arras or its corresponding objective, who has trod duck-boards and heard and felt them sqush and suck in the mud, who has seen the casual dead rotting beneath dissolving Flemish skies, who has smelt that dreadful smell of war—a combination of uneaten and evacuated food and slept-in mud and soiled and sweatty clothing—, who has spent four whiskey-less days cursing the General Staff. (One does not curse God in war: certainly anyone who can possibly be anywhere else, is there.)

  And Henri Barbusse moves one who has lain on a dissolving hill-side soaked through and through by rain until the very particles of earth rise floating to the top of the atmosphere, and air and earth are a single medium in which one tries vainly to stand and which it would seem that even gun fire cannot penetrate.

  And one can be moved by Rupert Brooke if he has done neither of these, if war be to him the Guards division eternally paraded, while the glorious dead can both fill saddles and coffins at the same time, in a region wherein men do not need food nor crave tobacco. And where there is no rain.

  But it remains for R. H. Mottram to use the late war to a successful literary end, just as the Civil War needed its Stephen Crane to clear it of Negro Sergeants lying drunk in the guest rooms of the great house, and to cut off its languishing dusky curls.

  Business as usual. What a grand slogan! Who has accused the Anglo-Saxon of being forever sentimental over war? Mankind’s emotional gamut is like his auricular gamut: there are some things which he cannot feel, as there are sounds he cannot hear. And war, taken as a whole, is one of these things.

  [Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1973, ed. Michael Millgate. That text, based on Faulkner’s typescript, probably written early in 1925, is printed here. The books to which Faulkner refers are: Sassoon, The War Poems, London, 1919; Barbusse, Le Feu, 1916, translated as Under Fire: The Story of a Squad, London, 1917; and Mottram, The Spanish Farm, London, 1924.]

  And Now What’s To Do

  His great-grandfather came into the country afoot from the Tennessee mountains, where he had killed a man, worked and saved and bought a little land, won a little more at cards and dice, and died at the point of a pistol while trying to legislate himself into a little more; his grandfather was a deaf, upright man in white linen, who wasted his inherited substance in politics. He had a law practice still, but he sat most of the day in the courthouse yard, a brooding, thwarted old man too deaf to take part in conversation and whom the veriest child could beat at checkers. His father loved horses better than books or learning; he owned a livery stable, and here the boy grew up, impregnated with the violent ammoniac odor of horses. At ten he could stand on a box and harness a horse and put it between runabout shafts almost as quickly as a grown man, darting beneath its belly like a cricket to buckle the straps, cursing it in his shrill cricket voice; by the time he was twelve he had acquired from the negro hostlers an uncanny skill with a pair of dice.

  Each Christmas eve his father carried a hamper full of whisky in pint bottles to the stable and stood with it in the office door, against the firelight, while the negroes gathered and rolled their eyes and clicked their gleaming teeth in the barn cavern, filled with snorts and stampings of contentment. The boy, become adolescent, helped to drink this; old ladies smelled his breath at times and tried to save his soul. Then he was sixteen and he began to acquire a sort of inferiority complex regarding his father’s business. He had gone through grammar school and one year in high school with girls and boys (on rainy days, in a hack furnished by his father he drove about the neighborhood and gathered up all it would hold free of charge) whose fathers were lawyers and doctors and merchants—all genteel professions, with starched collars. He had been unselfconscious then, accepting all means of earning bread as incidental to following whatever occupation a man preferred. But not now. All this was changed by his changing body. Before and during puberty he learned about women from the negro hostlers and the white night-man, by listening to their talk. Now, on the street, he looked after the same girls he had once taken to school in his father’s hack, watching their forming legs, imagining their blossoming thighs, with a feeling of defiant inferiority. There was a giant in him, but the giant was muscle-bound. The boys, the doctors’ and merchants’ and lawyers’ sons, loafed on the corners before the drug stores. None of them could make a pair of dice behave as he could.

  An automobile came to town. The horses watched it with swirling proud eyes and tossing snorts of alarm. The war came, a sound afar off heard. He was eighteen, he had not been in school since three years; the moth-eaten hack rusted quietly among the jimson weeds in the stable yard. He no longer smelled of ammonia, for he could now win twenty or thirty dollars any Sunday in the crap game in the wooded park near the railway station; and on the drug store corner where the girls passed in soft troops, touching one another with their hands and with their arms you could not tell him from a lawyer’s or a merchant’s or a doctor’s son. The girls didn’t, with their ripening thighs and their mouths that keep you awake at night with unnameable things—shame of lost integrity, manhood’s pride, desire like a drug. The body is tarnished, soiled in its pride, now. But what is it for, anyway?

