CUNY’s Carl Rollyson on William Faulkner & Southern Literature

The Learning Curve Carl Rollyson

[00:00:28] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody. And welcome to today’s episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your co-hosts, Dr. Albert Cheng from the University of Arkansas and co-hosting with me is Alisha Searcy.

[00:00:41] Hey, Alisha, what’s going on? Hello. All is well. Hope all is well with you, Albert. Yeah, I think so. I know last week you plugged an event that you were going to run. I hope that went well.

[00:00:53] Alisha Searcy: It went so well. Thanks for asking. We had almost 40 elected officials from six different southern states and talked about the science of reading and funding formulas and accountability and public charter schools.

[00:01:06] So it was a great event. Atlanta had perfect weather. Everyone was happy. I couldn’t have asked for a better event, and I think everybody left feeling inspired and ready to take action in their next legislative and school board sessions.

[00:01:19] Albert Cheng: All right. Well, that’s great to hear. And yeah, let’s see what unfolds in this legislative session in the next couple of years. Lots of exciting potential things going on in education here.

[00:01:31] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And I hope all for the benefit of kids.

[00:01:33] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, you know, this week’s show, Alisha, we’re going to go back to talking less about ed policy, but we’re going to talk about William Faulkner, the well-known author. I’m really looking forward to this show and learning more about him.

[00:01:45] I actually don’t know very much, so yeah. But hey, before we get to that, we should cover some news and I’ll let you go first. You were talking about an article that you saw about charter schools, I think, or I’ll, I’ll let you share about what you found.

[00:01:58] Alisha Searcy: Yeah. So interestingly, uh, came across an article in Penn live. com, Pennsylvania. That is black pastors’ group in Harrisburg that backs charter schools to host Cornell West. And I thought that it was interesting. So as a reminder, Cornel West is a professor, a very brilliant man. And he’s also known as a progressive activist. And he ran as a third-party presidential candidate this last cycle.

[00:02:23] Some ballots he was on, some he was not. And so, he’s going to be a guest of the Black Pastors United for Education in Harrisburg. And the reason that I thought this was interesting At Democrats for Education Reform, where I am the regional president of the southern region, and Education Reform now, they’re sister organizations, we have done some polling recently and it basically confirms what we already know when it comes to Democrats, when it comes to African Americans, when it comes to people of color in general.

[00:02:55] In the high 60s and 70s, all of these groups are supportive of public charter schools. And so having this meeting with Cornel West, I think, is really important. I think having members of the clergy involved in education is also important because there’s a lot of power and influence, particularly in the black church.

[00:03:17] And so I found this article to be fascinating because the election is over, but these conversations need to continue to happen. It’s not at all about, you know, we don’t want to improve traditional public education. I think those of us who support charter schools, and I bet you’re in this camp too, it’s about having options and being able to choose a school that best meets the needs of your children.

[00:03:39] If you’ve got more than one child in a household, you know that kids act differently, learn differently, even in the same household. So imagine what it would be like for You know, lots of other kids. And so it was kind of a breath of fresh air to see this meeting happening. I don’t actually know where Dr. Cornel West is on charter schools, but I would imagine if this group is inviting him, he’s probably supportive. And so as we continue these conversations about choice in public education, as we talk about what we do, that’s in the best interest of kids, I like the idea of seeing different groups. have these conversations, bring public charters to the forefront, and even where there’s disagreement, the dialogue is important. So that’s my article, thought it was great, and kudos to this group of Black pastors in Harrisburg for bringing these folks and these conversations together.

[00:04:34] Albert Cheng: Yeah, well, hey, thanks for sharing that. I mean, I really appreciate that. You’re absolutely right. I mean, it is about creating educational options, and I won’t get on a soapbox here because we’ve got a show, but you know, one of my things, schticks, I guess, is we’ve got lots of different groups and people and organizations and institutions throughout all of civil society, and religious groups are one of them.

[00:04:55] And I’ve always thought that in tackling this issue of Providing educational opportunities for more and more kids or better ones for more and more kids. We gotta have everyone involved. You know, lots of other kind of civic institutions. And so, can’t just be politicians. It can’t just be parent advocacy groups.

[00:05:13] It’s gotta be everyone. And look, I’ll tell you being on the board of a private school here in town. I mean, we lean heavily on the religious community, um, to one. So, you know, we’re actually using space, you know, empty church space to run a school. And so, I think there’s just so much potential for churches and other, uh, so civic associations to join the fray and do right by our kids.

[00:05:37] Exactly. Well said. Well, I’ve got a different kind of article. I just, this is an article, I don’t know, maybe I’m just a numbers and stats nerd, and so this one kind of leapt out at me. So, the title of the article is, uh, a trend colleges might not want applicants to notice. Any guesses what this trend might be?

