William Faulkner and Andrew Wyeth

Now we're getting down to the real education when we get very few in numbers and I know that we're getting close to truth and we can speak more freely. Actually this is a very difficult lecture series to get. It's hard for us to assess ourselves and our own tradition which is so misshapen in the universities and colleges much less to say the high schools or the popular conception that we're the most invisible people on earth. And there are very few individuals in this country I think now who understand the mystical capacities and metaphysical structures that have been engendered the last several hundred years here and are now ready to be put into play, into operation. And it's almost as if the country is like the Taj Mahal, a beautiful structure but it echoes with the desertion of the ancestors who were supposed to understand why all this was done.

So this lecture series in some part hopefully will furnish you with some clues for your own investigations. Go and look for yourselves. I'm hitting the high spots of the tradition and I'll have to do another lecture series because there are major high spots which I can't cover. The last two lectures, the one on William James and the one on Henry Adams, I think that I mentioned to you that if one were to take that generation that included Henry Adams born in 1838 and William James born in 1842 and both of them lived up until the time of the First World War, if we take that generation and examine their lives and their works we find that there was a leap of intelligence in that time period which we use the English word exponential to describe. That is the capacities of the United States in 1840 and the capacities of the United States in 1920 in terms of economics and military prowess and geographic control and so forth are just the barest outward expressions of an inner transformation that was major. And of course it was with the First World War that almost everyone who is alive now would date a transition to yet another echelon, another level of life and persons in the 1980s look back to 1919 with nostalgia for the slow good old days. But in fact the world of 1919 was an exponential explosion of capacity from the world. When that generation of people had been born around the 1840s and in turn those persons who had been born in the 1840s, 30s and 40s, were the recipients of a tremendous long lifetime of genius that we've seen exemplified with Franklin and Jefferson. So that in three great enormous quantum jumps the United States has gone from wilderness to its present interplanetary position. But the problem is and the problem was increasing in that middle jump from the time of the 1840s to the First World War that not everyone was keeping up with the understanding the comprehension of where we were going, what our capacities were being developed for, what the commensurate qualities of human character might be to sustain those high tension wires of consciousness that were being engendered.

And so after the Civil War after the first healing period of several years of the Andrew Johnson administration the tremendous elan of the United States began to be unraveled and misapplied into the metaphor of expanding power for power's sake. And the most convenient terms of course were economic terms, land terms and probably the all time great venture that encapsulates the domination of the land by power was the spread of the railroads from coast to coast and the laying of the golden spike is almost a spike on the cross of the original purpose for developing all these capacities and we’ll find increasingly as we look at the handful of individuals mainly artists who understood what had happened who understood the message from that middle jump generation and in our time, tried to find ways of creating expressive works which would on the surface lure the population of this country to enjoy these works. And yet as you would go into their inner structure and appreciation would go in such a way not to learn the meaningfulness that was there and finally attain to those moments of insight which reflectively would glance all the way back to the origins to the beginnings because the United States has to be seen as a unity complex epic flow that it is. It is a unity and it's one of the few histories of the world that still has its original unity intact.

There have been many dynasties in China and ancient Greece and archaic Egypt long gone and the wonderful Florentine Republic has long since gone but this guy is still a living historic motion, a duration of human courage and capacity in time-space whose durational gesture has a deep abiding meaning to it and has not yet dissipated. It's very difficult for someone like myself who has been trained and retrained and retrained time and again who would have one kind of a college education of 2 or 3 years and then have another one of 2 or 3 years and then another one of 2 or 3 years until finally one gets to feel that one's own perspective is rather like the steel of the samurai sword that has been back bent so many times that one can no longer count the counterweighters and yet the poignancy of insight simply becomes sharper and the emotion of understanding becomes stronger so that it's difficult to express the complex truth of the present without going in an enormous horizon of foundation. And so with this lecture which is the 102nd lecture I'll give you a prize. This is the first time that I have talked about anything contemporary because Faulkner lived into our own time and life. Also I'd like to begin with just a little quote on a card which I found at the library it’s from April 20th, 1924 and it's a quote from Manly P. Hall and I'll use it as a God. “You start when all cooperate to a definite end. The end is accomplished.” M. P. Hall April 1924. So that's our means now. All cooperate to an end. The end is a conference.

Faulkner was born in 1897. A little tiny town in Mississippi. Moved at a young age to Oxford, Mississippi which is about 30 miles or so south of Memphis, Tennessee. So it's in the northern part of Mississippi not too far from the Mississippi River 20 minute drive something like that. And not too far from Memphis, Tennessee. Oxford as a setting as an old fashioned square knot prosperous like the squares of western towns like Sonoma, California. Something like that. And not dignified and elegant like the squares and places like Concord and so forth. Oxford, Mississippi has sort of a ramshackle collection of one story buildings with lots in between and a white kind of a courthouse-like shape structure and a white steeple wooden church like structure and a few streets radiating out that have a few stores and a few houses. It's what we would call colloquially as a piddling place. And it was Faulkner's home for his lifetime. He is buried there. And he lived there.

By the time that Faulkner was getting into high school. He was already uninterested in the formal aspects of what the world tells you you should know. There are not many evidences but certainly one can see from some of his early works that he had begun to have the kinds of personal visions which are transformative about the character to such an extent that one loses confidence in building up step by step layer by layer a reasonable progression of individuality that the changes that come upon life are so fundamental that they recast your character so that one begins to understand that the entirety of one's personality is up for reconsideration at any time and that one's openness to the universe of experience is profound in the sense that it may recast you so that you are quite distinctly different in many respects from what you had been and your problem is to keep in contact with the real continuity under the surface of time-space which informs your quality of self presence and to keep the liaisons and bridge building capacities of the personality aligned to re-establish contact with the new mass that has come to life through one's experience. And so this ever changing external capacity and the unchanging internal vanishing point which we will see him refer to in several places which goes beyond time and space. They have to be not correlated so much but kept in communication and liaison. And the lines of those communication are not functions of intelligence or consciousness but are functions of the heart's energy courage and pity and compassion and sacrifice. And so it is those heart energies, the heart chakra energies, that are most important. And because they always array themselves in that chakra wheel-like diadems with spokes radiating from a common center of presence. When one experiences profound recasting changing moments one needs to go back to one’s sense of origin to refashion also the understanding of the liaisons as they stand now.

