Faulkner, William 1897-1962

FAULKNER, WILLIAM 1897-1962

Writer

Awards

A self-described Mississippi farmer was hailed as one of the world's greatest writers in 1950. In June the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded William Faulkner the Howells Medal, their highest honor to a senior writer, and in November Faulkner was named winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, which the Swedish Academy had withheld the previous year. In America the choice was roundly criticized. Faulkner was variously described in the popular press as depraved, obscure, insignificant, and irrelevant. As recently as 1945 none of Faulkner's seventeen books had been in print, and his two new novels of the early 1950s, A Requiem for a Nun (1951) and A Fable (1954), did little in the minds of most readers to justify the American Academy's and the Swedish Academy's judgments.

A Requiem for a Nun.

It was unclear to most readers whether A Requiem for a Nun was a play or a novel. It had elements of each and was criticized with equal vehemence when presented in either form. Faulkner clarified by explaining that the work | was a novel in the form of a play. Even setting aside confusion about the form, readers in the 1950s were | offended by the plot, which recalls brutal rape and abandonment in the context of a murder trial for infanticide that results in the death sentence of a mad, drug-addicted maid. The Times reviewer likened Faulkner's novel to the type of farming or lumber cutting that left the land denuded.

A Fable.

A Fable created further controversy. It was a sort of Christian allegory played out during a privately declared armistice on the battlefields of France during World War I. Such highbrow reviewers as Maxwell Geismar and Leslie Fiedler tended to agree with Faulkner that A Fable was his best novel. That was, however, the minority opinion. Gilbert Highet in Harper's wrote that if A Fable had been sent to him without the author's name indicated, "It would have scarcely seemed possible that it was the work of a sane man who had lived through both world wars, still less that it was a major novel by a winner of the Nobel Prize." Opinions about Faulkner's greatness were so divided that Atlantic magazine ran an article in 1951 by critic Harvey Breit that promised to "make Mr. Faulkner's work more meaningful for those who wish to make up for lost time" because Faulkner had "never received the thorough reading he deserved from his own countrymen."

Public Service

Faulkner was an intensely private man, and he made the mistake after winning the Nobel Prize of assuming responsibility as a spokesman on certain public issues. He learned soon enough that literary talent does not necessarily arm one to practice the art of politics. The Cultural Services Office of the State Department asked Faulkner to participate in several events abroad, notably in Japan in 1955, where he was greeted warmly. During the decade he spent some eight months in various countries discharging his duties as a world citizen.

Controversy

It was in America that his efforts at diplomacy created controversy. Race relations was a chief domestic issue of the time, and the State Department looked to Faulkner to provide guidance. He took a position too liberal for segregationists, too conservative for integrationists, and too philosophical for pragmatists, angering almost everyone. At the request of President Eisenhower, in 1956 Faulkner joined with novelist John Steinbeck and poet Donald Hall in a government program called People to People to promote American values in Communist nations. After a frustrating three months Faulkner quit. In a letter to the New York Times on 13 October 1957, he observed that "white people and Negroes do not like and trust each other and perhaps never can," suggesting a cleavage that liberals construed to be bordering on racism. But, he continued, it may not be necessary for us to like one another; we must simply federate. He concluded that "because of the good luck of our still unspent and yet unexhausted past" the country might still prevail over its problem as people see the necessity of dedicating themselves to "the proposition that a community of individual free men not merely must endure, but can endure." Harper's magazine commented that the statement was "clearly and explicitly meaningless."

Return to Writing

By the end of the decade Faulkner had returned to what he did best—writing and talking, when he talked, about his work. In 1956 he accepted a temporary position as writer in residence at the University of Virginia that was renewed annually. Nonetheless, Faulkner enjoyed the university setting and turned his attentions back to literature. On 1 May 1957 The Town, the second volume of his highly acclaimed Snopes Trilogy, was published, and on 13 November 1959 the third volume, The Mansion, appeared. They were hailed as works worthy of a writer of his stature.

Sources:

Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974);

Harvey Breit, "William Faulkner," Atlantic, 188 (October 1951): 53 56;

Madeleine Chapsal, "A Lion in the Garden," Reporter, 13 (3 November 1955): 40;

Leslie Fiedler, "Stone Grotesques," New Republic, 131 (23 August 1954): 18-19;

Maxwell Geismar, "Latter-Day Christ Story," Saturday Review, 37 (31 July 1954): 11-12;

Brendan Gill, "Fifth Gospel," New Yorker, 30 (28 August 1954): 78-80;

Michel Gresset, A Faulkner Chronology (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985);

Gilbert Highet, "Sound and Fury," Harpers, 209 (September 1954): 98-104;

"Mr. Faulkner Exhausts the Future," Nation, 185 (26 October 1957): 274-275;

"No Sanctuary," Newsweek, 38 (24 September 1951): 90-92.