Guenter Lewy: Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988.

 

This book should have been written by a pacifist. That it was not, that many pacifists will indignantly say American or its ‘military-industrial complex’ suffers the real “moral crisis,” confirms Guenter Lewy’s thesis: The major American pacifist organizations have become politicized. That is, they tend to put justice, (mis)conceived as egalitarianism, ahead of nonviolence and reconciliation. In their own way, key pacifist organizers now agree with political conservatives who insist that justice must precede genuine peace—although of course the two sides define ‘justice’ quite differently. Today’s pacifists not only define justice as partisan socialists do (and indeed may earlier pacifists were socialists) but they go on to define the conditions of justice as Marxist socialists do, accepting revolutionary war as the inevitable precursor of social justice, itself said to be the necessary precursor of peace.

Lewy examines the four major pacifist organizations in the United States: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the War Resisters League—all founded during or in the aftermath of the First World War. In the 1930s, at the very height of the Popular Front coalition of the ‘Left’ against fascism, these organizations rejected collaboration with communists; as Dorothy Detzer of WILPF said in 1937, communists lacked a “basis of moral integrity,” making honest partnership impossible. Pacifists had learned this not by theorizing but by experience. communists wanted to use pacifists for decidedly un-pacific ends. Some fifteen years before Senator Joseph McCarthy undertook to instruct Americans on the evils of communism, and only ten years before the Democratic Party split over the issue, pacifists well understood the Machiavellian arts of the Communist Party, and conscientiously resisted them.

But by the 1960s pacifist sentiments on collaboration began to change. Although Soviet power had increased in the previous three decades, and Soviet tactics in international politics remained unchanged, Stalin himself was gone. A new generation of pacifist organizers associated anti-communism less with a principled response to the nature of communism itself and more with America’s ‘McCarthyite’ reaction to it, a reaction portrayed as part paranoiac, part unscrupulous. United States participation in the Vietnam War stirred fear and anger sufficient to distort perceptions of the American regime itself. Increasingly, the American ‘Left,’ including pacifists, believed America to be the focus of evil in the modern world.

None of these factors logically need entail the abandonment of nonviolence. Judging from Lewy’s evidence, however, pacifists began to endorse a distorted Gandhianism. Gandhi had taught that the moral superiority of courage, even the battlefield courage that kills, to cowardly submission. American pacifists injected a dose of moral relativism and subjectivism to this, claiming that Vietnamese communists and other leftists revolutionaries had the right to resist injustice violently so long as they “believe in violence,” in the words of one organizer. The Gandhian moral hierarchy collapsed, and soon violent means were said to justify revolutionary ends. While Gandhi himself had collaborated with communists from a position of moral and political strength, American pacifists went adrift. What Liberation editor David Dellinger called “the violence of the victims” won sympathy from persons who in effect began to advocate pacifism for the democracies (“so-called,” many organizers insisted) and revolutionary war for communists (often described, wishfully, as agrarian nationalists).

In order to retain a pacifist shape to their activities, organizers redefined violence. ‘Revolutionary’ violence, a mere reaction to oppression, they described as “qualitatively different” from “the violence of the status quo”—which might not be literally violent at all, but rather was a synonym for injustice defined as socio-economic equality.

As Lewy acknowledges, traditionally pacifists have no simply condemned wars but have distinguished lesser evils from greater. He does not fully acknowledge how far back this tradition extends. Such early Church Fathers as Origen prayed for the victory of Roman armies, while forbidding warfare by Christians. The criteria for deciding which army to pray for, were supplied by the classical jus war doctrine, not yet ‘baptized’ by Augustine.

The moral crisis of American pacifism might better be restated as follows. After the just war doctrine was integrated into Christianity by Catholic and Protestant theologians, pacifist Christians got into the habit of refuting that doctrine in an unqualified way. By the twentieth century, many began almost ritually to condemn both sides in any war. Since the early nineteenth century, pacifists have become more politically active; prayerful martyrdom gave way to partisan organizing. The successes of Gandhi in South Africa and India whetted these political ambitions. And thanks to ‘totalitarian’ tyranny, political life itself became more ‘religious,’ if in a blasphemous way. Thus pacifists’ need for a prudential means of evaluating political actions radically increased, even as they abandoned traditional philosophic and moral guidance. In particular, they abandoned the right-to-revolution criteria set down in the Declaration of Independence, criteria firmly based upon God-endowed natural rights.