That primal horizon against which one sense of presence can always be begun, that is nature. Or in Faulkner I think most easily expressed nature in the form of the land. The land abides. Mass constructions change, the qualities of development of the land change, our use of all these facilities change, but the land with a capital L abides and as long as one can still re-establish a quality of presence with the primal nature of the land one will be alright. That eventually given time you will reestablish the totality of your personality and its capacity to relate to the universal functions and through that to the divinity itself. All of this while occurring in nascent forms to Faulkner as a young man began to lure him into trying various masks of roles upon himself. So he began to write little poems in French and he began to wear capes and he began to have walking sticks. And people in Oxford talked about peculiar softness and they called him count, no count. And he strutted around the square of Oxford as if it were the Sunset. And pretty soon even though he wasn't really enrolled in any school, he went over to the campus of Ole Miss and started writing little articles for them and drawing little diagrams of suave couples dancing in 1918 style clothing, elegant ballroom clothing. He began to grow a mustache and he began to realize that he should participate in the World War. He was too short to really do much in the American services. He was only five feet high. He wore a size six shoe. So he went up to Canada and joined the RAF in Toronto and he used to claim for a long time and claimed right to the end that he in fact had seen service in France in the RAF and had been shot down. He had a silver plate installed in his head and he had a little bit of a limp against the leg and so forth. And this is one of his favorite myths about himself. One of his favorite masks probably was not so physically or historically but was so psychologically and he carried it all through his life. In fact it became a characteristic of Faulkner that in his personality he would carry pockets of experience that may have happened or may not have happened but they were all true in the sense that they were violent restructuring emotional elements and they would develop into full episodes so that either himself or others that he could imagine in those situations would literally spin out of these pockets full of experience into episodes and the episodes would flesh out into writings and these would become stories and sometimes the stories would grab him and balloon out into novels.

And so it was that by the mid-1920s Faulkner began playing with his personas with his masks with his potentials and we'll follow his career somewhat but you can see the essential nature of how this happens. He did it better than anyone has done in our time. The shelf for Faulkner's books is about three feet wide and you can pick out easily a dozen or fifteen of them that would be considered first class world literature and probably half a dozen or so that would rank with Shakespeare's individual plays. So he's a major voice. The major voice as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Japan, France, Germany, England, wherever literature is read. He's considered the voice of the United States in the period between 1930 and 1960. The great writer. He actually took a four month trip to Europe and when he came back he went down to New Orleans and for a southern boy in the 1920s, New Orleans would have been the most sophisticated cosmopolitan center that he could have gone to. New York had been a little too large, a little too cold.

Memphis never has been a real center except for a regional center but New Orleans has always had a cosmopolitan style. And he lived I think in the UK and he lived above the writer who was just becoming quite well known in the 20s, Sherwood Anderson. And Mrs. Sherwood Anderson was named Elizabeth and her maiden name was Prague. And Elizabeth Prague had had a bookstore in New York City and Faulkner had worked for a year as a clerk. And of course when he came to New Orleans and he found out that Elizabeth was living there and he got his place and he found out that her husband wrote books which interested him greatly. But what interested him even more was that Anderson seemed to make a living from doing this. So when there's gold in our trees of course it's hard to stay away. So Faulkner wrote a very poor exciting novel called Soldier's Pay, and he badgered Anderson every night from dinner until they fell asleep. Finally Anderson said if I don't have to read it I'll write to my publisher and we'll get it published. And so Faulkner became published by his friend, by Horace Liveright, through the good offices of Sherwood Anderson who never did Soldier’s Pay. Well Faulkner with his tremendous sense of pride having this published immediately wrote another one somewhat worse called The Mosquitoes about the degenerate life of people out in the Delta regions of New Orleans drinking and carousing and so forth. That too was published and oddly enough they sold the halfway decent life. So, Faulkner began to consider himself a writer and searching around for more material and having lived a fairly sheltered life he wrote a book called Star-Crossed which was about the people of his own background some hundred years before and this was the first beginnings of the glimmer that he could use his own understanding of his own family tradition. His grandfather Murray Faulkner, Colonel Faulkner had built the railroad and was one of these high falutin people had even written a novel called The White Rose of Memphis which had been a best seller in the 19th century. So Faulkner felt that he'd probably inherited those genes. So after service he sat down to become a very very serious writer. And in this process working on his fourth novel as he himself explains he began to realize that writing was a very peculiar creative activity. And in his words he said he learned that characters cast shadows. Meaning that they create a sense of reality as viable as you and I do in the world if they're done right. So he rewrote and rewrote and came up with a vision for a book which was finally published called The Sound and the Fury. One of the really great novels and it was told in four separate parts. The same kind of quality of story from four different vantage points.

The Sound and the Fury when it came out of course caused some consternation because it was fantastic writing. It was experimental but this was the age. Don't forget Ulysses had been published. Early in the decade The Wasteland. There were writers like Cummings and William Carlos Williams around, so The Sound and the Fury got Faulkner on the force as a serious writer. At the same time as working on The Sound and the Fury he got an idea for a novel which he originally called Father Abraham. And as he worked on it and it transformed itself more and more he began to use the title for it called As I Lay Dying, and this work simmered in him for three years. And he would write a little bit on it and then put it aside and then write a little more. And every time he began to approach it it would change. Its whole structure would change. And as it changed it was like a question of proportion. As it blew up every smaller unit of structure within it became more and more transparent to him so he could see inside and see its structure and on down and almost like a nuclear physicist looking into the cloud chamber he began to see that at the very core of character there are phantasmal movements that leave a trail but in themselves seem to have no substance whatsoever. These are mystical qualities.

So having decided to become a serious writer and having already gone on the books as he was sitting in the basement of the University of Mississippi shoveling coal in the boiler was just one of those jobs he was doing at the time. And the sound and motion of that voice and the lungs being the only person there at the University created a peculiar kind of ambience which was just right for Faulkner at that time. And at six weeks straight writing every night every night every night in his little hieroglyphic longhand. He never typed. Originally he always was doing longhand first, handcrafted in six weeks of writing, night after night, he finished the manuscript of As I Lay Dying and set it up for his publisher Harrison Smith and he said I don't want to change a word. He said this came to me pure like a ribbon and this is what I want. And the peculiar thing about As I Lay Dying is that there is no narration in here from an objective standpoint. It is simply a collection of names of people. It begins with the person named Jarrod and moves on. There are several other people. The second one is Cora and we have some 60 episodes that are just named for a person. And what we have in the episode is the consciousness of that person, the quality of that person at some particular duration. And as we scan and go through these 60 parts or flashes of human character, we the reader construct out of this basic primal factual experience a fantastic story that has a quality of opalescence. That is the more you try and juggle your perception of the story the more qualities come into view until finally one is faced with the fact that you have a jewel before you magical jewel that you can keep turning indefinitely and it will tell more and more about that story and become more meaningful and more profound as it goes on. And the curious thing is that he used poor White Southern colloquial language. Nothing high philosophical nothing refined in a special syntax just the kind of language that dirt farmers and small town people in the South 50 years ago would have used. It is in the structure of As I Lay Dying that all the sophistication of the world is put in. Just to give you a taste of it, and this is the first time that Faulkner found a way to express himself completely. And I use this as an example now because we'll see 12 years later that he tries again with a little bit different structure. Anyway John published in 1930 Vardaman and then Darl's thinking. Darl incidentally goes insane and he is committed to an asylum but as he is being committed to an asylum at the end of the book his mind is intact his perceptions as presented by Faulkner are clear and sharp. He just no longer has any liaison with his body or his external personal expression but his perceptions are there and they are clear but they just don't connect with anything.

