Faulkner as American Diplomat
In late 1953 or early 1954 Faulkner was a guest at a dinner party in Princeton hosted by his Random House editor, Saxe Commins, and his wife Dorothy.[i] Faulkner frequently stayed with the Comminses on his trips to New York. Another guest at the dinner party was Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had been lured to Princeton in 1933 to join the school’s newly formed Institute for Advanced Study and had stayed on, living in Princeton until his death in 1955.
According to Commins, the two Nobel laureates, both known for their reticence, scarcely spoke to one another; but later Faulkner told Commins that he found Einstein to be a kind and gentle man whom he liked. Shortly after that meeting, Einstein gifted Faulkner with an inscribed copy of his Ideas and Opinions. Einstein had written on a front flyleaf: “To William Faulkner (without obligo) A. Einstein 54.”
It is doubtful that Faulkner read Einstein’s book, but he probably scanned it and may have noticed the chapter headings.[ii] If so, his attention might have been drawn especially to the section, “Atomic War or Peace,” in which Einstein offers an opinion that seems strikingly close to Faulkner’s:
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. . . . So long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. That is not an attempt to say when it will come, but only that it is sure to come. That was true before the atomic bomb was made. What has been changed is the destructiveness of war.
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth might be killed. But enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.[iii]
Not long after Faulkner’s meeting Einstein and Einstein’s gift volume to Faulkner, the author alluded to the physicist in the manuscript of the novel he was working on. “[Walter] said it like Uncle Willy had asked him where he was when Dr Einstein first propounded his theory of relativity.”[iv]
On April 20, 1955, four days after Einstein died, Faulkner sent the following telegram to Saxe Commins: “Albert Einstein was one of the wisest of men and one of the gentlest of men. Who can replace him in either let alone both.”[v]
Significantly, Faulkner’s encounter with Einstein occurred not long after the publication of A Fable, Faulkner’s novel about a mutiny of French soldiers during World War I but which interestingly contains allusions to the atomic bomb and other details which relate to World War II. Thus Faulkner conflates the two wars in a book that may be considered a treatment of modern warfare in general. Faulkner insisted the book is not a “pacifist” book, but there are clear and obvious elements that might be associated with an anti-war sentiment, especially war as it is carried out by governmental bureaucracies and a military-industrial complex. Albert Einstein shared such reservations.
Faulkner was likewise aware of the life and career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, as director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, is generally considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Faulkner cites Oppenheimer, one of “the pioneers in the simple science of saving the nation,”[vi] as one of the examples whose personal privacy had been invaded by a misguided and out-of-control “Freedom of the Press” that was allowed to run roughshod over individual rights and freedoms. The decision to strip Oppenheimer of his national security clearance, Faulkner insisted, “had nothing whatever to do with loyalty or disloyalty or security or insecurity, but was simply to batter and strip him completely naked of the privacy lacking which he could never have become one of that handful of individuals capable of serving the nation at a moment when nobody else was. . . .”[vii]
While “On Privacy” makes no specific mention of the atomic bomb or of Oppenheimer’s subsequent attempts to curtail its further development, Faulkner was doubtless aware of this aspect of Oppenheimer’s career. And it was an attitude that Faulkner, in his own personal and individualistic manner, seemed to share.
Although Faulkner never specifically addressed either Einstein’s or Oppenheimer’s opposition to the atomic bomb and plea for world peace, his own involvement as a cultural ambassador on behalf of the US State Department—with trips to Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, and most notably Japan, indirectly sought goals similar to those of the two scientists.
For that to happen, Faulkner had to undergo a significant change in outlook. For most of his life he had been fascinated by war and the military. He grew up hearing stories of his great-grandfather William C. Falkner’s heroic actions in the Civil War and used those stories as the source for the exploits of the character John Sartoris in The Unvanquished and other narratives. As a teenager Faulkner idolized the pilots of World War I and sought to emulate them by enlisting in the Canadian branch of the Royal Air Force. Although the war ended before he completed his training, Faulkner returned to his hometown proudly wearing an RAF uniform and displaying an injury which he claimed he received in actual combat. Some of his earliest poems and short stories, as well as his first novel Soldiers’ Pay and his later novel A Fable, deal with pilots and other soldiers of the Great War. Too old to serve in World War II, he found expression of his patriotism in Hollywood by writing movie scripts such as “The De Gaulle Story” and “Battle Cry,” which supported the Allied war effort. He enjoyed accompanying author and historian Shelby Foote—and later, as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Joseph Blotner—on visits to Civil War battlefields. Enamored as he was with all things military, Faulkner gladly accepted an invitation to visit the United States Military Academy at West Point on April 19-20, 1962, just weeks before he died.
But by the time he published A Fable in 1954, Faulkner’s attitude toward war had shifted significantly. Something had happened that had caused that change. And what it was that had happened, of course, was the development and use of the atomic bomb—and the very palpable fear in the 1950s that the world stood on the precipice of a World War III that could conceivably bring about the very destruction of the planet. All thinking individuals must do whatever they could to prevent such a catastrophe. What Faulkner decided he could do was to become a cultural ambassador promoting international cooperation and peace.
[In the continuation of this essay, I will examine Faulkner’s overseas cultural exchange trips and his role in chairing, at the invitation of President Eisenhower, the Writers’ Committee of the People-to-People Program.]
Notes
[i] Blotner dates it November 1953 (1984 bio, 578), but Einstein inscribed his book to Faulkner in ’54.
[ii] Unfortunately for researchers, Faulkner never underlined passages or made notes in the books he read.
[iii] Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1954), 118. The second paragraph is very similar to what Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Einstein’s essay originally appeared in the November 1945 and November 1947 issues of Atlantic Monthly, which Faulkner may or may not have seen.
[iv] William Faulkner, The Town (New York: Random House Vintage International Edition), 167.
[v] Joseph Blotner, ed., Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1978), 380.
[vi] William Faulkner, “On Privacy,” Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), 70-71.
[vii] Ibid., 71.