Famous writer engaged in freedom forum of his day

There are a whole lot of things they never taught me in school, or didn't bother to. I wonder if there's anyone anywhere who couldn't also write that sentence in full truth.

I learned William Faulkner's glowing and humane Nobel Prize acceptance speech in school, with this famous passage: "I decline to accept the end of man. ... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

But I didn't learn that he also wrote an extremely funny screed excoriating most of his hometown (Oxford, Miss.) clergymen for trying to extend, by five years, Oxford's ban on the sale of beer. He was a frequent writer of letters to the editor on the editorial page of his tiny hometown newspaper, The Oxford Eagle, and his "beer broadside" was penned in 1944, when he hadn't yet become a pillar of American letters and nearly none of his finest work remained in print -- though nearly every word he ever wrote is easily available today at Thruway Shopping Center or off Hanes Mall Boulevard. And it's pretty tough to get through school without reading Faulkner today, as well it should be. Although much amused with his laconic wit and his systematic skewering of the clergy for their errors in fact and syntax, the folks at the Eagle declined to print his letter.

So Count No-Count, as the townsmen referred to him in his younger days (making fun of his aristocratic manner and his disdain for the status quo), arranged for them to print his letter as a broadside. Broadsides are single sheets, publicly posted, cheaply printed. You can buy one of Faulkner's originals on the Internet today for $5,000.

The American Revolution was fueled with broadsides. The fall of the Soviet Union will probably eventually be attributed to photocopiers and Xerox machines smuggled into Russia to create a free press. Faulkner was fooling around, probably -- he asked his brothers and his nieces and nephews to hand the beer broadside out on the courthouse square. It was signed William Faulkner Private Citizen.

Faulkner wrote letters to the editor all his life, to Time magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Life magazine, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. But always to the insignificant Eagle, the hometown rag, with a circulation of at best 15,000 readers. He wrote about what he cared about, and an analogy might be this: he wrote about wasted money, the ballpark, misquoted scripture, a popularly unpopular mayor, racial injustice, his disappointments and his satisfaction with the city council. He wrote, in his way, about Billy Prim and Mayor Allen Joines, Scott Sexton and the death of Emmet Till. And he was a lion of American letters who cherished this simple and simply indispensable forum.

Long after Faulkner's dying career had been revived (largely by Malcolm Cowley's collection of his unavailable, out-of-print work), he continued to be part of the most immediate forum; he wrote sometimes cantankerous, sometimes mournful and sometimes comical letters to the editor.

What I had to learn on my own was that this giant of our literature spent so much time on a page just like the one you're holding. And I'm very grateful to him and to the fair beauty of forums and pages like this one. There are those who say newspapers are dying. And those who seem to believe they should die.

I remember reading a news account from 1960 about a bomb accidentally dropped from a military plane onto the grounds of the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, which wasn't far from the little apartment where my family lived. I read the words "bomb crater" and went tearing (in my pajamas) down Fisher Street to McDonough Boulevard to squeeze through the fence and stand on the rim of the hole in the ground with the men in suits and uniforms just staring at the wonder.

Today, I race through the news and the pictures to reach the forum, this page, where my friends and neighbors irritate and delight me, and where my own voice can sometimes be heard. And how could I not hear the echoes of William Faulkner, arguing for justice and raising a sardonic eyebrow to the militants and being granted the privilege of this forum?

Just letters to the editor? No. Those words let freedom ring.

Guy Neal Williams is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem. He is a regular contributor to The readers' forum.

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