My Generation

by William Styron

  I would like to close not by asking you to join me in the Pledge of Allegiance but to ask you to listen to a few lines in prose from a poet and translator whose work I greatly admired, and whom I wish I had known better—Robert Fitzgerald, who died in 1985, at the age of 74. “So hard at best is the lot of man,” he wrote not long before his death, “and so great is the beauty he can apprehend, that only a religious conception of things can take in the extremes and meet the case. Our lifetimes have seen the opening of abysses before which the mind quails. But it seems to me there are a few things everyone can humbly try to hold on to: love and mercy (and humor) in everyday living; the quest for exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect; self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy of art.”

  Such serenity seems appropriate to the ideals of which the Edward MacDowell Medal is an embodiment, and I leave it for your contemplation.

  [Speech delivered at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, August 21, 1988.]

  Antecedents

  William Faulkner

  He detested more than anything the invasion of his privacy. Though I am made to feel welcome in the house by Mrs. Faulkner and 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 kick 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 writer is his books. Now that he is dead and helpless in the 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, sixty 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 of 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. Black and white, they walk with both caution and deliberation. Beneath the portico of the First National Bank and along 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 twenty 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 those novels and stories of Faulkner through which this unholy weather—and other weather more benign—moves with almost touchable reality.

  In the ground-floor office of The Oxford Eagle, the editor and co-owner, Mrs. Nina Goolsby, bustles about under a groaning air conditioner. She is a large, cheerful, voluble woman and she reveals with great pride that the Eagle has recently won first place for general excellence among weekly newspapers in the annual awards of the Mississippi Press Association. She has just returned from distributing around town handbills which read:

  IN MEMORY

  OF

  WILLIAM FAULKNER

  This Business Will Be

  CLOSED

  From 2:00 to 2:15 PM

  Today, July 7, 1962

  It was her idea, she says, adding, “People say that Oxford didn't care anything about Bill Faulkner, and that's just not true. We're proud of him. Look here.” She displays a file of back issues of the Eagle, and there is the front-page headline: “Nobel Award for Literature Comes to Oxonian.” There is a page from another issue, a full page paid for by, among others, the Ole Miss Dry Cleaners, Gathright-Reed Drug Company, Miller's Cafe, the A. H. Avent Gin and Warehouse Company. The emblazoned message reads: “Welcome Home, Bill Faulkner. We want to tell people everywhere—Oxford, and all of us, are very proud of William Faulkner, one of us, the Nobel Prize winning author.” The page is full of pictures of Faulkner in Stockholm: receiving the Nobel Prize from the king of Sweden, walking in the snow with his daughter, crouched beside a sled where he is seen chatting with “a little Swedish lad.”

  “So you can see how proud we are of him. We've always been proud of him,” Mrs. Goolsby says. “Why, I've known Bill Faulkner all my life. I live not two blocks away from him. We used to stop and talk all the time when he was taking his walks. Lord, dressed in that real elegant tweed jacket with those leather patches on the elbows, and that cane curved over his arm. I've always said that when they put Bill Faulkner in the ground it just won't be right unless he has that tweed jacket on.”

  Back at the Faulkner house, the shade of the old cedars which arch up over the walkway and the columned portico offers only scant relief from the noonday heat. It is shirtsleeve weather, and indeed many of the men have removed their coats, around the front door where already some of the family has gathered: John Faulkner, himself a writer and almost a replica, a ghost of his brother down to the quizzical lifted eyebrows and downward-slanting mustache; John's grown sons; another brother, Murry, sad-eyed, gentle-spoken, an FBI agent in Mobile; Jill's husband, Paul Summers from Charlottesville, Virginia, a lawyer: like Jill, he refers to Faulkner as “Pappy.” The conversation is general: the heat, the advantages of jet travel, the complexities of Mississippi's antediluvian liquor laws. The group steps aside to allow passage for a lady bearing an enormous cake with raspberry-colored icing; it is only one of many to arrive this day.

  —

  Inside, it is a little cooler, and here in the library to the left of the door—just opposite the cleared living room where the coffin rests—it seems easier to pass the time. It is a spacious, cluttered, comfortable room. A gold-framed portrait of Faulkner in hunting togs, looking very jaunty in his black topper, dominates one wall; next to it on a table is a wood sculpture of a gaunt Don Quixote. There are gentle, affectionate portraits of two Negro servants painted by “Miss Maud” Falkner (unlike her son, she spelled the name without the “u,” as does most of the family). Around the other walls are books, books by the dozens and scores, in random juxtaposition, in jackets and without jackets, quite a few upside down: The Golden Asse, Vittorini's In Sicily, The Brothers Karamazov, Calder Willingham's Geraldine Bradshaw, the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, From Here to Eternity, Shakespeare's Comedies, Act of Love by Ira Wolfert, Best of S. J. Perelman, and many more beyond accounting.

