Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

by William Faulkner

  “How’s flying?” I said.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ve been at it about a week.”

  “A week,” I said.

  “Yes, I’m not so hot. I like it, though.”

  That was Saturday. Wednesday I was on the field again; I went into Mrs. Caya’s and there he was. He looked just like he did before, only he was alone, now, smoking a pipe this time and snapping the marbles about one of those slotted miniature pool tables in a glass box. He recognized me; I know he did, but he didn’t even look at me until I said:

  “Hello.”

  He looked at me. “Hello,” he said. Then he looked at the table; he loaded the plunger carefully. “I soloed yesterday morning,” he said.

  “What?” I said. “What? Soloed?” He had told me Saturday he had been at it about a week. “That’s fine,” I said. “Good work.”

  He snapped the plunger carefully. “Yes,” he said. “I got a kick out of it. The ship did too, I guess.”

  That was all. Later on I saw him and another lad about his age crossing the apron toward the airplane which he had learned to fly. They had a camera with them; later I saw that it had his name printed by hand on it, and I could imagine how he had probably approached Hayes with the notion of having his picture taken beside the airplane, asking Hayes whether he thought it would look too much like putting on side.

  Mac Grider’s story is not news to anyone in Memphis, I imagine; certainly not to anyone who ever read War Birds. He was in the first company of American air service candidates to go overseas. That was in 1917, when there were no airplanes for them to fly at home and when they took ship they did not even know where they were going and when they did arrive they immediately became military orphans without status or rank (and sometimes pay) while the other branches back home turned out officers complete to the spurs in 90 days or less.

  This American company went to England and was sent to the British School of Military Aeronautics at Oxford and there broken up and posted to the Royal Flying Corps, progressing through the primary and advanced flight stages and then to Pilots’ Pool, where in an anomalous state of neither fish nor fowl, with the status of enlisted men yet living as officers, American soldiers yet holding British pilot certificates, they languished again until the government back home remembered to decide what to do with them; whereupon one by one they emerged at last, with United States commissions and R. F. C. wings and were posted to British squadrons in France.

  It was the spring of 1918 then. Maj. William Bishop led the R. F. C. lists with 74 Huns and his V. C. and his D.S.O. twice and his M. C. and he had now become too valuable to be risked in combat where some German tyro on his first flight might shoot him down by accident. So he was recalled to England and given a squadron; he was permitted to organize it himself and choose what men he wanted.

  Three of the men he chose were Americans, Elliott Springs, Laurence Callahan and Grider. The squadron went out to France, where it became Sixty-five Squadron, S. E. 5’s, single seater pursuit, and which had the peculiar honor to be commanded in rotation by three of the ranking British combat pilots of the war, the Canadian Bishop, the Englishman McCudden, the Irishman Mannock. Grider has an official record of enemy craft destroyed before he failed to return from patrol one day in August, 1918. His body was found in the crash near Lille, behind the German lines, and identified and buried by the German Red Cross.

  So I stood on the apron, watching Grider’s son and the companion fiddling with the camera, when Hayes came up to me.

  “Listen,” he said, “I want you to do something. Knock out something for the papers about this: Mac Grider’s son. Twenty-two years old. Second year at Annapolis. Soloed in a week.”

  “In a week?” I said. “He actually soloed inside of seven days?”

  “Yes. He stuck at it pretty close; he’s got to be back at school on the twenty-eighth. So you knock out something. Something he won’t be ashamed of.”

  “If I had soloed inside of a week I would want to be ashamed,” I said.

  “You know what I mean,” Hayes said. “You do it.”

  They stood there beside the airplane, half playing with the camera, as people 22 years old would do.

  “Ashamed,” I said. “I don’t know whether I can or not. I’ll try it, though.”

  At last they had the camera ready, focused, whatever it was they were doing with it. He still wore the open shirt, the thin summer pants, the goggles of plain flat window glass that he had probably borrowed and that never cost much past $2 new.

  That was it. If he had turned up with his student’s permit and a pair of pursuit goggles with airproof bindings and calobar lenses you would not have been surprised. Or he could have come out even in a replica of his dead father’s uniform, Sam Browne and boots and all, and a lot of women would have cried over the picture and even men would not have thought too hard of him.

  But he didn’t: he just stood there where the sun would fall on him good, in clothes he might have put on to mow the back yard, while his companion squinted into the camera, turning gadgets and such.

  “Hurry it up,” he said. “I’d hate to have my face freeze like this.”

  [Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 23, 1934; reprinted, Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1975. That text is printed here.]

  * Title supplied by editor. War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator (New York, 1926), written by Elliott White Springs, is a part-fictional, part-autobiographical, account of the life and death of an American pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force in World War I. Springs took a little of his material from the diary of his friend John McGavock Grider, who was killed in June 1918. War Birds was originally published anonymously, but in 1927 Springs added a Foreword in which he implied that the book was the actual diary of a dead friend, which he had edited. It was soon understood, widely if erroneously, that the unknown aviator and author of the diary was John McGavock Grider. Faulkner knew the book and apparently shared the general misapprehension about its authorship.

