25

East and West

August–October 1955

A Star Turn East

In February 1954, Marilyn Monroe visited Japan and Korea on a two-week tour that electrified the troops and excited worldwide press coverage that far exceeded the reception accorded to any other American public figure traveling abroad. It seemed that no moment of her public appearances remained unrecorded in photographs and on film. The recently established United States Information Service (USIS; later renamed the United States Information Agency, or USIA), dedicated to public diplomacy, decided to give William Faulkner the star treatment, creating a thirteen-minute documentary, Impressions of Japan: William Faulkner, about his three-week visit. It did not include, of course, his staggered start, when he missed a reception, complained of a bad back, and in general seemed so out of sorts that Leon Picon and his USIS staff dreaded a disaster. The ambassador wanted Faulkner gone, but Picon offered to resign if he could not rectify the visit. A grateful Faulkner promised to do better, and he did.

The film begins with a Northwest Airlines plane landing in Tokyo, shots of Faulkner disembarking, looking surprisingly fresh in a neat white jacket and dark trousers, with close-cropped hair, carrying a briefcase, walking into the terminal, where he is met by reporters to the accompaniment of a voice-over narrator: “This is how it began, the probing questions and bright lights, the posings and signings.” They want to know about his trip, what he thinks of Japanese culture, man’s soul, and Ernest Hemingway.

What was he thinking? Did he remember Estelle’s return with a Japanese nurse in a traditional dress that wowed Oxford, and Ben Wasson, who listened to Faulkner say Japanese women were sexually different and made on the bias? Or that scene in Today We Live when Claude sends Bogard a Japanese parasol? Or the Japanese detention camps that are just beyond the boundaries of “Golden Land” in that story’s references to the way Angelenos miss their Japanese gardeners? Or the attack on Pearl Harbor in “Two Soldiers” and the talk of “whupping the Japanese,” or Major de Spain’s boy, who runs his plane into a Japanese battleship in “Shall Not Perish,” or the work in “Battle Cry” on Mama Mosquito, the old Chinese woman who miraculously outwitted the Japanese invaders, and his work on God Is My Co-Pilot, the story of the Flying Tigers who fought the Japanese in China?

Faulkner had some practice at handling a press scrum on his earlier trip to South America but also in a Ford Foundation seventeen-minute feature that had followed him around Oxford talking to friends and posing in the square. Howard T. Magwood, the director of that film, had called Faulkner an “interested actor,” willing to restage scenes like his graduation speech to Jill’s high school class. “He’s very good,” Magwood said. In fact, Faulkner now had a persona, what is now loosely called an icon, that he had perfected.

The film cuts to shots of a locomotive traveling from Tokyo to Nagano and then to a contemplative Faulkner in a Japanese robe seated beside a koi pond reading and puffing on his pipe: “a peaceful, pleasant place, a nice place to live,” he is quoted as saying. Then several shots show him visiting ancient temples “containing the secret of man’s salvation.” He meets with a Buddhist abbess and is shown answering students’ questions, articulating his faith in the individual. He is quoted as saying the Japanese wanted to meet a person, not an intellectual, a writer whose books spoke the “simple language of humanity.” Over several shots of people of different ages the narrator reports Faulkner’s wish just to look at the faces Manet and Van Gogh would have loved. One fleeting shot of a child and a toy boat in a pond recalls—at least to a Faulkner biographer—his delight in watching children and adults float their boats in Paris. A pilgrim praying segues to a geisha performing a ritualistic series of gestures that seem, the narrator quotes Faulkner: “elfin: puckish: or more than puckish even: sardonic and quizzical, a gift for comedy, and more: for burlesque and caricature: for a sly and vicious revenge on the race of men.” We see what Faulkner watched, and we wonder what he thought of the painted face, the mask not so different from the masks of The Marionettes. As we see Faulkner’s kimono-wrapped servant set the table, the narrator supplies what Faulkner says:

She does not speak my language nor I hers, yet in two days she knows my countryman’s habit of waking soon after first light so that each morning when I open my eyes a coffee tray is already on the balcony table; she knows I like a fresh room to breakfast in when I return from walking, and it is so: the room done for the day and the table set and the morning paper ready; she asks without words why I have no clothes to be laundered today, and without words asks permission to sew the buttons and darn the socks; she calls me wise man and teacher, who am neither, when speaking of me to others; she is proud to have me for her client and, I hope, pleased that I try to deserve that pride and match with courtesy that loyalty.

She bows as if to acknowledge the voice-over tribute.

