Writers, Faulkner says, “must teach [themselves] that the basest of all things is to be afraid...and then forget [fear] forever, leaving no room...for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart...lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Until they do that, he says, their griefs will leave no scars.

Faulkner says the writer’s duty is to delve deep into grief and scars, in order to help humans endure and prevail by lifting their hearts, and by reminding them of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which are the glories of our birthright.

There might be something in the Stockholm water, because here is an excerpt from John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech twelve years later:

“The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate humanity’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion, and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation.”

Of course, Hemingway, in his Nobel Prize speech in 1954, wrote “The writer works alone and must face eternity or the lack of it every day,” which is a less hopeful thought. But he wasn’t there in Stockholm to drink the water, having been injured in two consecutive airplane rides that ended in crashes a few months before.

I do think, and maybe Hemingway’s example proves this, that if you stop believing in hope, nihilism is much harder to face. You might think that nihilism and hope are contradictions in terms. But lots of contradictory concepts, once they’re embodied in the physical world, exist quite happily together, sometimes in the same object. The empty screen that we writers face every time we sit down to write is both void and hope.

It’s a dangerous combination, but it’s our combination.

Events since 1950 indicate that Faulkner’s question about being blown up may have had more power than the brave answers he posed against it. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, finds its entire time-frame in that instant when a V-2 Rocket, yet unexploded, begins to cave in the ceiling above our heads. Following William Golding, Pynchon asks the question of when it all became too late to decide anything about our fate as a culture.

There is a bronze plaque on the Hailey house that was the birthplace of Ezra Pound. It was put there by an Irish theater director in 1986. He was in Sun Valley to direct Yale Drama students during their summer retreat. He explained to the people of the Wood River Valley that Pound was a great man who had succumbed, in Pound’s own words, to the “stupid suburban predjudice of anti-Semitism that spoiled everything,” but that that shouldn’t be held against him, that he should instead be honored as a man who had shaped our literature and by extension, shaped our 20th Century selves. When I read that as a sturdy unkillable child of the very poor, I resented the patronizing tone and thought also that we should have bronze plaques for the birthplaces of Edward Teller and Joseph McCarthy, other shapers of our 20th Century selves.

There is evidence that Pound may have agreed with me. In the same 1967 interview where he renounced his anti-Semitism, he told Alan Ginsberg that he had discovered he had spent his life not as a lunatic but as a moron, and in a more resonant statement, said this: “The intention was bad—that’s the trouble—anything I’ve done has been an accident—any good has been spoiled by my intentions...”