Books: Growing Myth

WILLIAM FAULKNER: ESSAYS,SPEECHES AND PUBLIC LETTERS, edited by James 8. Meriwether. 233 pages. Random House. $6.

William Faulkner had a thing about privacy. "If I were reincarnated," he once told a friend, "I'd want to come back as a buzzard. Nothing hates him, or envies him, or wants him, or needs him; he's never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything."

Because Faulkner only rarely gave interviews about his work, never permitted journalists to pry into his private life, and refused to play the celebrity, the press made him something of a myth-laden enigma during his lifetime. The oddest myth of all is that Faulkner was a recluse in his classical Southern mansion in Oxford, Miss., and found company only in countless demijohns of bourbon while he wrenched out his primeval and difficult prose.

He was a drinker all right, and he was often shy with strangers, but he was no hermit. A dapper and courteous little man, he had a coterie of fishing and hunting companions in his home town, as well as numerous publishing friends in New York. He was always given a top table when he dropped in at Toots Shor's or "21" on his frequent visits to New York, graciously gave his autograph when asked, and readily discussed writing with perfect strangers —if they were not newsmen. In 1957 and 1958, he was the writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, and in 1962 lectured on writing at West Point. Moreover, perhaps no major U.S. writer ever used his pen so diligently and profitably in so many different ways. After his first success with Sanctuary in 1932, he frequently worked in the movie factories in Hollywood, wrote formula short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, and occasionally knocked out a book review for the New Republic or American Mercury.

Uneven Talents. As this collection proves, Faulkner was particularly busy from 1950 onward. Far from being a recluse, he reported on the Kentucky Derby for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, wrote on a variety of subjects for other magazines, and took a lively interest in public affairs. But just as his recently republished verse, The Marble Faun and A Green Bough (TIME, Nov. 26), showed that he was not much of a poet, this collection indicates that he possessed woefully uneven talents as a speaker, essayist and letter writer.

Readers who have fought their way through the syntactic quagmires of Faulkner's fiction will be mildly surprised to find that he could sometimes be straightforward and lucid, as in his Nobel Prize Speech of 1950 ("I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail"). Far less inspiring, however, was Faulkner's commencement address to the 1953 graduating class at the Pine Manor Junior College in Wellesley, Mass. The talk is so gauze-wrapped with mystical abstractions about man and his condition that the poor students must have stumbled away from it in a stupor. The essays, too, are recommended only for veterans of the quagmires who may still have their hip boots handy.