William Faulkner, lacking a good Host Personality, inadvertently implies that he has Multiple Personality

Faulkner’s interview by Jean Stein in Paris Review (New York City, 1956) begins as follows:

INTERVIEWER: Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like being interviewed.

WILLIAM FAULKNER: The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.

Most people would take the above to mean that since Faulkner likes his personal privacy, he will not cooperate with questions that invade his personal privacy, and so he will either refuse to answer such questions or he will give unreliable answers out of spite.

On the second and third pages of the interview, asked how a writer becomes a serious novelist, he says the following:

FAULKNER: …An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done…If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Most people would take this to mean that Faulkner is totally dedicated to his writing, as any serious writer would be. But he seems to be in an obnoxious, irritable mood.

I would interpret the above differently. “If the same [personal] question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different” because you may be talking to a different personality.

Regarding “An artist is a creature driven by demons,” we should keep in mind that Faulkner had continued to read the Bible since childhood. And when they say “demons” in the Bible, they don’t mean it as a metaphor for being determined or irritable, they mean being possessed, which psychiatry now understands to be multiple personality.

Why does Faulkner have such problems with interviews, in contrast to other writers like Doris Lessing, Sue Grafton, and Mark Twain? If you look at videos of interviews with Lessing or Grafton, they are pleasant, polished, and consistent. If you read interviews with Twain, he was similar. My answer is that, with those three, the interviewer would be speaking to their host personality (discussed in previous posts), a kind of personality that Faulkner evidently lacked.