The Books: “The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches”

My history bookshelf. Onward.

The second book on this shelf is another favorite of mine called The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches. An awesome resource. It’s not the “greatest” speeches – in that, there is not editorial control saying: “We approve of THIS person’s views, and therefore we include it in the collection, we don’t approve of THAT person’s views and therefore we do not include his speech …” For example, there are speeches of Stalin and Hitler included. Chilling. Absolultely chilling. It’s good to have the “greatest” speeches as well – for inspiration and for all that feel-good shite – but in terms of learning the truth of history, it’s GREAT to have an archive like this one. You can actually, if you read the book straight through, start to feel the march of historic events. Amazing. We’ve got Patrick Pearse, and Teddy Roosevelt’s muckraker speech and Lenin and Lloyd George and Emmeline Pankhurst and Sacco and Vanzetti – Oswald Mosley, Oppenheimer, Kwame Nkrumah, Castro, Bertrand Russell, Neville Chamberlain, FDR, Patton … etc. etc. Salman Rushdie, JFK, Krushchev, Martin Luther King, Alexander Solzhenitsyn … You get the idea. It’s a terrific book. Here is where you can see the full text of Vaclav Havel’s INCREDIBLE speech that he made on January 1, 1990 – which I read to myself, on occasion, if I need an uplifting experience.

I will post William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It’s a doozy. An amazing triumphant statement of the role of the artist in the world. It makes me want to cry. I will also print out the excerpt preceding the speech, so you can get the context.

From The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches.

WILLIAM FAULKNER
Stockholm, 10 December 1950
“The agony and the sweat”

When William Faulkner (1897 – 1962), the creator of Yoknapatawpha County and author of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, won the Nobel Prize, he bought his first dress suit for the occasion and decided to go to Stockholm for the prize-giving.

At the state banquet, the quiet farmer from Oxford, Mississippi, appeared before a microphone and television camera for the first time and said that he declined to accept the end of man.

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grive on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simplyl because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endue: 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. The poet’s the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars, to help him endure and prevail.