A SENSE OF FAULKNER
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sitting around in a Hollywood office and saying couldn't he work at
home, and the executives saying yes, thinking he meant his apartment
in Hollywood, but Faulkner meaning Oxford, Miss., and going home
really), is an example of Faulkner's innocence and simplicity.
And there was the time he was leaving New York for Oxford.
Shaking hands, he said to me: "Write me a letter. Don't write me about
how you are and about how I'm feeling. Write me a letter that says
something. Ask me a question. You tell me you're interested in
The
Bear.
Well, ask me questions about
The Bear,
specific questions. Ask me
something that matters." (When I remarked that I understood he didn't'
open his mail, he replied, eyes twinkling yet he himself immensely serious,
"I know what to open.")
Though this rejoinder may be interpreted as part of a performance,
of a stance, I accept it for what I believe it to be-a joke, issuing from
the uncomplicated fact that Faulkner does open some letters and not
others. It is a summing up of an experience, a dry humor that is related
to the speech of men who work farms from Maine to Florida. Faulkner's
humor, as a matter of fact, has been overlooked; though after the superb
joke that ends
Intruder in the Dust
(or for that matter the joke, the ter–
rible joke, that ends
The Old Man)
it would be sheer perversity to deny
it. His somewhat amused outlook was witnessed by Saxe Commins at
a football game. Faulkner, Commins says, predicted the right play at a
particularly subtle and crucial moment in the game. He congratulated
Faulkner, saying, "From now on you'll always be known as the grand–
stand quarterback." To which Faulkner demurred, "No, I'll always
be known as the corncob man."
There is a quality in Faulkner that is difficult to get hold of, that
is
most disconcerting, even when you know him. What I think it is
(though I am never sure) is simply a deep neutrality in Faulkner (re–
calling by its oppositeness Nietzsche's remark that perhaps all vulgarity
consists in man's inability to resist stimuli); a waiting and a listening
and a seeing that is neither friendly nor unfriendly, neither encouraging
nor discouraging.
Henry Green told me during his recent visit here that the one man
he wanted most to have read his work was Faulkner, adding,
"He'~
, the one man I'd like to meet more than anyone else in America." (How
strange, how much like Green's own fiction: Faulkner, who had not
been to New York more than a half dozen times in half a century, was
due to arrive that day.) When Green and Faulkner met a few nights
later, they were together for about twenty uninterrupted minutes. This
was the picture: Faulkner, small, wiry, relaxed and yet alert, silent,