Political life being what it is, this vacuum had to be filled. Pacifists eventually seized upon the ‘soft’ Marxism of the ‘Sixties New Left, then the harder Marxism of ‘liberation theology,’ to provide the needed criteria of judgment. Lewy is not alone in regarding this as an impoverishment of pacifism—politically, intellectually, and spiritually.

Lewy claims that “when the pacifist’s conscience does not allow him to support policies that utilize force or the threat of force, the proper course for him is to remain silent.” This recommendation strikes me as more utopian than much of what pacifists say, and moreover wrong. Pacifists should remain faithful to their witness, in public. Christians in particular are not know for silence but for courageous speech.

The real questions for pacifists are: Have their organizations remained faithful to the pacifist witness” Does some form of Marxism really offer the best criteria for judging the wars pacifists may not engage in, but must nonetheless judge? Finally, are there pacifists with the moral and civic courage not merely to raise these issues, and to engage in quiet, intra-organization debate, but to form a new organization altogether? A pacifist organization sensitive to the principles of God-endowed natural rights underlying the United States Constitution, the document that gives pacifists the political protections enjoyed in no Marxist regime anywhere, might in time have a better effect here and abroad than any other. A distinctively American pacifism is the only truly Gandhian response to Gandhi, who always insisted that each individual and nation work toward peace  within its own tradition.

In that even, some day this book may yet be written by a pacifist.

In July 1990, Red Bank, New Jersey political activist William Davis wrote a letter to the editor of The Register, a daily newspaper published in nearby Shrewsbury, New Jersey. Davis commented on a decision by Howard E. Cook, a Gwinnett County, Georgia judge who ruled that state law banning the wearing of masks intended for purposes of intimidation or criminality (in this instance, the mask worn by Ku Klux Klan members) was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Davis called the decision “resoundingly correct,” an act adhering to “the dictates of the law”—a Constitution that originally held “certain folks to be only a little more than half human.”

My reply, dated August 8, 1990, rebutted Mr. Davis’s argument.

 

In his justifiable indignation at the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. William Davis of Red Bank has misstated the principle and intentions of the Framers of the United States Constitution.

The Georgia judge who ruled that Klan members have a First Amendment right to wear their ludicrous costumes (including masks to conceal their identities) was not necessarily “following the dictates of the law,” as Mr. Davis supposes. The prohibition, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble”—even if this may be applied to legislation drafted by municipal and state lawmakers—does not shield dress-up racists preaching sedition. There are three reasons to question the judge’s reading of the First Amendment, and the regrettable body of legal opinion upon which his decision is based.

First, costuming isn’t speech. Alothough judges who prefer writing laws to interpreting them now chatter about ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘symbolic speech,’ you won’t find those formulas in the writings of the Framers. They said “speech”—not “fashion statements.” To the Framers, clothes most emphatically did not make the man. God and nature do, and reasoned speech is the unmistakable sign of that handiwork.

Second, freedom of speech is a civil liberty; that is, it partakes no only of liberty, but of civility. Freedom isn’t license, as a rather libertarian British educator [A. S. Neill] used to say. All forms of Constitutionally protected speech are civil. Constitutionally unprotected speech, speech fundamentally subversive of civil society, includes terroristic threats, obscenity, disruptions of public meetings, and so on. (It’s too bad that the American Civil Liberties Union exalts liberty while forgetting the civility that makes it possible, and thus mistakes what ‘American’ means.) The Klan’s history of terrorism clearly falls outside the limits of civil society.

Third, as Mr. Davis correctly observes, “the Klan has always regarded” certain ethnic and religious groups, including African-Americans, Jews, and Roman Catholics, “as subhuman beings.” But Davis misses the legal implication of this. Klan bigotry subverts each of the stated purposes of the Constitution: “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Klan bigotry also contradicts the underlying principle of the Constitution set down in the Declaration of Independence: “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The Ku Klux Klan is a subversive organization practicing sedition speech, verbal and ‘symbolic.’ A proper understanding of the Constitution would permit legislators to outlaw such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. Whether or not to act on such Constitutional permission should be a matter governed by prudential calculation of the likely results, not judicial interference.