  A girl got in trouble, and he clung to boxcar ladders or lay in empty gondolas while railjoints clicked under the cold stars. Frost had not yet fallen upon the cotton, but it had touched the gum-lined Kentucky roads and the broad grazing lands, and lay upon the shocked corn of Ohio farm land beneath the moon. He lay on his back in an Ohio hay stack. The warm dry hay was about his legs. It had soaked a summer’s sun, and it held him suspended in dry and sibilant warmth where he moved unsleeping, cradling his head, thinking of home. Girls were all right, but there were so many girls everywhere. So many of them a man had to get through with in the world, politely. It meant tactfully. Nothing to girls. Dividing legs dividing receptive. He had known all about it before, but the reality was like reading a story and then seeing it in the movies, with music and all. Soft things. Secretive, but like traps. Like going after something you wanted, and getting into a nest of spider webs. You got the thing, then you had to pick the webs off, and every time you touched one, it stuck to you. Even after you didn’t want the thing anymore, the webs clung to you. Until after a while you remembered the way the webs itched and you wanted the thing again, just thinking of how the webs itched. No. Quicksand. That was it. Wade through once, then go on. But a man wont. He wants to go all the way through, somehow; break out on the other side. Everything incomplete somehow. Having to back off, with webs clinging to you. “Christ, you have to tell them so much. You cant think of it fast enough. And they never forget when you do and when you dont. What do they want, anyway?”

  Across the moon a V of geese slid, their lonely cries drifted in the light of chill and haughty stars across the shocked corn and the supine delivered earth, lonely and sad and wild. Winter: season of sin and death. The geese were going south, but his direction was steadily north. In an Ohio town one night, in a saloon, he got t
o know a man who was travelling from county seat to county seat with a pacing horse, making the county fairs. The man was cunning in a cravatless collar, lachrymosely panegyric of the pacing of the horse; and together they drifted south again and again his garments became impregnated with ammonia. Horses smelled good again, rankly ammoniac, with their ears like frost-touched vine leaves.

  [Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1973, based on Faulkner’s apparently unfinished manuscript, probably written in the spring or early summer of 1925. That text is printed here.

  An unusual feature of the piece is its very clear autobiographical content. Faulkner may possibly have intended it to be a short story, and not everything in it should be taken literally, but in the part he completed he drew upon his own life to a greater extent than he did in any piece of fiction he ever wrote. Not until a quarter of a century later, in the part-fictional essay “Mississippi,” did he again so clearly center a piece of writing upon his own experiences.]

  The Composition, Editing, and

  Cutting of Flags in the Dust*

  One day about two years ago I was speculating idly upon time and death when the thought occurred to me that doubtless as my flesh acquiesced more and more to the standardised compulsions of breath, there would come a day on which the palate of my soul would no longer react to the simple bread-and-salt of the world as I had found it in the finding years, just as after a while the physical palate remains apathetic until teased by truffles. And so I began casting about.

  All that I really desired was a touchstone simply; a simple word or gesture, but having been these two years previously under the curse of words, having known twice before the agony of ink, nothing served but that I try by main strength to recreate between the covers of a book the world I was already preparing to lose and regret, feeling, with the morbidity of the young, that I was not only on the verge of decrepitude, but that growing old was to be an experience peculiar to myself alone out of all the teeming world, and desiring, if not the capture of that world and the fixing of it as you’d preserve a branch or a leaf, to indicate the lost forest, at least to keep the evocative skeleton of the dessicated leaf.

  So I began to write, without much purpose, until I realised that to make it truely evocative it must be personal, in order to not only preserve my own interest in the writing, but to preserve my belief in the savor of the bread-and-salt. So I put people in it, since what can be more personal than reproduction, in its two senses, the aesthetic and the mammalian. In its one sense, really, since the aesthetic is still the female principle, the desire to feel the bones spreading and parting with something alive begotten of the ego and conceived by the protesting unleashing of flesh. So I got some people, some I invented, others I created out of tales I learned of nigger cooks and stable boys of all ages between one-armed Joby, eighteen, who taught me to write my name in red ink on the linen duster he wore for some reason we have both forgotten, to old Louvinia who remembered when the stars “fell” and who called my grandfather and my father by their Christian names until she died, in the long drowsy afternoons. Created I say, because they are composed partly from what they were in actual life and partly from what they should have been and were not: thus I improved on God, who, dramatic though He be, has no sense, no feeling for theatre.

  And neither had I, for the first publisher to whom I submitted six hundred odd pages of mss. refused it on the ground that it was chaotic, without head or tail. I was shocked; my first emotion was blind protest, then I became objective for an instant, like a parent who is told that its child is a thief or an idiot or a leper; for a dreadful moment I contemplated it with consternation and despair, then like the parent I hid my own eyes in the fury of denial. I clung stubbornly to my illusion; I showed the mss. to a number of friends, who told me the same general thing—that the book lacked any form whatever; at last one of them took it to another publisher, who proposed to edit it enough to see just what was there.