[00:05:57] Alisha Searcy: I’m gonna say something about enrollment.

[00:06:01] Albert Cheng: Something about enrollment? It’s related. And I know you have a daughter, is it? Looking to applying this year?

[00:06:07] Alisha Searcy: Yes, she’ll be a freshman somewhere in the fall.

[00:06:10] Albert Cheng: Well, the trend this article is pointing out is that it’s actually becoming easier to get into college. And so, check out this article, there is a perception out there, and I actually thought it might have been true, but maybe I’m wrong, that it’s more difficult these days to get into college. I would say so. But apparently, there’s some data out there suggesting otherwise, that, that actually if you look, compare us acceptance rates across a vast majority of institutions across the country, uh, the acceptance rates have gone up and you know, the article is trying to explain some potential reasons for this.

[00:06:44] One is that fewer and fewer people are going to college. And I think this will only get aggravated later on as you know, birth rates have gone down. And so colleges are actually putting in lots of effort to recruit students. So anyway, I think all of this is kind of boiling down to the fact that, hey, over the past, you know, couple decades, it’s actually there in the data where.

[00:07:06] Acceptance rates generally have gone up. I mean, there are a few colleges where the acceptance rates have gone lower, but generally, on average, it’s a little bit easier to get in. So, I don’t know if this is going to bode well for your daughter. I didn’t see. Yeah. Anyway, we wish her the, wish her the best of luck in getting in and I know it’ll, it’ll work out.

[00:07:26] Alisha Searcy: It will. I’m confident about that. I am surprised though, I will say, because I think about, I went to Spelman and, I was on a call a few months ago and the average GPA of an applicant at Spelman is 4. 6. That was not the case when I applied something years ago. And so that is, I’m wondering if that information is maybe disaggregated, you know, based on region, based on the type of college or university, even in the University of Georgia, here in Georgia, it’s very. It’s a lot more competitive, and so I would like to see a little bit more of that data to see where exactly we’re talking about. That’s very interesting to me.

[00:08:10] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, those are absolutely great questions to ask. You know, it’s always worth another peek under the hood to see what’s going on. So, but hey, I get, you know, we could talk about this forever, but hey, we’ve got a show here about the great American literary author, William Faulkner.

[00:08:37] Albert Cheng: Carl Rollyson is professor of journalism at Baruch College, the City University of New York. He has published more than 40 books ranging in subject matter from biographies of William Faulkner, Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and Sylvia Plath to Studies of American Culture, Children’s Biography, Film, and Literary Criticism.

[00:09:02] Professor Rollyson has authored more than 500 articles on American and European literature and history. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the London Sunday Telegraph, and in journals such as American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Professor Rolison’s reviews of biography appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Kansas City Star, and the New Criterion.

[00:09:31] He is currently advisory editor for the Hollywood Legends series published by the University Press of Mississippi. Professor Rollyson, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you on. I’m happy to be here. Well, uh, admittedly, I don’t know that much about William Faulkner, so I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

[00:09:50] And so why don’t we start from the beginning here? I mean, you’ve got a two-volume biography of Faulkner. It’s probably the fullest portrait of this 20th century literary giant. Share with us a quick overview of his life and explain why he remains such an enduringly great American literary figure who we should all know more about.

[00:10:09] Carl Rollyson: Well, William Faulkner was born right at the end of the 19th century, 1897, began writing seriously in the 1920s. He thought he was going to be a poet until he went to New Orleans. I know we’ll get into this a little bit later, but he loved John Keats. He loved the Romantic poets. Some of the Elizabethan poets.

[00:10:30] And he had, from a very young age, wanted to be a great writer. But it took him a while, until he was almost 30 years old, to find that his real subject matter was the American South. And that’s what he’s known for, of course, as a great Southern novelist, although I would I would simply call him a great American novelist.

[00:10:49] He dealt with these major issues, like the issue of race, the issue of war, both in his Southern novels and World War I in his novel A Fable, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. At any rate, why is he a great writer? Why should we know about him now, I suppose? And I think above everything else is his language.

[00:11:10] It’s his eloquence. To me, no one surpasses Faulkner. I say that out of some ignorance, in the sense that I haven’t really kept up with contemporary literature, but I’ve yet to read somebody who’s said, oh, such and such a contemporary writer is Even greater than Faulkner. I’ve never heard that said. And if it can be pointed out to me, fine.

[00:11:32] But there’s something about his, on the one hand, his themes are dark. People sometimes say he’s depicting. Pressing, he deals with human corruption. At the same time, his language is so lofty and so eloquent that I don’t think one gets the feeling of depression when reading him, but rather exhilaration.

