William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi,
where his father was then working as a conductor on the railroad
built by the novelist’s great-grandfather, Colonel William Falkner
(without the “u”), author of
The White Rose of Memphis.
Soon the family moved to Oxford, thirty-five miles away, where young
Faulkner, although he was a voracious reader, failed to earn enough
credits to be graduated from the local high school. In 1918 he
enlisted as a student flyer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He spent
a little more than a year as a special student at the state
university, Ole Miss, and later worked as postmaster at the
university station until he was fired for reading on the job.
Encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, he wrote
Soldiers’ Pay
(1926). His first widely read book was
Sanctuary (1931), a
sensational novel which he says that he wrote for money after his
previous books—including
Mosquitoes (1927),
Sartoris
(1929),
The Sound and the Fury (1929), and
As I Lay
Dying (1930)—had failed to earn enough royalties to support a
family.
A steady succession of novels followed, most of them related to
what has come to be called the Yoknapatawpha saga:
Light in
August (1932),
Pylon (1935),
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936),
The Unvanquished (1938),
The Wild Palms
(1939),
The Hamlet (1940), and
Go Down, Moses, and Other
Stories (1941). Since World War II his principal works have been
Intruder in the Dust (1948),
A Fable (1954), and
The Town (1957). His
Collected Stories received the
National Book Award in 1951, as did
A Fable in 1955. In 1949
Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Recently, though shy and retiring, Faulkner has traveled widely,
lecturing for the United States Information Service.This conversation
took place in New York City, early in 1956.
INTERVIEWER
Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like
interviews.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to react
violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work,
I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may
not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the
answer may be different.
INTERVIEWER
How about yourself as a writer?
FAULKNER
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me,
Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are
about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
But what is important is
Hamlet and
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist
is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there
is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all
written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or
two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed
anyone since.
INTERVIEWER
But even if there seems nothing more to be said, isn’t perhaps
the individuality of the writer important?
FAULKNER
Very important to himself. Everybody else should be too busy with
the work to care about the individuality.
INTERVIEWER
And your contemporaries?
FAULKNER
All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on
the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my
opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I
would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist.
That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time
that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t,
which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he
matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to
cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of
perfection into suicide. I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist
wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the
short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And,
failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
INTERVIEWER
Is there any possible formula to follow in order to be a good
novelist?
FAULKNER
Ninety-nine percent talent ... ninety-nine percent discipline ...
ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he
does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot
higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better
than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than
yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know
why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is
completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from
anybody and everybody to get the work done.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean the writer should be completely ruthless?
FAULKNER
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be
completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes
him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security,
happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his
mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth
any number of old ladies.
INTERVIEWER
Then could the
lack of security, happiness, honor, be an
important factor in the artist’s creativity?
FAULKNER
No. They are important only to his peace and contentment, and art
has no concern with peace and contentment.
INTERVIEWER
Then what would be the best environment for a writer?
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 an artist to work in. It gives him 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 every month and pay off the local police. The place is
quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to
work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to
participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain
standing in his 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.
So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace,
whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a
cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up;
he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own
experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper,
tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
INTERVIEWER
Bourbon, you mean?
FAULKNER
No, I ain’t that particular. Between Scotch and nothing, I’ll
take Scotch.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned economic freedom. Does the writer need it?
FAULKNER
No. The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a
pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything good in writing to
come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer
never applies to a foundation. He’s too busy writing something. If
he isn’t first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn’t got time
or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers,
or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much
hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how
tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing
that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time
to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like
a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way
to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she
will do the crawling.
INTERVIEWER
Can working for the movies hurt your own writing?
FAULKNER
Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first-rate
writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there’s not anything
can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate
because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
INTERVIEWER
Does a writer compromise in writing for the movies?
FAULKNER
Always, because a moving picture is by its nature a collaboration,
and any collaboration is compromise because that is what the word
means—to give and to take.
INTERVIEWER
Which actors do you like to work with most?
FAULKNER
Humphrey Bogart is the one I’ve worked with best. He and I
worked together in
To Have and Have Not and
The Big
Sleep.
INTERVIEWER
Would you like to make another movie?
FAULKNER
Yes, I would like to make one of George Orwell’s
1984.