“Jewel and I come up from the field following the path in single file although I am 15 feet ahead of him. Anyone watching us from the cotton house can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. The path runs straight as a plumb line worn smooth by feet and baked brick hard by July between the green rows of laid back cotton to the cotton house in the center of the field. Where it turns and circles the cotton house at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again worn so by feet and fading precision.”

So we have a symbol of the self, this old cotton house and its set in the field and the path that man runs to it and foursquare around it and on again. And there are two brothers walking toward it. One of them is seeing.

“The cotton house is of rough blocks from between which the chinking has long fallen square with a broken roof set at a single pitch it leans and empty and shimmering dilapidation and the semi a single broad window in two opposite walls giving on to the approaches of the path. When we reach it I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Jewel 15 feet behind me looking straight ahead steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face. He crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and onto the path again. Just as I come around the corner in single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff”

And that's how it starts. And Darl is always trying to go around the corners and finally get so lost that you can't make it anymore. And Jewel’s stubbornness going straight through becomes really the son of all the children he becomes the wall. As the work moves on we realize that what is happening is that there's a woman dying, that the mother of four boys and a girl and the wife of the man is dying. And her name is Addie, Addie Bundren, and her husband's name is Anse. And they have some children. They have four boys and a girl. And it appears that Addie has been the workhorse of that family all her life. And now she's dying and it's leaving everything up for grabs. And the various children are seeing this in their ways and the husband in his way. But as we go on with the experience Faulkner giving us these little episodes of pure character, pure relational experience, a pluralistic universe, the only unity that's here is what we are construing and making for ourselves. That unity will become more and more opalescent as we go along. Then we finally have a section near the beginning, about 7 or 8 sections in, where the first person who is not in this family has a section. It's a farmer named Tull. And Tull has this thought wave going through him and keeps on rubbing his knees.

“His overalls are faded on one knee, a surge patch cut out of a pair of Sunday pants worn ironed slick. No man miss likes it more than me, he says. A fellow's got to guess ahead now and then I say but come along short it won't be no harm done. And either way she'll want to get started right off. She says it's far enough to Jefferson at best but the roads is good. Now I say it's fixin to rain tonight too. His folks buries at New Hope two not three miles away. But it's just like him to marry a woman born a day's hard ride away and have her dyin’. She has said that she wants to be buried in her own home some 40 miles away across the country. They're going to have to take this coffin all that way.”

And it's a huge journey. This is at the beginning. “To say he looks out over the land rubbing his knees. No man so mislikes it. He says dig it back in plenty of time I say. I wouldn't worry none. It means $3 he says. Might be. It won't be. No need for them to rush back. No ways I say I hope it she's a girl he says. Her mind is set on it. It's a hard life on women for a fact. Some women I'm on. My mammy lived to be 70 and more. Worked every day rain or shine. Never a sick day since her last child was born until one day she kind of looked around her then she went and taken that old lace trimmed nightgown she'd had for 45 years and never worn out of the chest and put it on laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. You all have to look out for Pa the best you can she said. I'm tired. He rubs his hands on his knees. The Lord giveth he says. We can cure her. Cash hammering and sawing beyond the corner. One of the boys is building the coffin while the mother has died. So it's true. Never a truer breath was ever breathed. The Lord giveth they say. That boy comes up the hill. He's carrying a fish knife long as he is. This is the youngest son still too young to understand what's happening. He slings it to the ground and grunts. Ha and spits over his shoulder like a man. All during thy long as he is what's that I say? A hog? Where did you get it? Down to the bridge he says. He turns it over the underside caked over with the dust. Where it is wet the eye coated over humped under the dirt. Are you aiming to leave it laying there? Aunt says. I aim to show it to mom, Vardaman says. He looks toward the door. We can hear the talking coming out on the drive. Cash too knocking and hammering at the boards. There's company in there he says. Just my folks. I say they love, they enjoy to see it too. He says nothing watching the door then he looks down at the fish laying in the dust. He turns it over with his foot and prods at the eye bump with his toe gouging at it. Anse is looking out over the land. Vardaman looks at Anse's face then at the door. He turns going toward the corner of the house but Anse calls him without looking around. You clean that fish and says Vardaman stumped. Why can't do Adele Clean it he says. You clean that fish and says oh poor Vardaman says you clean it and says he don't look around. Vardaman comes back and picks up the fish. It slides out of his hands smearing wet dirt onto him and flops down dirtying itself again. Gape mouth, goggle eyed, hiding in the dust like it was ashamed of being dead like it was in a hurry to get back hid again. Vardaman cusses it. He cusses it like a grown man standing astraddle it. Ants don't look around. Vardaman picks it up again. He goes on around the house toting it in both arms like an armful of wood. It overlapping him on both ends, head and tail turned on his heels.”

So increasingly in small glimpses of personality with absolutely no narration whatsoever we are given the essentials of a pluralistic universe yet literary experience. And as we go on more and more we begin to actually structure. And what Faulkner is of course producing here is that fantastic capacity for mirroring structure which we have out of anything. You can draw just the simple basic beginnings of something and pretty soon we begin to have a shape on it and all we need are just a few of the sketches. And remember now Faulkner's writing about the time that Cocteau's art was starting to come out and a lot of this perceptual art style. In the death of the mother, the moment of death is shown with the daughter who's been caring for her. And as it turns out that we construct it around. The daughter is pregnant and she's unmarried, she's 17 and so she is caught in between the death of her mother, the only person she could ever have talked to and her own pregnancy. And so between death and life. And she's trapped. And the only thing that she can do is to keep caring for her mother as long as she can. Just before she dies, Addie looks up and shouts out to her son Cash and says,