Mr. Davis thus fails to see the resources our Constitution provides to Americans who oppose racist politics. Part of the problem is his uncritical acceptance of a polemical thrust made by James Baldwin and others who claim that the Framers regarded the slave (in Davis’ words) as “only a little more than half human” or (as Baldwin put it) as “three-fifths of a man.” Were this true, the Framers would rank only a cut or two above the Klan in overall intelligence and humanity. Fortunately, the interpretation is a falsehood amply refuted by an examination of the Constitution itself. Unfortunately, this falsehood still enjoys currency among people who should know better.

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution as originally written apportions representatives and direct taxes among the states according to a population formula “determined by adding the whole number of free persons,” including bonded apprentices, excluding “Indians not taxed,” and including “three-fifths of the [population of] all other persons”—i.e., slaves. The formula was written this way because representatives of [predominantly] free states objected to the additional representatives slave state would have acquired, had the full slave population of those states been included. The slaveholders, obviously, wanted their slaves counted as if they were full citizens, as this would have maximized the power of the slaveholding states in Congress.

It is, of course, the lasting shame of the slaveholders that they perpetuated slavery, and the lasting misfortune of the United States that the slaveholders had the power to make their ‘peculiar institution’ last as long as it did. But the sentiments of the majority of the Framers should not be obscured. In his Address at Cooper Union, New York City, on February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln showed that only two of the 39 signers of the United States Constitution ever acted to forbid Congressional prohibition of slavery in the federal territories—a prohibition understood by pro-slavery and anti-slavery partisans alike as fatal in the long run to slavery everywhere in the Union. The Framers deliberately left intact the very engine that could dismantle slavery. During the founding period, many of the most prominent slaveholders in the South (e.g., George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) sought feasible ways to put slavery on the road to extinction. Although the slaveholders denied it, the Constitution itself as written (and, most emphatically, not as distorted by the majority of the Supreme Court in its infamous Dred Scott decision) proved the supreme instrument of slavery’s extinction, in the hands of a great statesman guided by the principles of the Declaration, even as the Framers were.

Pro-slavery passions hardened in the 19th century, partly as a reaction to the denunciations of radical abolitionists, partly as a response to slavery’s increased economic benefits to slaveholders after the invention of the cotton gin, and partly in the wake of nationalist and racist ideologies spawned not in American, but in continental Europe. None of these phenomena may fairly be traced to the principles of the American Founders. The commercial-republican regime embodied in the Constitution works toward the abolition of tyranny in all its forms, and under all its masks.

Mr. Davis concludes, “The Klan should wear their masks not as a First Amendment right, but as a sentence.” Agreed. But he should add that this sentence would be Constitutionally sound if preceded by the Klansmen’s arrest, unmasking, and trial by juries supervised by judges who understand Constitutional principles.

 

2018 Note: Judge Cook’s ruling was reversed later that year by the Georgia Supreme Court in State v. Miller (1990).

William Faulkner: The De Gaulle Story. Volume III of Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection. Edited by Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984).

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 17, Number 3, Spring 1990.

 

In Hollywood, William Faulkner wrote a screenplay about Charles de Gaulle. A surprising nexus: the General can be located plausibly in neither Yoknapatawpha nor Los Angeles County. Nor, in a way, can Faulkner. Yoknapatahpha is the fictional version of Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived among but not with “all my relations and fellow townsmen, including the borrowers and frank spongers,” who “all prophesied I’d never be more than a bum.” (A modern novelist, they might have replied, is still worse.) As for 1940s Hollywood, self-fictionalizing, its citizenry had suspicions, too. The head of Warner Brothers’ steno pool recalled, “We heard that he was coming. When we saw this little man, quiet and grey, who was sweet and kind and soft-spoken, we said, ‘This is a talent?'”

But some of these appearances deceive. History and culture do bind France with Faulkner’s part of the American South. In 1682, La Salle claimed for France what became Mississippi, and Lafayette County’s name commemorates the French marquis better known to Americans than to the French. By 1817, when Mississippi entered the Union, Southerners already admired the chevaliers of the Middle Ages; such novels as Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, which appeared five years later, enjoyed considerable popularity there. Gothicism entails a nostalgic defiance of modernity, yielding, among other things, natural and imitation aristocrats who lack the material and technical power to win the wars they courageously fight.

