LITERARY PORTRAITS
A SENSE OF FAULKNER
So far, Nobel Prize or not, Faulkner has remained Faulkner.
Anyone who knows him a little knows that he could not be changed by
the money, the honors, the recognition, or even by the French press.
Here is a recent example of how Faulkner remains Faulkner. Just before
he came up to New York, from where he was to fly to Stockholm, he
had Mrs. Faulkner telephone Saxe Commins, his good friend and editor
(if he could be said to have an editor). The voice from Mississippi:
"Bill wants you to buy him a dress suit." The voice in New York: "How
can I? I don't know Bill's measurements." The voice from Mississippi:
"I'll just give them to you now." While Commins held the phone, Faulk–
ner's wife measured Faulkner up, from cuff to waist and so on.
1
There is next to nothing (if nothing is too strong a word) in
Faulkner that is corruptible. But he is also complex and complicated
and sensitive and thoughtful and brooding-factors that are very often
missing when one thinks of an incorruptible man.
It
is this conjunction
of disparate elements that is impressive: he contains many of the char–
acteristics that force men into confusion and compromise, but he himself
acts with simplicity and conducts himself without compromise.
Often, men initially impress themselves through some one charac–
teristic. The impact of a first meeting with
T.
S. Eliot is one of friendli–
ness; with
E.
M. Forster, of shyness; with Evelyn Waugh, of impudence;
with W. H. Auden, of a:bstraction; with Elizabeth Bowen, of vigor; with
Marcel Ayme, of disinterestedness; with Dylan Thomas, of a puzzled
violence. After several meetings, the single characteristic tends to lose
its initial, exaggerated definition, and to take its proper, less conspi–
cuous place in a constellation of qualities. In Faulkner one is struck
first by a sense of intactness; and after, even long after, it is still there
as sharply defined as at first; it is never diminished, never tamed back
into the constellation.
The facts of Faulkner's early life are known. Born in Mississippi,
near Oxford (or J efferson; they have become interchangeable), in 1897.
Schooling regular up to his tenth or eleventh year; after that, it is
1.
Faulkner's Nobel Prize suit was not bought; it was rented.
