William Faulkner

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“Grief, Like Few Things Else, Is A Private Affair”

January 27, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

William Styron attended his idol William Faulkner’s 1962 funeral and filed a report for Life. The opening of the questionably titled, “As He Lay Dead, a Bitter Grief“:

“He detested more than anything the invasion of his privacy. Though I am made to feel welcome in the house by Mrs. Faulkner and by his daughter, Jill, and though I know that the welcome is sincere, I feel an intruder nonetheless. Grief, like few things else, is a private affair. Moreover, Faulkner hated those (and there were many) who would poke about in his private life–literary snoops and gossips yearning for the brief glimpse of propinquity with greatness and a mite of reflected fame. He had said himself more than once, quite rightly, that the only thing that should matter to other people about a wirter is his books. Now that he is dead and helpless in a gray wooden coffin. I feel even more an interloper, prying around in a place I should not be.

But the first fact of the day, aside from that final fact of a death which has so diminished us, is the heat, and it is a heat which is like a small mean death itself, as if one were being smothered to extinction in a damp woolen overcoat. Even the newspapers in Memphis, 60 miles to the north, have commented on the ferocious weather. Oxford lies drowned in heat, and the feeling around the courthouse square on this Saturday forenoon is a hot, sweaty languor bordering on desperation. Parked slantwise against the curb, Fords and Chevrolets and pickup trucks bake in merciless sunlight. People in Mississippi have learned to move gradually, almost timidly, in this climate. They walk with both caution and deliberation. Beneath the portico of the First National Bank and around the scantily shaded walks around the courthouse itself, the traffic of shirtsleeved farmers and dewy-browed housewives and marketing Negroes is listless and slow moving. Painted high up against the side of a building to the west of the courthouse and surmounted by a painted Confederate flag is a huge sign at least 20 feet long reading ‘Rebel Cosmetology College.’ Sign, flag and wall, dominating one hot angle of the square, are caught in blazing light and seem to verge perilously close to combustion. It is a monumental heat, heat so desolating to the body and spirit as to have the quality of a half-remembered bad dream, until one realizes that it has, indeed, been encountered before, in all these novels and stories of Faulkner through which this unholy weather–and other weather more benign–moves with almost touchable reality.”

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“The Vacant Ice Looked Tired, Though It Shouldn’t Have”

August 16, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Kudos to the folks at Open Culture for finding an archived Sports Illustrated article by William Faulkner, who reported on attending his first hockey game in 1955. An excerpt from “An Innocent at Rinkside“:

The vacant ice looked tired, though it shouldn’t have. They told him it had been put down only a few minutes ago following a basketball game, and after the hockey match it would be taken up again to make room for something else. But it looked not expectant but resigned, like the mirror simulating ice in the Christmas store window, not before the miniature fir trees and reindeer and cosy lamplit cottage were arranged upon it, but after they had been dismantled and cleared away.

Then it was filled with motion, speed. To the innocent, who had never seen it before, it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful, as if an inspired choreographer had drilled a willing and patient and hard-working troupe of dancers—a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.

Then he learned to find the puck and follow it. Then the individual players would emerge. They would not emerge like the sweating barehanded behemoths from the troglodyte mass of football, but instead as fluid and fast and effortless as rapier thrusts or lightning—Richard with something of the passionate glittering fatal alien quality of snakes, Geoffrion like an agile ruthless precocious boy who maybe couldn’t do anything else but then he didn’t need to; and others—the veteran Laprade, still with the know-how and the grace. But he had time too now, or rather time had him, and what remained was no longer expendable that recklessly, heedlessly, successfully; not enough of it left now to buy fresh passion and fresh triumph with.•

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“Boom Boom” Geoffrion in his prime:

“Boom Boom” selling beer in 1985:

Another William Faulkner post:

 

Another classic Sports Illustrated article:

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“Faulkner Is A Good Stylist, But Practically Unreadable In Content”

January 4, 2011 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

The Objectivist novelist Ayn Rand sat down for an interview with Playboy in 1964, back when that magazine routinely did Q&As with incredible subjects. She gave opinions on everything from politics to philosophy to religion to literature. An excerpt from the interview, conducted by Alvin Toffler, in which she shares her ardently contrarian views of novelists of that era:

“Playboy: Are there any novelists whom you admire?

Ayn Rand: Yes. Victor Hugo.

Playboy: What about modern novelists?

Ayn Rand: No, there is no one that I could say I admire among the so-called serious writers. I prefer the popular literature of today, which is today’s remnant of Romanticism. My favorite is Mickey Spillane.

Playboy: Why do you like him?

Ayn Rand: Because he is primarily a moralist. In a primitive form, the form of a detective novel, he presents the conflict of good and evil, in terms of black and white. He does not present a nasty gray mixture of indistinguishable scoundrels on both sides. He presents an uncompromising conflict. As a writer, he is brilliantly expert at the aspect of literature which I consider most important: plot structure.

Playboy: What do you think of Faulkner?

Ayn Rand: Not very much. He is a good stylist, but practically unreadable in content–so I’ve read very little of him.

Playboy: What about Nabokov?

Ayn Rand: I have read only one book of his and a half–the half was Lolita, which I couldn’t finish. He is a brilliant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill can justify them.”

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The Bootlegger, Sherwood Anderson And The Brothel: How William Faulkner Became A Novelist

July 27, 2010 in Books, Urban Studies | Permalink

William Faulkner: "And the Madam had literary aspirations and the three of us would sit in the courtyard and she would supply the whiskey..." (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)

In 1957-58, William Faulkner was the University of Virginia’s first writer-in-residence. The University has done a great thing by putting its many hours of Faulkner audio archives online. You can listen to entire lectures or search for pieces of audio by keyword. Once you start playing around with it, time slips away.