Next, shots of Faulkner in a car, pipe in hand, gazing at and praising the countryside, the impressive mountains and rich rice-growing land. He thinks of the rice paddies at home—larger and worked by machines and not as intensively cultivated by Japanese hands. He is shown talking to farmers—telling them about his farm and saying he is really just a farmer. He walks in an orchard and comments on how the apples are covered in paper in ornamental displays reminiscent of Christmas trees, but here they are integral to the everyday culture of these people. Among various water features he extols a culture’s oblations to water itself. He is shown hefting various house-making tools of ancient origins. Did he say anything at all about his own craftsmanship in wood and words? He observes a house built without nails. He sits on a floor watching an archer. The film does not show his own attempts at archery, which were wide of the mark. Taking up the challenge, though, was part of his characteristic openness to this new culture. The film does not disclose what Faulkner later confessed: He often felt awkward and out of place. The archery exhibition puzzled him. The archer had been knighted by the emperor and performed a kind of ritual, shooting at a target at a short distance. Faulkner said the archer would “get up, and go through certain motions to free . . . his forearm from his kimono, and then he would pace forward so many paces and bow to where the Emperor would be. Then he would get up and go through some more ritual and fit the arrow to the string, and then he would pace towards the target and stop and turn and do a sort of a—a ballet almost and draw the arrow back and let it go, and sometimes it hit the target but that didn’t matter. Nobody cared, you see. . . . It was no trouble to hit it.” What Faulkner did at this point is not clear, but he realized that he had “committed a—a fearful—it was more than a faux pas. It was lese majesty somehow. I—I had made a—a dreadful social error, and that is the Japanese—we simply could not communicate.”1

The film suggests otherwise with a closing low-angle shot of Faulkner gazing out over a Japanese vista of land and village, similar to his sketch in “The Hill” and to a passage of perspective he had yet to write about Yoknapatawpha in The Town. The film ends with a testimonial: “Something fragile contained in the mountains, but something supple and sturdy and enduring, a place of beauty worked wisely by such kind people.” Not a word of Faulkner’s fiction is quoted in the film. His own voice is never heard. But in his silence and composure he seems the wise man and teacher he denies himself to be.2

In To the Youth of Japan, a USIS pamphlet, he presented a harsher view of Reconstruction than appears in his fiction, a view that historians of Reconstruction would now reject, especially his description of “the conqueror [who] spent the next ten years after our defeat and surrender despoiling us of what little war had left. The victors in our war made no effort to rehabilitate and reestablish us in any community of men or of nations. . . . But all this is past; our country is one now. . . . I mention it only to explain and show that Americans from my part of America at least can understand the feeling of the Japanese young people of today that the future offers him nothing but hopelessness, with nothing anymore to hold to or believe in.” To rebuild required faith in man, “in his own toughness and endurance.” Faulkner extolled art as the “strongest and most durable force man has invented or discovered with which to record the history of his invincible durability and courage beneath disaster, and to postulate the validity of his hope.” Good writing had fueled the southern resurgence, he claimed—an idea that twenty-five years earlier he would have scoffed at. He predicted the same renaissance for Japan and its writers as they responded to war and defeat—although he tactfully never applied the word “defeat” to the Japanese. The only worthwhile struggle was for freedom and the consent of the governed—and not for an ideology or race.

Over three weeks Faulkner gave ten interviews, meeting with fifty Japanese professors of American literature, giving press conferences and talks—enough to fill a book—with a degree of courtesy and unprecedented patience. He remained “genial and informal.”3 He knew how to entertain, delighting the Japanese when he told them he wrote Sanctuary in order to buy a horse. The film and photographs and transcripts do not reveal his long silences, which made his utterances all the more dramatic, even when they were not otherwise remarkable. He loved talking to children, who did not ask him about Ernest Hemingway. This grueling schedule tired him, and he wanted to drink. Picon told him, “You are under contract to the U.S. government,” and Faulkner came through—doing better, Picon noticed, if he included young pretty women in the audience. Faulkner soon had his own young attendant: Midori Sasaki, who shaded him with an umbrella and blushed behind her fan when he flirted with her. She reminded him of Jean Stein, he said. He had it in his plan to join Jean in Italy after his Japanese assignment. As for Sasaki, she later received $490 from a fund Faulkner set up for worthy students. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Asked about the “Negro,” Faulkner predicted the coming of “complete equality,” but it would take time (“maybe in three hundred years”) and patience, especially on the part of black people because of white people’s fears of economic competition. He was between novels, he explained, and would continue to write.4 Many of his answers were restatements of the Nobel Prize address. Where he could, he mentioned Japanese literature—mainly as he understood it through Ezra Pound’s translations.5 When he said that “every young man should know one old woman . . . an old aunt . . . just to listen to,” readers of his work and his biography might think of Aunt Jenny or Aunt Bama. The posture of young Japanese females pleased him, although he did not elaborate.6 As to the South, he maintained the same ambivalence he had acknowledged in his essay “Mississippi,” declaring, “I was born there, and that’s my home, and I will still defend it even if I hate it.”7 But another part of his reasoning suggested he could not stand with the South alone since the development of rapid communications and travel meant a country could not “conduct its affairs without much regard for other countries. . . . [O]ne nation’s trouble now is everybody’s trouble. One nation’s freedom is every man’s freedom.”8