Edgar Allan Poe, the parodist from Virginia, understood Gothicism as well as did any American. His sardonic aestheticism (Gothicism’s anti-matter) anticipated Baudelaire’s independent reaction by two decades. (“Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe [beginning in 1846]? Because he resembled me.”) The fascination with death; l’art pour l’art; the mockery of heroes—all these went well with defeat, both its anticipation and its aftermath, in the South (1865) and in France (1871). A new generation of British poets tasted the French concoction (at age 25 Swinburne reviewed Les Fleurs du Mal in The Spectator) before decadents of both countries came into vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century among literary American Southerners. Faulkner (born 1897) drank deep. Hugh Kenner locates him precisely; “Faulkner’s miscalled Mississippi Gothic is more nearly a Mississippi estheticism.” One should add only that ironist aesthetes reacted to the straight-faced aesthetic of Gothicism, so their project makes little sense without its rival. Aesthetes consider this cross-fertilization. Others (for example, those who prefer to win wars) might consider it cross-sterilization.

Mule-stubborn Bill Faulkner came from a prolific line of businessmen, politicians, and drunkards. Drunkenness, predating both Gothicism and aestheticism as a means of escape, of course does not exclude those latter-day strategies; as Faulkner’s biographer Joseph Blotner ruefully jokes, many of the prominent Décadents were alcoholics, and Faulkner rejected neither his familial nor his artistic heritage in this regard. As an escape-method, lying predates even drunkenness, and Faulkner could combine those, as well. (“After a few drinks, he would tell people anything,” his wife noted.) While there may be some truth in wine, there aren’t many facts—and besides, Faulkner drank bourbon. Toward his life’s end, he amiably told undergraduates, “I don’t have much patience with facts, and any writer is a congenital liar to begin with or he wouldn’t take up writing.” He called the people in one of his novels partly real, partly fictional; “thus I improved on God, who, dramatic though He be, has no sense, no feeling, for theatre.”

This proud theatricality—of history, of culture, and of character—better suited Faulkner to Hollywood, and Hollywood to Faulkner, than either cared to admit. He first worked there in 1932, for MGM, where Irving Thalberg collected literary reputations. For the next thirteen years Faulkner wrote screenplays in Hollywood and novels in Mississippi. The movie work supported him and his family. He did it conscientiously, working on 48 film projects, of which eighteen were produced. At the not-rare times Hollywood began to wear, he would take sick leave and dose himself with Old Grand Dad.

Faulkner came to work for Warner Brothers after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his attempts to enlist in the Air Force and the Navy politely turned aside. Hollywood too was war duty. Jack Warner placed his studio at the service of his friend, President Roosevelt. (“I virtually commuted to the White House,” Warner recalled. “Court jester I was, and proud of it….”) Roosevelt wanted, and Warner ordered, a movie dramatizing General Charles de Gaulle, exiled in London since June 1940 when he became the only member of the French cabinet to publicly oppose the armistice with Nazi Germany.

De Gaulle interested Faulkner, who read the early biography done by Philippe Barrès. “This man bore none of the marks of our epoch,” Barrès wrote after his first interview with the General. “There is something elemental which gave him force, the expression of a soldier and a peasant.” De Gaulle was a pre-décadence Frenchman, a sort of virtuous Southerner, if you will. He was also an unusually realistic one, no Gothicist. Unlike Heidegger, who fetched his nostalgia from even farther back in history than Gothicists did, imagining the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism to inhere in an anti-technological vision, as early as 1934 de Gaulle saw Hitler’s massive arsenal of tanks and airplanes and supposed they were meant for use. In his first radio speech to the French after arriving in London, de Gaulle said, “Crushed today by a mechanical force, we can vanquish in the future by a superior mechanical force. The future of the world is there.” De Gaulle partook of classical virtue while appreciating the power of modernity; this tension defined his life. As one brought up on stories of Souther chivalrists defeated by Yankee materièl—one, moreover, who invented stories of aristocratic Sartorises retreating before the vulgar tribe of Snopes—Faulkner surely saw some of this.

