Essays, Speeches & Public Letters
Page 16
I think I had forgotten about Sanctuary, just as you might forget about anything made for an immediate purpose, which did not come off. As I Lay Dying was published and I didn’t remember the mss. of Sanctuary until Smith sent me the galleys. Then I saw that it was so terrible that there were but two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. I thought again, “It might sell; maybe 10,000 of them will buy it.” So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book. It had been already set up once, so I had to pay for the privilege of rewriting it, trying to make out of it something which would not shame The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much and I made a fair job and I hope you will buy it and tell your friends and I hope they will buy it too.
New York, 1932.
WILLIAM FAULKNER.
Foreword
TO
The Faulkner Reader
(NEW YORK, 1954)
MY GRANDFATHER had a moderate though reasonably diffuse and catholic library; I realize now that I got most of my early education in it. It was a little limited in its fiction content, since his taste was for simple straightforward romantic excitement like Scott or Dumas. But there was a heterogeneous scattering of other volumes, chosen apparently at random and by my grandmother, since the flyleaves bore her name and the dates in the 1880’s and ’90’s of that time when even in a town as big as Memphis, Tennessee, ladies stopped in their carriages in the street in front of the stores and shops, and clerks and even proprietors came out to receive their commands—that time when women did most of the book-buying and the reading too, naming their children Byron and Clarissa and St. Elmo and Lothair after the romantic and tragic heroes and heroines and the even more romantic creators of them.
One of these books was by a Pole, Sienkiewicz—a story of the time of King John Sobieski, when the Poles, almost single-handed, kept the Turks from overrunning Central Europe. This one, like all books of that period, at least the ones my grandfather owned, had a preface, a foreword. I never read any of them; I was too eager to get on to what the people themselves were doing and anguishing and triumphing over. But I did read the foreword in this one, the first one I ever took time to read; I don’t know why now. It went something like this:
This book was written at the expense of considerable effort, to uplift men’s hearts, and I thought: What a nice thing to have thought to say. But no more than that. I didn’t even think, Maybe some day I will write a book too and what a shame I didn’t think of that first so I could put it on the front page of mine. Because I hadn’t thought of writing books then. The future didn’t extend that far. This was 1915 and ’16; I had seen an aeroplane and my mind was filled with names: Ball, and Immelman and Boelcke, and Guynemer and Bishop, and I was waiting, biding, until I would be old enough or free enough or anyway could get to France and become glorious and beribboned too.
Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books; obviously, since the publisher considered them worth the financial risk of being printed, someone would read them. But that was unimportant too as measured against the need to get them written, though naturally one hopes that who read them would find them true and honest and even perhaps moving. Because one was too busy writing the books during the time while the demon which drove him still considered him worthy of, deserving of, the anguish of being driven, while the blood and glands and flesh still remained strong and potent, the heart and the imagination still remained undulled to follies and lusts and heroisms of men and women; still writing the books because they had to be written after the blood and glands began to slow and cool a little and the heart began to tell him, You don’t know the answer either and you will never find it, but still writing the books because the demon was still kind; only a little more severe and unpitying: until suddenly one day he saw that that old half-forgotten Pole had had the answer all the time.
To uplift man’s heart; the same for all of us: for the ones who are trying to be artists, the ones who are trying to write simple entertainment, the ones who write to shock, and the ones who are simply escaping themselves and their own private anguishes.
Some of us don’t know that this is what we are writing for. Some of us will know it and deny it, lest we be accused and self-convicted and condemned of sentimentality, which people nowadays for some reason are ashamed to be tainted with; some of us seem to have curious ideas of just where the heart is located, confusing it with other and baser glands and organs and activities. But we all write for this one purpose.
This does not mean that we are trying to change man, improve him, though this is the hope—maybe even the intention—of some of us. On the contrary, in its last analysis, this hope and desire to uplift man’s heart is completely selfish, completely personal. He would lift up man’s heart for his own benefit because in that way he can say No to death. He is saying No to death for himself by means of the hearts which he has hoped to uplift, or even by means of the mere base glands which he has disturbed to that extent where they can say No to death on their own account by knowing, realizing, having been told and believing it: At least we are not vegetables because the hearts and glands capable of partaking in this excitement are not those of vegetables, and will, must, endure.
So he who, from the isolation of cold impersonal print, can engender this excitement, himself partakes of the immortality which he has engendered. Some day he will be no more, which will not matter then, because isolated and itself invulnerable in the cold print remains that which is capable of engendering still the old deathless excitement in hearts and glands whose owners and custodians are generations from even the air he breathed and anguished in; if it was capable once, he knows that it will be capable and potent still long after there remains of him only a dead and fading name.
