Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

by William Faulkner

  None of them are long and none overtold—his sense of restraint along with his gift for narrative are the author’s best qualities—though I feel that some of them never warranted the telling to begin with—and most of them are tinged with a kind of sentimental journalese—that reportorial rapport which seems to know at once and by sheer instinct when any public figure enters town and where to find him—which shows especially in his nature descriptions. You are never arrested by a single description of night sky or night earth or sunset or moonlight or fog; you have seen it before a hundred times and it has been phrased just that way in ten thousand newspaper columns and magazines. But then, he contributed to a newspaper column I understand. But even if he had not, this could justly be excused him because of the sort of life a test pilot would have to lead: a life which would never dare solitude, whose even idleness must take place where people congregate, which would not dare retire into introspection where it might contemplate sheer language calmly or it would have to cease to be that of a test pilot. But he has undeniable narrative skill; he would doubtless have written whether he flew or not. In fact, the book itself indicates that he apparently wanted to write, or at least that he flew only to make money to support his family. And he was a Communist; he said himself, with an admirable calm simplicity, that he saw no other economic belief for one to hold: and so he would be the only Communist aviator outside of Russia because the idea of an American professional flyer and ex-Army officer professing Communism hardly makes sense. And “Return to Earth” will both speed your breathing and stop it, and “Back-Seat Pals” will split your sides, and “High Fight” will make any husband roar; and granted that one of a writer’s jobs is to show man in his always ludicrous and not always successful clashes with the world which he created, he did his job well.

  Because it was not Collins who hurt his book. He is dead, killed in the crash of an aeroplane which he was testing for the Navy, it being the custom of the Military to not permit its own pilots to test new aeroplanes. The last chapter in the book is entitled “I Am Dead” and consists of an obituary which Collins wrote himself. I dont mean this as any commentary on twentieth-century publishing methods, the crass come-on schemes of modern day publishing for whose benefit by an almost incredible fortuity he wrote the document, dared to it, I believe jokingly, by a friend, and I believe jokingly, complying because the book states that the dive which killed him was the last of a series on the last aeroplane which he intended to test, having perhaps gradually built up an assured income through his writing. It should have been a private document, shown you privately by the friend with whom he left it. You are sorry you read it in a book. It should not have been included. It should have been quoted from at most, quoted from not as the document which it is but for a figure which it contains, the only figure or phrase in the book which arrests the mind with the fine shock of poetry:

  The cold but vibrant fuselage was the last thing to feel my warm and living flesh

  But there is still another reason why it should not have been included. Because this time he overwrote himself, the only time in the book. Because, though he may have begun it jokingly, he did not continue since no man is going to joke to himself about his own death. So this time he overwrote. But I suppose this may be forgiven him too, since though a man stops sentimentalising about love probably the day he discovers that both he and his first sweetheart not only can desire and even take another but do, he probably never reaches that day when he no longer sentimentalises over his own passing.

  But this is not what I hold against the book. What I hold is, it is not what I had hoped for. I had hoped to find a kind of embryo, a still formless forerunner or symptom of a folklore of speed, the high speed of today which I believe stands a good deal nearer to the end of the limits which human beings and material were capable of when man first dug iron, than to the beginning of those limits as they stood ten or twelve years ago when man first began to go really fast. Not the limits for the machines but for the men who fly them: the limit at which blood vessels will burst and entrails rupture in making any sort of turn that will keep you in the same county, not to speak of co-ordination and perception of distance and depth, even when they invent or discover some way to alter further the law of top speed ratio to landing speed than by wing flaps so that all the flights will not have to start and stop from one of the Great Lakes. The precision pilots of today even must have absolutely perfect co-ordination and depth perception, so perhaps, being perfect, these will function at any speed up to infinity. But they will still have to do something about his blood vessels and guts. Perhaps they will contrive to create a kind of species or race like they used to create and nurture races of singers and eunuchs, like Mussolini’s Agello who flies more than four hundred miles an hour. They will be neither stalled ox nor game chicken, but capons: children culled by rules or even by machines from each generation and cloistered and in a sense emasculated and trained to conduct the vehicles in which the rest of us will hurtle from place to place. They will have to be taken in infancy because the precision pilot of today begins to train in his teens and is through in his thirties. These would be a species and in time a race and in time they would produce a folklore. But probably by then the rest of us could not decipher it, perhaps not even hear it since already we have objects which can outpace their own sound and so their very singers would travel in what to us would be a soundproof vacuum.

  But it was not of this folklore that I was thinking. That one would be years in the making. I had thought of one which might exist even now and of which I had hoped that this book might be the symptom, the first fumbling precursor. It would be a folklore not of the age of speed nor of the men who perform it, but of the speed itself, peopled not by anything human or even mortal but by the clever willful machines themselves carrying nothing that was born and will have to die or which can even suffer pain, moving without comprehensible purpose toward no discernible destination, producing a literature innocent of either love or hate and of course of pity or terror, and which would be the story of the final disappearance of life from the earth. I would watch them, the little puny mortals, vanishing against a vast and timeless void filled with the sound of incredible engines, within which furious meteors moving in no medium hurtled nowhere, neither pausing nor flagging, forever destroying themselves and one another, without love or even copulation forever renewing.

  [The original published text of Faulkner’s review of Test Pilot, by Jimmy Collins, in American Mercury, November 1935, was included in the first edition of this collection, and is found here on this page–this page. Subsequently, Faulkner’s typescript was found. It had been heavily edited: nearly three hundred words had been omitted and a title, “Folklore of the Air,” had been added. The typescript text was published in the Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1980. That text is printed here.]

  LETTER TO THE NEW ORLEANS Times-Item*

  “What is the matter with marriage?” I do not think there is anything the matter with marriage. The trouble is with the parties thereto. Man invariably gains unhappiness when he goes into a thing for the sole purpose of getting something. To take what he has at hand and to create from it his heart’s desire, is the thing. Men and women forget that the better the food, the quicker the indigestion.

  Two men or two women—forming a partnership, always remember that the other has weaknesses, and by taking into account the fallibility of mankind, they gain success and happiness. But so many men and women when they marry seem to ignore the fact that both must keep clearly in mind that thing which they wish to create, to attain, and so work for it together and with tolerance of each other.

  None of us will believe that our sorrows are ever brought about by ourselves. We all think that the world owes us happiness; and when we do not get it, we cast the blame upon that person nearest to us.

  The first frenzy of passion, of intimacy of mind and body, is never love. That is only the surf through which one must go to reach the calm sea of real love and
peace and contentedness. Breakers may be fun, but you cannot sail safely through breakers into port. And surely married people do want to reach some port together—some haven from which to look backward down golden years when mutual tolerance has removed some of the rough places and time has blotted out the rest.

  If people would but remember that passion is a fire which burns itself out, but that love is a fuel which feeds its never-dying fire, there would be no unhappy marriages.

  There is nothing wrong with marriage. If there were, man would have invented something else to take its place.

  [New Orleans Times-Item, April 4, 1925]

  * In the spring of 1925, the New Orleans Times-Item offered a prize of $10 each week for the best letter answering the question, “What Is the Matter with Marriage?” Faulkner wrote a winning letter, published with an introductory note about his poetry on April 4.

  LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS

  Commercial Appeal*

  In the matter of W. H. James’ letter on lynching in the Commercial Appeal Feb. 2.

  History gives no record of lynching prior to reconstruction days for several reasons.

  The slave-holders and slaves of the pre-Civil War time, out of whose relations lynchings did, or could, take place, were not representative of either people, any more than the Sicilian expatriates and shopping women in Chicago stores, out of whose accidental coinciding the murder of innocent bystanders (or fleers) occurs, are representative of European emigrants or American women and children, or of the General Cooks and the George Rogers Clarks who made Chicago possible.

  Secondly, there was no need for lynching until after reconstruction days.

  Thirdly, the people of the black race who get lynched are not representative of the black race, just as the people who lynch them are not representative of the white race.

  No balanced man can, I believe, hold any moral brief for lynching. Yet we in America have seen, ever since we set up to guide our own integral destiny, miscarriage of elementary justice on all hands. Like all new lands, not yet aware of our own strength, we have been the prey of opportunist and demagogues; of men whose sole claim to rule us was that they had not a clean shirt to their backs. So is it strange that at times we take violently back into our own hands that justice which we watched go astray in the blundering hands of those into which we put it voluntarily? I don’t say that we do not blunder with our “home-made” justice. We do. But he who was victim of our blundering, also blundered. I have yet to hear, outside of a novel or a story, of a man of any color and with a record beyond reproach, suffering violence at the hands of men who knew him.

  It will be said that the standard for a black man is stricter than that for a white man. This is obvious. To make an issue of it is to challenge and condemn the natural human desire which is in any man, black or white, to take advantage of what circumstance, not himself, has done for him. The strong (mentally or physically) black man takes advantage of the weak one; he is not only not censured, he is protected by law, since (and the white man the same) the law has found out that the many elemental material factors which compose a commonwealth are of value only when they are in the charge of some one, regardless of color and size and religion, who can protect them.