“You Cash. She shouts her voice harsh strong and unimpaired. You Cash. He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a composite picture of all time since he was a child. He drops the saw and lifts the board for her to see. Watching the window in which the face has not moved he drags a second plank into position and slams the two of them into their final juxtaposition gesturing toward the ones yet on the ground shaking with his empty hand and pantomime the finished box. For a while she looks down at him from the composite picture. Now that with censure nor approbation then the face disappears. She lies back and turns her head without so much as glancing at Paul. She looks at Vardaman. Her eyes, the life in them rushing suddenly upon them. The two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had leaned down and blown a continent. Ma, Dewey Dell says, Ma, leaning above the bed her hands lifted a little the fan still moving like it has for ten days. She begins to keen. Her voice is strong young tremulous and clear wrapped with its own timbre and volume. The fan still moving steadily up and down whispering the useless air. Then she flings herself across Addie Bundren’s knees clutching her shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Annie Bundren left jarring the whole bed into a chattering semblance of mattress shuts her arms out flung in the fan in one hand still beating with expiring breath into the quilt from behind pours leg. Vardaman peers his mouth full open and all color drained from his face into his mouth as though he has by some means flushed his own teeth in himself sucking. It begins to move slowly backward from the bed. His eyes round his pale face fading into the dusk like a piece of paper pasted on a failing wall and so on the door.”

And so she dies but her vitality and force are still electrically alive in all the sections and show that she’s still a centerpiece and until she is buried into the ground returned back to the earth. And her father had told her the only reason for being alive is to get ready to stay dead a long long time. And so her affinity is with the land and all of the family. She goes through in her little section her vision of how all the children came to be born. And that in fact Jewel, the wooden faced young man is the son of the local preacher and herself and that she had this little child Vardaman to make up for this to give this little child as a gift to her husband to make up for this lapse on her part. And in her accounting of it she has evened out her presence in the world. And the five children, the four regular children and the one on the side, and that's her family. But she has realized that her husband has a peculiarity in the sense that he relates to the land also and he respects her physical and metaphysical need to be rejoined to it and he will see that she is buried where she wants to be buried, but she also knows that he is going to be totally unaffected by it. He has no comprehension of the depths of a relationship at all. He never had. He never would. And in fact near the end of As I Lay Dying we find that one reason why he wanted to actually go all the way to town to get her buried was so he could buy some new teeth for himself. And in fact as soon as he gets his new teeth he also goes out and gets himself a new bride. A duck-shaped woman who's carrying a gramophone in a valise.

And at the very end of As I Lay Dying all the children are in the buckboard and they're looking down at their dad coming in. Read it for you. “Who's that? Then we see. It wasn't the grip that made him look different. It was his face. And Jewel says he got them teeth. It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller. Kind of holding his head up. Hangdog and proud too. And then we see her behind him carrying the other grip. A kind of duck shaped woman all dressed up with them kind of hard looking pop eyes like she was daring a man to say nothing. And there we sat watching them with Dewey Dell's and Vardaman's mouth half open and half ate bananas in their hands and her coming around from behind Paul looking at us like she dared every man. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little gramophones. It was for a fact all shut up and pretty as a picture. And every time a new record would come from the mail order and I was setting up at home in the winter listening to it I would think what a shame Darl couldn't be here to enjoy it too. But it is better for him. This world is not his world and this life is not his life. It's Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell. Paul says kind of hangdog and proud too with his teeth and all even if he wouldn't look at us. Meet Missus Bundren he says.”

So, incredible humor, incredible profundity, exquisiteness all the way through and characteristic of Faulkner's style. Already by 1930 he was just 32 years old capable of painting the entire emotional universe in one vast opalescent structure. With the publishing of As I Lay Dying he decided that he would take a chance and write a bestseller, a barnburner. So, and he was planning to get married to a woman named Estelle Oldham. And so to get set for this marriage to provide a place for her and an income for him since he already knew that he could write he wrote a novel called Sanctuary and he sent it off to his publisher and the publisher sent a note back and said Good God man I can't publish this. We'd both be put in jail. He took the most horrific things he could think of and piled them into one word and with torrential writing strength. Of course it was just a little bit too much. So Faulkner decided that he would go through the manuscript and clean it up a little bit, revise it. And so he rewrote, in fact twice rewrote, Sanctuary and finally sent it in. And Sanctuary proved to be a bestseller and when it came out in 1931 it was the only work of Faulkner's that has remained in print all the way through and never went out of print.

Even later on as we'll see when all of his books were out of print there was a period of low visibility for Faulkner. Sanctuary was still in print but before it became a bestseller he had made arrangements with the publisher who had done As I Lay Dying, the man to whom he had dedicated As I Lay Dying. And when the royalties had piled up to about $4,000 due him which in 1931 was a lot of money the publisher went bankrupt. And Faulkner was never to receive a cent. So he found himself with a wife and she of course very quickly, within a year, he had a small child but unfortunately the child died in just five days. But he got to thinking about how was he ever going to support a family. And it was at this time that he began his contact with Hollywood. And he found himself out in Los Angeles and he got himself a job as a screenwriter on the strength of the sales of Sanctuary. And he was paid the astronomical sum of $500 a week. And of course Faulkner thought that the muse herself had saved him. And as soon as he had saved enough money he worked for about a year, year and a half, he went back to Oxford and bought a huge place, Roanoke which he would spend the rest of his life trying to pay for. An enormous two story Southern plantation mansion with all the acreage and so forth. And also at this time he began to take on other people being responsible for them. He was for about 20 years responsible for maybe 15 or 20 human beings for their room and board and food and so forth. One of his brothers died in a plane crash so he had his brother's wife and two children. He had his own wife and a child. Later on a couple of elderly servants that lived with them. Family friends and a brother who was really a no good and his wife and two children. And Faulkner supported them all when times were tough. Faulkner was just beside himself because he was responsible for all these lives, all of their well-being. And even though he would earn enormous amounts of money from time to time it would all go on these projects.

Well the only contact in Hollywood in 1931 that Faulkner really enjoyed was with Howard Hawks and he and Hawks hit it off and had a tremendous relationship. They were always open with each other and for the rest of their lives. Faulkner and Hawks were like two buddies and from time to time as we'll see when Faulkner needed money badly he would make it back to Hollywood. And when he got disgusted with the plastic people who were making films he would somehow be rescued by his old friend Howard Hawks. And in fact I think he worked on at least 7 or 8 of Hawks films. And we'll see after we take a break. How this courier actually seemed to blossom and developed almost magically at a certain point.

Well let's stop at this colloquial moment and have some tea.