[00:11:57] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s talk even more about his background and how that maybe influenced his work. So, in the first volume of your Faulkner biography, The Past is Never Dead, you note that Faulkner emerged, and I’m quoting here, emerged from the ravaged South. Half backwards, half defeated the empire. And you’ve alluded to this already but tell us more about the context of his young life, early 20th century Mississippi, which is, you know, really only a generation removed from the Civil War, family background, education, relationships. How did all these experiences in his early life form his literary life later on?

[00:12:30] Carl Rollyson: Well, of course, he grew up in a family, a southern family in Oxford, Mississippi, a great grandfather who had fought in the Civil War. There were still Civil War veterans around, so we heard tales of the Civil War. The South itself was, of course, decimated by the Civil War.

[00:12:46] Mississippi had been quite a prosperous state, but a prosperity that was really based on slavery. Pretty much half the population was Black, and this is something that, for someone who wanted to be a writer, who wanted to be honest, it was an issue that ultimately he would have to deal with. Although, as I say, he really didn’t come to grips with it until almost into his, his 30s.

[00:13:11] He did not grow up in a literary community. Oxford, though it had a university, the university certainly was not teaching contemporary American literature. Things begin to change in the South with the First World War. For the first time, and Faulkner then, as a young man, wants to go off and fight the war, but never quite makes it, never gets out of flight training school in Toronto.

[00:13:36] The war ends on him. But for the first time, with the First World War, you begin to see, in towns like Oxford, the American flag flying again. That’s how long it took, from the end of the war, 1865, until 1918. And, of course, there were still some Southerners who very much could not get over the Civil War and flew the Confederate flag on special occasions and so on.

[00:14:02] But he very much wanted a national voice. He wanted to go beyond what the Civil War veterans and, and, and the people in his family taught him. That’s, that’s why even though he spent so much of his life in the South, it’s those experiences outside the South that really transformed him as a human being.

[00:14:22] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s talk about his first novel a little bit, Soldier’s Pay. And so, in his late teens, early twenties, he was mentored by a local Ivy League educated attorney, Phil Stone. And as you mentioned earlier, he tried to write poetry and actually met writers like Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, you know, you talked about him trying to get into World War I. Apparently there’s, what, travels to Europe, including fascist Italy, living in New Orleans. I mean, how do all these experiences in that time of his life fit in?

[00:14:54] Carl Rollyson: I think, yeah, I think two key events. One is his time in New Orleans, which is very, compared to where he had come from, was a very cosmopolitan city in which he met people of all walks of life, and most importantly, the writer Sherwood Anderson.

[00:15:09] He began to tell Sherwood Anderson stories about growing up in the South. And Sherwood Anderson began to say, you know, that’s what you need to write about. And people in New Orleans, one of the newspapers, got him to write sketches of local characters. And I think he began to see the attractiveness of prose and how he could shape that.

[00:15:30] So he spends about six months in New Orleans. wants to go to Europe to get that experience. It’s something that his great grandfather had done. He had gone to Europe and actually wrote a, wrote a book about his travels. So it was very much a part of family history in that sense of going off to see the European continent.

[00:15:50] So anyway, he goes there to make a long story short. And one of the things that Faulkner experiences is life in these small Italian mountain towns. He writes one story in particular, Mistral, which is his, Faulkner’s, I almost said first encounter with fascism, but his first encounter with fascism is in his own native land in the South and the way that the Blacks are, are treated and the way race becomes a category by which individuals are judged.

[00:16:21] But in this Italian town, what he finds out is there’s evidently been a murder, and nobody wants to talk about it. And there’s a kind of community enforcement of silence that two young Americans visiting pick up on. And at one point, they even use this phrase, joking to themselves, no spica, meaning, you know, you dare not speak about certain things.

[00:16:43] Well, this was true when he grew up. There were certain things you couldn’t talk about, you know, there was the whole issue of miscegenation, you know, Black Faulkners, for example, was something that the family never acknowledged. And so, he suddenly sees what’s happened to him in the South from a global perspective, or at least a European perspective, by traveling in Europe.

[00:17:07] And so I think when he writes his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, it’s actually his first published novel, he’s interested in that idea of a returning veteran who’s, disabled by the war, virtually blind, and trying to readjust to a world in which World War I has, has changed that world. It’s no longer the same world anymore.

[00:17:32] Albert Cheng: Hmm. That’s fascinating. Well, let’s maybe switch gears a little bit and we’ll get back to his works, but kind of switch back to his personal life. Faulkner lived much of the rest of his life, really, you know, after that in Oxford, Mississippi, where he ultimately married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, who herself was a writer. And now that proved to be a complicated, tumultuous match, made worse by his excessive drinking. So, tell us about his family, his wife had a daughter, Jill, and what about his writing habits at his home, uh, Rowan Oak?