I have an idea for an ending which would prove the thesis I’m
always hammering at: that man is indestructible because of his simple
will to freedom.
INTERVIEWER
How do you get the best results in working for the movies?
FAULKNER
The moving-picture work of my own which seemed best to me was done
by the actors and the writer throwing the script away and inventing
the scene in actual rehearsal just before the camera turned on. If I
didn’t take, or feel I was capable of taking, motion-picture work
seriously, out of simple honesty to motion pictures and myself too, I
would not have tried. But I know now that I will never be a good
motion-picture writer; so that work will never have the urgency for
me which my own medium has.
INTERVIEWER
Would you comment on that legendary Hollywood experience you were
involved in?
FAULKNER
I had just completed a contract at MGM and was about to return
home. The director I had worked with said, “If you would like
another job here, just let me know and I will speak to the studio
about a new contract.” I thanked him and came home. About six
months later I wired my director friend that I would like another
job. Shortly after that I received a letter from my Hollywood agent
enclosing my first week’s paycheck. I was surprised because I had
expected first to get an official notice or recall and a contract
from the studio. I thought to myself, the contract is delayed and
will arrive in the next mail. Instead, a week later I got another
letter from the agent, enclosing my second week’s paycheck. That
began in November 1932 and continued until May 1933. Then I received
a telegram from the studio. It said: “William Faulkner, Oxford,
Miss. Where are you? MGM Studio.”
I wrote out a telegram: “MGM Studio, Culver City, California.
William Faulkner.”
The young lady operator said, “Where is the message, Mr.
Faulkner?” I said, “That’s it.” She said, “The rule book
says that I can’t send it without a message, you have to say
something.” So we went through her samples and selected I forget
which one—one of the canned anniversary-greeting messages. I sent
that. Next was a long-distance telephone call from the studio
directing me to get on the first airplane, go to New Orleans, and
report to Director Browning. I could have got on a train in Oxford
and been in New Orleans eight hours later. But I obeyed the studio
and went to Memphis, where an airplane did occasionally go to New
Orleans. Three days later, one did.
I arrived at Mr. Browning’s hotel about six p.m. and reported to
him. A party was going on. He told me to get a good night’s sleep
and be ready for an early start in the morning. I asked him about the
story. He said, “Oh, yes. Go to room so-and-so. That’s the
continuity writer. He’ll tell you what the story is.”
I went to the room as directed. The continuity writer was sitting
in there alone. I told him who I was and asked him about the story.
He said, “When you have written the dialogue I’ll let you see the
story.” I went back to Browning’s room and told him what had
happened. “Go back,” he said, “and tell that so-and-so—Never
mind, you get a good night’s sleep so we can get an early start in
the morning.”
So the next morning in a very smart rented launch all of us except
the continuity writer sailed down to Grand Isle, about a hundred
miles away, where the picture was to be shot, reaching there just in
time to eat lunch and have time to run the hundred miles back to New
Orleans before dark.
That went on for three weeks. Now and then I would worry a little
about the story, but Browning always said, “Stop worrying. Get a
good night’s sleep so we can get an early start tomorrow morning.”
One evening on our return I had barely entered my room when the
telephone rang. It was Browning. He told me to come to his room at
once. I did so. He had a telegram. It said: “Faulkner is fired. MGM
Studio.” “Don’t worry,” Browning said. “I’ll call that
so-and-so up this minute and not only make him put you back on the
payroll but send you a written apology.” There was a knock on the
door. It was a page with another telegram. This one said: “Browning
is fired. MGM Studio.” So I came back home. I presume Browning went
somewhere too. I imagine that continuity writer is still sitting in a
room somewhere with his weekly salary check clutched tightly in his
hand. They never did finish the film. But they did build a shrimp
village—a long platform on piles in the water with sheds built on
it—something like a wharf. The studio could have bought dozens of
them for forty or fifty dollars apiece. Instead, they built one of
their own, a false one. That is, a platform with a single wall on it,
so that when you opened the door and stepped through it, you stepped
right off onto the ocean itself. As they built it, on the first day,
the Cajun fisherman paddled up in his narrow, tricky pirogue made out
of a hollow log. He would sit in it all day long in the broiling sun
watching the strange white folks building this strange imitation
platform. The next day he was back in the pirogue with his whole
family, his wife nursing the baby, the other children, and the
mother-in-law, all to sit all that day in the broiling sun to watch
this foolish and incomprehensible activity. I was in New Orleans two
or three years later and heard that the Cajun people were still
coming in for miles to look at that imitation shrimp platform which a
lot of white people had rushed in and built and then abandoned.