New York
November, 1953
Review
OF
The Road Back
BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE
THERE is a victory beyond defeat which the victorious know nothing of. A bourne, a shore of refuge beyond the lost battles, the bronze names and the lead tombs, guarded and indicated not by the triumphant and man-limbed goddess with palm and sword, but by some musing and motionless handmaiden of despair itself.
Man does not seem to be able to stand very much prosperity; least of all does a people, a nation. Defeat is good for him, for it. Victory is the rocket, the glare, the momentary apotheosis at right angles with time and so doomed: a bursting diffusion of sparks at the last, dying and dead, leaving a word perhaps, a name, a date, for the tedium of children in primary history. It is the defeat which, serving him against his belief and his desire, turns him back upon that alone which can sustain him: his fellows, his racial homogeneity; himself; the earth, the implacable soil, monument and tomb of sweat.
This is beyond the talking, the hard words, the excuses and the reasons; beyond the despair. Beyond that dreadful desire and need to justify the disaster and give it significance by clinging to it, explaining it, which is the proven best way to support the inescapable. Victory requires no explanation. It is in itself sufficient: the fine screen, the shield; immediate and final: it will be contemplated only by history. While the whole contemporary world watches the defeat and the undefeated who, because of that fact, survived.
That’s where the need to talk, to explain it, comes from. That’s why Remarque puts into the mouths of characters speeches which they would have been incapable of making. It’s not that the speeches were not true. If the characters had heard them spoken by another, they would have been the first to say, “That is so. This is what I think, what I would have said if I had just thought of it first.” But they could not have said the speeches themselves. And this method is not justified, unless a man is writing propaganda. It is a writer’s privilege to put into the mouths of his characters better speech than they would have been capable of, but only for the purpose of perm
itting and helping the character to justify himself or what he believes himself to be, taking down his spiritual pants. But when the character must express moral ideas applicable to a race, a situation, he is better kept in that untimed and unsexed background of the choruses of Greek senators.
But perhaps this is a minor point. Perhaps it is a racial fault of the author, as the outcome of the War was due in part to a German racial fault: a belief that a mathematical calculation would be superior to the despair of cornered rats. Anyway, Remarque justifies himself: “… I try to console him. What I say does not convince him, but it gives me some relief.… It is always so with comfort.”
It is a moving book. Because Remarque was moved by the writing of it. Granted that his intent is more than opportunism, it still remains to be seen if art can be made of authentic experience transferred to paper word for word, of a peculiar reaction to an actual condition, even though it be vicarious. To a writer, no matter how susceptible he be, personal experience is just what it is to the man in the street who buttonholes him because he is a writer, with the same belief, the same conviction of individual significance: “Listen. All you have to do is write it down as it happened. My life, what has happened to me. It will make a good book, but I am not a writer myself. So I will give it to you. If I were a writer myself, had the time to write it down myself. You won’t have to change a word.” That does not make a book. No matter how vivid it be, somewhere between the experience and the blank page and the pencil, it dies. Perhaps the words kill it.
Give Remarque the benefit of the doubt and call the book a reaction to despair. Victory has its despairs, too, since the victorious not only do not gain anything, but when the hurrah dies away at last, they do not even know what they were fighting for, what they hoped to gain, because what little percentage there was in the whole affair, the defeated got it. If Germany had been victorious, this book would not have been written. And if the United States had not got back its troops 50-percent intact, save for the casual cases of syphilis and high metropolitan life, it would not be bought (which I hope and trust that it will be) and read. And it won’t be the American Legion either that will buy the 40,000 copies, even if there are forty thousand of them that keep their dues paid up.
It moves you, as watching a child making mud pies on the day of its mother’s funeral moves you. Yet at the end there is still that sense of missing significance, the feeling that, like so much that emerges from a losing side in any contest, and particularly from Germany since 1918, it was created primarily for the Western trade, to sell among the heathen like colored glass. From beyond the sentimentality, the defeat and the talking, this fact at least has emerged: America has been conquered not by the German soldiers that died in French and Flemish trenches, but by the German soldiers that died in German books.
[New Republic, May 20, 1931]
Review
OF
Test Pilot
BY JIMMY COLLINS
I WAS disappointed in this book. But it was better than I expected. I mean, better as current literature. I had expected, hoped, that it would be a kind of new trend, a literature or blundering at self-expression, not of a man, but of this whole new business of speed just to be moving fast; a kind of embryo, instead of the revelation by himself of a man who was a pretty good guy probably and did it pretty well and had more to say than some I know and in a sense was just incidentally writing about flying.
