The Visitor

It was his first classroom appearance, and the shy, drawling visiting lecturer admitted being "terrified." If he could not get a good discussion going, then he would simply be wasting everybody's time. Nobel Prizewinning Novelist William Faulkner (Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury) need not have worried. Last week, as he began his five-month tenure as the University of Virginia's first visiting "writer in residence," he proved from the start that in his own quiet, philosophic way, he would give his students plenty to talk about.

What, asked reporters, is the value of a college education to a writer? Said Faulkner: "That's too much like trying to decide how important a warm room is to a writer. To some, it might be of great importance as some artists couldn't work in a cold room." Then he added that he did not go to college himself, felt that "people try to read into the true meaning of college lots of things that aren't there. The college is to produce first a humanitarian. No man can write who is not first a humanitarian."

What is the measure of a writer's greatness? "The splendor of failure," said Faulkner. What any writer wants is "not to be better than his friend Hemingway or his friend Dos Passes, but he wants to be greater than Cervantes or Dostoevsky. None of us were quite as good as those. We all failed. There is no degree of failure in art. It is or it ain't."

Who are America's top contemporary novelists? Faulkner's ranking: Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Caldwell and Hemingway in that order. Wolfe is on top because "he ventured more and tried hardest to inscribe the whole history of man's heart on the head of a pin."

Why had Faulkner come to Virginia? "Because I like your country. Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs. They spend so much time being snobs that they don't meddle with you."

With no formal lectures to give and no student manuscripts to read, what would be Author Faulkner's contribution to Virginia students? "The contribution would come out of my experience as a writer, as a craftsman, in contact with a desire of young people to be writers and craftsmen. Out of 100, there may be one who will get something out of the fact that I was in Charlottesville."

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