He gave “The De Gaulle Story” two foci. One was de Gaulle himself, the other a pair of fictional brothers, Georges and Jean. Faulkner explained that Georges “represents the French individual as de Gaulle represents the abstract idea of Free France.” Georges possesses “all the French middle-class virtues,” especially patriotism and humaneness. Although the bourgeoisie is “that class which by tradition is democratic, which is the backbone of any democracy,” Faulkner also included other “representative individuals”—a peasant, a priest, a music teacher, a factory worker—enough to symbolize “all France.”

Home on leave during the days before the Nazi blitzkrieg, Georges plans to marry the daughter of the village mayor. The young man’s spiritedness leads to acrimonious debate with his future father-in-law concerning the utility of the Maginot Line. Colonel de Gaulle, commander of the tank school where Georges trained, wrote a book (Vers l’armée de métier, 1934) advocating mechanized counteroffensive as the indispensable complement to fortification. The mayor dismisses Georges’ Gaullist criticisms of French strategy as impudent subversion, and temporarily cancels the wedding. Faulkner cannot resist contriving a messenger to interrupt their second argument with news of the Nazi invasion of Holland—the beginning of the flanking maneuver which rendered the Maginot Line useless.

The real statesman in the village is not the mayor but the priest. Faulkner introduces him at church, delivering a sermon with the tantalizing first line, “In the beginning was the earth.” Omitting such phrases as “God created” and “the heavens” gives the sentence a decidedly secular tone; while this very republican cleric does go on to deplore the blessing of guns “in the name of ultimate peace,” and attributes this sacrilege to the fact that “We have deposed Him,” he concludes with an appeal to French patriotism. Later, after Georges kills a Nazi officer, the priest counsels him to seek absolution “where all Frenchmen must, and find it where all Frenchmen will: in the freeing of France.”

As the priest is a statesman, so de Gaulle’s statesmanship is a priesthood. Faulkner shows de Gaulle urging the last cabinet of the Third Republic to resist Nazi tyranny, then welcoming the first Free French recruits in the name of liberty. As he review his troops, we hear that the name “De Gaulle” does better than raise the dead in France; “it raises the living.” Later, a soldier who heeded a Vichyite’s appeal to return to France comes back to de Gaulle; we are given to understand that a politically dead man has returned to life. De Gaulle’s final speech in the screenplay predicts the liberation of the French from “the enemies of France.” Faulkner’s de Gaulle, is prophet, priest, and “Chief of all Frenchmen who want to be free.” Political salvation is Faulkner’s theme. It also would be one of de Gaulle’s themes in his Mémoires de guerre, whose third volume is titled Le Salut.

De Gaulle himself disappears almost entirely in the screenplay’s second half, as French salvation requires that Gaullist spirit animate the French. We see this in the conversion of Georges’ older brother, Jean, a navy officer who begins by collaborating with the Nazis, in a limited way, out of fidelity to the military command structure. Jean finally aids the Resistants after he sees their martyrs’ courage; one of them saves Jean’s life before sacrificing his own. Jean “save[s] his soul,” as one Resistant says, by as it were becoming Georges; he substitutes himself for his brother (now a confidant of de Gaulle and key man in the Underground) in a Nazi jail cell. One might say that the re-founding of the city, France, requires both an Abel who resists and a Cain who sacrifices himself.

Returned to his village, Georges needs one more act of charity to complete his physical salvation. The priest ships him out in a coffin, enabling Georges’ later resurrection. The Nazis expose the priest, murdering him after he spits in one of their faces—a gesture disregarding traditional pieties about turning the other cheek. Having metamorphosed the Old Testament story of Cain and Able, Faulkner metamorphoses the New Testament story of Jesus and Lazarus.

In the screenplay’s penultimate scene, Georges hears the good news that his wife has borne their child. The priest had insisted on Georges’ marriage during the war, in order to moderate his spiritedness—to make him serve life, not merely risk it. The birth demonstrates the priest’s posthumous success. Faulkner himself would arrange a wartime union or marriage between statesmanship and Christianity. In his final scene he shows the Resistants setting fires all across France, lighting the way for Allied bombers. The Christian imagery of an obscure childbirth thus anticipates the Christian imagery of apocalypse. The coming and second coming of a savior are clearly indicated.