[00:18:02] Carl Rollyson: Yeah, after he made some money in Hollywood, he was able to afford this old, decrepit Southern mansion, which he himself fixed up. He certainly had help, but I mean, he, he was good with his hands. He was a good laborer in that sense. It’s a good example of living at Roanoke of his, in a sense, divided sensibility. On the one hand, he was highly critical of the South and of slavery and many of the things that the South stood for. On the other hand, he grew up in a kind of aristocratic family.

[00:18:30] of leading citizens. His grandfather owned a bank, for example, which Wachter worked in briefly. So, on the one hand, you would think he would be a good catch for Estelle, also a local family, and their childhood sweethearts. But he doesn’t seem to catch on. That is, he’s a dreamer. He doesn’t seem reliable. He quits school.

[00:18:55] He doesn’t finish high school, for example. And the family don’t think he’s such a good match for their daughter. They’re certainly a social climbing family who want to do better, not worse. And so, in spite of Faulkner’s own good family connection, so to speak, he himself does not seem to be a reliable sort of person.

[00:19:16] I didn’t really mention Phil Stone. You mentioned him earlier as one of the local lawyers, an Ivy League graduate who had tutored Faulkner in literature. That’s certainly true. But Phil Stone also began to have misgivings about his mentee, the young man who he had mentored. And he didn’t think much of Estelle Oldham either.

[00:19:37] She seemed to him, Kind of flighty. He didn’t see her serious side at all. At any rate, she doesn’t marry Falkner right away. She goes off with what seems to be a very promising attorney to the far east. Comes back almost a decade later, in which he marries her to use the sort of the cliche on the rebound.

[00:19:57] And they never really quite got over that. The fact that they weren’t married when they were supposed to be married, but they tried to patch things up. Falkner never really fought back. I don’t think he found anyone else that he really wanted to marry other than Estelle. She was the prize catch for him as a teenage boy and was still so in his late 20s and early 30s.

[00:20:20] They had one daughter who died in infancy. It was two of them. Terrible. I only lived for a few days. And then about a year later, his daughter Jill was born. And one of the things I try to do in my biography is say, as great a writer as he is, writers often don’t make good parents. Because they’re so obsessed with their writing, and often not even home, and Faulkner did leave home a lot.

[00:20:47] But at the same time, dearly loved his daughter, and he dearly loved the whole idea of family. And that’s what I thought, although that’s certainly talked about in some of the other Faulkner biographies, I wanted to, to really show how central that was. to his sensibility and what an impact he had since he never had a son.

[00:21:08] The impact he had not only on his daughter but on cousins, a niece as well, that he became, they called him Papi, he really became the family heir. Patriarch, in a way that other modern writers like, say, Ernest Hemingway never did. He had several children and several marriages, but never the same kind of grounded sensibility that Faulkner had.

[00:21:32] Albert Cheng: Thanks for that. Well, let’s get to discussing more about his work. The imaginary Yaknapatawpha County. Yes. I hope I did that well enough. Yeah, pretty well. And so, I believe it’s Chicksaw for spring. Split land, is that correct?

[00:21:46] Carl Rollyson: Yeah, that’s what it’s supposed to mean, yeah. Okay.

[00:21:49] Albert Cheng: Now, I mean, I’ll let you discuss more about that, but certainly it provided the setting for some of his most inspired and complex novels, including The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, As I Lay Dying, published a year later, Light in the August 1932, and Absalom, Absalom, in 1936.

[00:22:08] Tell us some more about the literary landscape, as well as the important characteristics and themes. Found in these works.

[00:22:15] Carl Rollyson: One of Faulkner’s early novels, actually his third novel, Flags in the Dust, is the first novel in which he doesn’t use the term Yakhnapatawpha yet, but it’s set in Yakhnapatawpha, which is essentially the area around Oxford, Mississippi.

[00:22:30] He doesn’t use Oxford as a place name, he uses the name Jefferson. And it’s his attempt, especially in that first novel, Flags in the Dust, first Yakhnapatawpha novel, to get everything in there. To get the aristocratic whites, to get in the black servants, to get in the, the hill folk, the people who live out in the country, the rural life, to sort of map out the geography of Yakhnapetrov, the same way that Thomas Hardy does in his Wessex novels, where you have the rustics, and you have the rural life.