In one segment, Faulkner describes the unusual events that led to his first novel being published. It seems like it could be partly a tall tale, but who knows? (Oddly, it’s not the first time this site has mentioned Faulkner and brothels in a post.) A transcript of his amusing story:

“I was running a launch for a New Orleans bootlegger then down across Pontratrain down Industrial Canal into the Gulf to an island where we would pick up the sugar cane alcohol that came up from the Caribbean and bring that back to his kitchen and he would turn it  into scotch and gin and bourbon, whatever he wanted.

Sherwood Anderson in Central Park in NYC in 1939. (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)

I met Sherwood Anderson who lived in New Orleans at the time and I liked him very much just as you meet a man and you know that you’ll get along with him. We would meet in afternoons and sit in parks and he would talk and I would listen. We would meet again in the evening and go to a well-known, very elegant brothel then. And the Madam had literary aspirations and the three of us would sit in the courtyard and she would supply the whiskey and we would drink and he would talk and she would talk and I would listen. And the next morning I went to see him. He was in seclusion working.

That would go on day after day, afternoons and evenings, he would sit over whiskey and talk and I would listen. I thought that if that was the life it took to be a writer that was the life for me. And so I wrote my first book and when I finished, Mr. Anderson said, ‘I’ll make a trade with you. If I don’t have to read it, I’ll tell my publisher to take it.’ So I said ‘done’ and he told his publisher to take it.”

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Some Genius Decided To Bother Harper Lee

July 2, 2010 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Harper Lee reunites with Boo Radley in 2007. (Image by Eric Draper.)

With the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird upon us, some brainiac from the Daily Mail thought it was a good idea to show up unannounced and bother novelist Harper Lee for an interview, even though Lee hasn’t been interested in doing that kind of thing for more than 45 years. The reporter was politely rebuffed. Good for Lee. Back when she was open to discussing her work, Lee  sat down with Roy Newquist in 1964 and covered many topics, including the then-state of contemporary writing. An excerpt:

“Roy Newquist: When you look at American writing today, perhaps American theatre too, what do you find that you most admire? And, conversely, what do you most deplore?

Harper Lee: Let me see if I can take that backward and work into it. I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing, and especially in the American theatre, is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this—the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea. It takes time and patience and effort to turn out a work of art, and few people seem willing to go all the way.

I see a great deal of sloppiness and I deplore it. I suppose the reason I’m so down on it is because I see tendencies in myself to be sloppy, to be satisfied with something that’s not quite good enough. I think writers today are too easily pleased with their work. This is sad. I think the sloppiness and haste carry over into painting. The search, such as it is, is on canvas, not in the mind.

But back to writing. There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

Mockingbird: I don't care for the title. (Image by Eurico Zimbres.)

Now, as to what I think is good about writing. I think that right now, especially in the United States, we’re having a renaissance of the novel. I think that the novel has come into its own, that it has been pushed into its own by American writers. They have widened the scope of the art form. They have more or less opened it up.

Our writers, Faulkner, for instance, turned the novel into something Wolfe was trying to do. (They were contemporaries in a way, but Faulkner really carried out the mission.) It was a vision of enlargement, of using the novel form to encompass something much broader than our friends across the sea have done. I think this is something that’s been handed to us by Faulkner, Wolfe, and possibly (strangely enough) Theodore Dreiser.

Dreiser is a forgotten man, almost, but if you go back you can see what he was trying to do with the novel. He didn’t succeed because I think he imposed his own limitations.

All this is something that has been handed to us as writers today. We don’t have to fight for it, work for it; we have this wonderful literary heritage, and when I say “we” I speak in terms of my contemporaries.

There’s probably no better writer in this country today than Truman Capote. He is growing all the time. The next thing coming from Capote is not a novel—it’s a long piece of reportage, and I think it is going to make him bust loose as a novelist. He’s going to have even deeper dimension to his work. Capote, I think, is the greatest craftsman we have going.

Of course, there’s Mary McCarthy. You may not like her work, but she knows how to write. She knows how to put a novel together. Then there’s John Cheever—his Wapshot novels are absolutely first-rate. And in the southern family there’s Flannery O’Connor.

You can’t leave out John Updike—he’s so happily gifted in that he can create living human beings. At the same time he has a great respect for his language, for the tongue that gives him voice. And Peter De Vries, as far as I’m concerned, is the Evelyn Waugh of our time. I can’t pay anybody a greater compliment because Waugh is the living master, the baron of style.

These writers, these great ones, are doing something fresh and wonderful and powerful: they are exploring character in ways in which character has never been explored. They are not structured in the old patterns of hanging characters on a plot. Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.”

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The Best Job Faulkner Ever Had: Brothel Landlord

June 2, 2010 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

William Faulkner: "There is enough social life in the evening." (Image by Carl van Vechten.)

William Faulkner was better with a pen than a microphone. When he sat down for an interview with the Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner warned his interlocutor that he wasn’t partial to Q&As. “The reason I don’t like interviews,” he said, “is that I seem to react violently to personal questions.” But Faulkner did open up about what he thought was the finest job he ever had. An excerpt:

“Paris Review: Then what is the best environment for a writer?

William Faulkner: Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn’t care where it is. If you mean me, the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion, it’s the perfect milieu for a writer to work in. It gives him a perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and to go once very month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning, which is the best time of the day to work. There is enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in society; he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him ‘sir.’ All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him ‘sir.’ And he could call the police by their first names.”

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