The professors wanted to know what he read and what influenced him. His remarks on the Old and New Testaments had a bearing on A Fable, although no one, including Faulkner, made the connection. He read the Old Testament for its stories about people and the New for “philosophy and ideals” with “something of the quality of poetry” that dealt with the “aspiration of man within a more or less rigid pattern, such as the pattern of the art formed by philosophy.” Critics had complained about the rather abstract, allegorical characters in A Fable, treating it as a New Testament that lacked the rich storytelling of the Old Faulkner.

Asked about Rousseau, Faulkner maintained the same position he adopted in Sutter’s Gold. There was no going back to a state of nature, no return to recover humanity—only “advancement. . . . We must take the trouble and sin along with us, and we must cure that trouble and sin as we go.”9 He spoke simply and directly, striking one American professor as the “least affected and most genuinely modest man I ever met.”10

Faulkner patiently and diplomatically answered every question and explained why he had decided to do so. As a young man he was “busy . . . [d]oing the work. Later on, when the blood gets slower, just like the athlete that can’t move as fast as he could once, he has more time to become aware of what people think, and then it becomes more important to him what people thought because that is the only measure of whether he has wasted his time or not, is what people think. And if what he has said caused people to want to talk to him, to ask him questions, if young people are interested enough to come where he is and want to know what his experiences were, then that is a reward for what he did.”11 That attention paid mitigated his frequent remark that in America writers did not count for much in a moneymaking economy.

The polite question-and-answer sessions rarely touched on personal matters, but Faulkner was asked about drinking. “I consider drinking a normal instinct . . . [a] normal and healthy instinct.”12 Faulkner was good with chopsticks,13 seemed to fit in for all his Western ways, and the State Department staff considered his visit the high point in Japanese-American relations. For many Japanese, the encounter with Faulkner was memorable and powerful, as one American witness told Joseph Blotner. And yet Faulkner had his doubts. At Mary Washington University a questioner remarked that he seemed to have touched the Japanese. “Well, I hope so,” he responded, “but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. They would ask me the same questions over and over and then answer them themselves.”14

On August 23, Faulkner left Japan for Manila, spending two days there with Bill and Victoria (Cho-Cho) Fielden and somehow managing to fit in some sailing. To Leon Picon, Faulkner wrote he was already missing Japanese food and sake. He had taken to Japanese ways, wearing a kimono. Whitman biographer Gay Wilson Allen had watched Faulkner imbibe considerable quantities of the local brew but never saw him drunk.15 To Picon, Faulkner wrote, “I hope things will go well here, to match our good Japanese record.” He was meeting with the press and various literary groups.16 He reiterated much of what he said in Japan, emphasizing what had brought him to the public stage. It was not the Nobel Prize per se but to see “these many people, some of them young people, coming to hear him because they believe that he knows something of the truth. That is better than the Nobel Prize.”17 He had always had a special feeling for young people. They were the unspoiled ones who could change the world. At the University of the Philippines he said: “I saw more people listening to me than I ever saw before in my life. And I do hope that what little I may give you, tell you, you will remember after I am gone.” How much of a diplomat he had become is evident in his saying, “When I leave your country I will leave something of me behind, that someday I will be forced to come back here to recover it.”18 He made a good impression. He seemed the antithesis of the so-called Ugly American second-raters depicted in a novel with that title three years later. He was, paradoxically, humbly proud about America’s contribution to the world and not at all defensive when criticism of it came up in conversation. And of course as a southerner he had his own complaints that he aired in Japan that put him on their side, and in the Philippines as well, with its history of brutal and patronizing American interventions. He was good listener, often giving answers that were shorter than the questions and comments put to him.

