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August 3, Evening Part One
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3:11
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APPLAUSE
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Audience |
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August 3, Evening Part One
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0:18
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I'm very happy that such a nice audience on a nice evening should welcome the beginning of the Conference on the Contemporary Novel. On our Conference on Poetry some years ago, it was said that the conference was a nest of singing birds. On the Conference on Literary Criticism last year, if it were birds, it might have been crows. They live on each other's bones, these critics.
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William Yandell Elliott |
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August 3, Evening Part One
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0:51
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I shan't attempt before the conference to describe the Conference on the Novel because here we have novelists and critics together. That isn't my duty after all. As Director of the Summer Session, it's my privilege to introduce the gentleman who will preside over these meetings and to whom, in large part, the distinguished roster of participants is due. He has persuaded them to come.
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William Yandell Elliott |
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August 3, Evening Part One
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1:17
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Professor Carvel Collins, a professor of English literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is one well known to those who follow American literature, alas he has not been able to produce his own particular hero. He is the biographer of Faulkner. I gather that the only way to produce Faulkner is to have his daughter graduate at an exercise and all the colleges in the country are trying to get Ms. Faulkner to come and be a graduate of those colleges. I'm sure that when she gets to a college, there will be no doubt about her graduating from that college.
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William Yandell Elliott |
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August 3, Evening Part One
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1:56
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Mr. Collins has just come back from a trip trying to persuade Faulkner to violate his sacred principle and come up here. And alas, Penn Warren, who was to have come has just had a child. And being his first, he takes it very seriously and isn't likely to depart.
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William Yandell Elliott |
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August 3, Evening Part One
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2:17
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Mr. Collins is one of these students of American literature who is interested in the roots of things, and particularly in the period just before the Civil War. His book on the American sporting gallery has, I think, given some of the best grassroots history of that period. And if he doesn't start singing "On the road to California, oh, it's a long and a tedious journey far across the Rocky Mountains," he'll be out of character tonight.
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William Yandell Elliott |
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August 3, Evening Part One
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2:49
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His articles and published portions of his book on Faulkner's fiction show his interest in American folklore. And he will have an ample opportunity, I think, in presiding at these meetings to relate American folklore and the characters of American fiction to some of the most distinguished novelists and critics of our times. It's with great pleasure that I turn the meeting over to Mr. Carvel Collins.
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William Yandell Elliott |
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August 5, Afternoon Part Three
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23:27
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Mr. Ellison and I have been sitting here feeling our commercial instincts losing more and more strongly to the force of our entire physiques. And perhaps a few words from the people who have to back the actual work of writers, and back it with their money, with their hearts, with their time, with their work, with their face, wouldn't be out of place here.
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William Yandell Elliott |