WILLIAM FALKNER.
Oxford, Miss.
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, February 15, 1931]
* The Memphis Commercial Appeal, February 2, 1931, published a letter from W. H. James, a black man from Starkville, Mississippi, praising a recently organized anti-lynching women’s group in Mississippi. In it James stated: “How strange it seems that history never gave a record of a single lynching until after the days of reconstruction.”
In a letter signed “William Falkner” and published in the Commercial Appeal, February 15, Faulkner responded at some length. This reply, with James’s letter, was included in an essay by Neil R. McMillen and Noel Polk, “Faulkner on Lynching,” Faulkner Journal, Fall 1992 (i.e., Spring 1994). That text is printed here.
BLURB FOR Men in Darkness, BY JAMES HANLEY*
A damned fine job. That’s language: not British, not American, not South African, not Ebury Street nor Chicago: just language. It’s almost like a good clean cyclone or a dose of salts, since most books nowadays sound like they were written either by pansies or stallions.
* This blurb by Faulkner appeared on the dust jacket of the first American edition of James Hanley’s novel Boy (New York: Knopf, 1932).
BLURB AND PROMOTIONAL USE OF LETTER TO CLIFTON CUTHBERT**
“I have just finished your book,” William Faulkner writes to Clifton Cuthbert, author of JOY STREET, just published by William Godwin. “I hated to put it down even to sleep. I would not have believed (save for that unmistakable quality of freshness) it to be a first book. In fact, as regards craftsmanship, knowing what to tell and what not to tell, it’s one of the best first books I have ever read.”
[William Faulkner: The Carl Petersen Collection, Berkeley, 1991]
“The story is very exciting; I hated to put it down even to sleep. I would not have believed (save for that unmistakable quality of freshness) it to be a first book. In fact, as regards craftsmanship, knowing what to tell and what not to tell, it’s one of the best first books I ever read.”
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Jacket of Thunder without Rain, New York, 1933]
** On the dust jacket of the first edition of the novel Thunder without Rain, by Clifton Cuthbert (New York: William Godwin, 1933), appears a blurb by Faulkner praising Cuthbert’s first novel, Joy Street. The text of the blurb is taken from Faulkner’s letter to Cuthbert, probably written in late 1931 or early 1932, which appeared in an unidentified New York newspaper. A clipping of the published letter was quoted in William Faulkner: The Carl Petersen Collection, compiled by Peter B. Howard, Berkeley, Calif., 1991. That text of the letter, with the publisher’s notations, is printed here, as is the dust jacket blurb text, which differs slightly.
—
CLASSIFIED AD IN THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal*
I will not be responsible for any debt incurred or bills made, or notes or checks signed by Mrs. William Faulkner or Mrs. Estelle Oldham Faulkner.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
*This classified ad appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 22, 1936, and was reprinted in the Oxford Eagle, June 25, soon after Faulkner’s return from a script-writing stint in Hollywood, where he and Meta Carpenter had become lovers. He wrote to her that Estelle, in spite of his warnings to local merchants, “had managed to charge up to about a thousand dollars during his absence.” (See A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter, by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten, New York, 1976.) Joseph Blotner included the Commercial Appeal text in Faulkner: A Biography, vol. 2, New York, 1974. That text is printed here.
INSCRIPTION ON THE MONUMENT TO LAFAYETTE COUNTY’S WORLD WAR II DEAD*
AFRICA ALASKA ASIA
EUROPE THE PACIFIC
DEC. 7, 1941 SEPT. 2, 1945
THEY HELD NOT THEIRS,
BUT ALL MEN’S LIBERTY,
THIS FAR FROM HOME
TO THIS LAST SACRIFICE.
* Faulkner was the anonymous author of the inscription on the monument to Lafayette County’s World War II dead. Erected in 1947, it stands on the north side of the courthouse in Oxford. The text was first published in the Oxford Eagle, February 13, 1947, where it was attributed to Faulkner. One change was made in the text for the monument: the date “Sept. 2, 1945” had been “Aug. 15, 1945” in the Eagle.
The Eagle text, and the change for the monument, appeared in James B. Meriwether, “Faulkner and the World War II Monument in Oxford,” in A Faulkner Miscellany, ed. James B. Meriwether, University Press of Mississippi, 1974.