[00:23:04] Higher class people, and you’ve got the business people, and so on. And Faulkner takes a very hardy esque view of all this, or he’s often compared to the French novelist Balzac as well, doing some of the same thing, writing a kind of social history. That becomes very important. And then it’s layered in with this intense Psychological look at the way many Southern families operate, this comes to the fore in The Sound and the Fury with the Compson family, where you’ve got one son Quentin who is sort of a standard bearer, like, just like Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, Quentin Compson is going off to Harvard and he’s meant to, the way the same is.

[00:23:53] Phil Stone, who went off to Yale, he’s supposed to distinguish the family by making good in the North and then coming back to the South, and it turns out that that whole heritage absolutely haunts Quentin. It becomes a burden to him, and ultimately, he commits suicide. in the Sound of the Fury. And then you’ve got a brother, Jason, who’s working in a hardware store, and the Faulkner family actually did have a Faulkner, uh, had a hardware store at one time.

[00:24:23] And Jason is the bitter one, the one who is left at home, who doesn’t go to college, who has to deal with a hoi polloi, so to speak, and who’s very angry about this, this whole setup. And then there’s There never was a daughter in the family, Faulkner family, but Faulkner gives himself one in a sense. Gives it to the Compson family, Cady Compson, who’s this beautiful, intelligent, sensitive woman who simply does not fit into this environment, who is treated, Quentin, her brother Quentin wants to idolize her, to make her into romantic heroine, and she’s a young teenage girl who just.

[00:25:05] You know, she wants to have a good time. Her mother is no help. The mother just, you know, because Caddy does not want to behave like a southern belle. The family is dysfunctional. That’s the only way to put it. And in the last section of the novel, the famous Dilsey section, is about the black servant, Dilsey, and the Faulkner family had a servant like this, Calibar, who is the glue.

[00:25:29] Who keeps everything together, and who understands the Compsons better than the Compsons do. She understands what Jason’s about, and copes with him, stands up to him, in a way that no one else in the family can. And this was very much Faulkner’s experience with Kelly Barr, with the woman who brought him up, who was a very strong woman, who took no guff, and who, you know, laid it out for Faulkner, what it was like for Black people under Reconstruction.

[00:26:02] Faulkner was hearing from white people about, oh, you know, there were carpetbaggers and scalawags and these people taking advantage of us, and woe is me. And Cali Bar was there, well let me tell you something. You know, there was another side to this whole story. And that’s what makes Faulkner great. Is he listened.

[00:26:21] His brothers did not listen. His brothers were art segregationists. His mother was an art segregationist. Faulkner was the only one in the family who actually listened to Black people, and listened to the way they spoke, and discovered their humanity. And their humanity becomes, in many ways, a touchstone in his novels, a way of measuring what happened to the American South, so much so that many, many Southerners of Faulkner’s era hated him.

[00:26:50] Absolutely hated him because they felt he was a, you know, a renegade, a traitor to the Southern cause. And so, what makes him so outstanding is, yes, he’s a product of his time. There are lots of things about him which contemporary readers would not like, but he was so ahead of his time in his understanding, not only of Southern history, but of American history.

[00:27:15] Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. I want to dig into that a little bit more. But before I get there, I want to ask you. about Faulkner’s time in Los Angeles. So, to earn money, we know that he was writing screenplays and working on as many 50 films between 1932 and 54. And so your biography reveals a lot about this period, including his passionate lengthy affair with the younger woman, Meta Carpenter. So, can you talk about Faulkner’s experience in Hollywood and its influence on his literary work?

[00:27:46] Carl Rollyson: Sure. Faulkner came to New York in 1931 because one of his novels, Sanctuary, was considered, oh, sensationalistic. It came out at the same time as gangster films, like Little Caesar came out. And there’s a character in Sanctuary, Popeye, that people were quite taken with as in this kind of modern mode.

[00:28:06] Anyway, he met people in New York. Who were from Hollywood, people like Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. And when he finished Light in August of 1932, he decided he needed money. He wanted to buy Roanoke, for example, this Southern mansion. So, he went out to Hollywood, and he made a lot of money. But he got interesting projects, and he lucked out.

[00:28:28] People don’t think of Faulkner as lucky out in California, but he did. Because Howard Hawks, the director, Howard Hawks was a great reader of Hemingway. And he was a great reader of Faulkner. And Hawks sat down one day and essentially put Faulkner through film school, you know, talked about what’s a dolly shot, you know, what’s, you know, how close ups work, how flashbacks work, although he often would say Faulkner when Faulkner’s writing a script, no flashbacks.

[00:28:56] We got to keep the story moving. So anyway, Howard Hawks was a great reader of literature, and he was also a great film director. And so he put Faulkner on a number of important, interesting projects. Faulkner never. He acknowledged his friendship with Hawks and was very grateful to Howard Hawks. He was never stingy about giving credit to Howard Hawks.