Faulkner becomes more and more interesting as we review his life. Also because we have a very private person, major artist, who from time to time in his life was forced to go public for financial reasons and go public in the largest most crass market in the world, which is being a screenwriter for films in Los Angeles. He was in Hollywood associated with people like Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack Warner and Sam Marx and these are all very high powered kinds of individuals who ran roughshod over the writers in their stable. And each time that Faulkner would come back to Hollywood he would be given a smaller and smaller salary and relegated more and more to the status of just being a junior writer. And all through the 1930s, as he almost every year in the 30s published a major work, would be at work on his serious literature. He would have to be working at least six months out of the year in Hollywood. He tried to keep away for some time and as his books came out and I wish I could go into them I thought by now that it would be up to the end of World War Two but just up to 1930. So I'll just have to encapsulate the 30s for you in saying that almost every year during the 1930s he published a major work. In 1932 he published Light in August which is one of the great novels of American literature. In 1936 he published Absalom, Absalom which many consider his masterpiece and greatest work. But all through the 30s stories would appear in the Saturday Evening Post or in various other magazines and then would be published. And finally his publisher had come to be Random House. The vice president of Random House, Robert Haas, was a great friend of his and believed in Faulkner's talent and genius. And of course as the works came out in the United States they began to be translated into other languages and especially the French with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus began to popularize Faulkner so that he began to have an underground reputation in European letters. But as the 30s wore on and as his works would come out they would sell less and less. The reviews would become less and less kind until finally he reached the low point in his career as a writer in terms of sales in 1942 and paradoxically in 1942 he published one of his greatest works given the title Go Down Moses. But within the year Go Down Moses would be put on the remainder tables along with all of his other titles and they all went out of print except the Modern Library version of Sanctuary so that as 1943 would come in Faulkner would be literally a forgotten man down to a salary of 250 a week writing third string potboiler plots that would never be made into movies. Living in a hotel up on Highland Avenue in Hollywood.

It's peculiar because in 1942 with Go Down Moses Faulkner's writing abilities seemed to mature to an astronomical love of the work. Still for most readers the level of appreciation and capacity to integrate remains a collection of fine stories. There are seven of them but once one has refined what sense of experience and reading capacity and metaphysical penetration one sees that Go Down Moses is in fact one of those scintillating celestial type structures that really great world literature exhibits. Go Down Moses of course in the title comes from the old slave song Go down Moses to the promised land, Tell old Pharaoh let my people go. And for the slaves in the South, the primary literary background which they would have had by word of mouth would have been the Old Testament and especially that section of the Old Testament concerning Genesis and Exodus and in particular there would have been great affinity and was great affinity with their plight in the United States with the plight of the Jewish ancestors in the captivity in Egypt. And in the dedication for Go Down Moses, Faulkner dedicated, “To Mammy, Caroline Barr, Mississippi (1840–1940): who was born in slavery and gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love.”

And in fact in 1942, in 1940 when she died Faulkner gave his first public speech which was the funeral sermon for Mammy Caroline Barr. And I think I read you just the first paragraph of this. Caroline has known me all my life. It was my privilege to see her out of curtains after my father's death. To Mammy I came to represent the head of that family to which he had given a half century of fidelity and devotion. But the relationship between us never became that of master and servant. She still remained one of my earliest recollections not only as a person but as a fount of authority over my conduct and have security for my physical welfare and of active and constant affection and love. She was an active and constant precept of decent behavior. From her I learned to tell the truth. To refrain from waste. To be considerate of the weak and respectful to age. I saw fidelity to a family which was not hers. Devotion and love for people she had not born so too Mammy Caroline was dedicated Go Down Moses.

And in the development of the work again as in As I Lay Dying, Faulkner stretched himself out to try to find in his experience the largest most complex opalescent structure that he could to tell the oldest story in the world of man going in it from his own horizon of natural being discovering that he was afraid of the gap that he had created and feared to fall in that abyss and tried to find some way of patching up the wound of accepting the scar tissue and coming back to contact with what he really belonged to after all. And of course primarily in Faulkner's work it's coming back to a decent relationship with the land. It's coming back to a sense of continuity with the history of the family no matter what has happened how terrifying or terrible how graceful or humorous all of it has to be accepted and worked in. Both these themes of family and land of experience as a communal human being and as a natural spiritual phenomenon come together again and more profoundly in Go Down Moses than in As I Lay Dying. And for the second time in his life after a 12 year hiatus Faulkner had a go at it. The protagonist of major interest in Go Down Moses featured in three of the seven sections is Isaac McCaslin. Old Ike he's called when he's 80 years old and as a young boy he is initiated into a sense of family and into a sense of relationship with the land by an old man who is mostly Chickasaw Indian and has some Black blood in him, Negro blood in him. So that Sam Fathers is really an old Indian chief in terms of his true heritage, his people. The Chickasaws had lived on that land since time immemorial. But he had a spot of slave's blood in his background. And Faulkner as he writes it says this man is called Sam fathers because his Chickasaw Indian name meant had two fathers because his real father sold him and his mother into slavery and the new father was a forced marriage and they were considered slaves and he was considered a slave. But he actually survived the time of slaves and survived the machinations that circumstance would have put on him and had long since regained his position as an Indian chieftain and it was exhibited most clearly each year in the Great Hunt in November that the male members of this family line would all get together and go to the big woods to hunt go to the wilderness to hunt deer and hope occasionally to get a bear. In this annual hunting this returning to the land returning to the wilderness to reconfirm their relationship to the land and their manhood among themselves each time they would go. Throughout the decades and the generations the shape of the family and its meaningfulness would slowly come into focus. And for Isaac McCaslin his life bridged that earliest part where he could still remember old Sam Fathers and the part where he was the old man. And the young boy who was coming in was a son of a Black and White relationship. So his life span this whole tremendous interpenetration of man with the land, races with each other. As a young boy of 12 he is introduced by Sam Fathers to the fact that one does not always hunt the animals to kill them because there is a relationship with the animals and at one point when he's 12 years old they're in the deep woods and they hear the sound of the hunting horn which means that a deer has been killed. And young Isaac McCaslin wants to go to see the kill. Sam Fathers holds him back saying nothing but looking off as Faulkner says into the misty gray light rain. Sky in between the trees. And suddenly coming out of this opalescent grey rainy mist is an enormous huge buck with 14 point antlers coming in, stately walking in. And as Faulkner says his body seemed to be made of all the light collected in the woods and irradiated out. And Sam Fathers motions him to put his gun down. And then as the deer, the stag noble comes with straight eye and walks past them. Sam holds up his hand and salutes him all and he says grandfather. And Isaac McCaslin begins to realize that there is a whole interpenetration between him and the land the animals and the woods and two years later he will have had the seed matured in him to the point that at 14 now he wants to find out what this has for him. Where is it for him? And he has tried it in the forest. He has tried to have this mystical relationship with the animals and the shared horizon of the land and he can't do it. And Sam says to him it must be the gun. It is the gun. You will have to choose, Sam said.