A Star Turn West

Word had been sent ahead, and on August 28, Jean Stein met William Faulkner at the Rome airport for a ten-day amour. Did Stein offer him her little bag of chocolates that she often produced for friends at the theater? She adored art, had an affair with sculptor Alberto Giacometti before she met Faulkner, and she would later start an important literary magazine, Grand Street, fund aesthetic endeavors, and produce three important oral histories. Artists wanted to be with her, attend her parties, and meet one another. “She was interested in their minds and imaginations,” as a friend of hers put it. As the daughter of a powerful Hollywood agent, she had learned early to size people up and had a toughness that allowed Faulkner not to worry, as he did with Joan, about what pain or confusion his interest in her might cause. Not since Meta had he found a woman so given over to him, and yet, even at twenty, Jean was more worldly than any woman he had ever wooed, except for Else Jonsson. At the same time—and this was part of Jean’s paradoxical appeal—she had a “fluttery vulnerability” to go along with that breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. She was “gamine and bird-like, a determined waif,” a figure very like Audrey Hepburn and the epicene women of William Faulkner’s fiction. This was no cheerleader or gushing William Faulkner fan. When they discussed his work, she opened him up—a rare experience for a man who kept his process of creation so private. Sharing himself with her was also a way of opening up to a world that he felt all too often was closing in upon him. Decades later, her friend John Heilpern teased her: “ ‘Terrific start. Faulkner yet . . .’ She looked surprised. ‘But he was really interesting,’ she protested, and meant it.”19 She was a Hollywood princess and would have known exactly what it was like for William Faulkner to be at the mercy of agents and studio heads. She watched countless actors and Hollywood’s power elite cater to her father. Like Faulkner, she went out of her way to be herself. Her daughter said, “She loved quirky people and misfits . . . whistle blowers and troublemakers.” Hilton Als said, shortly after Jean committed suicide: “She really was a teenager in spirit. She never became jaded and never forgot the feeling of what it is like to feel like to be new in a place.”20 She appealed to William Faulkner’s powerful feeling for the young and stimulated his reckoning with the world-shattering changes he was about to write about in The Town and The Mansion.

A taciturn Faulkner proved a disappointment to Italian writers Alberto Moravia and Ignacio Silone. After his Asian tour he seemed all talked out. On his visits to three cities, he did manage to revive and deliver a characteristic salvo: “The people in our State Department in Europe are intelligent people. They have learned by hard experience that the enemy, the opponent, is not the foreigner, it’s in the State Department in Washington, the bureaucrats in Washington.” Feted by his Italian publisher, Alberto Mondadori, Faulkner loosened up, writing an appreciative thank-you note for “your kindness and courtesy,” and for a “happy and memorable” visit. He then resorted to a diplomatic formula he had worked out in Japan: “They say to part is to die a little or if not to die, at least one leaves some part of oneself behind, which I have done in Milano and Italy, so that I shall not be complete until I have returned to Italy and Milano and joined myself whole again.”

In Paris by September 19, after a brief visit to Munich for a performance of Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner departed from routine by consenting to more than just a diplomatic interview for Cynthia Grenier, the young, attractive wife of a Foreign Service officer. The setting helped. On an Indian summer day, he stretched out on the “broad green lawn at the back of the U.S. Information Service building.” As one of his Oxford acquaintances put it, “in the out-of-doors he seemed to open up.”21 Perhaps it helped too that her last name was the same as one of the founders of Jefferson, Mississippi. She sat beside Faulkner, looking into his “very alert black-brown eyes under epicanthic lids.” He may have admired her vocabulary as well. She seemed smitten with this well-turned-out “handsome man, with a well-brushed head of white hair” and “tanned face.” Perhaps the secret of drawing William Faulkner out had to do not with the questions but with the quality of attention—what the interviewer could give to him by way of a relationship. This romantic portrayal included a close-up: “His chin juts up and out meeting the world directly and defiantly. He speaks in a soft, slow voice with what could be called an educated Southern accent.” Educated—as in practiced, refined? She caught the stops and starts that now were part of his persona: “Sometimes his sentences are short—‘cause I do’—and other times when he is speaking of his craft or his beliefs fine long involved rhetorical sentences roll out, as they do in his prose.” Interviewer and author shared an intermediate realm—somewhere between the everyday and the effigy of a writer he had now perfected. Did she understand that he was responding to her when she commented on his “considerable engaging quiet charm which succeeds in being courtly and puckish at the same time”? Puckish—the very word he had used for that geisha. It also helped that he felt at home in Paris, which he called a second home: “There’s the liberty here to be an artist. It’s in the air.” A different air, and a different reception, awaited him back home.

