WILLIAM FAULKNER

As a boy, William Faulkner had been fascinated by planes. As a young man, after the United States entered World War I, he went to Canada in July 1918 to volunteer for the Royal Air Force; but the war ended before he actually qualified as a fighter-pilot. In part, perhaps, he was motivated by a family history of gallant participation in the armed defence of ideals. But the choice of serving as a fighter-pilot in the cause of the Western allies may also have had something to do with his love of planes. More than once, that interest found a place in his writing: the short story, “Death Drag”, is about a barn-storming pilot who ekes out a precarious livelihood doing acrobatic stunts in small towns for cash on the barrel; and his first novel, the eloquent “Soldiers’ Pay”, has a blinded and dying fighter-pilot as one of its central characters; the later 1934 novel, “Pylon”, touches on the same theme of flight.

Those fictions, like nearly all his work, are set in the Deep South. It was a world he knew about and wrote about, obsessively, in exact detail and with penetrating insight. Some of the details seem dated, to a reader nowadays: the use of the word “negro”, for instance, has become obsolete and is regarded with distaste; and bits of slang, in the dialogue, are relics of a vanished past, like some of the accoutre­ments of daily life. But what is important is the quality of the content Faulkner peopled his books with brilliantly portrayed individuals, rich in their humanity (and sometimes their inhumanity), all of them speaking with an authentic voice; and the eloquence of his narrative prose is unique.

He never left the South, essentially. From time to time he was absent physically, in Hollywood and Paris, for example. But wherever he went (and he was never away for long), the South went with him, a prime component of his inner luggage. And his whole body of writing is the work of a divided man: on the one hand, he was the consummate artiste engagé, in the sense that he forever immersed himself in the one community he knew inside out, in its way of life, its harmonies and tensions; on the other hand, he was a total loner, secluding himself in the privacy of his work-room, where he could recreate that community with objectivity and detachment. This, of course, is how most writers work. Only in isolation and silence can the truth be made to live, convincingly in valid language. That sense of isolation and the need for it are common in the trade: some writers are quite gregarious when away from their desks; but solitude is a necessary condition of their work. It is not always easy to achieve, if they live in a social climate that presses in on them, blithely ignoring their need for time to themselves. Faulkner grew up in just such an environment, and he had to carve out his own space with the same diligence as his ancestors had used in carving out their plantations. His doing so must have seemed, to his neighbours, somewhat antisocial. But as his reputation grew, their respect for his reclusiveness must have grown correspondingly. Early on, though, before he became famous, he probably found it difficult to distance himself from the world which was, after all, the material of his work. What perhaps confirmed his appreciation of such distance, and strengthened his resolve to make a habit of it, was his experience, as a young man, of being among strangers, in Canada, living unto himself far away from home, and yet discovering that the essence of home was undiluted by absence — if anything, its essentials persisted inside him with even greater clarity than when they were physically, and intrusive­ly, at his elbow. Afterwards, when he came back from travels elsewhere, he replicated that experience in his own home: he was surrounded by all that was familiar and formative; but at the core, closed off from the world, was his work-room, his sanctum. And from it, year after year, the world issued forth, in book after book, transformed from its mundane self into a higher version of that self — transformation of a sort that can only be achieved by a very great writer. Recognition abroad was not slow in coming. In the United States generally, and more particularly in the Deep South, Faulkner was less acclaimed, to begin with: it was as though readers there could not see past the local surface of his writing to its universal human depth. Eventually, of course, he was properly revered by his own countrymen as the foremost American writer of his time. And this esteem was internationally endorsed, late in his life, by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

William Faulkner was born in Mississippi on September 15th 1897. He died in Mississippi on July 6th l962, aged sixty-four.