Faulkner at West Point, and: Faulkner and Postmodernism: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1999, and: Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2000 (review)

It is pleasant to have Faulkner at West Point back in print after so many years. When it was published in 1964, it shared with the longer and more comprehensive Faulkner at the University the distinction of recording the public statements of a very private William Faulkner in conversation with mostly young people who had read some of his work. Faulkner's recorded classroom interviews and public appearances as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia in 1957-1958 were published by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner in 1959. The West Point visit was arranged by Faulkner's son-in-law, Paul D. Sommers, USMA 1951, and he was pleased to accept General Westmoreland's invitation. He and Estelle, with Paul and Jill Sommers, spent two days there in April 1962. He read from the then unpublished The Reivers, held a brief press conference, and met two first-year classes on "The Evolution of American Ideals as Reflected in American Literature," in which the story "Turnabout" was required reading. Truth to say, the questions for the most part were uncomplicated and nonliterary and the familiar answers formulaic at that. The source of the Snopes and Sartoris families? Observation, experience, and imagination. The corruption and perversion in your books? Moving and tragic stories of the human heart in conflict with itself. You can repeat that over and over with no embarrassment? Yes. Man will endure and the last sound on this worthless, fleeting earth will be two people still talking about where they are going next. For those who needed a text for such statements, Fant and Ashley reprinted the "Nobel Prize Address" in an appendix. Still, amid questions on atheism, juvenile delinquency, (southern) racism, and the motives of the characters in a fair range of novels and stories (including "Turnabout"), the transcriptions show that Faulkner enjoyed himself at West Point and dealt honestly with his audience, as might be expected of a past-sixty-year-old smiling public man among military schoolchildren. Certainly the old RAF Cadet and self-avowed World War I pilot must have been pleased to be feted by the Commanding Officer at West Point—he claimed as much for his son-in-law, at least, in a letter to Westmoreland reprinted here. The Academy faculty was pleased as well. Joseph Fant writes in a brief reflection on Faulkner's visit,

I remember him as more than a preeminent writer—rather as a sage for his vision in recognizing and succinctly expressing that many of the problems prevalent in our society, as certainly today as yesterday, are the results of "too much talk of right and not enough talk of responsibility."

(123)

It is pleasant, too—an annual pleasure—to have available the most recently published proceedings of the successive Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conferences, the 1999 Conference (Faulkner and Postmodernism) and the 2000 (Faulkner and the Twenty-First Century), the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh in the series. The pleasure of the proceedings, it must be said, is second only to attending the conference in late July each year where the old tales and talking, in my experience, surpass those anywhere, anytime. Ann Abadie and her galaxy of co-editors still are turning out handsome collections on a variety of subjects having to do with "Faulkner"—the books, the man, and, increasingly, as in these volumes, his place and time in his and our time. The contributors to these volumes constitute a distinguished crowd of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century...