INTERVIEWER
You say that the writer must compromise in working for the motion
pictures. How about his writing? Is he under any obligation to his
reader?
FAULKNER
His obligation is to get the work done the best he can do it;
whatever obligation he has left over after that he can spend any way
he likes. I myself am too busy to care about the public. I have no
time to wonder who is reading me. I don’t care about John Doe’s
opinion on my or anyone else’s work. Mine is the standard which has
to be met, which is when the work makes me feel the way I do when I
read
La Tentation de Saint Antoine, or the Old Testament.
They make me feel good. So does watching a bird make me feel good.
You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a
buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him.
He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
INTERVIEWER
What technique do you use to arrive at your standard?
FAULKNER
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested
in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no
shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach
yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good
artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has
supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he
wants to beat him.
INTERVIEWER
Then would you deny the validity of technique?
FAULKNER
By no means. Sometimes technique charges in and takes command of
the dream before the writer himself can get his hands on it. That is
tour de force and the finished work is simply a matter of fitting
bricks neatly together, since the writer knows probably every single
word right to the end before he puts the first one down. This
happened with
As I Lay Dying. It was not easy. No honest
work is. It was simple in that all the material was already at hand.
It took me just about six weeks in the spare time from a
twelve-hour-a-day job at manual labor. I simply imagined a group of
people and subjected them to the simple universal natural
catastrophes, which are flood and fire, with a simple natural motive
to give direction to their progress. But then, when technique does
not intervene, in another sense writing is easier too. Because with
me there is always a point in the book where the characters
themselves rise up and take charge and finish the job—say somewhere
about page 275. Of course I don’t know what would happen if I
finished the book on page 274. The quality an artist must have is
objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to
kid himself about it. Since none of my work has met my own standards,
I must judge it on the basis of that one which caused me the most
grief and anguish, as the mother loves the child who became the thief
or murderer more than the one who became the priest.
INTERVIEWER
What work is that?
FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury. I wrote it five separate times,
trying to tell the story, to rid myself of the dream which would
continue to anguish me until I did. It’s a tragedy of two lost
women: Caddy and her daughter. Dilsey is one of my own favorite
characters, because she is brave, courageous, generous, gentle, and
honest. She’s much more brave and honest and generous than me.
INTERVIEWER
How did
The Sound and the Fury begin?
FAULKNER
It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it
was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s
drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where
her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was
happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I
explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants
got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a
short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized
the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the
one of the fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe
to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been
offered love or affection or understanding.
I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the
idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by
someone capable only of knowing what happened but not why. I saw that
I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the
same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not
it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third
brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together
and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not
complete, not until fifteen years after the book was published, when
I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get the
story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace
from it. It’s the book I feel tenderest toward. I couldn’t leave
it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and
would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.
INTERVIEWER
What emotion does Benjy arouse in you?
FAULKNER
The only emotion I can have for Benjy is grief and pity for all
mankind. You can’t feel anything for Benjy because he doesn’t
feel anything. The only thing I can feel about him personally is
concern as to whether he is believable as I created him. He was a
prologue, like the gravedigger in the Elizabethan dramas. He serves
his purpose and is gone. Benjy is incapable of good and evil because
he had no knowledge of good and evil.
INTERVIEWER
Could Benjy feel love?
FAULKNER
Benjy wasn’t rational enough even to be selfish. He was an
animal. He recognized tenderness and love though he could not have
named them, and it was the threat to tenderness and love that caused
him to bellow when he felt the change in Caddy. He no longer had
Caddy; being an idiot he was not even aware that Caddy was missing.