Warner Brothers never produced “The De Gaulle Story.” Editors Brodsky and Hamblin, following Joseph Blotner, propose several reasons: De Gaulle quarreled with Churchill, whose “attitudes were communicated to Roosevelt,” who communicated them to Warner, who canceled the project; producer Robert Buckner despaired of finding an actor to play de Gaulle; Fighting France representatives in the U. S. criticized the script; another script, “Mission to Moscow,” received higher priority.

Roosevelt’s apparent veto must have decided the matter. FDR hardly needed Churchill to make him distrust de Gaulle. Churchill more or less kept faith with the French from the beginning to the end of the war. But Roosevelt and his State Department quickly turned away, preferring to deal with Vichy and a series of dubious pretenders. In November of 1943, when Faulkner’s work was halted, the Allies invaded North Africa; de Gaulle was excluded from the operation at Roosevelt’s insistence, over Churchill’s cautious objections. De Gaulle had anticipated this. In October he wrote an eloquent letter to Roosevelt, warning that “If France, when liberated by the victory of the democracies, will drive her to submitting to other influences. You know which ones.” Roosevelt never replied. Neither he nor the State Department personnel who read the letter worried much about postwar Communism.

The film Mission to Moscow confirms this. In his memoirs, Jack Warner extends warm self-congratulations on his studio’s wartime efforts. “We had taken on Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Tojo, and the rest of the totalitarian mob in one gutty picture after another.” Unfortunately, there was more than one totalitarian mob in those days, as Brodksy and Hamblin observe: “Ostensibly a documentary based on [Joseph E.] Davies experiences in Russia in 1936, Mission to Moscow was designed by Davies and Warner Brothers, with the encouragement and full support of President Roosevelt and the Office of War Information, to sell the American public on the idea that Joseph Stalin would be an acceptable ally in the struggle against Adolf Hitler. To accomplish this purpose, however, the makers of the film played fast and loose with important historical facts, most notably by justifying both the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s and the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1941 as appropriate and necessary responses to the threat of Nazism. Judging by Stalin’s willingness to allow Mission to Moscow to be shown in the Soviet Union, the film apparently succeeded….” Whether or not Moscow actually displaced “De Gaulle” at Warner Brothers, film history does parallel diplomatic history, here.

Buckner exclaimed of the character de Gaulle in “De Gaulle,” “What a casting problem!” True enough: Claude Rains, though good at imitating Frenchmen, would not suffice, although Buckner did suggest making de Gaulle an invisible man in the film (“Why show de Gaulle? Why not just talk about him?”). The French questioned de Gaulle’s role in another way: Faulkner had made it too small to justify the use of the General’s name in the title. However trivial and contradictory, these objections to suggest that, somehow, Faulkner’s characterization of de Gaulle is the central problem with “The De Gaulle Story.” The fault is simple and fundamental. Faulkner’s conception of statesmanship cannot quite account for de Gaulle. De Gaulle must disappear from the film, given this conception.

One Resistant has a speech on the subject: “All [the Nazis] have to threaten us with is death. And little people are not afraid to die. The little people, and the very great. Because there is something of the little people in the very great: as if all the little people who had been trodden and crushed had condensed into one great one who knew and remembered all their suffering.” After enduring too many French criticisms of his work, Faulkner wrote to Buckner, “Let’s dispense with General de Gaulle as a living character in the story,” thus ridding Warner Brothers of the need for the Gaullists’ imprimatur. “Any historical hero, angel or villain, is no more than the figurehead of his time. He is only the sum of his acts, only the sum of the little people whom he slew or raised, enslaved or made free.” One should note that Faulkner’s democratic/historicist assessment of “historical” heroes did not apply to artists. His daughter, whom he cherished, once tried to talk him out of starting a drinking bout. “Think of me,” she pleaded (he usually could be depended upon to do so). Faulkner was still sober enough, and perhaps just drunk enough, to deliver an unanswerable reply: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.”