[00:29:20] But Faulkner always spoke about Hollywood in the most pejorative terms. You know that it was, he was there for the money, and he was. But as I like to say, we live in a world of mixed motivations. Just because you’re doing something for money doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an impact on you, or that you can’t learn from it.

[00:29:36] And that’s one of the things that Faulkner did. He used the screenplay form which we begin to see play itself out in the 1940s and 1950s and later parts of his career. So Hollywood is very important, and Meta  was very important. Why was Meta important? She was Howard Hawks secretary for one thing. And she knew how Howard Hawks worked, and she was from Tunica, Mississippi, she knew all about the South, she was from the South, and so she could meet Faulkner on his own ground, and the other thing she did, which I don’t think people acknowledge as much as they should with Meta, She took Faulkner’s dictation.

[00:30:14] He actually dictated some of his screenplays to her. And she would stop and ask him certain things. And by stopping and asking him certain things, he began to learn more about the screenplay form of what worked, what didn’t work, and so on. She was very important. And then, of course, there’s romantic interest.

[00:30:33] She was beautiful. She was in her, her late 20s. He was older than her. He had this, I don’t know what else to call it, this thing for younger women that rejuvenated him. This was true right too, almost to the end of his life. And so she was, in a sense, the ideal woman for him in galvanizing, His romantic interest, he couldn’t have written a novel like The Wild Palms, which is one of the most romantic novels ever written by an American. She’s right in there. Her character’s helping to inspire his, his feeling toward women and also his changing feelings toward women.

[00:31:11] Alisha Searcy: Hmm. That’s a very interesting context. I want to go back to this conversation about the South. In the title of his novel, Go Down Moses of 1942, It’s drawn from an African American spiritual, and he dedicated the book, quote, to Mamie Caroline Barr, Mississippi, 1840 to 1940, who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation or of recompense, and to my childhood, an immeasurable devotion and love.

[00:31:42] And so James Baldwin, as we know, was a writer, was highly critical of Faulkner’s go-slow view of desegregation, while Ralph Ellison, on the other hand, who’s author of Invisible Man, said, quote, no one in American fiction has done so much to explore the types of Negro personality as has Faulkner, unquote. So, can you talk to us about Faulkner’s self, race, and civil rights?

[00:32:10] Carl Rollyson: Yeah. There are in a sense two Faulkners. There’s the Faulkner of the novels, and there’s the Faulkner that lived every day in the South. The Faulkner that lived every day in the South is who James Baldwin is criticizing. When Faulkner said, go slow now, he was worried because he saw his own family being riled up.

[00:32:27] He saw his brother John saying, you know, if it comes to it, I’m going to come out in the streets and shoot Negroes if they, if they keep marching for civil rights and so on. So. How do you live there? It got so bad for Faulkner that at one point he said, I may have to one day, just like the Germans during the 30s in World War II, the Germans who protested Hitler, I may have to go live somewhere else.

[00:32:49] And in a sense he did. The last five years of his life, most of the time he spent in Charlottesville, Virginia, not in Oxford, Mississippi, because he was getting death threats. Not the only reason he was in Charlottesville, but it was one of the reasons. So, on the one hand, you’ve got this great novelist, and this is especially true of Absalom Absalom.

[00:33:08] I have an article coming out in the National Review about Absalom Absalom, that it’s the greatest novel about race ever written in this country. Not just my opinion. Ralph Ellison might have said that much. Toni Morrison did say that much, and so did Cornel West also feels that way about it.

[00:33:30] Faulkner, when he was, he had this view of literature, you know, they call him a modernist. Now what it means to be a modernist writer is, what your devotion is, your devotion is to literature. It’s literature that might have a message in it, but it’s not the purpose of literature. Literature shouldn’t have an axe to grind.

[00:33:48] Literature shouldn’t be message driven, even if there is a message inside of it. And this is the Faulkner you get in the novels. The Faulkner you get in novels is incredibly courageous and brave in dealing with race relationships. On the other hand, you get the Faulkner outside of the novels. And you have to remember, too, the Civil Rights Movement, as we understand it, comes out of the 1950s.

[00:34:14] By the 1950s, Faulkner has written many of his great novels. During that period, he was not a national public figure. He’s not a national public figure until he wins the Nobel Prize in 1949. So, no one’s asking him his opinion about integration, for example. So, when people start asking him, he’s got his segregationist family to deal with, and he’s got his neighbors to deal with, and his hunting buddies to deal with, and everybody around him, he gets very worried.

[00:34:45] And he’s not a politician, he’s not particularly versed in how social causes work, and, frankly, he becomes more timid than his novels are. And that’s when people, and, and I think James Baldwin is right to criticize Faulkner at this point. Faulkner does not understand social protest in the sense that Baldwin and other of Baldwin’s contemporaries do.