“So he left the next morning before light without breakfast. Long before Uncle Ash would wake up in his quilts on the kitchen floor and start the fire he had only the compass and a stick for the snakes. He could go almost a mile before he would need to see the compass. He sat on a log the invisible compass in his hand while the secret night sounds which had ceased at his movements scurried again and then fell still for good and the owl ceased and gave over to the waking day birds. And there was light in the gray wet woods and he could see the compass. He went fast yet still quietly becoming steadily better and better as a woodsman. Without yet having time to realize it. He jumped a doe and farm. Walked. Waked them out of bed. Close enough to see them. The crash of the undergrowth. The white cut the fawn scudding along behind her faster than he had known it could have run. He was hunting right upwind as Sam had taught him but that didn't matter now. He had left the gun by his own will and relinquishment. He had accepted not a gambit, not a choice but a condition in which not only the bears heretofore inviolable anonymity but all the ancient rules and balances of hunter and hunted had been abrogated. He would not even be afraid not even in the moment when the fear would take him completely. Blood, skin, bowels, bones, memory from the long time before it even became his memory all saved. That thin clear squelched lucidity which alone differed him from this bear and from all the other bears and bucks he would follow during almost 70 years to which Sam had said be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you if you don't corner it or it don't smell that you are afraid. A bear or a deer has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be. By noon he was far beyond the crossing on the little bayou and he goes deeper and deeper into the woods. So he sat down sits down on a log and he realizes that he's still carrying a compass. He still has a link to the world of intellectual imposed order. He isn't free yet. He was still tainted Fowler says. He removed the light chain of the one and the loop thong of the other from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered in what he realized he was lost. He did as Sam had coached and drilled him. He made a cast across his backtrack. He had not been going very fast for the last 2 or 3 hours. He had even gone less fast since he left the compass and watch on the bush so he went slower still now since the tree could not be very far. In fact he found it before he really expected to and turned and went to it. But there was no bush beneath it no compass nor watch. So he did next to Sam had coached and drilled him made his neck circle, circle in the opposite direction and much larger so that the pattern of the two of them would bisect his tracks somewhere but crossing no trace nor mark anywhere at his feet or any feet. And now he was going faster though still not panicked his heart beating a little more rapidly but strong and steady enough. And this time it was not even the tree because there was a downed log beside it which he had never seen before. And beyond the log a little swamp the seepage of moisture somewhere between earth and water. They did what Sam had coached and drilled him as the next and the last saying as he sat down on the log the crooked print this large huge bear called Old Ben has a crooked print. He's the chief in the forest. He's the grandfather. He's the master of the animals. Sam Fathers says he's the man of the forest. He's a crooked plant. The warped indentation in the wet ground which while he looked at it continued to fill with water till it was level full and the water began to overflow on the sides of the print began to dissolve away even as he looked. He saw the next one and moving the one beyond it moving not hurrying running but merely keeping pace with them as they appeared before him as though they were being shaped out of thin air. Just one constant short of where he would lose them forever and be lost forever himself. Tireless eager. Without doubts or dread. Panting a little above the strong rapid little hammer of his heart. Merging suddenly into a little glade and the wilderness coalesced. It rushed soundless and solidified the tree the bush the compass and the watch glinting were a ray of sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge. Appear. It was just there immobile fixed in the green and windless noons. Hot. Dappling got as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected. Bigger dimensionless against the dappled obscurity looking at him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste walking for an instant into the sun's full glare and out of it and stopped again and looked back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone. It didn't walk into the woods. It faded sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had watched the fish. The huge old bass one time sink back into the dark depths of its pool. And vanish without even any movement of its fins.”

So he learns the mysteries of life and the most primal way of finding himself picked up by the neck of his experience. And she sat in front of it. And all of this he is able to pass on late in his life to another. And we don't have time to go into it. But as you can see it's something that one should look into. Go Down Moses. This tremendous work, this tremendous writing appeared in 1942 and by the end of the year all these things were closed out as just undesirable stuff cluttering up the shelves, getting in the way. And so for Faulkner 1942 became a year of great remorse. He wrote his agent Harold Ober once, he said, “I have $0.60 in my pocket and if I don't have $15 I'm going to shut the power off on me. Can you spare it?”

And in this dismay his basic idea was that he would take any job even going back to Hollywood again even if it paid just $100 a week. He was at the end of his line and he figured that he had written himself out. And at 46 he said I seem not to have been able to ever do it. So he went to Hollywood. Jack Warner got him signed up for one of these murderous seven year contracts. Bernie as a junior writer something about one fourth or one fifth of what a screenwriter usually is paid. And he was set down to do rewrites. The Warner Brothers loved to make rewrites and do rewrites of pictures that they had done before. 1943 came and Faulkner in the midst of this desolation was at a party and these Hollywood screenwriter parties were just the sort of thing that would turn him on. And so he was standing characteristically with a drink by himself and he got into a conversation with two men, a man named Hathaway who was a director and a man named Vulture who was a producer of sorts a writer but especially was gifted as a visionary. The Hollywood community always puts visionaries down with special sort of a kook category if they're interesting to have around like an ornament vulture. And the conversation came up with the fantastic idea that they should do a story, the three of them together. Faulkner read it, he produced it, Hathaway could be involved in it as the director. They would set it in World War One and they would take the Unknown Soldier and they would use as the what if theme. Suppose that the Unknown Soldier in that tomb was actually Christ who had come the second time and had come to earth again during the First World War and in the crunch, the crisis of the trench warfare in the early summer of 1918. And in fact they found that there had been an incident that a whole battalion of soldiers refused to fight near Christmas for several weeks and that the German troops had begun to respect the men who for years and years they had been shelling each other and everyone was afraid that this was going to spread and that this might have meant the end of war because if they won't fight it doesn't matter who is right or who is wrong. If man will not fight, wars are finished. So Faulkner began to puff on his pipe in this party and in 1943, the depths of this desolation, the first beginning germs of what would become his magnum opus his greatest work. And it would take him 12 years to finally get it finished and written. And in that time of course he would become one of the most famous writers in the world winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and so forth. But he never let go of that fantastic visionary theme. And it tried it. And As I Lay Dying it tried it in Go Down Moses.