  Note on A Fable*

  This is not a pacifist book. On the contrary, this writer holds almost as short a brief for pacifism as for war itself, for the reason that pacifism does not work, cannot cope with the forces which produce the wars. In fact, if this book had any aim or moral (which it did not have, I mean deliberately, in its conception, since as far as I knew or intended, it was simply an attempt to show man, human beings, in conflict with their own hearts and compulsions and beliefs and the hard and durable insentient earth-stage on which their griefs and hopes must anguish), it was to show by poetic analogy, allegory, that pacifism does not work; that to put an end to war, man must either find or invent something more powerful than war and man’s aptitude for belligerence and his thirst for power at any cost, or use the fire itself to fight and destroy the fire with; that man may finally have to mobilize himself and arm himself with the implements of war to put an end to war; that the mistake we have consistently made is setting nation against nation or political ideology against ideology to stop war; that the men who do not want war may have to arm themselves as for war, and defeat by the methods of war the alliances of power which hold to the obsolete belief in the validity of war: who (the above alliances) must be taught to abhor war not for moral or economic reasons, or even for simple shame, but because they are afraid of it, dare not risk it since they know that in war they themselves—not as nations or governments or ideologies, but as simple human beings vulnerable to death and injury—will be the first to be destroyed.

  Three of these characters represent the trinity of man’s conscience—Levine, the young English pilot, who symbolizes the nihilistic third; the old French Quartermaster general, who symbolizes the passive third; the British battalion runner, who symbolizes the active third—Levine, who sees evil and refuses to accept it by destroying himself; who says ‘Between nothing and evil, I will take nothing;’ who in effect, to destroy evil, destroys the world too, i.e., the world which is his, himself—the old Quarte
rmaster General who says in the last scene, ‘I am not laughing. What you see are tears;’ i.e., there is evil in the world; I will bear both, the evil and the world too, and grieve for them—the battalion runner, the living scar, who in the last scene says, ‘That’s right; tremble. I’m not going to die—never.’ i.e., there is evil in the world and I’m going to do something about it.

  [Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1973; text based on a typescript from the files of his editor, for whom Faulkner wrote the piece late in 1953 or early in 1954, apparently either as dust jacket copy or as a statement to be used in publicity for the novel, which was published in August 1954.]

  * Title supplied by editor.

  Funeral Sermon for Mammy Caroline Barr

  MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL, FEBRUARY 5, 1940

  As oldest of my father’s family, I might be called here master. That situation never existed between “Mammy” and me. She reared all of us from childhood. She stood as a fount not only of authority and information, but of affection, respect and security. She was one of my first associates. I have known her all my life and have been privileged to see her out of hers.

  She was a character of devotion and fidelity. Mammy made no demands on any one. She had the handicap to be born without money and with a black skin and at a bad time in this country. She asked no odds and accepted the handicaps of her lot, making the best of her few advantages. She surrendered her destiny to a family. That family accepted and made some appreciation of it. She was paid for the devotion she gave but still that is only money. As surely as there is a heaven, Mammy will be in it.

  [Upon the death on January 31, 1940, of the beloved family servant Mammy Caroline Barr, Faulkner gave her funeral sermon at Rowanoak on February 4. The text of the sermon, apparently what he delivered on February 4, was published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal on February 5. That text is printed here. (For a revised version of this text, see this page–this page.)]

  Address to the Congrès pour

  la Liberté de la Culture

  PARIS, MAY 30, 1952*

  Allocution de M. William Faulkner

  MR. CHAIRMAN,

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

  I wish I could say this in French because it should be said in French by an American.

  I am not a speech maker. I have not prepared a speech to make here. But this is something that should be said by an American. I have known for a long time that Americans in Europe behave badly.

  I think that most Europeans do not know why. We still think in terms of a continent to be covered, not conquered, but completed, and of all the people who can have a star in the flag. It is difficult for us to think now of people who cannot have a star in our flag but we know better that we all cannot; that our earth is bigger than our continent; that our earth is the whole world.

  And we will or should behave better than we do and I believe that we will behave better than we do. I believe that in the intelligence of the French members here, and the muscle of Americans may rest the salvation of Europe.

  Je pense que presque tous les Américains ont une dette de gratitude envers la France et je crois que, dans le monde entier, tous les hommes libres doivent un petit quelque chose à ce pays qui a été toujours la “Mère” universelle de la liberté de l’homme et de l’esprit humain. (Applaudissements.)

