提示：如听力音频不能播放, 请点击此处下载并安装FLASH播放器
Broadcast: December 5, 2004
((THEME))
VOICE ONE:
I'm Faith Lapidus.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today, we begin the story of the life of a famous Southern writer, William Faulkner. He wrote about an imaginary place and described changes in the American South.
((THEME))
VOICE ONE:
William Faulkner was born at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a time when there were two Souths in the United States. The first was the South whose beliefs had existed from before the American Civil War which began in eighteen sixty-one. This South did not question rules, even when those rules did not satisfy human needs. It was a South filled with injustice for black people. It held the seeds of its own destruction.
The other South was a land without any beliefs. It was a place where success was measured by self-interest. This was a South where each person had lost his place in the group. It was a place where people owned things that they did not know how to use.
Faulkner
Faulkner saw that the old beliefs were not right or even worth believing. And he saw that they could not provide justice because they were based on slavery. Yet he felt that even with their lies and half truths the old beliefs were better than the moral emptiness of the modern South.
VOICE TWO:
In Faulkner's story called "The Bear" a group of men are talking after the day's hunt. One man reads from a poem by the English writer, John Keats:
"'She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair. '
"He's talking about a girl," one man says.
The other answers, 'He was talking about truth. Truth is one. It doesn't change. It covers all things which touch the heart -- honor and pity and justice and courage and love. Do you see now. '"
The American writer, Robert Penn Warren says about Faulkner, "The important thing is the presence of the idea of truth. It covers all things that involve the heart and define the effort of man to rise above the mechanical process of life. "
VOICE ONE:
Faulkner has been accused of looking back to a time when life was better. Yet, he believes that truth belongs to all times. But it is found most often in the people who stand outside what he calls "the loud world. "
One of the people in his story "Delta Autumn" says, "There are good men everywhere, at all times. "
Faulkner's GREat-grandfather accepted the old beliefs. He was one of the men who had helped build the South, but his time was gone. Now money had replaced the old order of honor. What Faulkner saw was that there could be no order at all, no idea of doing what is right, in a world that measured success in terms of money.
VOICE TWO:
This is the changing South that Faulkner describes in the area he created. He named it Yoknapatawpha County. He describes it as in the northern part of the state of Mississippi. It lies between sand hills covered with pine trees and rich farmland near the Mississippi River. It has fifteen-thousand-six-hundred-eleven people, living on almost four-thousand square kilometers. Its central city is Jefferson, where the storekeepers, mechanics, and professional men live.
The rest of the people of Yoknapatawpha County are farmers or men who cut trees. Their only crops are wood and cotton. A few live in big farmhouses, left from an earlier time. Most of them do not even own the land they farm.
The critic Malcolm Cowley says, "Others might say that Faulkner was not so much writing stories for the public as telling them to himself. It is what a lonely child might do, or a GREat writer. "
((Music Bridge))
VOICE ONE:
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in eighteen-ninety-seven. His father worked for the railroad. William's GREat-grandfather had built it. His grandfather owned it. When the grandfather decided to sell the railroad, William's father moved his family thirty-five miles west to the city of Oxford.
Growing up in Oxford, William Faulkner heard stories of the past from his grandmother and from a black woman who worked for his family. He heard more stories from old men in front of the courthouse, and from poor farmers sitting in front of a country store.
You learn the stories, Faulkner says, without speech somehow from having been born and living beside them, with them, as children will and do.
VOICE TWO:
Faulkner was a good student. Yet by the time he was fifteen he had left school. Except for a year at the University of Mississippi at the end of World War One, that was the last of his official education.
He took a number of jobs in Oxford, but did not stay with any of them. He began to think that he was a writer. Then in nineteen-eighteen the woman he loved married another man. Faulkner left Mississippi and joined the British Royal Flying Corps. He was sent to Canada to train to fight in World War One.
The war ended before he could be sent to Europe. He returned to Oxford, walking with difficulty because of what he said was a "war wound. "
VOICE ONE:
At home Faulkner again moved from one job to the next. He wrote bad poetry, drew pictures that looked like other men's pictures, and wrote uninteresting stories. A book of his poetry, The Marble Faun, was published in nineteen-twenty-four.
A year later he went to the Southern city of New Orleans, Louisiana. There he met the American writer, Sherwood Anderson. They became friends. Anderson told Faulkner to develop his own way of writing, and to use material from his own part of the country. He also told Faulkner he would find a publisher for the novel Faulkner was writing. But Anderson also told Faulkner that he would not read the book.
