FAULKNER AT WEST POINT

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Shortly before he died Faulkner gave a reading from The Reivers to the cadets and faculty of West Point and later held question and answer sessions with them and with the press, the transcripts of which make up the book. Faulkner buffs won't be impressed, but for the interested reader the queries are sharp enough and the replies frank, forceful sometimes funny, surely characteristic. Like Frost, Faulkner became good copy in his later years, the limelight making him seem only more of what he always was, at least as a public figure, a sort of suprarepresentative regional man, the non-platforming spokesman for the South. The topics here include shop talk, the changing patterns in America and the world, the problems of generations and of race. Faulkner on the latter: ""for the next few years the Negro has got to be better than the white man""; on Hemingway's possible suicide; ""I think that Hemingway was too good a man to be the victim of accidents""; on his characters: ""Now I don't understand Popeye. He, to me, was a monster. He was just there"". In a somewhat different sense being just there sums up what Faulkner stresses throughout- his romantic idea of endurance, his shrewdly stoical acceptance of life as life is. When he was done, the cadets cheered.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION