Reading Faulkner

I started reading William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying today.  Thirty-seven pages in and I have not yet attuned my ear to the voices speaking but I'll keep at it (not just because we have a tutorial on the text this coming Thursday).

Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature fifty-one years ago.  In his acceptance speech (10th December 1951) he set out what he saw as the writer's purpose; writing's purpose.  He said;

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.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal 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 decline 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 dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

Listen to his speech here.

Two essays back today

86% for Ulysses

 87% for Sula

Let fly this wounded bird

I pressed into the willing hands of one not there
the once-forgotten hopes of one who would not dare
to dream or live as dreamers might or could;
of one who sank too far into the depths of should,
misunderstood the differences between those three
and chose not wisely nor chose well the way to be,
perhaps from fear, maybe from doubt
that could would work its own way out,
so should must therefore be the only path to take
against the gnawing fear of making some mistake
which in the grander scheme of life's events
must matter less - far less - than all that fear prevents
from living, breathing, taking off, perhaps to soar
above the clouds that stop us, always, seeing more.

 

Further thoughts on Colin Doyle

From an e.mail to my friend Yvonne Strachan ...

I’ve been trying to write something for a couple of days but it’s an odd exercise in a way.  Memories, as in hard and fast recollections of events, times and places, are less easy to set down in a meaningful way than to think of the feelings that bubbled up to the surface when I read that he’d left the world into which we’re all born.  There was immense sadness, of course.  But that immediate reaction was quickly supplemented by an echo of the fun, banter, laughter of our engagements; his sometimes mad schemes and what I think of (then and now) as Colin’s Peter Pan-like enthusiasm for virtually everything he touched: his beloved Arsenal; the rich vitality of London at its best; the potential of building membership benefits in the NUS card (of all unlikely things); his time running coaches for Galleon; wine; his apartment in The Barbican; those 1970s suits with wide lapels; laughing at someone’s outrageous stories in a bar full of overconfident bright young things who intended to re-shape the universe (some of whom may even have achieved some of those intentions); telling his own tall tales; his giant white Audi 100 car that her knew he ought not to possess but which he couldn’t resist.

Our last e.mail exchanges were filled with the unmistakable affection, pride, love, exasperation of a father for his children who clearly meant just about everything to him.  He wrote as he spoke, as I think he lived; seventeen to the dozen, never in a straight line but with exuberance and optimism forever.  I think I met him for the first time when I was a sabbatical officer at Stirling University, so that’s 77 or (more likely) 78.  We were in a bar (as almost seems inescapably likely for that period) in CC2 (as it was known).  Like the first contact with some people one meets (I have been more fortunate than others in that regard) he captured a place in my heart immediately.  I miss him and always shall, which is no bad thing.

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