LETTER TO THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
I have just received a letter from a citizen of Chickasaw County, where the killing occurred and the parties to it lived, about the Chickasaw-Calhoun County tragedy in which three white men are said to have dragged an unarmed Negro farmer from his wagon and, in the presence of his wife and children, beat him to death with an automobile tool, the trial of which was transferred by change of venue to Calhoun County, where the defendant was declared not guilty on the grounds of self-defense.
The letter is not signed.
I think I understand why: those who, even at odds of three to one, were reduced to that extremity for self-preservation, will probably not hesitate to use more of the same kind of self-defense on any critic of their behavior.
So I don’t quote the body of the letter at this time. There is no need for it, since the men’s lawyers have already implied the same thing in achieving a change of venue from the county and the people who knew the clients best.
But I will quote this:
“The people (of Chickasaw County) knew Malcolm Wright.
“The man whose place this Negro rented had arranged that the place should go to him in the event that the landlord died first; that is, the small farm which Wright had worked for years was to be his as provided by will.
“My little colored maid, a young married woman, said, ‘Mama always told us children that if we kept our place and did right, nothing would ever harm us. But Malcolm Wright kept his place and always tried to do right.’ ”
That’s the important part, not just tragic but terrifying. All that the Negro has, he got from us, the white people. That is, his ways and habits are our ways and habits, because he had to learn and ape our ways and habits in order to live among us. We taught him to speak a language, and read it, to eat and think as we eat and think, to wear the same clothes, to want the same automobile, the same pleasures, to farm the same land by the same methods to raise the same cotton and corn; we even invented and taught him his religion and his vices; the homely and primitive worship, the malt whisky and the dice.
And now we seem to be offering him a postgraduate course. And if this—not just the murdering of little children in their beds at night, or the dragging of unarmed fathers out of wagons on public roads and beating them to death with iron rods while their wives and children watch, but the seed, the heritage of desperation and hatred in the blood of their kin and descendants—is what we have set out to teach them now, then, ladies and gentlemen, we had better be afraid.
Some of us already are—fear and grieve both. But so far all some of us either dare or can do is raise anonymous voices like the above: to which tragic pass has come this country, this land, America, founded by oppressed people that there shall be forever a refuge where no man shall oppress another, which only yesterday took share in a bloody war on the principle that every man’s life and liberty shall be safe and secure, Mason, Methodist, Jew, Republican, Atheist, Vegetarian or Swedenborgian:—to what tragic pass, when that condition is not only condoned but even supported and so perpetuated by precedent, for whatever supported and so perpetuated by precedent, for whatever the reason—ignorance or bigotry or—basest of all—the employment of the ignorance and bigotry for preferment or money, wherein a citizen dare not raise his voice against outrage and injustice for fear of martyrdom.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 30, 1950]
BLURB FOR The End of the Affair,
BY GRAHAM GREENE*
… for me one of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
* From the rear panel of the dust jacket of the first edition of Graham Greene’s novel Loser Takes All (London: Heinemann, 1955). It was taken from a letter Faulkner wrote to Harold Raymond, senior partner of Chatto and Windus, his English publisher, January 22, 1952. The letter is published in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner, New York, 1977.
DRAFT OF SEPTEMBER 15, 1957, LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS Commercial Appeal*
The undersigned agrees with writer M. J. Greer (Letters to the Editor, Sept. 1st.) in his practical evaluation of the segregation problem. All the laws in the world will not make white and non-white people mix if one of the parties doesn’t want to, just as all the laws in the world cant keep them separate if both parties want to mix.
I still dont believe the Negro wants to “mix” with white people. I dont believe he likes white people that much. But, from three hundred years of association with white people, he has become enough like the white man to rebel at a culture which holds him inferior and second class simply because of his race and color—which, because of his pigment, denies him privilege which anyone else with a different color of skin, possesses by natural right. He doesn’t want to be in the white man’s churches and schools anymore than he wants the white man in his: he simply wants the right to choose not to enter them.