[00:35:11] So I think that there is this divide in Faulkner that many writers about Faulkner have identified, and I think you can’t square it. There’s the man outside the novels and there’s the man inside the novels. Now the man outside the novels did, right from the beginning after the Supreme Court decision Brown v.

[00:35:31] Board of Education in 1954, declare forthrightly that integration was the right thing. But for Faulkner, it was a matter of time. That’s where we get to the go slow business. Some people thought he really didn’t want integration, so he said go slow. I think he did. He did believe in integration, and he also was also very conservative when he said, go slow.

[00:35:56] Alisha Searcy: Again, very helpful context, as you mentioned before, you know, when you’re reading it in modern times, you may not understand all of the, the history and the background there. So, thank you for that explanation.

[00:36:06] Carl Rollyson: Sure.

[00:36:08] Alisha Searcy: You mentioned the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his speech, he says, quote, Man is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit, capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. Unquote. And so, in 1955 and again in 1963, he also won the Pulitzer Prize. So, can you talk about his famous Nobel speech?

[00:36:40] Carl Rollyson: They had a tremendous impact, worldwide impact. You have to remember the, you know, this is after the dropping of the atomic bomb. He says also in the Nobel Prize speech that you have a new generation of young people wondering, will I be blown up? And that really struck a chord with me. I’m also a biographer of Sylvia Plath. And Sylvia Plath says precisely that. She doesn’t mention Faulkner, but she says, I wonder if my younger brother will live long enough to have a full life in the nuclear age.

[00:37:10] So I think that was part of it. Part of the Nobel Prize speech was a surprise, because many people thought of Faulkner as presenting the dark side of American experience. And when he says, man will prevail, people were kind of surprised. I think that message is, that, that idea of human beings prevailing is inside of his great novels that he wrote in the late 1920s throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.

[00:37:36] I think it is there, and I think we also have to remember that even though he says, man will prevail, you might ask the next question, on what terms? What terms will men prevail? So, I think that was an open ended question for Faulkner. The other thing that the Nobel Prize did is it made Faulkner, I’ve already sort of said this, a world figure. And that changed his own attitude toward the public and what he thought was expected of him.

[00:38:07] Alisha Searcy: So, I want to move to talking about the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. It’s a saga about the rise and decline of the Snopes family, and these novels chronicle the cunning efforts of these hillbillies to dominate their rural community, take over the county seat, as well as the decay of the Old South and social change after the Civil War. So can you briefly tell us more about Faulkner’s key themes and lessons about the American South?

[00:38:37] Carl Rollyson: Well, there’s a story Faulkner used to like to tell, and that did get into his novels, did get into the Hamlet, called Spotted Horses, and it’s about Flem Snopes, this man who comes from nothing, you know, from hill people, has nothing, no special way of starting life, and he eventually owns his own bank.

[00:38:58] And there were similar stories. Faulkner knew it happened to his own grandfather, lost his bank to someone like Snopes. So Faulkner knew this, that this was the coming age, but he knew that the Snopes story was not the end of it. In Spotted Horses, what happens is Phlegm Snopes brings in the Spotted Horses, these ponies, and he sells them at a profit to the community.

[00:39:19] They’re really wild horses, and they’re uncontrollable. And what the horses, in a sense, represent, what the whole story represents, is this new, unstable element that’s been introduced into the community. You might call it a kind of raw capitalism, as raw as those wild ponies. And Falker spends almost three decades thinking about how to write this story and how to come to terms with it.

[00:39:47] And he finally, in the third, I think, the third volume of the trilogy, The Mansion, he comes It comes down to one character whose name is Linda Snopes, who, among other things, marries an artist and goes off to the Spanish Civil War. She loses her hearing. She’s ultimately triumphant over Flem Snopes, the guy who started the whole thing.

[00:40:21] So the Snopes, the trajectory of the Snopes novel is very much the trajectory of the Old and the New South. And a kind of moral triumph, in a way, both for a writer and for the female character he writes. When the novel was published in 1959, reviewers didn’t understand it at all. They didn’t understand what Linda Snopes was doing there.

[00:40:43] She didn’t seem to be a typical Faulkner character in any way, but I think gradually we’ve come to understand. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t agree with the comment that all of Faulkner’s great writing was in the 30s. I think almost right to the end of his life he was still writing great fiction.

[00:41:02] Alisha Searcy: Thank you for that. So, I want to ask you this final question, and I’m going to ask you after this to read from your biography, but. Ralph Ellison called William Faulkner, quote, the greatest artist the South has produced, end quote. Could you discuss his influence on other Southern writers, including folks like Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and Shelby Foote, as well as his wider legacy as among the most important novelists of the 20th century?

