Essays, Speeches & Public Letters by William Faulkner & James B. Meriwether (ed)

Author:William Faulkner & James B. Meriwether (ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Movements & Periods, History & Criticism, Anthologies, Essays & Correspondence, United States, Letters & Correspondence, Letters, Essays, Criticism & Theory, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9781588363510
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 2011-04-19T12:00:00+00:00

[University of Virginia Magazine, Spring 1958; collected in Faulkner in the University, edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, University of Virginia Press, 1959. The text printed here has been taken from Faulkner’s typescript.]

Address to the English Club

of the University of Virginia

CHARLOTTESVILLE, APRIL 24, 1958

A Word to Young Writers

Two years ago President Eisenhower conceived a plan based on an idea which is basically a sound one. This was that world conditions, the universal dilemma of mankind at this moment, are what they are simply because individual men and women of different races and tongues and conditions cannot discuss with one another these problems and dilemmas which are primarily theirs, but must attempt to do so only through the formal organizations of their antagonistic and seemingly irreconcilable governments.

That is, that individual people in all walks of life should be given opportunity to speak to their individual opposite numbers all over the earth—laborer to laborer, scientist to scientist, doctors and lawyers and merchants and bankers and artists to their opposite numbers everywhere.

There was nothing wrong with this idea. Certainly no artist—painter, musician, sculptor, architect, writer—would dispute it because this—trying to communicate man to man regardless of race or color or condition—is exactly what every artist has already spent all his life trying to do, and as long as he breathes will continue to do.

What doomed it in my opinion was symptomised by the phraseology of the President’s own concept: laborer to laborer, artist to artist, banker to banker, tycoon to tycoon. What doomed it in my opinion was an evil inherent in our culture itself; an evil quality inherent in (and perhaps necessary though I for one do not believe this last) in the culture of any country capable of enduring and surviving through this period of history. This is the mystical belief, almost a religion, that individual man

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