  In the meantime I had refused to have anything to do with it. I prefaced this by arguing hotly with the person designated to edit the mss. on all occasions that he was clumsy enough to be run to earth. I said, “A cabbage has grown, matured. You look at that cabbage; it is not symmetrical; you say, I will trim this cabbage off and make it art; I will make it resemble a peacock or a pagoda or three doughnuts. Very good, I say: you do that, then the cabbage will be dead.”

  “Then we’ll make some kraut out of it,” he said. “The same amount of sour kraut will feed twice as many people as cabbage.” A day or so later he came to me and showed me the mss. “The trouble is,” he said, “is that you had about six books in here. You were trying to write them all at once.” He showed me what he meant, what he had done, and I realised for the first time that I had done better than I knew and the long work I had had to create opened before me and I felt myself surrounded by the limbo in which the shady visions, the host which stretched half formed, waiting each with its portion of that verisimilitude which is to bind into a whole the world which for some reason I believe should not pass utterly out of the memory of man, and I contemplated those shady but ingenious shapes by reason of whose labor I might reaffirm the impulses of my own ego in this actual world without stability, with a lot of humbleness, and I speculated on time and death and wondered if I had invented the world to which I should give life or if it had invented me, giving me an illusion of quickness.

  * In March 1934 Faulkner mailed from Oxford to his agent Morton Goldman in New York an untitled two-page manuscript describing the writing of his third novel, Flags in the Dust (though the title does not appear in the piece), its rejection by his publisher, and its subsequent editing and cutting by another hand. (That person was his friend and future agent Ben Wasson, also not named.) The manuscript is obviously early and was sent to his agent not for publication, for the handwriting is difficult to read, but presumably in the hope that it might be sold to a collector. (Faulkner was having serious financial difficulties at this time.) And it is possible that he was willing to dispose of the manuscript because he had already made a typescript from it, which is now not thought to have survived.

  The piece was first transcribed and published by Joseph Blotner in the Yale University Library Gazette, January 1973, as “William Faulkner’s Essay on the Composition of Sartoris” The piece was subsequently edited by George Hayhoe and this editor, and a clear text, with textual notes, appeared as an appendix to Hayhoe’s 1979 University of South Carolina doctoral dissertation, “A Critical and Textual Study of William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust” which this editor directed. That clear text, with further emendations, is printed here.

  It is difficult to tell exactly when the piece was written. Faulkner states that this was two years after he began Flags which, if true, would place it in the late fall of 1928 or early in 1929. But it may well date from as much as a year later.

  What was Faulkner’s purpose in writing it? Perhaps it is a draft of a memorandum for the publisher of Sartoris—or for Wasson. Certainly his care in describing his reactions to the rejection and subsequent editing and cutting of his novel suggests that he intended to make some use of it, perhaps even publish it in some form. Hayhoe thinks it may have been written as an introduction for a later edition or reissue of Sartoris. But Faulkner would not have thought that so severe a criticism of the novel could have been a part of its republication, and he may have written it only for his own benefit.

  Mac Grider’s Son*

  About twice a year Charlie Hayes and I do a little barracks or airport fishing. In the winter it will be at the stove in Mr. Holmes’ office, but in the summer almost any shade, even that of an airplane wing, will do. It is mostly in Canada or about the Great Lakes, though during the past two years we have got as far south as Reelfoot Lake or even Arkansas; sometimes I suppose we really believe that we are going to do it.

  So (it was Saturday a week ago; my brother was getting our airplane gassed at Municipal Airport to go down home and I went over to Mrs. Caya’s to
get some chewing gum), when I went in the door and saw Hayes and another man at the counter, I immediately tied on a fly and began to strip off some line. Hayes and the other man were not eating. They both wore goggles, so I knew that he was a student even before I saw that Hayes had a pencil and paper and was drawing a diagram of an aerofoil.

  “This is Mister So-and-So,” Hayes said: that’s the way I hear names, being completely lacking in that presence of mind which catches names at once. Or maybe I was already making a false cast, reaching into my pocket for the nickel for the gum and Hayes and I already leaving Chicago for the North Michigan lakes, when the other man offered me a cigaret. I realized then that I had taken out a match box along with the nickel, and suddenly I thought, remembered, or maybe just registered: Grider? Grider?

  “Mac Grider’s son, George,” Hayes said. Then I looked at the other for the first time, remembering him as I had glanced at him from the back as I came in: a man in the same sense in which they speak of each other as men in colleges, because even from the back that’s what he looked like. Like he might be on the sophomore boxing team; big in the shoulders but not especially big anywhere else, in an open shirt and a pair of summer pants, with a young face good between the eyes and a mouth and chin more delicate than you might expect.

  “Oh,” I said. Then Hayes and I were well up toward Sault Ste. Marie, and, since the weather chart said that it would be cooler tomorrow, we had killed a moose or two. Then my brother called me; we all went out together, I slowing until Grider came up.