Resist the Mass

He quickly became a familiar figure on campus--a small, slight man with precise, courtly manners who was almost always smoking a pipe and wearing a Tyrolean hat. Students soon got used to meeting him out for a solitary walk as late as 2 a.m., or having him show up unannounced to watch an R.O.T.C. drill or a track meet. By last week, as he completed his four-month stay as writer-in-residence, famed Novelist William Faulkner seemed as much a fixture at the University of Virginia as the maples that line the campus.

Faulkner had never before settled at a college and spoken his mind. At first, neither he nor the university knew how the experiment in communication would turn out. Students were warned not to intrude on his personal life or ask for autographs. The prospect of facing a roomful of students terrified Faulkner.

Corn Likker Breakfast. As it turned out, Faulkner and the students had plenty to say to each other. He had no formal teaching schedule, instead appeared before most of the university's graduate and undergraduate classes in English to read his labyrinthian fiction in a soft, gentle voice slurred slightly by a Mississippi accent. Then he politely answered questions about such matters as the murky origins of his stories. He told of drinking corn likker for breakfast with "those unhuman people who live between the Mississippi and the levee." He once frankly admitted that his writing methods were often haphazard because "when the characters come alive, all the writer has to do is jog along with his notebook and record what they say."

But Faulkner's greatest service to his students came between the hours of 10 and 12 in the morning, five days a week, when he would sit in a tiny office and talk about the lonely task of writing with anyone who cared to drop in. The student who wanted to learn about himself found that a talk with Faulkner was as revealing as a session on the analyst's couch. "He reminded me of things I wanted to forget," said one senior. "You have to open up your insides and put them out on the table and examine them with Faulkner."

Detroit Tintype. Faulkner's advice was as starkly frank as his methods. He cautioned one student writer not to slip into a grey flannel suit and measure out his life in installment plans. "Do you want a piece of tin from Detroit and a $30,000 pile of bricks in the suburbs?" he demanded. "If you do, you should get a load on every night. Isn't that a hell of a goal?" Television and the movies have their uses. Faulkner conceded, since they are "a simple way to get a paycheck and have nothing to do with writing." For a young writer, Faulkner kept saying, the only thing that matters is a craving to write: "The writer's got to be demon-ridden, to have the demon drive, to express the breadth, beauty, injustice and compassion of life."

For Faulkner, his stay in an ivory tower 'at Charlottesville was a pleasant interlude. He spent hours playing with his 13-month-old grandson Paul Summers (his daughter Jill is married to a third-year law student at the university). He also toured nearby Civil War battlefields in a battered station wagon. He and his wife lived in a Georgian house just a 15-minute walk from the rolling campus that Thomas Jefferson picked for the university he designed and started to build. Normally shy, Faulkner delighted school officials by accepting outside speaking invitations.

Last week, after his final class, Faulkner tried to compare the students he had met at Virginia with his own generation. "They are more intellectually curious; they are more daring," he carefully summarized. "But they have more and more pressures to be submergent to a mass. The young man is tricked into not realizing the pressures to belong to a mass, a group which wants to do his thinking for him, give him his ideas." Rebel Faulkner's final advice: "The young man must struggle against the mass."

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