In November, Faulkner condemned segregation in an address before the Southern Historical Association in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where because of segregation much effort was needed for blacks to be admitted. The speech was published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal under the headline “A mixed audience hears Faulkner condemn the `shame' of segregation”. Though Faulkner opposed segregation, however, he opposed federal involvement in the issue, which resulted in his being understood by neither southern conservatives nor northern liberals. Faulkner's increasingly vocal stand on the issues of race drew fire from his fellow southerners, including anonymous threats and rejection by his own brother, John. Misunderstanding over Faulkner's views increased when in a February 1956 interview with a London Sunday Times correspondent he was quoted as saying that he would “fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes” [13].
In April 1956, black civil rights legend W.E.B. Du Bois challenged Faulkner to a debate on integration on the steps of the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where the accused in the Emmett Till murder trial had been acquitted by an all-white jury. Faulkner declined in a telegram, stating “I do not believe there is a debatable point between us. We both agree in advance that the position you will take is right morally, legally, and ethically. If it is not evident to you that the position I take in asking for moderation and patience is right practically then we will both waste our breath in debate” [7, p.362].
In September, Camus' adaptation of Requiem for a Nun premiered at the Thйвtre des Mathurins. That same month, Faulkner became involved in the Eisenhower administration's “People-to-People Program”, the aim of which was to promote American culture behind the Iron Curtain. At the end of September a steering committee consisting of Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Donald Hall drew up several “resolutions”, including one supporting the liberation of Ezra Pound, but Faulkner would withdraw from the committee three months later.
From February to June 1957, Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia and agreed to a number of question-and-answer sessions with the students, faculty, and faculty spouses. Highlights of the taped sessions would be published in 1959 by Professors Joseph Blotner and Frederick Gwynn under the title “Faulkner in the University” [22].
In May 1957 Faulkner published The Town, the second volume of the “Snopes” trilogy. Picking up where The Hamlet left off, it depicts Flem Snopes' ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson. Now dividing his time between Oxford and Charlottesville, from February to May 1958 he fulfilled his second term as writer-in-residence at Virginia. Also while living in Virginia, he began to relish fox-hunting, and he was invited to join the Farmington Hunt Club, an achievement he displayed proudly by posing for photographs and portraits in his pink membership coat. In December, Jill's second son, William, was born, and the following month saw the premiere of Requiem for a Nun on stage at the John Golden Theater in New York, making the United States the thirteenth nation in which the play had been produced [23].
Throughout 1960, Faulkner continued to divide his time between Oxford and Charlottesville. On October 16, Faulkner's mother, Maud Butler Falkner, died at the age of 88. A talented painter who had completed nearly 600 paintings after 1941, she had remained close to her eldest son throughout her life.
In January 1961, Faulkner willed all his manuscripts to the William Faulkner Foundation at the University of Virginia. In February, he accepted an invitation from General William Westmoreland to visit the military academy at West Point. In April, Faulkner went on a final trip abroad for the State Department, this time to Venezuela, where he was the guest of President Rуmulo Betancourt. He spent the summer in Oxford, where in August he completed the manuscript for his nineteenth and final novel. Titled The Reivers, an archaic Scottish spelling of an old term for “thieves”, the novel is a light-hearted romp set at the turn of the century in which Boon Hogganbeck takes eleven-year-old Lucius “Loosh” Priest and a stowaway, Ned McCaslin, the Priest family's black coachman, on a joyride to a Memphis brothel in Loosh's grandfather's Winton Flyer automobile while “Boss” Priest is away at a funeral. Beginning the novel, subtitled A Reminiscence, with the phrase “Grandfather said…” Faulkner dedicated it to “Victoria, Mark, Paul, William, Burks”, his grandchildren by his two step-children and biological daughter. The novel, published in June 1962, would posthumously earn for Faulkner his second Pulitzer Prize for fiction [21, p.30-48].
In January of that year, Faulkner suffered another fall from a horse, forcing yet another hospital stay. In April, he again visited West Point with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, and the following month in New York, fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty presented Faulkner with the Gold Medal for Fiction awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
On June 17, Faulkner was again injured by a fall from a horse. In constant pain now, he signaled something was wrong when he asked on July 5 to be taken to Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia. Though he had been a patient there many times, he had always been taken there before against his will. His nephew, Jimmy, and Estelle accompanied him on the 65-mile trip to Byhalia, where he was admitted at 6 p.m. Less than eight hours later, at about 1:30 a.m. on July 6, 1962 - the Old Colonel's birthday - his heart stopped, and though the doctor on duty applied external heart massage for forty-five minutes, he could not resuscitate him. William Faulkner died of a heart attack at the age of 64. He was buried on July 7 at St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford. As calls of condolence came upon the family from around the world and the press - including novelist William Styron, who covered the funeral for Life magazine - clamored for answers to their questions from family members, a family representative relayed to them a message from the family: “Until he's buried he belongs to the family. After that he belongs to the world”.
1.2 W. Faulkner's aesthetic views
Martin A. Bertman said that there is something he would call the metaphysical function of literature. It is often overlooked by critics, since, as an interpretive dimension, its importance relates only to great literature. Critical accessibility to great literature, however, is incomplete without its inclusion.
The great literary work's metaphysical function is to bring the reader to the periphery of his existence. The reader can contemplate the work, have a liberating emotion which puts a distance between himself and other emotions generated by the work. This emotion is the prerational basis for rational discrimination. It is the existential condition that provides the focus for all levels of such discriminations. It suggests the continued relevance of the great work, for those who have the capacity for appropriate discrimination.
Faulkner's writings by their greatness exemplify this. These writings, especially some of the novels, present an added characteristic, which Martin Bertman called William Faulkner's Thucydidean aesthetic.
Faulkner thinks to find the individual through history. Like Thucydides, he believes that an examination of the past conflicts of men will uncover for each man the “old verities”. Faulkner's literary pursuit of the meaning of the Civil War searches for the old verities and truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice”, as he said in his acceptance of the Noble Prize in 1946. His approach assumes the eternality of human nature; and, further, it elevates character, in transaction with chance, as the essential explanatory form of human meaning.
It is understandable that the modern mentality, heir both to evolutionary models and to relativistic theories, can easily misunderstand Faulkner's historical project cum literature. It may be seen as mere quaint moral mastication or, yet worse, be misunderstood as subject matter rather than as the method or vehicle of the subject matter [5, p.99-105].
William Faulkner in his speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm in December 1950 said: “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.
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 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. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail” [3, p.203-205].
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