Some Notes on Faulkner's Reading

Abstract

Carvel Collins's collection of Faulkner's Early Prose and Poetry, containing mainly material written between 1919 and 1922, with one or two items from 1925, introduces the reader to a young author who is not only concerned with questions of his craft but also engaged by several of the dominant aesthetic, intellectual and critical arguments of his day. Let me briefly list some of those engagements: Faulkner's review of Conrad Aiken's Turns and Movies and his renderings of Symbolist poetry demonstrate his interest in the proper language of poetry; the essay ‘On Criticism’ presents him sparring with notions of what good criticism could and should achieve; in his piece on Eugene O'Neill he expresses surprise that O'Neill had chosen to write first about the sea rather than about the more familiar land, and of W. A. Percy he says ‘like every man who…ever lived, he is the victim of his age’ (p. 72)—comments which hint at thoughts on the disparity between life and art (a recurrent subject in his poems), which was a chief critical point in the feverish debates of the time between the emerging ‘literary radicals’ like Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks and the ‘new humanists’, such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. Also, in ‘American Drama: Inhibitions’, Faulkner stresses the importance of native subject-matter for the American writer, taking ‘the old Mississippi river days’ and ‘the romantic growth of the railroads’ (44) as examples. In the same essay, like Brooks and H. L. Mencken before him, he points out the comparative richness of the American tongue: thus it is no surprise to learn that Mencken's The American Language (1919) is listed in the Appendix to William Faulkner's Library—A Catalogue as one of the books Phil Stone ordered with his younger friend ‘in mind’.