FAULKNER’S ENDURING “DIXIE LIMITED”

M. THOMAS INGE

Writers from America’s South to rural China have been
influenced by the work of William Faulkner

For the Southern writer, as Flannery O’Connor once noted, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Her railroading metaphor wittily captured much of the respect and unease the example of Faulkner has brought the worldwide community of writers.

Few modern writers seem to have had so profound an influence throughout the world as has William Faulkner. He has been praised but, like any writer, has had his critics, as well. He might be called a “writer’s writer,” one who is held up as a preceptor and model for other writers to emulate. The novel has certainly not been the same since Faulkner, that much seems clear. Equally clear, perhaps, is the fact that Faulkner’s contemporaries as well as later novelists have always found plenty to say about Faulkner, suggesting that his writings have had a profound impact on their work and that of many other writers.

Literature, especially the novel, has flourished as an important part of American culture during the 20th century. Such writers as Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Saul Bellow have been considered not just American writers for an American audience, but also writers of international stature. One emerging issue is the extent to which this will hold true in the 21st century. Will these American novelists continue to hold the esteem of writers and critics on a worldwide, or even national, scale? One way to gauge the response to this question is to examine the extent to which any of these writers has influenced his fellow practitioners of fiction.

In the case of Faulkner, there is plenty of evidence on record. Faulkner began to attract the attention of other writers at the very start of his career as a published novelist. In Nashville, poet Donald Davidson, not yet a spokesman for Agrarianism, reviewed Faulkner’s first three novels for his prominent book page in the Nashville Tennessean newspaper. Soldiers’ Pay (1926) he found to be the product of a skillful writer with “a fine power of objectifying his own and other’s emotions, an artist in language, a sort of poet turned into prose.” Mosquitoes (1927) he thought too much under the influence of James Joyce and too possessed with the grotesque, but admirable nevertheless for “the skill of the performance.” An emerging poet himself, with two volumes in print, Davidson was no doubt drawn to the skills of another wordsmith.

Such praise was limited not only to fellow Southerners, however. Modernist poet Conrad Aiken, writing in the New York Post on Mosquitoes, provided a thorough analysis of both the charms and deficiencies of Faulkner’s prose and, along the way, found him the equal of Hemingway in dialogue, “with something of Katherine Mansfield’s sense of light and texture, and a good deal of [Aldous] Huxley’s erudition....” In a later 1939 essay for Atlantic magazine, in a penetrating defense of the complexity of Faulkner’s style, Aiken placed him in the company of Henry James and Balzac as a brilliant stylist.

Reviewing Mosquitoes for the New York Herald Tribune, playwright Lillian Hellman (who had enthusiastically read the manuscript for the publisher) likewise found Faulkner comparable to Huxley at his best, and at his worst under the influence of Joyce in overwritten passages. Mainly, the novel demonstrated a genius found “in the writings of only a few men.” Of course, both Aiken and Hellman were transplanted Southerners, the first from Savannah, Georgia, and the second from New Orleans, Louisiana, the exact states in which the first two novels were set, respectively. They were thus able to exercise a kind of judgment about authenticity that other readers might not. But this was not why they were impressed with the works. Their independent critical judgments suggested that they were in the presence of a great writer and rival.

Just about all of Faulkner’s contemporaries also knew they were in for major competition from the young Mississippi country boy with an unabridged vocabulary and undisciplined style. Beginning with Sartoris (1929), to be followed shortly by The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Sanctuary (1931), as well as the other stellar works of the 1930s, including Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), anyone who cared about writing in America could hardly overlook or ignore his presence. Among the older generation of writers, Sherwood Anderson both praised and mentored Faulkner. He said in an essay for American Mercury in 1930, “The two most notable young writers who have come on in America since the war, it seems to me, are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.” That particular coupling would be made frequently, usually to the chagrin of the latter.

The leading lady of Southern letters, Ellen Glasgow, repulsed by the Gothicism and grim naturalism of many modern writers, rejected Faulkner as one of their number. In her essays and letters, she referred to “the fantastic nightmares of William Faulkner,” “the sodden futilitarians and the corncob cavaliers of Mr. Faulkner,” and “Faulkner’s school of Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones” fiction. Similarly, the genteel Midwestern sensibility of Booth Tarkington found Faulkner little to his liking, sarcastically nominating him “our Leader and Hero.” But after parodying his prose in a 1932 letter to historical novelist Kenneth Roberts, Tarkington would admit, grudgingly, “Outside of being different with parenthesis and things now and then, and some traces of Stephen Crane, our Leader is often satisfactorily confusing in ways that demonstrate greatness.”