Now he would try for one of these vast epic structures. He estimated one time that it might even run to a thousand pages. So I just I don't know what I can finish it but as if that energy had seeded him and brought back the muse Calliope as the muse of the epic poet. And she's a very gracious lady. And as if Calliope's wonderful meant that again settled on his shoulders. He suddenly got a call from his old buddy Howard Hawks who said I can't stand the fact that you're wasting your time writing all these things. And in fact I have, I have need of you. He was making a movie called Air Force and he brought Faulkner in. He said I don't have anything particular but I want to have you on the set of this. You provide the kind of energy that I need. So he brought Faulkner in to finish up on Air Force and then Hawks had the right to make a film on Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. And then some other director took this over and so Hawks made a claim. He said well actually I don't need to take his best book. I could take his worst book and make a great film out of it. So Hemingway agreed to have Hawks get the rights to the book To Have and To Have Not about Harry Morgan smuggling guns down in Cuba. So Faulkner was brought in and Hawks and Faulkner were hunting buddies, drinking buddies, and at this time of course Bogart was hanging around Hawks quite a bit. And in fact in one wonderful weekend Howard Hawks and Faulkner and Bogart and Dashiell Hammett went duck hunting down around the Imperial Valley and I heard from a friend who was near them at that time that they came back with no ducks and also no bodies. They had to enjoy themselves for a full week. But there began to be this incredible dimension of Faulkner's writing and in the screenplay of To Have and To Have Not you can, if you see the film, you can tell that there's a lot of Faulkner dialogue going on and his style of character. One of the characters in there played by Walter Brennan is Eddie a sort of an old drunk. In order to test people he has a nonsense phrase he says, “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” And anyone who ignores him he automatically knows that they have no connection with the wonderful world of myth and reality. They're all balled up in their own serious self-imposed seriousness of life. And of course Lauren Bacall gives the archetypal great answer to you know it was you. And Eddie says this is the right girl for you. So in the film, To Have and To Have Not, suddenly Faulkner was brought into conjunction with Bogart and Hawks and so they decided that this was a fantastic alien that they had developed. So the next film that Hawks worked on of course Faulkner did the screenplay with a little help with Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett. And it was The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's great novel. And of course if you go through the dialogue in The Big Sleep it's just scintillating, especially I think the dialogue at the beginning of the film between old General Sternwood who is out in the garden with all the orchids and Humphrey Bogart who is the detective who's in there fanning himself. And Sternwood declares that he hates orchids. And all this is just an excuse to keep himself warm. And the rest of the film really has the style of Faulkner's great writing in it. If you get a chance to see The Big Sleep it shows from time to time review it and take a look at it. And also about this time, that was 1943 1944 1945, also about this time Malcolm Cowley a great literary critic wrote to Faulkner and he said you know I've been rereading some of your books and I think everyone's misunderstood you. You're really quite a great writer and I have a contract with Viking Books to do a book called The Portable Faulkner, I want to make selections from your works because it's hard for people to read 10 or 12 works. I want to make a one volume selection of about 600 pages. And so the great Portable Faulkner came out in 1946 and it was a smash hit. And about that time Bennett Cerf, President of Random House decided that they'd better reissue all of Faulkner's works. And so they came out. And Faulkner also since he had had connections with the movie industry at all levels decided that he would get his share. That as a screenwriter you get just so much. But if you sell a novel to the movies you get quite a bit more. So I wrote a great story called Intruder in the Dust which was made into a film which he received I think some $50,000 for which in 1948 was a lot of loot. So all the years of travail began to fade away and Faulkner began to be a real count in his land. In fact they had the world premiere of the film in Oxford, Mississippi at the only movie house there. And of course Faulkner, just as proud as he could be, and people in the town still wondering why other people would be so interested in reading about our troubles. Then came word that he had been voted unanimously the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1950. And would he go? Would he go?

He had never done much traveling. And finally it was his daughter Jill, grown up by now, who prevailed upon him and said Pappy I would really love to see Europe with you. He said well I will take you then. And so he went to Stockholm. And usually the speeches for the Nobel Prize are just gestures of thanks and don't really rate very high as works. But Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech of course has been singled out as the greatest one ever done for the Nobel Prize of Literature. And he gave it in Stockholm, December 10th, 1950. And I think we need to hear it because Faulkner put the entirety of the Nobel Prize speech in the center of the table in the mouth of the general who was to make the decision about the court martial. And it's interesting because we can see yet again Faulkner working with his pockets of personality and even while he was doing one of the most serious things, grandest things of his life, he was still writing his work. Let's hear this speech. My copy of The Fable was lent out apparently years ago and I don't have it. I have 70 books lying about Faulkner and my copy of The Fable was not there so I'm not able to read you other passages of it.

“I feel that this award was made to me not to me as a man but to my work, a life's work, in the agony and sweat of the human spirit not for glory and least of all for profit but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine and trust it will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaimed too by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer questions of the spirit. There is only one question. When will I be blown up? Because of this the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony, worth the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basis of all things is to be afraid and teaching himself that forget it forever. Leaving no work no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the human heart the old truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value of victories without hope and worst of all without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he relearns these things he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I declined to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure. That when the last ding dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening. That even then they will still be one more scent that of his puny inexhaustible voice. Still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He 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. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man. It can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

And so of course with the great Nobel Prize speech Faulkner came back and he was lionized. His works began to sell. His reputation began to balloon. Studies began to proliferate. And when he published A Fable in 1954 it was so large, so complex, so enormous that most critics did not even read it. They would write their comments. I went through them all. I once taught a class at Berkeley where we collated all of the reviews in several languages of Faulkner's A Fable and we found that on analysis one person had actually read it and understood it and that was Professor Carlos Baker of Princeton University. And so if you want a good review of A Fable I think it appeared in Newsweek in 1954, Carlos Baker. But A Fable is so complex and enormous so close to our dilemma which we are still in 20 years later 30 years later that we can hardly see it. The point of A Fable was that we have had one continuous war since 1914 with just hiatuses that there has been no letup that the same psychological continuity of doom and destruction has been fed to three generations now so that it has become accepted as the condition of normal life rather than as an aberration and that man must find his way out of this nightmare out of this jungle. And the way to do it of course is to tilt his mind and his consciousness and his heart together to be able to perceive structures complex enough to dissolve and thus provide a solution for the nightmarish phony problems that seem to beset him. And until we are tuned to that level that quality of perception and experience we labor under the curse of the nightmare. It is only when we mature our dreams and our lives and our mythic capacities to the extent to where we can see the universal pattern as a whole then that realization dissolves the problems. The solution hermetically dissolves the problems. It doesn't just meet them. It doesn't perform some kind of a structural function where a new higher meta problem evolves itself. A solution dissolves it so that it can be seen to be no more or as if it had never been. So A Fable is that kind of work that qualitative work.