  * On May 30, 1952, Faulkner gave a short speech, in English with a final paragraph in French, at a meeting organized by the Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture under the title “L’Oeuvre du XXe Siècle.” It was circulated, in English and in a French translation, in a pamphlet, reproduced from typescript, devoted to the conference. The French translation was published in Arts (Paris), June 1952. The pamphlet text of the English (with the last paragraph in French) is printed here.

  Address at the American

  Literature Seminar

  NAGANO, JAPAN, AUGUST 5, 1955

  In a discussion in Tokyo, a statement of mine was misconstrued, if not misquoted. This was to the effect that I believed that America had no culture, that we were all savages without intellect or spiritual tradition.

  I did not say this because I don’t believe it to be so. As I see it, no peoples have a mutual culture save those who happen to believe primarily in the same things, like the peoples who believe in freedom or the peoples who believe in serfdom.

  I believe that all racial and ethnic groups have their own individual cultures. The Japanese culture, for instance, is a culture of rationality, and the British culture one of insularity. That is, each one of these makes its culture its national character.

  Thus our American culture is not just success, but generosity with success—a culture of successful generosity. We desire and work to be successful in order to be generous with the fruits of that success. We get as much spiritual pleasure out of the giving as we do out of the gaining. All of these cultures are important, and in a way, they are interdependent.

  A proof of this to me is the fact that we are meeting here in Japan, 10,000 miles from America, discussing in the English language American literature—that is, we are matching and comparing our two separate cultures which produce our national literature. Compared with the Japanese, we are clumsy and awkward and even bad-mannered. Yet out of this clumsiness and awkwardness has come that power which produced the American writers whom you consider worthy of being discussed here.

  Out of our clumsiness and awkwardness there came that force which produced writers important enough to have a share in a seminar of intellects, the hosts to which are the people who have made a culture of the intellect.

  I think it is our American culture of success and generosity which enabled our American writers to offer you something here today. I think that like our culture of material success, our writers are interested not merely in the success but in the generosity. We are as much interested in having what we have to offer acceptable to the writers of other nations as we are in being successful writers in our own country. I think we are much more interested in universal writing than we are in being American writers.

  I think that our American culture causes our writers to think of themselves only secondarily as American writers, that we think of ourselves first as men and women dealing in the universal quality which is literature. I believe we are not really trying to produce American literature nor even to add to its prestige. I believe we are trying to increase the prestige of a universal literature. I believe that when we seem awkward and provincial, it is because we are provincial.

  It is because our culture of the intellect is so new that we have carried with us into the art of literature a certain naivete which we are too young in the craft as yet to have rid ourselves of. A proof of this American naivete is that there is no jealousy based on gender and very little even on material success among American writers. No American assumes it the man’s prerogative to have more talent or to be more important in literature than a woman writer.

  We have been, as a nation, a lucky people. We have escaped so much of the trouble and grief that other peoples have had to suffer and we are aware of this, and a part of our culture of success and generosity is a wish to share this good fortune with less fortunate people, if we can, through qualities of the spirit as well as of the pocketbook; that the American writer is quite proud of his position in universal literature without being jealous of any other nation.

  I think that most other literary people can’t quite conceive that the American can be a writer without being a man of ideas. The European writer, if he is a writer, is per se a member of all other correlative intellectual processes. The American writer can be a writer and not be a part of the universality of ideas at all. What serves him for an idea is not a rational process at all, but an emotional concept of and belief in the universal truth of man’s heart, and its record in literature. It is this that we are proudest to participate in and share.

  [In Japan in August 1955 Faulkner was frequently interviewed, and his comments were widely reported in the Japanese press. To co
rrect or prevent misunderstanding of some of these comments, he wrote a statement that he gave as a speech at Nagano on August 5. In 1965 Joseph Blotner was given a typescript (not typed by Faulkner) of the speech, which he published in the Summer 1982 issue of the Mississippi Quarterly. Neither he nor the present editor, who edited that issue, was aware that a version of the speech had been published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 28, 1955, “Distributed by International News Service.” That published text was reproduced in Each in Its Ordered Place: A Faulkner Collector’s Notebook, by Carl Petersen (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1975). The text printed here is that of the typescript and Mississippi Quarterly.]

  Address upon Receiving the

  Andrés Bello Award

  CARACAS, APRIL 6, 1961*

  The artist, whether he would have chosen so or not, finds that he has been dedicated to a single course and one from which he will never escape. This is, he tries, with every means in his possession, his imagination, experience and observation, to put into some more durable form than his own fragile and ephemeral life—in paint or music or marble or the covers of a book—that which he has learned in his brief spell of breathing—the passion and hope, the beauty and horror and humor, of frail and fragile and indomitable man struggling and suffering and triumphing amid the conflicts of his own heart, in the human condition. He is not to solve this dilemma nor does he even hope to survive it save in the shape and significance, the memories, of the marble and paint and music and ordered words which someday he must leave behind him.