A KING AMONG KINGS

The writers who rested most uneasily in light of Faulkner’s increasing reputation were those immediate contemporaries who were making a conscious bid for recognition as the major American novelist. Ernest Hemingway, the chief contender, was especially worried that Faulkner was the better writer. When not put out or responding nastily to some negative comment he thought Faulkner had made about his own writing, Hemingway was quite generous in his praise. Reacting in 1932 to a reviewer of Death in the Afternoon who had misunderstood a reference to Faulkner in that book, Hemingway wrote the New Yorker to assert “I have plenty of respect for Faulkner and wish him all luck.” They were simply different kinds of writers with different artistic visions, and their public personae sometimes got in the way.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who alternately found himself either being tutored how to write better or being disparaged by Hemingway, although he needed no lessons, held no public discourse with Faulkner and no sense of competition. They seemed to respect each other, but when Fitzgerald was making notes or giving advice about writing, he often cautioned against Faulkner’s influence. He warned John Peale Bishop, when reviewing his manuscript for Act of Darkness, that too often he “saw patterns in this book which derived background and drama from Faulkner.” While working on Tender is the Night, he made a note for himself: “Must avoid Faulkner attitude and not end with a novelized Kraft-Ebing—better Ophelia and her flowers.” He and Zelda frequently gave friends copies of Sanctuary, although one told Zelda “she couldn’t sleep for three nights it gave her the horrors so terribly.” In 1932, Scott reported, “Have been reading Sanctuary and Little Lord Fauntleroy together...and am simply overwhelmed by the resemblance. The books are simply two faces of the same world spirit....”

Of course, neither Hemingway nor Fitzgerald was likely to be influenced very much by Faulkner, set as they were in their own aesthetic ways, but the influence did go the other way. In Faulkner’s first two novels, techniques he had learned about style and authorial attitude from both writers are clearly evident, and the original title for Soldiers’ Pay, “Mayday,” had been used previously by Fitzgerald for one of his short stories. After Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, and the temporary eclipse of his reputation, when asked to list the major American writers, Faulkner usually omitted Fitzgerald but consistently included Hemingway, although what he said nearly always got him into trouble.

It was, in fact, what Faulkner said specifically about Thomas Wolfe that got him into the most trouble with Hemingway. On more than one occasion that got into print, Faulkner ranked Wolfe above Hemingway among the current generation of writers, because Hemingway lacked the artistic courage of a Wolfe. As Faulkner later retold it:

I ranked Wolfe first because we had all failed but Wolfe had made the best failure because he had tried hardest to say the most.... My admiration for Wolfe is that he tried his best to get it all said; he was willing to throw away style, coherence, all the rules of preciseness, to try to put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin, as it were. He may have had the best talent of us; he may have been “the greatest American writer” if he had lived longer....

Two years before his death, Wolfe made some encouraging, if condescending, remarks about both Hemingway and Faulkner to a newspaper reporter:

I have met both Hemingway and Faulkner and my own deep feeling is that neither has begun to reach full maturity and that both will do better books than they have done yet.... I don’t think [Faulkner] has begun yet to use the whole range and sweep of his material, for here is a man whose talent could play over all of life....The Sound and the Fury was in many ways a very wonderful book, and I doubt that a man of that imaginative and inventive power can be held down or restricted to one type of story.

Interestingly enough, it was the very thing that Faulkner admired in Wolfe—the sweep and inclusiveness of human experience—that Wolfe felt Faulkner lacked in his focus on those alienated from, and marginalized by, society. But if Wolfe could not tell by then, having read some of his best novels, that Faulkner was a great writer, he probably never would have recognized his worth. We do not know if Faulkner ever saw these comments, but he did not retain his high opinion and rudely told a reporter in 1957 that reading Wolfe bored him.

FAULKNER ON RACE

As a new generation of writers after Faulkner’s emerged in the United States, they, too, found their result of the large shadow cast by Faulkner. But it was a more diverse group now, with more African-Americans and women than before. When fellow Mississippian Richard Wright published his first book in 1930, Uncle Tom’s Children, he told an interviewer that Faulkner was one of his two favorite writers because “He is the only white writer I know of living in Mississippi who is trying to tell the truth [about the real South] in fiction.” Native Son attracted Faulkner’s attention in 1940, and when Black Boy appeared in 1945, he sat down to write a letter to Wright commending his courage for saying what “needed to be said” about race relations in America, but he went on to express his preference for Native Son, because it was a more “artistic” statement on the level of general human experience.

Ten years later, Faulkner told a Japanese interviewer that Wright “wrote one good book and then went astray,” because he failed to remain an artist first and a black activist second. Wright had partly responded to this charge when Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in 1950 by writing a tribute in French in which he congratulated him for making art out of the material of regional experience: “...Faulkner’s greatness resided primarily in his power to transpose the American scene as it exists in the Southern states, filter it through his sensibilities and finally define it with words.” While there seems to be a meeting of the minds here, the truth is both followed separate missions as artists and writers.

