University of Virginia Library

William Faulkner delivered his last public acceptance speech in New York City on May 24th, 1962, less than six weeks before his death.[1] The occasion was the awarding to him of the Gold Medal for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Recalling the ceremony, the distinguished critic Malcolm Cowley assessed Faulkner's speech with prescient, almost prophetic intuitiveness: "Faulkner's acceptance . . . had a tone of retrospection, of lament for the dignity and freedom of the past, that was not exactly new for him, but that

seemed to have a new resonance. He compared his own gold medal with those that used to be awarded to products displayed at Leipzig, St. Louis, and other world's fairs."[2]

Indeed, if Faulkner's tone, as conveyed in a prose style which by then had long become synonymous with his name, was "not exactly new for him," its "resonance" was. But at that time, neither Cowley nor any other individual except the one man who had collaborated in writing Faulkner's acceptance speech, could have known that its resonance owed a substantial measure of indebtedness to the typewritten draft from which Faulkner had drawn his thematic inspiration: a version of the speech composed at his own suggestion by Faulkner's young friend, Joseph L. Blotner, assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia during and after the academic years of 1957 and 1958 when Faulkner was Writer-in-Residence at that institution.

Nor, for that matter, at the time he was drafting his version of the speech Faulkner would utilize, could Blotner himself have realized he would be co-conspiring in a pattern to which Faulkner had resorted at least twice before. Only during the last years of the sixties, while Blotner was gathering information for Faulkner: A Biography, would he discover that Faulkner previously had sought the assistance of Abram Minell in penning his October 2, 1959, speech to the 7th Annual Conference of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO; and that two years prior, Faulkner had coerced Duncan Emrich, Cultural Affairs Officer for the State Department's International Educational Exchange Service in Greece, into writing the speech he would deliver on March 28, 1957, upon receiving the Silver Medal of the Athens Academy.[3]

Clearly, during the last twelve years of his life, Faulkner seemed to regard literary, civic, and humanitarian accolades bestowed upon him as perfunctory and ephemeral afterthoughts or footnotes to his writing career. And, with few exceptions, the obligatory oratory which was required for him to win deliverance from each award ceremony would be as tediously bothersome and uninspired to compose as it appeared painful for him to deliver publicly. Yet, with uneasy resolve, out of patriotic or professional sense of duty, he repeatedly acquiesced to conventional, formal protocol. If only a few of his public utterances, most notably his Nobel Prize, "Never Be Afraid," and "Delta Council" speeches achieved oratorical and rhetorical eloquence worthy of universal acclaim, the others, at least, were idiosyncratically Faulknerian in prose style, tone, and attitude; even one like the 1962 Gold Medal speech upon which he had unabashedly collaborated. Faulkner predictably was here a fastidious craftsman striving to make his prose uniquely, distinctively, his own, despite the highly derivative nature of its motifs and image clusters. Indeed, in this case, his most compelling task was to impose his "Faulknerian" style on the imitation in which the draft had been written. Accomplishing this required four revisions before he could feel satisfied that he had adequately transmuted Blotner's original into his own personal expression.

Actually, the document from which Faulkner initially worked, a two-page ribbon typescript with corrections in blue ink, was Blotner's revised draft of

his own initial two-leaf, three-page, blue-ink holograph rendering. On the verso of the second leaf of this holograph, Blotner has written the following explanatory comments referring to the diarylike pencil notations he had made on this same page twenty-five years before: "I made these pencil notes after William Faulkner told me, on one of his periodic visits to my office in the English Department in Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia, that he had to write an acceptance speech when he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. This was April 27, 1962. When he said 'I hate to swot up a speech for that Gold Medal,' I volunteered to write one for him. I wrote the draft version in blue ink and then gave him the black ribbon typescript version when he visited my office again on May 4. When he returned on May 8, he gave the typescript back to me and the carbon typescript of his final version of the speech. 'Here's your copy,' he said. 'Maybe you can make some money out of it sometime.' He delivered the speech on May 24, 1962 in New York."

I acquired these three documents from Joseph Blotner in early April 1987. A phone call to Ms. Nancy Johnson, Librarian of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, was rewarded by a letter confirming that the Academy did have on file the ribbon typescript of Faulkner's Gold Medal speech for 1962.[4] The accompanying xerox copy proved to be identical to the carbon typescript Faulkner had given Blotner on May 8, 1962, except that the Academy's copy carried in Faulkner's hand in blue-black ink the superscription, "Speech of William Faulkner for May 24th." Regarding the speech, Ms. Johnson wrote: "I looked through the correspondence files again and there is nothing at all to indicate that there was any other version of this speech. Miss Geffen's requests for an advance copy apparently went unanswered. It seems that Mr. Faulkner brought this typescript with him and left it here following the award presentation."

In point of fact, the complete census of extant manuscripts of Faulkner's 1962 acceptance speech upon receiving the Gold Medal for Fiction numbers seven documents, of which six are textually variant. The Brodsky Collection contains Joseph Blotner's three-page holograph original draft [A] and his revised two-page, hand-corrected, ribbon typescript [B]. The one-page, blue-ink holograph manuscript which Faulkner himself drafted after reading Blotner's text and adopting it as his prototype [C], and two sequentially advancing one-page authorial ribbon typescript revisionary drafts with holograph corrections [D & E] are part of the Faulkner Collections at the University of Virginia's Alderman Library.[5] The last typescript version in this sequence, the one-page ribbon copy [F] from which Faulkner read to its attending members, and then deposited there, resides in the files of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The carbon typescript [G] of this reading version, formerly in the possession of Joseph Blotner, is located in the Brodsky Collection.[6]

Transcribed below in order of composition are Blotner's ribbon typescript version [B], Faulkner's holograph first attempt at composing his own rendition [C] on the basis of [B], followed by the carbon typescript [G] of the final

version revised from [E]. Joseph Blotner's text is presented without textual apparatus but incorporates all his intended deletions and additions as though it were a fair-typed copy. Faulkner's holograph is transcribed according to a system invented by Fredson Bowers for dealing with alterations in manuscripts.[7] The typed final version is transcribed as delivered, its typed revisions (no hand alterations) listed as footnotes. A full collation of all variants (except typos) in [D] and [E] is appended keyed to the final version [F-G], which for convenience of reference has been printed line-for-line with the original. All listed revisions in [D] and [E] are in ink unless specified as typed, and the listing includes all deletions and additions to enable the documents to be reconstructed. To this collation has been added for the reader's convenience in following the progress of the revision the variants in the final text of the holograph [C] but its alterations—being noted in the transcript itself—are not included descriptively in the collation.