  Here in the library I meet Shelby Foote, the novelist and Civil War historian and one of Faulkner's very few literary friends. A pleasant, dark Mississippian in his mid-forties (he is dressed in seersucker and looks extremely cool), he observes that, naturally, a mere Virginian like myself cannot be expected to cope with such heat. “You've got to walk through it gently,” he counsels; “don't make any superfluous moves.” And he adds depressingly, “This is just beginning to build up pressure. You should be around here in August.”

  Foote is searching for a book, an anthology which contains one of Faulkner's early poems—a short poem written more than thirty years ago called “My Epitaph.” I join in the search, which leads us to Faulkner's workroom at the rear of the house. There is more clutter here, more books: 40 Best Stories from Mademoiselle, Doctor Zhivago, Dos Passos's Midcentury, Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, H. K. Douglas's I Rode With Stonewall (one of the books Faulkner was reading just before his death), a hundred others jammed into a low bookcase, several shelves of which contain parcels of books sent to Faul
kner for autographing: all of these remain dusty and unopened. The heavy antique typewriter which Faulkner worked on has been taken away and in its place on the table rests, somewhat inexplicably, a half-gallon bottle of Old Crow, one-fourth full. Behind this table on a mantelpiece littered with ashtrays, ornamental bottles, a leaking tobacco pouch, there stands a small comic painting of a mule, rump up high, teeth bared in manic laughter. “I think Faulkner loved mules almost as much as people,” Foote reflects. “Maybe more.” He has found the book and the poem.

  Now several electric fans are whirring in the downstairs rooms and hallways, and a buffet lunch is being served. The food at a Southern funeral is usually good, but this food is splendid: turkey and country ham and stuffed tomatoes, loaves of delectable soft homemade bread and gallons of strong iced tea. We sit informally around the dining-room table. The hour of the service is approaching and outside through the window the afternoon light casts black shadows of trembling oak leaves and cedar branches against the rich hot grass.

  —

  From far off comes a mockingbird's rippling chant. Suddenly someone in the family recalls that just the night before, they had run across something which must have been one of the last things Faulkner had written, but that it was in French and they couldn't read it. It is brought forth and as a couple of us begin to puzzle it out we see that it is written in pencil on the front of a business envelope—the draft of a reply, in Faulkner's tiny, vertical, cramped, nearly illegible calligraphy, to an invitation to visit from someone in France—a note courteous, witty, and in easy French. He said he couldn't come.

  Promptly at two o'clock a hush comes over the house as preparations for the service begin. We put our coats back on. There are several dozen of us—all but a handful (like his publishers, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer) members of the family, gathered here from all over the South, Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and Virginia and Tennessee—and we stand in the two rooms, the dining room, from which the table has been removed now, and the living room, where the coffin rests. The Episcopal minister in white surplice and stole, the Reverend Duncan Gray, Jr., is bespectacled and balding, and his voice, though strong, is barely heard above the whine and chattering vibration of the electric fans:

  “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

  The mockingbird again sings outside, nearer now. Through the hum of the fans the minister reads Psalm 46:

  “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

  “Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea….”

  —

  We repeat the Lord's Prayer aloud, and soon it is all over. There is a kind of haste to leave the house. The procession to the cemetery is up South Lamar Avenue through the center of town, past the statue of the Confederate soldier and the courthouse. As the line of cars stretches out ahead behind the black hearse and as we near the courthouse, it becomes plain that Mrs. Goolsby's campaign to close the stores has had good effect. For though it is now past two-fifteen, the stores are still shut up and the sidewalks are thronged with people. White and Negro, they stand watching the procession in the blazing heat, in rows and groups and clusters, on all sides of the courthouse and along the sidewalks in front of Grundy's Cafe and Earl Fudge's Grocery and the Rebel Food Center. I am moved by this display and comment on it, but someone who is a native of the region is rather less impressed: “It's not that they don't respect Bill. I think most of them do, really. Even though none of them ever read a word of him. But funerals are a big thing around here. Let a Baptist deacon die and you'll really get a turnout.”

  Our car comes abreast of the courthouse, turns slowly to the right around the square. Here the statue of the Confederate soldier (“Erected 1907” is the legend beneath) stands brave and upright on his skinny calcimine-white pedestal, looking like a play soldier and seeming vaguely forlorn. Both courthouse and statue loom over so much of Faulkner's work, and now, for the first time this day, I am stricken by the realization that Faulkner is really gone. And I am deep in memory, as if summoned there by a trumpet blast. Dilsey and Benjy and Luster and all the Compsons, Hightower and Byron Bunch and Flem Snopes and the gentle Lena Grove—all of these people and a score of others come swarming back comically and villainously and tragically in my mind with a kind of mnemonic sense of utter reality, along with the tumultuous landscape and the fierce and tender weather, and the whole maddened, miraculous vision of life wrested, as all art is wrested, out of nothingness. Suddenly, as the watchful and brooding faces of the townspeople sweep across my gaze, I am filled with a bitter grief. We move past a young blue-shirted policeman, crescents of sweat beneath his arms, who stands at attention, bareheaded, his cap clapped to his breast. Up North Lamar the procession rolls, then east on Jefferson.