He knew only that something was wrong, which left a vacuum in which
he grieved. He tried to fill that vacuum. The only thing he had was
one of Caddy’s discarded slippers. The slipper was his tenderness
and love, which he could not have named, but he knew only that it was
missing. He was dirty because he couldn’t coordinate and because
dirt meant nothing to him. He could no more distinguish between dirt
and cleanliness than between good and evil. The slipper gave him
comfort even though he no longer remembered the person to whom it had
once belonged, any more than he could remember why he grieved. If
Caddy had reappeared he probably would not have known her.
INTERVIEWER
Does the narcissus given to Benjy have some significance?
FAULKNER
The narcissus was given to Benjy to distract his attention. It was
simply a flower which happened to be handy that fifth of April. It
was not deliberate.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any artistic advantages in casting the novel in the form
of an allegory, as the Christian allegory you used in
A Fable?
FAULKNER
Same advantage the carpenter finds in building square corners in
order to build a square house. In
A Fable, the Christian
allegory was the right allegory to use in that particular story, like
an oblong, square corner is the right corner with which to build an
oblong, rectangular house.
INTERVIEWER
Does that mean an artist can use Christianity simply as just
another tool, as a carpenter would borrow a hammer?
FAULKNER
The carpenter we are speaking of never lacks that hammer. No one
is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It
is every individual’s individual code of behavior, by means of
which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to
be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or
crescent or whatever—that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty
inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against
which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot
teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It
shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code
and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a
matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.
Writers have always drawn, and always will draw, upon the allegories
of moral consciousness, for the reason that the allegories are
matchless—the three men in
Moby Dick, who represent the
trinity of conscience: knowing nothing, knowing but not caring,
knowing and caring. The same trinity is represented in
A Fable
by the young Jewish pilot officer, who said, “This is terrible. I
refuse to accept it, even if I must refuse life to do so”; the old
French Quartermaster General, who said, “This is terrible, but we
can weep and bear it”; and the English battalion runner, who said,
“This is terrible, I’m going to do something about it.”
INTERVIEWER
Are the two unrelated themes in
The Wild Palms brought
together in one book for any symbolic purpose? Is it, as certain
critics intimate, a kind of aesthetic counterpoint, or is it merely
haphazard?
FAULKNER
No, no. That was one story—the story of Charlotte Rittenmeyer
and Harry Wilbourne, who sacrificed everything for love and then lost
that. I did not know it would be two separate stories until after I
had started the book. When I reached the end of what is now the first
section of
The Wild Palms, I realized suddenly that
something was missing, it needed emphasis, something to lift it like
counterpoint in music. So I wrote on the “Old Man” story until
“The Wild Palms” story rose back to pitch. Then I stopped the
“Old Man” story at what is now its first section and took up “The
Wild Palms” story until it began again to sag. Then I raised it to
pitch again with another section of its antithesis, which is the
story of a man who got his love and spent the rest of the book
fleeing from it, even to the extent of voluntarily going back to jail
where he would be safe. They are only two stories by chance, perhaps
necessity. The story is that of Charlotte and Wilbourne.
INTERVIEWER
How much of your writing is based on personal experience?
FAULKNER
I can’t say. I never counted up. Because “how much” is not
important. A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and
imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which—can
supply the lack of the others. With me, a story usually begins with a
single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is
simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it
happened or what it caused to follow. A writer is trying to create
believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving
way he can. Obviously he must use as one of his tools the environment
which he knows. I would say that music is the easiest means in which
to express, since it came first in man’s experience and history.
But since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in
words what the pure music would have done better. That is, music
would express better and simpler, but I prefer to use words, as I
prefer to read rather than listen. I prefer silence to sound, and the
image produced by words occurs in silence. That is, the thunder and
the music of the prose take place in silence.
INTERVIEWER
Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after
they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for
them?
FAULKNER
Read it four times.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned experience, observation, and imagination as being
important for the writer. Would you include inspiration?
FAULKNER
I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know
what inspiration is—I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.
INTERVIEWER
As a writer you are said to be obsessed with violence.
FAULKNER
That’s like saying the carpenter is obsessed with his hammer.
Violence is simply one of the carpenter’s tools. The writer can no
more build with one tool than the carpenter can.
INTERVIEWER
Can you say how you started as a writer?
FAULKNER
I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was
necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood
Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to
people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or
two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see
him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I
decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer
was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I
found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn’t seen Mr.
Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time
he ever came to see me, and said, “What’s wrong? Are you mad at
me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and
walked out. When I finished the book—it was
Soldiers’ Pay—I
met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going,
and I said I’d finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will
make a trade with you. If he doesn’t have to read your manuscript
he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and
that’s how I became a writer.
INTERVIEWER
What were the kinds of work you were doing to earn that “little
money now and then”?
FAULKNER
Whatever came up. I could do a little of almost anything—run
boats, paint houses, fly airplanes. I never needed much money because
living was cheap in New Orleans then, and all I wanted was a place to
sleep, a little food, tobacco, and whiskey. There were many things I
could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for
the rest of the month. By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp. I
don’t want money badly enough to work for it. In my opinion it’s
a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest
things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day
after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for
eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for
eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and
everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
INTERVIEWER
You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but how do you regard
him as a writer?
FAULKNER
He was the father of my generation of American writers and the
tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He
has never received his proper evaluation. Dreiser is his older
brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.
INTERVIEWER
What about the European writers of that period?
FAULKNER
The two great men in my time were Mann and Joyce. You should
approach Joyce’s
Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist
preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
INTERVIEWER
How did you get your background in the Bible?
FAULKNER
My Great-Grandfather Murry was a kind and gentle man, to us
children anyway. That is, although he was a Scot, he was (to us)
neither especially pious nor stern either: he was simply a man of
inflexible principles. One of them was everybody, children on up
through all adults present, had to have a verse from the Bible ready
and glib at tongue-tip when we gathered at the table for breakfast
each morning; if you didn’t have your scripture verse ready, you
didn’t have any breakfast; you would be excused long enough to
leave the room and swot one up (there was a maiden aunt, a kind of
sergeant-major for this duty, who retired with the culprit and gave
him a brisk breezing which carried him over the jump next time).
It had to be an authentic, correct verse. While we were little, it
could be the same one, once you had it down good, morning after
morning, until you got a little older and bigger, when one morning
(by this time you would be pretty glib at it, galloping through
without even listening to yourself since you were already five or ten
minutes ahead, already among the ham and steak and fried chicken and
grits and sweet potatoes and two or three kinds of hot bread) you
would suddenly find his eyes on you—very blue, very kind and
gentle, and even now not stern so much as inflexible—and next
morning you had a new verse. In a way, that was when you discovered
that your childhood was over; you had outgrown it and entered the
world.
INTERVIEWER
Do you read your contemporaries?
FAULKNER
No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a
young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old
Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes,
Don Quixote—I read
that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac—he created
an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty
books—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville
occasionally and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick,
Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I’ve read these
books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to
the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d
meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.
INTERVIEWER
And Freud?
FAULKNER
Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I
have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did
either, and I’m sure Moby Dick didn’t.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever read mystery stories?
FAULKNER
I read Simenon because he reminds me something of Chekhov.
INTERVIEWER
What about your favorite characters?
FAULKNER
My favorite characters are Sarah Gamp—a cruel, ruthless woman, a
drunkard, opportunist, unreliable, most of her character was bad, but
at least it was character; Mrs. Harris, Falstaff, Prince Hal, Don
Quixote, and Sancho of course. Lady Macbeth I always admire. And
Bottom, Ophelia, and Mercutio—both he and Mrs. Gamp coped with
life, didn’t ask any favors, never whined. Huck Finn, of course,
and Jim. Tom Sawyer I never liked much—an awful prig. And then I
like Sut Lovingood, from a book written by George Harris about 1840
or 1850 in the Tennessee mountains. He had no illusions about
himself, did the best he could; at certain times he was a coward and
knew it and wasn’t ashamed; he never blamed his misfortunes on
anyone and never cursed God for them.
INTERVIEWER
Would you comment on the future of the novel?
FAULKNER
I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people
will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the
pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man’s capacity
to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture
writing in the Neanderthal cave.
INTERVIEWER
And how about the function of the critics?
FAULKNER
The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones
who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write
don’t have the time to read reviews. The critic too is trying to
say “Kilroy was here.” His function is not directed toward the
artist himself. The artist is a cut above the critic, for the artist
is writing something which will move the critic. The critic is
writing something which will move everybody but the artist.
INTERVIEWER
So you never feel the need to discuss your work with anyone?