After A Fable Faulkner was chosen by the US State Department under the prompting of President Eisenhower to go to several countries and represent the United States. So Faulkner willing enough being a real old fashioned patriot went to Japan for the United States, went to Venezuela for the United States, visited many countries in Europe all under the aegis of trying to make liaisons for the United States with other countries. In fact he was lionized in Japan and Faulkner at Nagano. He was at Nagano, Japan. I guess I didn't bring the volume here. There's a volume called Faulkner. He also in 1957 became the writer in residence at the University of Virginia. He had refused several doctorates saying for a man who had not even graduated from high school be a shame on American education to accept a Ph.D. but he would become writer in residence and he began to fall in love with the University of Virginia because it had been designed by Thomas Jefferson and because the town and all of his mythical novels was called Jefferson and he said that he felt even more at home at the University of Virginia than in Oxford, Mississippi. And so he began to shop around to try and find some sort of a ranch or farm. And he was working on finishing a great trilogy of novels called the Snopes Trilogy. The first novel of that came out in 1940 called The Hamlet. And then he brought up the town and then the mansion in 1955 and 1957. And the Snopes Trilogy was like one of his largest tapestries and really exquisite to wade into year after year just fills itself out tremendously. All of the novels of the Snopes Trilogy and many of the others like As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom, all had been seen to fit together into a saga of Yoknapatawpha County, Jefferson being the center of that. And in fact in Absalom, Absalom, in 1936, he had even drawn a little map for readers of his mythical county. And as Malcolm Cowley said it would seem that Yoknapatawpha County had about 14,300 people in it and Faulkner seemed to have written about all of them. So when you read the 20 or 25 books that make them up it's almost as if he had recreated this entire American county for himself.

Well he was ready to make the transition. And as a parting shot to Oxford to Yoknapatawpha County he went back to Go Down Moses and he went back to one of the characters in here named Boon Hogganbeck and back to Ike McCaslin and he wrote his last work called The Reivers. He preferred the Scottish spelling. Reivers means the stealers and what they had sold was a horse a racehorse and it's one of the reoccurring themes in Faulkner that the racehorse is the prize animal and it has sport and it has gambling and it has breeding. It has all the wonderful capacities that human beings love all wrapped up into one. And it all comes down to the championship race where you win money and fame and good horse judgment sense all of these capacities. The Reivers was chosen as Book of the Month Club. It sold an enormous number of copies and the receipts from it of course were huge, were tremendous. So Faulkner was ready to buy an estate about 14 miles out of Charlottesville when he died of a heart attack in July of 1962 and he was just about ready to leave Oxford but instead he's buried there.

And I think that with Faulkner and everything that I've been able to present on him to you it's difficult for all of this to settle in just hearing it through the voice. So I wanted to present some images from the world of the visual arts to help you later on when you go into reading Faulkner reading some of the works for yourselves. I think some visual images would help. So I'd like to show you about ten slides of Andrew Wyeth's work because Wyeth is very much like Faulkner. And I think in the next series I'll just devote a whole evening to Andrew Wyeth. I'd like to show you about ten of his images because he has in his painting the qualities of in-depth spiritual perception which Faulkner has in his literary style. Let's see these slides and then we'll pull it through.

Wyeth chooses sparsity whereas Faulkner chooses complexity. But both of them are working in parallel with Faulkner's complexity. You're left more and more with a simple residue very much like Wyeth here of just hints and clues and the capacity to let form emerge out of nothing in particular rather than nothing whatsoever is a quality of letting the everyday world be a matrix for the deepest religious insights. If the everyday world, nothing in particular can be a creative matrix then we're able to use whatever data experience is given to us no matter what our situation is no matter what our time is as a base. Experiential base to develop the perception of the spirit. Going backwards. So it's the everyday world. For both. The common ordinary objects. But of course because of choosing a stylized time period to become less ordinary in the sense that we can recognize that these are very mundane objects they create a mundane world pattern but they increasingly are abstracted from our time because we don't participate in this particular historical style very much anymore so that we see it as somewhat old fashioned not archaic and not ancient but just old fashioned but close enough to us so that we recognize it instantly as basic mundane experience and associated with times which the grand parent situation might have resolved. And just as it is in Faulkner also for Wyeth it's the grandparent generation that gives us the spiritual teachings not the parents. And in pouring down the perception to just a few basic elements and movements. With a tone of having the spiritual inner eye open. To perceive this we have to bring ourselves into relationship with every element of the work in order to flesh it out.

It's just too simple too big. And so we enter into the condition of throwing our own experience into the composition to flesh it out to give it unity to give it substantiality. And in doing this we create a liaison of communication which was happening which was after each word. We want to be there as we are there. So that for instance loneliness becomes transmuted into solitude. Or the sparseness becomes transmuted into a Zen-like thing. And so on. So that as we get used to that horizon of experience the everyday qualities we're able to appreciate and enjoy Wyatt in this case Faulkner and the recent case more and more. But we can also take the insight and flavor of this experience with ourselves into our everyday life. Whatever it is that we surround ourselves with seem to do and dissolve the habitual nature of it so that it occurs to us that all of the elements are worth looking at with the same penetrating newness and freshness with which we look at a pailful of blueberries and Wyeth's Wilde's picture. So that we are honing ourselves to become the writing styles of our own circumstance freeing us from this habitual pattern which anesthetizes ourselves and allowing us to enter into a refreshed worldview which is always the prerequisite for re-establishing communication with the deeper patterns. As long as we are habituated to whatever surrounds us in the everyday and accepted blandly as the mundane whereas if cursed or hypnotized and unable to actually move in penetration.

But as we disassociate ourselves from that kind of humdrum. We attenuate our capacity as a restructuring psychic able to open up to the larger universal patterns. More and more that we do that the more the old fairy tales can come true and the more meaningfulness any type of primordial activity by any human group has an affinity with our own life style. So we have in Faulkner and in wine the same sophistication that we would have had in Zen Buddhism or in the Sufi developments of Islam. In other words in our culture by the time of Faulkner and Wyeth has achieved very very high order of intelligence and sensibility and mystical penetration but done within a cultural realm that is familiar to us. Instead of being exotic to us. And thus we're able to retranslate it back into experience quite readily and become mobile in our own world view much much faster. And so the ordinary becomes the miraculous. And out of that wonderment is the beginnings of philosophy.

Well we will find next week with Alan Hovhaness and Morris Graves that the next generation, the one just preceding our own, carried it even further. So let's we'll hope to see you there. And I'll try not to be floating off the ground when giving this mystical lecture next week. Thank you very much.