William Faulkner on Privacy

STEPHEN HAHN
 

In the July 1955 issue of Harper's Magazine Wilham Faulkner
published an essay titled "On Privacy, The American Dream:
What Happened To It?" Since this was the so-called McCarthy
era, his focus on privacy as an aspect of the American Dream was
timely. It was also personally so, for the essay was in some sense a
response to a recent biography. The Private World of William
Faulkner by Robert Coughlan. Yet behind this publication stands a
decade ofthe development of Faulkner's thoughts on privacy in let¬
ters and drafts, among them a key letter to Donald Klopfer in the
Random House Papers, Although the essay receives scant attention
from critics of Faulkner's fiction, it remains of interest today
because both the issue of privacy and the author's works continue
to interest us,

Faulkner's personal resistance to publicity can be readily under¬
stood if we reflect on the degree of moralizing that was common in
literary reviewing not so long ago and on the degree of incompre¬
hension that frequently met innovative artists before a "tradition"
of avant-garde art became established. Some examples illustrate the
case. When Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1950, along with Bertrand Russell, he might have applied also for
the position of "prophet without honor." On November II, the
day after the award was announced, the New York Herald lamented
that "one would have preferred the choice of a laureate more smil¬
ing in a world gradually getting darker." The Times similarly com¬
plained that "incest and rape are perhaps widespread distractions in
the Jefferson, Mississippi of Faulkner, but not elsewhere in the
United States." The implication was clear: the nature of emphasis
and incident in Faulkner's fiction must represent personal or
regional pathology.
 

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