  The old cemetery has been filled; therefore his grave lies in the “new” part, and he is one of the first occupants of this tract. There is nothing much to say about it, really. It is a rather raw field, it seems to me, overlooking a housing project; but he lies on a gentle slope between two oak trees, and they will grow larger as they shelter him. Thus he is laid to rest. The crowd disperses in the hot sunlight and is gone.

  At the end of The Wild Palms, an early novel of Faulkner's, the condemned hero, speculating upon the possibility of a choice between nothing and grief, says that he will choose grief. And certainly even grief must be better than nothing. As for the sorrow and loss one feels today in this hot dry field, perhaps it needs only to be expressed in Faulkner's own words, in the young poem he called “My Epitaph”:

  If there be grief, let it be the rain

  And this but silver grief, for grieving's sake,

  And these green woods be dreaming here to wake

  Within my heart, if I should rouse again.

  But I shall sleep, for where is any death

  While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead

  I'm rooted like a tree? Though I be dead

  This soil that holds me fast will find me breath.

  [Life, July 20, 1962.]

  “O Lost!” Etc.

  The shade of Thomas Wolfe must be acutely disturbed to find that his earthly stock has sunk so low. All artists want fame, glory, immortality, yet few were so frankly bent on these things as Wolfe was, and no writer—despite his agonizing self-doubts—seemed so confident that they lay within his grasp. The unabashed desire for perpetuity moves in a rhythmic, reappearing theme through all of his works. In a typically boisterous apostrophe to the power of booze in Of Time and the River he chants:

  You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy when we were twenty, when we reeled home at night through the old moon-whitened streets of Boston and heard our friend, our comrade, and our dead companion, shout through the silence of the moonwhite square: “You are a poet and the world is yours.”…We turned our eyes then to the moon-drunk skies of Boston, knowing only that we were young, and drunk, and twenty, and that the power of mighty poetry was within us, and the glory of the great earth lay before us—because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die!

  But poor Tom Wolfe if not dead is currently moribund, and the matter of his resuscitation is certainly in doubt. The young, one is told, being gland- and eyeball-oriented, read very little of anything anymore, and if they do it is likely to be Burroughs or Beckett or Genet or a few of the bards of black humor or camp pornography. Of the older writers, Hemingway and Fitzgerald are still read, but Wolfe seldom. When the literary temper of a generation is occult, claustrophobic, doom-ridden, and the qualified snigger is its characteristic psychic response, no writer could be so queer as the shambling, celebratory hulk of Thomas Wolfe, with his square's tragic sense and his bedazzled young man's vision of the glory of the world. What a comedown! In Europe, with the possible exception of Germany, he is not very well known. No, the reputation of Wolfe is in very
bad shape; I suppose it was inevitable that, a short time ago, when I asked a college English major what he thought of the work of Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe he actually did reply seriously, “You mean the Tangerine Streamlined Whatever-it's-caIled guy?”

  Yet it would be hard to exaggerate the overwhelming effect that reading Wolfe had upon so many of us who were coming of age during or just after World War II. I think his influence may have been especially powerful upon those who, like myself, had been reared, as Wolfe had, in a small Southern town or city, and who in addition had suffered a rather mediocre secondary education, with scant reading of any kind. To a boy who had read only a bad translation of Les Misérables and The Call of the Wild and Men Against the Sea and The Grapes of Wrath (which one had read at fourteen for the racy dialogue and the “sensational” episodes), the sudden exposure to a book like Look Homeward, Angel, with its lyrical torrent and raw, ingenuous feeling, its precise and often exquisite rendition of place and mood, its buoyant humor and the vitality of its characters and, above all, the sense of youthful ache and promise and hunger and ecstasy which so corresponded to that of its eighteen-year-old reader—to experience such a book as this, at exactly the right moment in time and space, was for many young people like being born again into a world as fresh and wondrous as that seen through the eyes of Adam. Needless to say, youth itself was largely responsible for this feverish empathy, and there will be reservations in a moment in regard to the effect of a later rereading of Wolfe; nonetheless, a man who can elicit such reactions from a reader at whatever age is a force to be reckoned with, so I feel nothing but a kind of gratitude when I consider how I succumbed to the rough unchanneled force of Wolfe as one does to the ocean waves.