Although a statesman likely takes popular opinion more seriously than an artist must, de Gaulle exceeded “his time,” the sum of “the people.” Faulkner saw materials testifying to that. Barrès recalls, “I left General de Gaulle, not carried away—he’s too cold to produce that impression—but convinced that I had just seen a man.” The coldness of de Gaulle’s manliness suggests something more than spiritedness in his soul. It suggests moderation and prudence. In Barrès’ best chapter, de Gaulle gives a concise, masterly overview of wartime geopolitics. Speaking in November of 1940, de Gaulle tells Barrès that Hitler “knows perfectly well the war he has unleashed is a world war and that it can end only in a total victory for him, [or] for us.” Hitler also knows “it is the United States which holds the balance of power.” Hitler’s designs on Africa thus aim at South and Central America. With the Panama Canal closed by Axis troops, the United States could not quickly transfer ships between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; German and Japanese forces then would bring a devastating two-front war to North America. “This war is a struggle for strategic bases,” de Gaulle concluded. Barrès adds that “the democracies, governed by untrained masses and by rather shortsighted businessmen and politicians, have been incapable of comprehending the fantastic breadth of view and the cynical ambition of the group of ruthless men who govern totalitarian Germany.” Many of de Gaulle’s contemporary speeches sound the same themes.

Given these sources, Faulkner should have appreciated the statesman’s capacity to comprehend the tyrant’s comprehension. Faulkner did not. He therefore could not assume the statesmanlike artist’s responsibility to present both comprehensions. Faulkner’s mind did not calculate efficiently (he once enrolled in a college math course as an antidote to fuzzy thinking, but quickly dropped out). He knew petty calculators—Snopes—well enough. But great calculators were beyond him.

One doubly regrets this because “The De Gaulle Story” remains a brilliant screenplay, reflecting the remarkable specimen of human nature who wrote it. Like so many drunks, Southerners, and Frenchmen, Faulkner combined sentimentality with cynicism, orotundity with debunking wit. But Faulkner also had a strength of character that bent in the wind but never broke in a gale. When his firstborn daughter died in infancy, when his young brother died in an airplane crash, Faulkner did what needed doing, without bourbon. He could endure major comic adversities, too—staying sober at his second daughter’s wedding, a dispiriting event in the life of any man. And on public matters, in his last ten years he said things worth heeding about Americans and our relations with the Soviet Union, criticizing his countrymen from the perspective of a moral strength that had nothing to do with moralism. [1]

Gothicism, the romance of ruined Christianity, and Decadence, the romance of ruined Satanism, provoked the literary ‘modernists’ (we need a better word) to “make it new,” to rebuild or rediscover the foundations of human life. The question of the extent to which this enterprise requires a builder’s ingenuity or a discoverer’s intelligence, is a question familiar to careful students of politics. But not one of the English-speaking ‘modernists’ succeeded politically. Not one adequately integrated politics into his recreation or imitation of the world. None of them got far enough beyond the Gothic and Décadent denigration of politics. This denigration went with the denigration of prudence.

As he grew older, Faulkner may have glimpsed this. He envisioned another life for himself: “I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.” The sharp-eyed buzzard, unblinking toward death, who both rises to an overview and descends to the particulars, who excites little comment in either Mississippi or California, and who doesn’t work hard for a living—he, more than the dog, is the philosophic animal. Faulkner was on to something, there. He needed only a more calculating mind to realize it.

 

NOTE

1. After some West Point cadets were expelled for cheating, Faulkner said, “They are victims of that whole generation of their fathers, teachers, governors, who promulgated and put on public record the postulate of national fear of our national character: that Americans as individuals or in the mass are incapable of independence, courage, endurance, sacrifice; that in time of trouble we will not hold together since our character is not in the brain nor in the heart, but in the appetites, the entrails; incapable of independence, so we have made charity a national institution; incapable of decision and discipline and government, so we have transferred control of the individual’s slightest action into federal bureaus….” Faulkner declined a State Department request to tour the Soviet Union on the grounds that the Russia which produced Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol… is no longer there.” “If I who have had freedom all my life in which to write truth exactly as I saw it, visited Russia, the fact of even the outward appearance of condoning the condition in which the present Russian government has established, would be a betrayal, not of the giants: nothing can harm them, but of their spiritual heirs who rik their lives with every page they write; and a lie in that it would condone the shame of them who might have been their heirs who have lost more than life: who have had their souls destroyed for the privilege of writing in public.” In a fittingly less lofty tone, he replied to Khruschev’s prediction, “We will bury you”: “That funeral will occur about ten minutes after the police bury gambling.”