To her question about whether he could write in Paris, he responded with a “little side grin” to her: “Oh, I couldn’t. I’d have too much fun here to ever work.” She did not ask him, or at least did not record, what he meant by “fun.” Instead of just cataloguing the writers he liked to read, which meant in most cases reread, he actually explained why Balzac, for example, mattered to Yoknapatawpha: “His people don’t just move from page one to page 320 of one book. There is continuity between them all like a blood-stream which flows from page one through to page 20,000 of one book. The same blood, muscle and tissue binds the characters together.” Faulkner’s last three novels would prove more Balzacian than ever.

Unlike most interviewers, Grenier made herself into a character, eyeing her subject even as he scrutinized her. Something was in play here that did not often get into other interviews precisely because most interviewers were not playful. When Faulkner said Simenon’s stories were like Chekhov, Grenier said, “I guess maybe I’d better read Chekhov again.” This made Faulkner pause, perhaps because he was not used to this kind of banter that broke through his facade. Of course he did fall back on old chestnuts when he summed up his days with Sherwood Anderson or his piloting. Was he thinking of Estelle and Helen Baird when he said: “Success is feminine. It’s like a woman. You treat her with contempt and she’ll come after you, all fawning and eager, but chase after her and she’ll scorn you”? He shared with Grenier his fantasy about establishing a house for artists similar to the writers’ colony he told Joan Williams he wanted to organize, providing the room, the paper, and the equipment to create. But this was not about sharing ideas. They should work—not talk too much. He did not mention Mosquitoes or that New Orleans had wrung that kind of talk out of his system.

If Faulkner had no time for critics of his work, he also admitted: “I doubt if an author knows what he puts in a story. All he is trying to do is tell what he knows about his environment and the people around him in the most moving way possible. He writes like a carpenter uses his tools.” That his characters often succumbed to their fate did not bother him. Someone always survived, he pointed out—and what mattered, anyway, is “how they go under.” Which meant?, she wanted to know: “It’s to go under when trying to do more than you know how to do. It’s trying to defy defeat even if it’s inevitable.” Too bad they did not make a list, putting the French architect and the Bundrens perhaps first. Like his own work, man’s was a record of failure, but: “He wants to have more compassion than he has. Suddenly, sometimes, he finds to his surprise he is more and more honest.” All through this interview Faulkner smoked his pipe, which he seemed to employ as a kind of punctuation, a prop in an actor’s hands. Just at this point Grenier intervened: “Faulkner holds interviewer with long firm look, then tamps down pipe.”

Faulkner got off that wonderful phrase about his work “being a kind of keystone in the universe.” It also became obvious why he had spent so much time away from home: “If they believed in my world in America the way they do abroad, I could probably run one of my characters for President . . . (studiously tamping his pipe) maybe [F]Lem Snopes.” He gave her a keen look when she said, “I see you got some of us Greniers living in a shack as half-wits down in Yoknapatawpha County.” She was referring of course to Louis Grenier, the retarded descendent of one of the county’s founders. Cynthia Grenier, like Joan Williams, found a wordless Faulkner companionable: “One of the most agreeable qualities about Faulkner is his capacity for being silent in a natural, easy way.” Throughout the interview, she mentions his smiling and watching her, reading her every move, it seems.

Grenier got a rise out of him when she said she admired Ike McCaslin for repudiating a tainted inheritance. Faulkner demurred: “I think a man ought to do more than just repudiate. He should have been more affirmative instead of shunning people.” Faulkner, often described as an Oxford recluse by many of its residents who were polled by scholar Robert H. Moore, might have been surprised at his neighbors’ answer. Many of them treated Faulkner as standing apart from them, like Ike, and even as inimical to their town. You can spend your life in Oxford, one of them said, and never see, let alone meet, William Faulkner. But they did not consider that keystone, or know him as Mac Reed, Phil Stone, Kate Baker, and many, many children did, or even as a newspaper editor like Walter G. Anderson, who said: “I thought the world of Mr. Faulkner and visited with him on my regular trips to Oxford which were once a month.”22

