William Faulkner, Part One

((THEME))

VOICE ONE:

I'm Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special
English. Today, we begin the story of the life of a famous Southern
writer, William Faulkner. He wrote about an imaginary place and
described changes in the American South.

((THEME))

VOICE ONE:

William Faulkner was born at the end of the nineteenth century.
It was a time when there were two Souths in the United States. The
first was the South whose beliefs had existed from before the
American Civil War which began in eighteen sixty-one. This South did
not question rules, even when those rules did not satisfy human
needs. It was a South filled with injustice for black people. It
held the seeds of its own destruction.

The other South was a land without any beliefs. It was a place
where success was measured by self-interest. This was a South where
each person had lost his place in the group. It was a place where
people owned things that they did not know how to use.

Faulkner saw that the old beliefs
were not right or even worth believing. And he saw that they could
not provide justice because they were based on slavery. Yet he felt
that even with their lies and half truths the old beliefs were
better than the moral emptiness of the modern South.

VOICE TWO:

In Faulkner's story called "The Bear" a group of men are talking
after the day's hunt. One man reads from a poem by the English
writer, John Keats:

"'She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, Forever wilt
thou love, and she be fair. '

"He's talking about a girl," one man says.

The other answers, 'He was talking about truth. Truth is one. It
doesn't change. It covers all things which touch the heart -- honor
and pity and justice and courage and love. Do you see now. '"

The American writer, Robert Penn Warren says about Faulkner, "The
important thing is the presence of the idea of truth. It covers all
things that involve the heart and define the effort of man to rise
above the mechanical process of life. "

VOICE ONE:

Faulkner has been accused of looking back to a time when life was
better. Yet, he believes that truth belongs to all times. But it is
found most often in the people who stand outside what he calls "the
loud world. "

One of the people in his story "Delta Autumn" says, "There are
good men everywhere, at all times. "

Faulkner's great-grandfather accepted the old beliefs. He was one
of the men who had helped build the South, but his time was gone.
Now money had replaced the old order of honor. What Faulkner saw was
that there could be no order at all, no idea of doing what is right,
in a world that measured success in terms of money.

VOICE TWO:

This is the changing South that Faulkner describes in the area he
created. He named it Yoknapatawpha County. He describes it as in the
northern part of the state of Mississippi. It lies between sand
hills covered with pine trees and rich farmland near the Mississippi
River. It has fifteen-thousand-six-hundred-eleven people, living on
almost four-thousand square kilometers. Its central city is
Jefferson, where the storekeepers, mechanics, and professional men
live.

The rest of the people of Yoknapatawpha County are farmers or men
who cut trees. Their only crops are wood and cotton. A few live in
big farmhouses, left from an earlier time. Most of them do not even
own the land they farm.

The critic Malcolm Cowley says, "Others might say that Faulkner
was not so much writing stories for the public as telling them to
himself. It is what a lonely child might do, or a great writer. "

((Music Bridge))

VOICE ONE:

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in
eighteen-ninety-seven. His father worked for the railroad. William's
great-grandfather had built it. His grandfather owned it. When the
grandfather decided to sell the railroad, William's father moved his
family thirty-five miles west to the city of Oxford.

Growing up in Oxford, William Faulkner heard stories of the past
from his grandmother and from a black woman who worked for his
family. He heard more stories from old men in front of the
courthouse, and from poor farmers sitting in front of a country
store.

You learn the stories, Faulkner says, without speech somehow from
having been born and living beside them, with them, as children will
and do.

VOICE TWO:

Faulkner was a good student. Yet by the time he was fifteen he
had left school. Except for a year at the University of Mississippi
at the end of World War One, that was the last of his official
education.

He took a number of jobs in Oxford, but did not stay with any of
them. He began to think that he was a writer. Then in
nineteen-eighteen the woman he loved married another man. Faulkner
left Mississippi and joined the British Royal Flying Corps. He was
sent to Canada to train to fight in World War One.

The war ended before he could be sent to Europe. He returned to
Oxford, walking with difficulty because of what he said was a "war
wound. "

VOICE ONE:

At home Faulkner again moved from one job to the next. He wrote
bad poetry, drew pictures that looked like other men's pictures, and
wrote uninteresting stories. A book of his poetry, The Marble Faun,
was published in nineteen-twenty-four.

A year later he went to the
Southern city of New Orleans, Louisiana. There he met the American
writer, Sherwood Anderson. They became friends. Anderson told
Faulkner to develop his own way of writing, and to use material from
his own part of the country. He also told Faulkner he would find a
publisher for the novel Faulkner was writing. But Anderson also told
Faulkner that he would not read the book.

VOICE TWO:

The book was called "Soldier's Pay." It would not be remembered
today if it were not for Faulkner's later work. The same could be
said of Faulkner's next book, "Mosquitoes."

Money from these books made it possible for him to travel to
Europe. He educated himself by reading a large number of modern
writers. Among them was the Irish writer James Joyce. From him,
Faulkner learned to write about people's inner thoughts. He also
read the books of the Austrian doctor, Sigmund Freud. From him,
Faulkner learned some of the reasons people act in the strange way
they often do.

Instead of remaining in Paris, as many American writers did,
Faulkner returned to Mississippi and began his serious writing. "I
was trying," he said, "to put the history of mankind in one
sentence. " Later he said, "I am still trying to do it, but now I
want to put it all on the head of a pin. " He created Yoknapatawpha
County and its people, and gave them a meaning far beyond their
place and lives.

((MUSIC BRIDGE))

VOICE ONE:

In nineteen-twenty-nine Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, the
woman he had loved since they were in school together. Her earlier
marriage had failed. She had returned to Oxford with her two
children.

They bought an old ruined house and began the costly work of
repairing it. Faulkner also took on the job of supporting the rest
of his family. His letters from this time on are often full of talk
about what he must do to support his family and to continue the
repairs to his house.

VOICE TWO:

Faulkner's next book, "Sartoris," presents almost all the ideas
that he develops during the rest of his life. First, however, the
book Faulkner wrote had to be cut by about twenty-five percent.

Faulkner resisted. He said, if you grow a vegetable, you can cut
it to look like something else, but it will be dead. Yet, when
Faulkner read the book after his editor cut it, he approved. He even
cooperated in more re-shaping of the book.

In "Sartoris," Faulkner found his subject, his voice, and his
area. He writes about the connection between an important Southern
family and the local community. He describes how the Sartoris family
seems to help in its own destruction.

VOICE ONE:

In the next seven years, between nineteen-twenty-nine and
nineteen-thirty-six, he seemed to re-invent the novel with every
book he wrote. "Get it down," he said. "Take chances. It may be bad,
but that's the only way you can do anything good. "

At that time, most novels about the South described a land that
never existed. After Faulkner, few northerners were brave enough to
write about a South they did not know. And no serious Southern
writer was willing to describe a South that did not exist.

(THEME)

VOICE TWO:

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

VOICE ONE:

And I'm Faith Lapidus. Join us again next week for the rest of
the story about William Faulkner on People in America in VOA Special
English.

((THEME))