  It requires a certain amount of sentimentality, an escaping from the monotonous facts of day by day, to make a lynching. Note the crimes in compensation of which lynching occurs. Sacredness of womanhood, we call it. Not a thing, but a reaction: something so violent and so nebulous that even all the law words can not pin it down, since the law words were all invented in lands and by people who had had time to outgrow (or who could not afford) our American susceptibility to vocal resonance.

  Lynching is an American trait, characteristic. It is the black man’s misfortune that he suffers it, just as it is his misfortune that he suffers the following instances of white folks’ sentimentality.

  Let James go to his county tax collector, who will tell him (his county being fairly representative of Mississippi hill country as distinct from the delta) that there is more white-owned land sold up for taxes than colored-owned, though the delinquent list be the same. There may be reason for this, white man’s reason: as, for instance, it will be proved that the colored man had never had title to the land at all, having used, as they do, two or even three separate names in making trades or borrowing money from the government loan associations, and so having used the land tax-free for a year and made a crop and moved on. Thus: Joe Johnson arranges with a white man and a bank to buy a piece of land. He is about to make a good crop; he is a hard worker; maybe he runs the neighborhood blacksmith shop; he is getting ahead. Then one day the cashier of the bank and the Farm Loan secretary compare notes and they find that a certain John Jones has borrowed $700 on land identical in description with that in the temporary possession of one Joe Johnson. There’s nothing to do. Joe Johnson, or John Jones, tricked two white men. “Oh, well,” the white men, the cashier and the secretary say, “he’s a good man. He may make out.” And he not only may and will, but he perhaps does make a good crop by hard work. But he has first committed one felony in person and a second one by proxy in permitting to compound it one of that unwitting race which holds with the Bible that justice is a matter of violent and immediate retribution on the person of the sinner: a sentimentalist.

  There is a colored man, a friend who has helped me in my need and whom I have helped in his, who has eaten of my bread and between whom and myself the crass material balance of labor and recompense has long since faded from our ken, to be perhaps totted and receipted for in some better place, he hopes, who tells me now and then of his brother. They are sons of a slave. The brother went to Detroit years ago, where, he writes back, “he has not done a lick of work in 15 years, because the white folks up there give him food. All he has to do is, fall in a line at a designated place on a designated day, and receive the food or its equivalent in a printed form, which he sells to wop and bohunk immigrants who have not yet learned to talk enough English to save the middleman’s profit.”

  In Europe they don’t lynch people. But think of a man living for 15 years and doing nothing at all, in France say, or Italy. It cannot be done anywhere under the sun except in America.

  James speaks of “as humble and submissive as.…” Let him think about this. Humility and submissiveness is usually the part of a weak person waiting to take his advantage, without regard to color. Humility and submissiveness are as false a part of a black man’s social equipment as of a white man’s. He does not need them. And the black man who is a valuable integer in the social fabric (property owner, merchant; any one who does a fair day’s labor and receives a fair day’s wage and applies it toward the comfort of his present life and the security of his old age) has no reason to assume humility. And he does not do it. In fact, there is a certain class of colored people who trade in humility just as there is a certain class of people who trade in man’s other weaknesses and vices; it just happens that the colored man is better fitted to trade in humility, as the Irishman is for politics.

  James reminds us that history records no lynchings prior to reconstruction days. Neither does history record any peculiar and noticeable removal to, and sojourn in, the south of Yankees until that period. Particularly New Englanders, who had some time since begun to practice the custom of hanging people of whose conduct they did not approve. I have lived in Mississippi all my 30 years, yet most of the lynching[s] with which I am acquainted have occurred in outland newspapers; vide three I read of in French newspapers in Paris during a period of nine weeks, one of which happened at Oregon, D.C., Washington, the second at Halma, Alabama, D.C., America, and the third at a place called NveZique. They had photographs, flames and all, and the men there, looking at the camera. Most of them wore smock coats, and one man near the front had on wooden shoes.

  I hold no brief for lynching. No balanced man will deny that mob violence serves nothing, just as he will not deny that a lot of our natural and logical juris
prudence serves nothing either. It just happens that we—mobber and mobbee—live in this age. We will muddle through, and die in our beds, the deserving and the fortunate among us. Of course, with the population what it is, there are some of us that won’t. Some will die rich, and some will die on cross-ties soaked with gasoline, to make a holiday. But there is one curious thing about mobs. Like our juries, they have a way of being right.