[00:41:33] Carl Rollyson: Yeah, I think that one of the things that Flannery O’Connor said was he called Faulkner the Dixie Express that you didn’t want to be on the track when Faulkner came down with his novels. He’s pretty hard to beat. But what he did is, especially with someone like Flannery O’Connor, with some of the other Southern novelists, he’s He really made it possible to deal with what sometimes is called the Southern Gothic, with sort of the dark aspects of human nature.

[00:42:01] But the other thing that Flannery O’Connor and some of the other Southern writers do is what Faulkner could also do at the same time, we were talking about the Snopes Trilogy, is he could do it with a great deal of humor. Dark humor sometimes, but humor nevertheless, and I think he almost gave permission to novelists to do things like that, whether it was Shelby Foote or William Styron, a great, in a sense, acolyte of Faulkner’s. They were all able to do this because of his example.

[00:42:31] Alisha Searcy: Thank you. So, this has been great. Before we close, would you share with us an excerpt from your biography?

[00:42:39] Carl Rollyson: Yes, this is the last paragraph, actually, of the biography, because I think it kind of sums up what Faulkner was as a man and how it got into his fiction. I should say Calibar is mentioned here, Estelle, which is his wife, of course. Dorothy is Faulkner’s sister. Sister, I don’t think I need to identify anybody else. This is after Faulkner died. This is at the funeral. Earl Wortham, the blacksmith who had shot Faulkner’s horses, was there to see him off. Earl had been there from the beginning, delivering wood to the Oldham house with a little pair of oxen yoked onto a wagon.

[00:43:18] Estelle and her sister Dorothy would hop on as Earl assured their mother they would not get hurt. He had watched Kelly Barr walking with little William on the sidewalks before the streets were paved. He would break away and run into the square. Later, Earl asked him why he did that. I like to be in the dust, William told him.

[00:43:40] Earl thought it a mistake for Faulkner to ride that big gray horse, Stonewall, the last horse to throw him to the ground. Earl had told him; you don’t need that horse. The horse started easily and reared up. At unpredictable times, when he seemed quite still, Stonewall was a good jumper, and Faulkner could not bear to part with him.

[00:44:04] Perhaps in memory of those livery stable days, Faulkner always stopped and spoke with Earl, who said, I suppose it is not very common for one man to love another, but I loved William Faulkner and that’s how it ends.

[00:44:20] Alisha Searcy: Love it. And there you have it. Thank you so much Professor Rollison for being with us today. We both learned quite a bit and appreciate the time you’ve taken with us today.

[00:44:29] Carl Rollyson: That was my pleasure.

[00:44:42] Albert Cheng: Well, Alisha, I enjoyed learning a bit more about, well, actually not just a bit more, a lot more about William Falkner. A lot more. Yeah. Very fascinating guy. Yeah. It’s just one of these, I mean, I just love hosting this show. Just, I just walk out always feeling like I’ve learned something for the day. It’s so true.

[00:44:58] And not just for the day, you know, for life. Anyway, hey, we’re going to close out our show right now. So let me read the tweet of the week. This one actually comes from the Gettysburg National. Military Parks Twitter. And today, or yesterday actually, November 19th, is actually the 161st anniversary of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

[00:45:23] Alisha Searcy: Yes.

[00:45:23] Albert Cheng: Um, and so I’ll just read the tweet verbatim just to leave it with you listeners. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address during ceremonies dedicating 17 acres of the Gettysburg battlefield as a national cemetery. Famed orator. Edward Everett of Massachusetts preceded Lincoln and spoke for two hours.

[00:45:44] Lincoln then delivered his address in less than two minutes. Although many in attendance were at first unimpressed, Lincoln’s words have come to symbolize the definition of democracy itself. If you’re listening, you know, maybe it’s out there to take a brief moment and read those timeless words. I mean, Wow. One of the greatest speeches ever.

[00:46:06] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And so meaningful for today. So, I highly recommend it.

[00:46:10] Albert Cheng: We’ll leave you to take a look at the Gettysburg Address again, or maybe, you know, refresh your memory if you’ve memorized it before. Well, Alisha, I want to thank you for co-hosting with me, as usual. Of course. And next week, be sure to join us.

[00:46:23] We’re going to have Eric Rosbach, who is Vice President and Senior Counsel at the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty. And he’s going to come talk to us about a recent development, the Loffman versus California Department of Education case recently had a ruling. It’s about religious liberty and schooling.

[00:46:40] And so be sure to join us for a fascinating conversation about that topic. Until then, be well.