William Faulkner, Part 2

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VOICE ONE:

I'm Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Steve Ember with People in
America in VOA Special English. Today, we finish the story of the
writer William Faulkner. He created an area and filled it with
people of the American South.

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VOICE ONE:

In nineteen-forty-five, all seventeen books William Faulkner had
written by then were not being published. Some of them could not be
found even in stores that sold used books.

The critic Malcolm Cowley says, Faulkner's "early novels had been
praised too much, usually for the wrong reasons. His later and in
many ways better novels had been criticized or simply not read. "

Even those who liked his books were not always sure what he was
trying to say. Faulkner never explained. And he did not give
information about himself. He did not even correct the mistakes
others made when they wrote about him. He did not care how his name
was spelled: with or without a "u. " He said either way was all
right with him.

Once he finished a book he was not concerned about how it was
presented to the public. Sometimes he did not even keep a copy of
his book. He said, "I think I have written a lot and sent it off to
be printed before I realized strangers might read it. "

VOICE TWO:

In nineteen-forty-six, Malcolm Cowley collected some of
Faulkner's writings and wrote a report about him. The collection
attempted to show what Faulkner was trying to do, and how each
different book was part of a unified effort.

Cowley agreed that Faulkner was an uneven writer. Yet, he said,
the unevenness shows that Faulkner was willing to take risks, to
explore new material, and new ways to talk about it.

In nineteen-twenty-nine, in his novel "Sartoris," Faulkner
presented almost all the ideas he developed during the rest of his
life. Soon after, he published the book he liked best, "The Sound
and the Fury." It was finished before "Sartoris," but did not appear
until six months later.

VOICE ONE:

In talking about "The Sound and the Fury," Faulkner said he saw
in his mind a dirty little girl playing in front of her house. From
this small beginning, Faulkner developed a story about the Compson
family, told in four different voices. Three of the voices are
brothers: Benjy, who is mentally sick; Quentin, who kills himself,
and Jason, a business failure. Each of them for different reasons
mourns the loss of their sister, Caddie. Each has a different piece
of the story.

It is a story of sadness and loss, of the failure of an old
Southern family to which the brothers belong. It also describes the
private ideas of the brothers. To do this, Faulkner invents a
different way of writing for each of them. Only the last part of the
novel is told in the normal way. The other three parts move forward
and back through time and space.

VOICE TWO:

The story also shows how the Compson family seems to cooperate in
its failure. In doing so the family destroys what it wants to save.

Quentin, in "The Sound and the Fury," tries to pressure his
sister to say that she is pregnant by him. He finds it better to say
that a brother and sister had sex together than to admit that she
had sex with one of the common town boys of Jefferson.

Another brother, Jason, accuses others of stealing his money and
causing his business to fail. At the same time, he is stealing from
the daughter of his sister.

Missus Compson, the mother in the family, says of God's actions:
"It can't be simply to…hurt me. Whoever God is, he would not permit
that. I'm a lady."

VOICE ONE:

Some of the people Faulkner
creates, like Reverend Hightower in "Light in August," live so much
in the past that they are unable to face the present. Others seem to
run from one danger to another, like young Bayard Sartoris, seeking
his own destruction. These people exist, Faulkner says, "in that
dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which
you cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no…[belief]."

As Malcolm Cowley shows, all of Faulkner's people, black or
white, act in a similar way. They dig for gold after they have lost
hope of finding it --like Henry Armstid in the novel, "The Hamlet."
They battle and survive a Mississippi flood for the reward of
returning to state prison -- as the tall man did in the story "Old
Man." They turn and face death at the hands of a mob -- like Joe
Christmas does in the novel, "Light in August." They act as if they
will succeed when they know they will fail.

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VOICE TWO:

Faulkner's next book, "As I Lay Dying," was published in
nineteen-thirty. It is similar to "The Sound and the Fury" in the
way it is written and in the way it deals with loss. Again Faulkner
uses a series of different voices to tell his story. The loss this
time is the death of the family's mother. The family carries the
body through flood and fire in an effort to get her body to
Jefferson to be buried.

Neither "As I Lay Dying" nor "The Sound and the Fury" was a great
success. Faulkner did not earn much money from them. He was adding
to his earnings by selling short stories and by working from time to
time on movies in Hollywood. Then to earn more money, he wrote a
book full of sex and violence. He called it "Sanctuary."

When the book was ready to be published, Faulkner went to New
York and completely rewrote it. The changes were made after it was
printed. So Faulkner had to pay for them himself.

VOICE ONE:

The main person in "Sanctuary" is a man called Popeye. He is a
kind of mechanical man, a man, Faulkner says, without human eyes.
Faulkner says he is a person with the depth of pressed metal. For
Faulkner, Popeye represents everything that is wrong with modern
society and its concern with economic capitalism.

Popeye is a criminal, a man who "made money and had nothing he
could do with it, spend it for. " He knows that alcohol will kill
him like poison. He has no friends. He has never known a woman.

In later books he appears as a member of the Snopes family. The
Snopes are a group of killers and barn burners. They fear nothing,
except nature. They love no one, except themselves. They cheat
everyone, even the devil. They live in a private land without
morals. Yet Flem Snopes ends as the president of the bank in
Jefferson.

Like Popeye, they gain the ownership and use of things, but they
never really have them. Flem Snopes marries into a powerful family
but his wife does not even have a name for him. She calls him "that
man. "

Faulkner says that nothing can be had without love. Love is the
opposite of the desire for power. A person in one of Faulkner's
stories says, "God created man, and he created the world for him to
live in. And…He created the kind of world he would have wanted to
live in if he had been a man. "

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VOICE TWO:

"Light in August" starts with the search by a woman, Lena Grove,
for the man who promised to marry her. The story is also about two
people who do not fit with other people. They are a black man named
Joe Christmas, and a former minister John Hightower, who has lost
his belief in God. Faulkner ties the three levels of individual
psychology, social history, and tragedy into a whole.

In nineteen-thirty-six, Faulkner followed "Light in August" with
"Absalom, Absalom." Many consider this his best novel. It is the
story of Joseph Sutpen, who wants to start a famous Southern family
after America's Civil War. It is told by four speakers, each trying
to discover what the story means. The reader sees how the story
changes with each telling, and that the "meanings" are created by
individuals. He finds that creating stories is the way a human being
finds meaning. Thus, "Absalom, Absalom" is also about itself, as a
work of the mind of man.

VOICE ONE:

Faulkner's great writing days were over by the end of World War
Two. Near the end of his life, Faulkner received many honors for his
writing. The last, and best honor, was the Nobel Prize for
Literature in nineteen-fifty.

In a speech accepting the award, Faulkner spoke to young writers.
It was a time of great fears about the atomic bomb. Faulkner said
that he refused to accept the end of the human race. He said he
believed that man will not only survive, he will rule. "Man is
immortal," he said, "because he has a soul, a spirit capable of
compassion, sacrifice and endurance. The writer's duty is to write
about these things. "

William Faulkner died of a heart attack in nineteen-sixty-two. He
was sixty-five years old.

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VOICE TWO:

This Special English program was written by Richard Thorman and
produced by Lawan Davis. I'm Steve Ember.

VOICE ONE:

And I'm Faith Lapidus. Join us again next week for People in
America in VOA Special English.

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