Faulkner was heading in the direction of The Town when he described Ratliff, Gavin Stevens, and Chick Mallison as his affirmative characters—antidotes to the isolated Ike McCaslin, and perhaps to the Faulkner who used to be. They would form a triumvirate that took over Jefferson’s history from the narrative voices of Requiem for a Nun and the essay “Mississippi.” Their deep engagement with community lore and the rise of the Snopeses would constitute Faulkner’s move toward voices joined together in a cross-generational, democratic continuum. None of them could outmatch the character-narrators of earlier work, but their Yoknapatawpha triptych brought a new dimension, a new kind of history to fiction. Gavin Stevens might not “succeed in living up to his ideal. But his nephew the boy, I think he may grow up to be a better man than his uncle. I think he may succeed as a human being.”23

The interview ended as Faulkner announced he had an appointment on the Left Bank. Perhaps it was that event hosted by his French publishers, Gallimard, at which he no longer appeared so relaxed, after that interlude on the grass. Madeleine Chapsal, a French journalist who observed him, called it his “most grueling ordeal,” a cocktail party. This Faulkner appeared stiff, “unbending and strong, peasantlike. . . . He looks like the kind of man who gets along well with animals and children.” Even Albert Camus, at work on an adaptation of Requiem for a Nun, received no more than a handshake. Talking to Faulkner was like scaling a wall. In response to each question, he took a step backward. The trouble was they wanted to get a story out of him—Faulkner as fodder for print. He softened up some with a bourbon and a young woman. “Women,” Chapsal suggested, are “like Faulkner . . . [m]ore inclined to feel like displaced persons.” By the end of the evening in a party that eventually included four hundred people, Faulkner had bivouacked at the “far end of the garden, beneath the tree with the heaviest foliage, backed up against the wrought-iron barrier.” Detachments would be sent out to reconnoiter and would return to say: “It’s appalling! I can’t watch it; it’s like seeing someone being tortured.” One lady, determined to bag her man, returned saying, “It’s cold out there beneath the trees.” She no longer sounded so confident. What he had to give was in his books, Chapsal concluded.24 Usually yes, but not always, as Jean Stein or Cynthia Grenier could have told her.

Stein arranged parties for him in Paris, where he had a reunion with Anita Loos. Tennessee Williams appeared and depicted a haunted Faulkner who belonged in a Tennessee Williams play: “Those terrible, distraught eyes. They moved me to tears.”25 When Faulkner did not enjoy himself and felt cornered—he refused to talk about black people with Williams—he sometimes turned surly and insulting. When a French friend wanted to excuse herself to attend another party, Faulkner laughed and said, “Go with your queers.”26 It is hard to gauge what came over him at such moments, when, for example, over a case of corn liquor, he said to a fellow farmer that black people were the ruination of the country,27 or expressed similar racist comments to a screenwriter working on Land of the Pharaohs.28 This recidivist Faulkner erupted to do what? One Oxford resident who knew Faulkner’s family and observed him as a boy said, “He delighted in being different—being a little shocking.”29

On the way back to the United States, Faulkner, the hardened Cold Warrior, visited Iceland for five days of public receptions and press conferences. At one of the receptions, Donald Nuechterlein, a Foreign Service officer, told the taciturn, uncomfortable Faulkner about his two-year-old daughter named Jill asleep in an adjoining room. “He seemed pleased to be diverted from the party and spend a few minutes in a dark bedroom leaning over the crib of our sleeping beauty. He even smiled when we exited the room.”30 Back to business, he was asked about the presence of American troops and answered, “Is it not better to have American forces here in the name of freedom than a Russian one in the name of aggression and violence, as in the Baltic states?” A U.S. Legation member noted in a report, “Just what the doctor ordered.” Brad Wallace, a political affairs officer at the Iceland embassy, remarked that Faulkner was “so different from so many intellectuals at home who think the Cold War is an American invention.”31

Faulkner understood the game—that the Soviet Union did not want a united Europe any more than it wanted a united Germany since whole nations would not turn Communist. So confident was he that communism could not rule over Europe that he proposed the following to Harold Howland at the State Department: “I wonder what would happen if we took publicly a high moral plane and said that a un-unified nation is such a crime against nature and morality both that, rather than be a party to it, we will allow Germany to withdraw from promise of NATO troops, and be unified under any conditions they wish.”32 Faulkner would elaborate his “high moral plane” argument in a forthcoming speech to the Southern Historical Association. It seems doubtful that the State Department considered his proposal. There is no record of Howland’s reply.33

From New York on October 20, Faulkner wrote to Else Jonsson: “I will go back to Mississippi soon and get to work again. I know I wont live long enough to write all I need to write about my imaginary country and county, so I must not waste what I have left.”34