In the same interview in which he mentioned Wright in Japan, Faulkner also noted, “Another [black writer] named Ellison has talent and so far has managed to stay away from being first a Negro, he is still first a writer.” Ralph Ellison’s only novel, Invisible Man, which had appeared three years earlier, was very Faulknerian in its uses of time, narrative consciousness, and surreal structure. But Ellison was always uneasy about Faulkner. In an essay written in 1946, but not published until 1953, he found “mixed motives” in Faulkner’s frequent use of black stereotypes. Nevertheless, he believed that Faulkner was “the greatest writer the South has produced.”

Among other black writers, Chester Himes said he always turned to Faulkner for inspiration when he was writing, because he felt that Faulkner’s world view was based on the absurdity of life, as was his own. Referring to his close relationship with Richard Wright, Himes once noted, “Faulkner had the utter influence over my writing, but Dick had influence over my life.” The younger and more radical James Baldwin had little patience with Faulkner, especially his gradualist attitude towards civil rights. He saw Faulkner as a mixture of contradictions and hypocrisy, who embodied the confused paradox of being a Southerner in the modern world. For Baldwin, Faulkner seemed to be a fallen idol who was unable to match his words with action, itself a profound form of respect.

PRAISE OR CENSURE

Not all writers share Baldwin’s respect for Faulkner. When John Hawkes declared “I love Faulkner” in an exchange with John Barth, Barth replied, “I read Faulkner with proper astonishment and instruction when I was graduate student age. I do not remember him with great pleasure.” Truman Capote declared, in his first published interview, “I’m afraid of Faulkner, squeamish, really—I see him as a personal threat,” and later in his career, “I find Faulkner’s prose so cumbersome and tanglesome, the exact opposite of what I admire and try to do myself.”Vladimir Nabokov said in 1965 that he saw no way “Faulkner’s corncob chronicles can be considered ‘masterpieces’....” Edward Dahlberg, perhaps, offered the most savage attack on record, as evidenced by a few sample lines: “...the Popeye Faulkner novelist is a medieval corncob poet of everyday banalities that have a Rasputin odor.... Faulkner the Nobel Prize winner gives us a diseased world, a moldy poor white class—and all in the name of truth and humanity.... Faulkner never bothered to learn how to write....”

Such opinions notwithstanding, so powerful is the Faulknerian influence that it continues to the present. One of the most popular emerging writers at the moment is one more Mississippian, Richard Ford, who chooses to write about neither the South nor Mississippi. Growing up in Jackson, Ford was aware of the spirit of Faulkner and the local reality of Eudora Welty, “whom I used to see,” he says, “buying her lunch at the steam table at the Jitney Jungle grocery....” He didn’t begin to read Faulkner until college. Absalom, Absalom!, in particular, dazzled him with its language. He says that “if anything I read influenced me to take a try at being a writer—even on a midget scale—it was this pleasure I got from reading Faulkner.”

There is the case, too, of Toni Morrison, a recent Nobel Prize winner, who wrote her master’s thesis on Virginia Woolf and Faulkner. She has taught his works, but denies any direct influence on her fiction. Morrison has been “fascinated by what it means to write” the way he did in Absalom, Absalom!, but feels her roots lie more in a distinctive African-American experience and culture. However that may be, critics are finding interesting parallels, and are reading the works of Morrison and Faulkner together in ways to elucidate each author’s vision and accomplishment. There is a dialogue about race going on between them that is remarkably rational, intelligent, and enlightening.

Meanwhile, the waves of Faulkner’s influence have begun to reach the shores of new parts of the world. South African playwright Athol Fugard says that Faulkner “convinced him he was on the right track by concentrating on the dramas of his own small world.” Japan’s most recent Nobel Prize winner, Kenzaburo Oe, has said, “Among the modern British and American writers, Faulkner is the one whom I have the strongest impulse to challenge.”

Even in China, one of the most respected contemporary authors, Mo Yan, has confessed that “Two particular works had the greatest impact on me. One was García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.The other was William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” While possessing his own style and point of view, Mo Yan nevertheless has proceeded to create a fictional world based on rural Shandong province very much in the grand Faulknerian manner.

This brief survey of essays, articles, reviews, letters, and interviews published over the last seven decades by novelists, poets, and dramatists about Faulkner, his fiction, and the power of his accomplishment, demonstrate how profound and far reaching his impact has been. Most speak about his technical virtuosity and aesthetic genius, and how these have influenced their own practice as writers. Others express the difficulties of trying to escape his example in forging their own styles. A minority criticize him for what they see as artistic failures and poor writing. Such a variety of responses indicate, in any case, that Faulkner has been an unavoidable presence in his own time and after, and he will remain a permanent part of the literary landscape both in the United States and abroad.

Additional Resources:

Blotner, Joseph. William Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1984.
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
Inge, M. Thomas. “The Faulkner 100 Bookshelf.” American Studies International 35 (October 1997), 80-88.
Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

M. Thomas Inge is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of English and the Humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, where he teaches and writes about American literature, popular culture, and comic art. His books include William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews (1995) and Conversations with William Faulkner (1999).

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