Office Hours
A truly strange, endearing new view of Faulkner.
I got up at 5:30 a.m. today and wrote for seven hours, took an hour break, and wrote for another hour, so I hope you’ll forgive me for not taking on a question this week.
Instead: a strange offering.
A friend turned me on to this video that…I am having trouble describing. It has Faulkner in it. It feels a little like, um, a newsreel? And yet…and yet…
Better you should watch it for yourself:
This made me feel so fond of Faulkner, somehow. I mean, I always feel fond of Faulkner, but he and his community seem so open here, so vulnerable and goofy.
The form itself seems like a path-not-taken in terms of how writers present themselves to the public. It sounds scripted, and is stiff as heck, but I feel the (strange) goodwill running through it.
Does anyone have any information on who made this, and how, and why?
(Our intrepid editor, Samantha Storey, found this explanation.)
This also makes me think of something from that Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway - a bit near the end, where an older (and clearly nervous) Hemingway does a live TV spot, in which he seems to be reading off cue cards. At one point, he reads the word “comma,” for the symbol, and so on.
All of this to say: writers weren’t always expected to be public speakers, or even fully public figures. In our time, I guess it’s somewhat expected that writers should give readings and talks and do interviews and so on…but it wasn’t always this way.
And even now, there’s a range. Some writers stay quietly at home, others…play guitar and sing on Colbert.
To each their own, I suppose.
When I first started to get a little attention for my work, I thought I’d best carefully construct something - decide how I wanted to be seen, and stick with it. But that was stressful (because false, because constructed). And, it turned out, it actually felt less stressful to be out in the public, trying to be honest and taking my best shot at explaining my art and so on - especially since, I am always bemoaning the fact that writers were no longer central to the culture.
So, generally, whenever I get a chance to do something public and potentially risky/fun, I feel, “Oh, sure, why not - life is short.” (I also have a lot of confidence in my artistic practice’s ability to stay clean and pure and functional, no matter what’s happening in my public life.)
Which might explain how a (very) short story of mine once ended up on a Chipotle bag.
More on Sunday, behind the paywall, about Isaac Babel’s “In the Basement.”
A different Faulkner recording & Faulkner's mistress: My father, William Schallert, had a small role in the film "In the Heat of the Night". During filming, the script supervisor approached him and asked about his accent since she knew he was from Los Angeles.
He told her that he'd studied Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech (I still have the record album). She looked nonplussed, said, "Oh," then turned and walked away.
My father approached the director, Norman Jewison, and asked if he'd said something wrong.
"That was Meta Carpenter-Wilde," he said. "She was Faulkner's mistress for 18 years."
I told my father he should take it as a compliment that she asked!
Here's a great quote from the speech: "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 problems of the spirit. There is only the 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 and the sweat."
Here's George on the Chipotle bag:
"Hope that, in future, all is well, everyone eats free, no one must work, all just sit around feeling love for one another."