For the book turned out to be a perfectly normal and pretty good collection of anecdotes out of the life and experience of a professional flyer. They are wide in range and of varying degrees of worth and interest, and one, an actual experience which reads like fiction, is excellent, concise, and ordered, and not only sustained but restrained. None of them is long and none overtold (his sense of restraint along with his gift for narrative were the author’s best qualities), though I feel that some of them never warranted the telling to begin with, and most of them are tinged with a kind of sentimental journalese—that reportorial rapport which seems to know at once and by sheer instinct when any public figure enters town and where to find him—which shows especially in his nature descriptions. You are never arrested by a single description of night sky or night earth or sunset or moonlight or fog; you have seen it before a hundred times and it has been phrased just that way in ten thousand newspaper columns and magazines. But then, Collins was a newspaper writer. But even if he had not been, this could justly be excused him because of the sort of life a test pilot would have to lead: a life which would never dare solitude, whose even idleness must take place where people congregate, which would not dare retire into introspection where it might contemplate sheer language calmly or it would have to cease to be that of a test pilot. But he had undeniable narrative skill; he would doubtless have written whether he flew or not. In fact, the book itself indicates that he apparently wanted to write, or at least that he flew only to make money to support his family.
Collins is dead, killed in the crash of an aeroplane which he was testing for the Navy, it being the custom of the military not to permit its own pilots to test new aeroplanes. The last chapter in the book is entitled “I Am Dead”, and consists of an obituary which Collins wrote himself. I don’t mean to make any commentary on twentieth-century publishing methods, the crass come-on schemes of modern day publishing, for whose benefit by an almost incredible fortuity Collins wrote the document, dared to it, I believe jokingly, by a friend, and I believe jokingly complying, because the book states that the dive which killed him was the last of a series on the last aeroplane which he intended to test, having perhaps gradually built up an income through his writing: but this should have been a private document, shown you privately by the friend with whom he left it. You are sorry to read it in a book. It should not have been included. It should have been quoted from, at most, quoted not as the document which it is, but for a figure which it contains, the only figure or phrase in the book which suddenly arrests the mind with the fine shock of poetry:
The cold but vibrant fuselage was the last thing to feel my warm and living flesh.
But there is still another reason why “I Am Dead” should not have been included. Because this time Collins overwrote himself, the only time in the book. Because, though he may have begun it jokingly, he did not continue, since no man is going to joke to himself about his own death. So this time he overwrote. But I suppose this may be forgiven him too, since though a man stops sentimentalizing about love probably the day he discovers that both he and his first sweetheart not only can desire and even take another but do, he probably never reaches that day when he no longer sentimentalizes over his own passing.
But this is not what I hold against the book. What I hold is that it is not what I had hoped for. I had hoped to find a kind of embryo, a still formless forerunner or symptom of a folklore of speed, the high speed of today which I believe stands a good deal nearer to the end of the limits which human beings and material were capable of when man first dug iron, than to the beginning of those limits as they stood ten or twelve years ago when man first began to go really fast. Not the limits for the machines, but for the men who fly them: the limit at which blood vessels will burst and entrails rupture in making any sort of turn that will keep you in the same county, not to speak of co-ordination and perception of distance and depth, even when they invent or discover some way to alter further the law of top speed ratio to landing speed than by wing flaps so that all the flights will not have to start and stop from one of the Great Lakes. The precision pilots of today even must have absolutely perfect co-ordination and depth perception, so perhaps, being perfect, these will function at any speed up to infinity. But they will still have to do something about a pilot’s blood vessels and guts. Perhaps they will contrive to create a kind of species or race, as they used to create and nurture races of singers and eunuchs, like Mussolini’s Agello who flies more than four hundred miles an hour. They will be neither stalled ox nor game chicken, but capons: children culled by rules or
even by machines from each generation and cloistered and in a sense emasculated and trained to conduct the vehicles in which the rest of us will hurtle from place to place. They will have to be taken in infancy because the precision pilot of today begins to train in his teens and is through in his thirties. These would be a species and in time a race and in time they would produce a folklore. But probably by then the rest of us could not decipher it, perhaps not even hear it since already we have objects which can outpace their own sound and so their very singers would travel in what to us would be a soundproof vacuum.
But it was not of this folklore that I was thinking. That one would be years in the making. I had thought of one which might exist even now and of which I had hoped that this book might be the symptom, the first fumbling precursor. It would be a folklore not of the age of speed nor of the men who perform it, but of the speed itself, peopled not by anything human or even mortal but by the clever willful machines themselves carrying nothing that was born and will have to die or which can even suffer pain, moving without comprehensible purpose toward no discernible destination, producing a literature innocent of either love or hate and of course of pity or terror, and which would be the story of the final disappearance of life from the earth. I would watch them, the little puny mortals, vanishing against a vast and timeless void filled with the sound of incredible engines, within which furious meteors moving in no medium hurtled nowhere, neither pausing nor flagging, forever destroying themselves and one another.