Chekhov’s Mistess

A Whiskey for My Friend: In Honor of Mr. Faulkner’s Birth Anniversary

Take heart writers! William Faulkner, who was born on this day in 1897, was considered by many as washed up by the time he was in his forties and most of his books were out of print. Then he won the Nobel prize in 1949 and became one of the most celebrated and studied authors in America.

Faulkner is my favorite author because he made his own rules, his language is creative and provocative, and his characters need no description, you just know them by their actions and thoughts. I read Light in August while in the delivery room during the 36 hours that my wife was in labor with our son.

Faulkner was not only an amazing writer, but quite a whiskey drinking, no nonsense character too. See The Writer’s Almanac for some stories (scroll down to find). And here are a couple of quotes from the Paris Review’s 1956 interview:

Interviewer:

Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?

Faulkner:

Read it four times.

Interviewer:

Can working for the movies [which he did] hurt your own writing?

Faulkner:

Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there’s not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate, because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

Interviewer:

Do you read your contemporaries?

Faulkner:

No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes – Don Quixote. I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac – he created a world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books – Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally, and of the poets Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.

Interviewer:

And Freud?

Faulkner:

Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I’m sure Moby Dick didn’t.

Of course you can find myriad books by or on Faulkner, but here is the latest that I know of:

Essays, Speeches & Public Letters
This is a newly updated edition.

Although The Sound and the Fury is his most famous (I recommend the Norton Critical Edition, which includes some interesting criticism and fascinating contextual information, such as Sartre’s essay “Time in the Work of Faulkner.”), my personal favorite is As I Lay Dying…

which I’m sure has influenced many writers. One of note is Suzan-Lori Parks, the fantastic playwright (Topdog/Underdog), whose first novel, Getting Mother’s Body is based on Faulkner’s work.

Here are some good WF links:

Nobel Prize speech and other information.

William Faulkner on the Web from a professor at University of Mississippi in Oxford, Faulkner’s hometown.

The William Faulkner Society

University of Virginia’s Special Collections Library which has WF’s personal library and manuscripts.

Read widely, think well, and write often.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: September 25, 2004
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:0
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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