名人轶事27:William Faulkner,Part One

Broadcast: December 5, 2004

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VOICE ONE:

I'm Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today, we

begin the story of the life of a famous Southern writer, William Faulkner. He

wrote about an imaginary place and described changes in the American South.

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VOICE ONE:

William Faulkner was born at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a time

when there were two Souths in the United States. The first was the South

whose beliefs had existed from before the American Civil War which began in

eighteen sixty-one. This South did not question rules, even when those rules

did not satisfy human needs. It was a South filled with injustice for black

people. It held the seeds of its own destruction.

The other South was a land without any beliefs. It was a place where success

was measured by self-interest. This was a South where each person had lost

his place in the group. It was a place where people owned things that they

did not know how to use.

Faulkner

Faulkner saw that the old beliefs were not right or even worth believing. And

he saw that they could not provide justice because they were based on

slavery. Yet he felt that even with their lies and half truths the old

beliefs were better than the moral emptiness of the modern South.

VOICE TWO:

In Faulkner's story called "The Bear" a group of men are talking after the

day's hunt. One man reads from a poem by the English writer, John Keats:

"'She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love, and

she be fair. '

"He's talking about a girl," one man says.

The other answers, 'He was talking about truth. Truth is one. It doesn't

change. It covers all things which touch the heart -- honor and pity and

justice and courage and love. Do you see now. '"

The American writer, Robert Penn Warren says about Faulkner, "The important

thing is the presence of the idea of truth. It covers all things that involve

the heart and define the effort of man to rise above the mechanical process

of life. "

VOICE ONE:

Faulkner has been accused of looking back to a time when life was better.

Yet, he believes that truth belongs to all times. But it is found most often

in the people who stand outside what he calls "the loud world. "

One of the people in his story "Delta Autumn" says, "There are good men

everywhere, at all times. "

Faulkner's great-grandfather accepted the old beliefs. He was one of the men

who had helped build the South, but his time was gone. Now money had replaced

the old order of honor. What Faulkner saw was that there could be no order at

all, no idea of doing what is right, in a world that measured success in

terms of money.

VOICE TWO:

This is the changing South that Faulkner describes in the area he created. He

named it Yoknapatawpha County. He describes it as in the northern part of the

state of Mississippi. It lies between sand hills covered with pine trees and

rich farmland near the Mississippi River. It has fifteen-thousand-six-

hundred-eleven people, living on almost four-thousand square kilometers. Its

central city is Jefferson, where the storekeepers, mechanics, and

professional men live.

The rest of the people of Yoknapatawpha County are farmers or men who cut

trees. Their only crops are wood and cotton. A few live in big farmhouses,

left from an earlier time. Most of them do not even own the land they farm.

The critic Malcolm Cowley says, "Others might say that Faulkner was not so

much writing stories for the public as telling them to himself. It is what a

lonely child might do, or a great writer. "

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VOICE ONE:

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in eighteen-ninety-

seven. His father worked for the railroad. William's great-grandfather had

built it. His grandfather owned it. When the grandfather decided to sell the

railroad, William's father moved his family thirty-five miles west to the

city of Oxford.

Growing up in Oxford, William Faulkner heard stories of the past from his

grandmother and from a black woman who worked for his family. He heard more

stories from old men in front of the courthouse, and from poor farmers

sitting in front of a country store.