The Charlottesville Daily Progress 24 May 1958

Faulkner Would Like to Live Final Years in Albemarle

By Ted McKown

William Faulkner made his last appearance yesterday as the University of Virginia's writer-in-residence – then indicated he would like to settle here permanently.

"If I do it will take a certain amount of doing," he told a reporter. First he would have to sell his farm near Oxford, Miss., he said.

"It's so far in the future it couldn't be called a plan. It's more like a hope. Mrs. Faulkner and I both like it here. It wouldn't be a bad place to spend the next 60 years."

Earlier the soft-voiced 60-year-old Nobel Prize winner told an audience in Rouss Hall:

"I could use this last hour to try and say thank you to the people of Charlottesville and Albemarle County for making my stay here happy. But I won't.

"Every individual is the sum total of his past. I leave something here – where Faulkner was happy – and I'll take with me something of Albemarle County. I will come back from time to time to so those two separates can be joined again."

Faulkner said his favorite pastimes are horses, dogs, hunting and riding. Most of his time here was spent riding from Grover Vandevender's stables, he said.

Asked if he still holds to a statement made a year ago that he likes Virginians because they are snobs, Faulkner said, "that was sort of thrown off in a moment of relaxation. I do mean it. But it means a certain kind of snobbery.

"They (Virginians) know they're all right, and when they accept me it means I'm all right too. They don't meddle in other people's affairs. To me, that's an admirable quality."

Faulkner read a passage from his novel, "The Sound and the Fury," then answered questions from the audience about books, writing, critics, movies and a college education.

Mostly he talked about a favorite theme – that man will endure and prevail. An admiration for man is his incentive to write, "apart from it being fun," Faulkner said.

"You live in a world and you see man – frail, fragile, made out of flesh and bone, mostly water – thrown into a world stuck together with electricity. The problems he faces are usually bigger than he is, but amazingly enough, he copes with them, not as an individual but as a race."

To the artist "this is so amazing, you might say so beautiful, that he wants to put it down on paper or canvas or in music. . . . Writing is the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet. You never reach satiation."

Faulkner said he is convinced that the last activity on earth will be "two men building an air ship to go somewhere else and arguing about where they will go."

Later he told reporters, "Amend that picture to three men – two of them building the air ship and one there writing about it."

Would Faulkner still write if he were the last man on earth?

"The writer writes for satisfaction. . . . He would write if nobody read it, even if he had to pay for the privilege, or if it were burned. . . .

"He really is not interested in communicating; he is trying to make something that was not here yesterday. He's not doing it for profit, not for money. When he passes through the wall of oblivion he will still write, even if it's just to stop and write 'Kilroy was here' on the wall."

Is Faulkner's basic conception of life optimistic?

"Yes."

But not for the individual?

"The individual is not too important. He's only a pinch of dust. His species, his dreams – they go on."

What about God?

"I can't say. The writer ain't interested in that either. He's interested in man in motion, that man is, not how he got here."

Who are Faulkner's favorite Bible characters?

"Most of them. They were all scoundrels and blackguards, doing the best they could just like people now."

©1958 The Daily Progress