A SENSE OF FAULKNER
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sporadic: he puts in appearances at the high school only now and then,
and later at the university in Oxford for a few courses. He joins the
Royal Canadian Air Force in World War
I,
is shot down twice, is
wounded, and returns to Oxford after the Armistice. He takes different
jobs, house painter, night watchman, post-office clerk, even travels up
to New York (at Stark Young's invitation) where he works in a book
shop.
New York disturbs him and he returns quickly to Oxford (later
he is to say about New York: "I feel the stone and steel weighing down
on me and closing me in. Remember, I'm a farmer.") ; restless, and not
doing anybody any good, he goes to New Orleans. It is a crucial time
and, as it happened, a crucial place. Though to hear Faulkner tell it,
nothing really happened; there is not the slightest hint in his story of
the miracle of crystallization that in effect did occur.
In New Orleans, Faulkner used to see Mrs. Sherwood Anderson
(he had known her in Mississippi). One day he asked her what her
husband's business was. When she told him, he was impressed. He said:
"You have a pretty good life when you're a writer. You write in the
morning, you walk around the town in the afternoon and see the sights,
you eat and drink in the evening, and you see your friends at night.
Now, that's good." Mrs. Anderson didn't see Faulkner for quite a
stretch after that; and then one day she did, and she asked him where
he'd been keeping himself. "I've been writing a book," he said. It was
Soldier's Pay.
When it was finished, Sherwood Anderson said he'd send
it to his publisher, providing he didn't have to read it. That suited
Faulkner. ("I was pleased," he says, recalling Anderson's offer.) Ap–
parently he didn't believe the novel had an existence other than that it
had been written (or he simply had forgotten about it) ; because, soon
after, he crossed the Atlantic on a cattle boat. It was while he was
knocking around France that he learned he had become an official
author.
But it launched him, launched a career that in so many ways typifies
the main line of the American creative impulse. He shares with it its
most distinctive features: isolation, introspection, moralism, an obsessive
>and compulsive need to work things out by himself, without concession,
in his own time, out of his own cadence, through his own syntax. Con–
sidering, too, that he is a busy man-he runs his own, good-sized farm–
he has written a considerable amount, most of which holds up power–
fully and lives by itself. Undeniably, things "get done" on a farm, not
only the chores but the reading and writing too. Incidentally, it seems
noteworthy to point out to what an engaging extent Faulkner has