FAULKNER
No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it
does I don’t need to talk about it. If it doesn’t please me,
talking about it won’t improve it, since the only thing to improve
it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a
writer. I don’t get any pleasure from talking shop.
INTERVIEWER
Critics claim that blood relationships are central in your novels.
FAULKNER
That is an opinion and, as I have said, I don’t read critics. I
doubt that a man trying to write about people is any more interested
in blood relationships than in the shape of their noses, unless they
are necessary to help the story move. If the writer concentrates on
what he does need to be interested in, which is the truth and the
human heart, he won’t have much time left for anything else, such
as ideas and facts like the shape of noses or blood relationships,
since in my opinion ideas and facts have very little connection with
truth.
INTERVIEWER
Critics also suggest that your characters never consciously choose
between good and evil.
FAULKNER
Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was
constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing
in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was
so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish
between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must
devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion
is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power,
pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by
force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make
choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral
conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with
himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept
from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
INTERVIEWER
Could you explain more what you mean by motion in relation to the
artist?
FAULKNER
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by
artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later,
when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since
man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave
something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This
is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall
of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday
pass.
INTERVIEWER
It has been said by Malcolm Cowley that your characters carry a
sense of submission to their fate.
FAULKNER
That is his opinion. I would say that some of them do and some of
them don’t, like everybody else’s characters. I would say that
Lena Grove in
Light in August coped pretty well with hers.
It didn’t really matter to her in her destiny whether her man was
Lucas Burch or not. It was her destiny to have a husband and children
and she knew it, and so she went out and attended to it without
asking help from anyone. She was the captain of her soul. One of the
calmest, sanest speeches I ever heard was when she said to Byron
Bunch at the very instant of repulsing his final desperate and
despairing attempt at rape, “Ain’t you ashamed? You might have
woke the baby.” She was never for one moment confused, frightened,
alarmed. She did not even know that she didn’t need pity. Her last
speech for example: “Here I ain’t been traveling but a month, and
I’m already in Tennessee. My, my, a body does get around.”
The Bundren family in
As I Lay Dying pretty well coped
with theirs. The father having lost his wife would naturally need
another one, so he got one. At one blow he not only replaced the
family cook, he acquired a gramophone to give them all pleasure while
they were resting. The pregnant daughter failed this time to undo her
condition, but she was not discouraged. She intended to try again,
and even if they all failed right up to the last, it wasn’t
anything but just another baby.
INTERVIEWER
And Mr. Cowley says you find it hard to create characters between
the ages of twenty and forty who are sympathetic.
FAULKNER
People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has
the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no
longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of
the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun
to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into
channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong
before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between
twenty and forty. The people around my home who have caused all the
interracial tension— the Milams and the Bryants (in the Emmett Till
murder) and the gangs of Negroes who grab a white woman and rape her
in revenge, the Hitlers, Napoleons, Lenins—all these people are
symbols of human suffering and anguish, all of them between twenty
and forty.
INTERVIEWER
You gave a statement to the papers at the time of the Emmett Till
killing. Have you anything to add to it here?
FAULKNER
No, only to repeat what I said before: that if we Americans are to
survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to
be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous
and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or
purple or blue or green. Maybe the purpose of this sorry and tragic
error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an
afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to
survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our
desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what
reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably
won’t.
INTERVIEWER
What happened to you between
Soldiers’ Pay and
Sartoris—that is, what caused you to begin the
Yoknapatawpha saga?
FAULKNER
With
Soldiers’ Pay I found out writing was fun. But I
found out afterward not only that each book had to have a design but
the whole output or sum of an artist’s work had to have a design.
With
Soldiers’ Pay and
Mosquitoes I wrote for the
sake of writing because it was fun. Beginning with
Sartoris
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was
worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to
exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I
would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to
its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I
created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God,
not only in space but in time too. The fact that I have moved my
characters around in time successfully, at least in my own
estimation, proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition
which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual
people. There is no such thing as
was—only
is. If
was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to
think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the
universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away
the universe itself would collapse. My last book will be the Doomsday
Book, the Golden Book, of Yoknapatawpha County. Then I shall break
the pencil and I’ll have to stop.