A few years ago the Supreme Court rendered a decision which we white Southerners didn’t like, and resisted. As a result, last month Congress would have passed a bill containing ramifications and implications a good deal more threatening than the presence of a Negro child in a white school or a Negro vote in a white ballot box, if there hadn’t been one expert on hand to see it in time. So we escaped—that time. But as long as the Negro continues to be held inferior and second class in citizenship—that is, subject to taxes and military service, yet denied the economic and political and educational equality giving him at least the right and competence to vote for, even if not represented among, them who tax and draft him—Congress will continue to be offered bills containing these ramifications and implications visible only to an expert, until some day that expert wont be on hand to save us, and one of them will pass. But at least we will have the satisfaction of knowing that we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
If we really want to make admission to our schools selective and restrictive and still stay clear of Congress and the Supreme Court, all we need do is raise the standards of the grades and classes to that level where the schools themselves will exclude the inferior and the unfit—which we would have done long ago if we had wanted really to train and educate our children. But that would exclude some white pupils too so
[Unfinished]
* Faulkner’s letter to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 15, 1957, was included in the first edition of this collection, and is found here on this page. An unfinished but much longer draft of the letter appears on the verso of two pages of The Mansion’s typescript, and it was published in “Faulkner’s Typescripts of The Town,” by Eileen Gregory, Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1973. That text is printed here.
ESTATE ADMINISTRATOR’S NOTICE
STATE OF MISSISSIPPI COUNTY OF LAFAYETTE ADMINISTRATOR’S NOTICE TO CREDITORS OF MAUDE BUTLER FALKNER
Letters of Administration having been granted on the 18th day of October 1960 by the Chancery Court of Lafayette County, Mississippi, to the undersigned upon the estate of Maude Butler Falkner, deceased, notice is hereby given to all persons having claims against said estate to present the same to the clerk of said Court for probate and registration according to law within six months from this date, or they will be forever barred.
This 17th day of October, 1960.
William C. Falkner, Administrator
Jesse J. Hardin, Clerk
By Mary Wilson, D.C.
[Faulkner’s mother died October 16, 1960. This estate administrator’s notice was published in the Oxford Eagle, October 20, 1960, and repeated on October 27 and November 3.]
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Charles Frazier
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Salman Rushdie
•
Oliver Sacks
•
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal
WILLIAM FAULKNER
(1897–1962)
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the ‘u’ to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather ‘The Old Colonel,’ a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called The White Rose of Memphis, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the ‘ink stain’ from him.
Never fond of school, Faulkner left at the end of football season his senior year of high school, and began working at his grandfather’s bank. In 1918, after his plans to marry his sweetheart Estelle Oldham were squashed by their families, he tried to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army but was rejected because he did not meet the height and weight requirements. He went to Canada, where he pretended to be an Englishman and joined the RAF training program there. Although he did not complete his training until after the war ended and never saw combat, he returned to his hometown in uniform, boasting of war wounds. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi, where he began to publish his poetry.
After spending a short time living in New York, he again returned to Oxford, where he worked at the university post office. His first book, a collection of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published at Faulkner’s own expense in 1924. The writer Sherwood Anderson, whom he met in New Orleans in 1925, encouraged him to try writing fiction, and his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1926. It was followed by Mosquitoes. His next novel, which he titled Flags in the Dust, was rejected by his publisher and twelve others to whom he submitted it. It was eventually published in drastically edited form as Sartoris (the original version was not issued until after his death). Meanwhile, he was writing The Sound and the Fury, which, after being rejected by one publisher, came out in 1929 and received many ecstatic reviews, although it sold poorly. Yet again, a new novel, Sanctuary, was initially rejected by his publisher, this time as ‘too shocking.’ While working on the night shift at a power plant, Faulkner wrote what he was determined would be his masterpiece, As I Lay Dying. He finished it in about seven weeks, and it was published in 1930, again to generally good reviews and mediocre sales.
In 1929 Faulkner had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, after her divorce from her first husband. They had a premature daughter, Alabama, who died ten days after birth in 1931; a second
daughter, Jill, was born in 1933.
With the eventual publication of his most sensational and violent (as well as, up till then, most successful) novel, Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner was invited to write scripts for MGM and Warner Brothers, where he was responsible for much of the dialogue in the film versions of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and many other films. He continued to write novels and published many stories in the popular magazines. Light in August (1932) was his first attempt to address the racial issues of the South, an effort continued in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). By 1946, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print in the United States (although they remained well-regarded in Europe), and he was seen as a minor, regional writer. But then the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, who had earlier championed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others of their generation, put together The Portable Faulkner, and once again Faulkner’s genius was recognized, this time for good. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as many other awards and accolades, including the National Book Award and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s Legion of Honor.
In addition to several collections of short fiction, his other novels include Pylon (1935), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962).