Critical Companion to William Faulkner A Literary Reference to His Life And Work
A. NICHOLAS FARGNOLI
MICHAEL GOLAY
ROBERT W. HAMBLIN
William Faulkner
A Literary Reference to His Life and Work
C RITICAL C OMPANION TO
Critical Companion to William Faulkner: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work
Copyright © 2008 by A. Nicholas Fargnoli, Michael Golay, and Robert W. Hamblin
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fargnoli, A. Nicholas.
Critical companion to William Faulkner : a literary reference to his life and
work / A. Nicholas Fargnoli, Michael Golay, Robert W. Hamblin.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: William Faulkner A to Z. c2002.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8160-6432-8 (acid-free paper) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962
—Encyclopedias. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography—Encyclopedias.
3. Yoknapatawpha County (Imaginary place)—Encyclopedias. 4. Mississippi—In literature
—Encyclopedias. I. Golay, Michael, 1951– II. Hamblin, Robert W. III. Fargnoli,
A. Nicholas. William Faulkner A to Z. IV. Title.
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For Phineas and Jupiter, my Southern grandsons.
A. N. F For my father.
M. G.
For Kaye.
R. W. H.
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction and Guide to Use ix
Part I: Biography
1 Part II: Works A to Z
19 Part III: Related People, Places, and Topics 359
Part IV: Appendixes 459 Chronological Bibliographies of Faulkner’s Works and Adaptations 461 Library Holdings; Bibliographies of Secondary Sources; Web Sites; and Societies, Centers, and Conferences 496
Day-by-Day Chronology of Events in As I Lay Dying 521 Faulkner’s Appendix to The Sound and the Fury 527 Faulkner’s Introduction to Sanctuary 535 Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 537 Chronology of William Faulkner’s Life 538 Index
543
W
ith sincere gratitude, we acknowledge our friends and colleagues who have graciously helped us in preparing Critical Companion to Wil-
liam Faulkner. Because of their assistance, our task
was all the easier. We add their names here along with the names of those who aided us in the writing of William Faulkner A to Z, this book’s predecessor: Don Bowden, Matthew J. Bruccoli, J. D. Chapman, Wenhui Chen, Cynthia Cox, Joan Crane, Christina Deane, Larry Donato, Kathleen Duffy, Alessandro Fargnoli, Gioia Fargnoli, Giuliana Fargnoli, Harri- ett Fargnoli, Sister Elizabeth Gill, O.P., Joel Green- berg, Gregory A. Johnson, Robert Kinpoitner, Mark Lerner, Robert Martin, Trisha O’Neill, Brian Quinn, Regina Rush, Norman Weil, and the Refer- ence Department at the Great Neck Library.
Special recognition and gratitude must be given to Jeff Soloway, executive editor at Facts On File, whose insights and professionalism are equaled only to his patience. Gratitude is also owed to Anne Savarese, our previous editor, who facilitated the publication of William Faulkner A
to Z; to the Committee for Faculty Scholarship
and Academic Advancement at Molloy College for funds to help with photo-reproduction costs; and to Southeast Missouri State University for its support for this project.
When writing William Faulkner A to Z, we ack- nowledged Eva Weber of Northampton, Mass., for having contributed to the entries on 39 Faulkner short works from the Collected Stories and Uncollected
Stories; a debt of gratitude is again mentioned.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
C ritical Companion to William Faulkner is an
expanded and updated version of William
Faulkner A to Z. More than 80,000 words have
been added to the text. Character entries through- out the book and Critical Commentary sections on Faulkner’s major works have been significantly expanded, and entirely new sections providing excerpts from contemporary reviews have been added. Other new features include further-reading lists for Faulkner’s major novels and short stories and an appendix providing a detailed chronology of one of Faulkner’s greatest and most compli- cated works, As I Lay Dying. In addition, the text throughout has been revised and augmented in the light of the latest scholarship. Joining the authors of the previous edition is Robert W. Hamblin of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.
The organization of the text also differs in this new volume. In keeping with Facts On File’s Criti- cal Companion series, the entries in this book are categorically arranged to assist the reader, espe- cially the student reader, in finding information quickly and easily. Part I contains a short biography of Faulkner. Part II consists of entries on Faulkner’s works; most entries contain composition and pub- lication information, a synopsis and critical analy- sis, and descriptions of important characters and some related items. Entries on major works also contain excerpts from selected contemporary reviews. Part III contains entries, in alphabetical order, on people, places, events, and topics related to Faulkner. Fictional places that appear in sev- eral of Faulkner’s works, such as Yoknapatawpha County, appear here; a few fictional places that are specific to an individual work appear as subentries to the main work entry in Part II. Part IV contains the appendixes including, among other things, pri- mary and secondary bibliographies, library hold- ings, Faulkner’s appendix to The Sound and the
Fury and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and a dateline.
References to works covered in entries in Part II or to related items covered in entries in Part III are given in
the first time they appear in any entry. Like its predecessor, Critical Companion to Wil-
liam Faulkner offers the general reader and non-
specialist a clear and organized supplement to the reading of William Faulkner’s works. Faulkner is one of the most important literary figures in Amer- ican literature and is recognized worldwide as a stylistic innovator, but his work can also be bewil- dering at times because of his complex, sometimes convoluted, prose style and narrative techniques. Understanding his plots, themes, and characters can be difficult for any reader. The primary goal of this volume is to assist students and general readers in their quest to understand, enjoy, and situate in a larger literary and historical context the works and
I NTRODUCTION AND G UIDE TO U SE
SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS
x Critical Companion to William Faulkner
life of this great American writer and Nobel laure- ate. It is also our intention to provide those already familiar with Faulkner’s works a convenient one- volume reference source.
Faulkner’s published writings span a period of more than 40 years and include poems, short sto- ries, novels, essays, speeches, screenplays, and let- ters. His literary works contain well in excess of a thousand named characters, some of whom appear in several different works. Unfortunately for the reader and scholar, there are times when Faulkner is inconsistent with either the names of his characters or with their spellings. For instance, the surname McCallum first appeared as MacCallum, and the character V. K. Ratliff was first called V. K. Suratt. The reader might bear in mind that Faulkner him- self seemed unconcerned about such discrepancies. “What I am trying to say is, the essential truth of these people and their doings is the thing,” he once told an editor. We have attempted to minimize the confusion that may surround a character’s identity by placing and describing that character after each work in which he or she appears. We also provide a cross-reference to any other work in which that character appears.
Faulkner’s works have endured for several rea- sons but—to adapt a concept from Aristotle—pri- marily because the highest achievement of art is an expression of the human spirit and of the universal element of life. Faulkner catches the imagination
and the emotions of his readers, and he can be at
once serious and comic as he portrays the struggles of the human heart in conflict with itself.
We are indebted to the many scholars and critics who, through the insights and ideas in their writ- ings, have provided us with valuable historical and critical information. Like all major writers whose works are characterized by complexity and depth of purpose and meaning, William Faulkner is an author one must read in communion with others. Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County—his “little postage stamp of native soil,” as he referred to it—occupies a permanent place in the world’s liter- ary geography and conjures up a world with bound- less interpretative possibilities. If Faulkner drew much of his inspiration from his native Mississippi, he also wrote of what he knew best, and he was not indifferent to trying new narrative techniques that he thought best expressed his characters and themes. His works are peopled with vivid and mem- In 1987, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative first-class stamp bearing Faulkner’s likeness.
(Stamp Design © 1987 U.S. Postal Service. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.)
Introduction and Guide to Use xi
orable characters—too numerous to list in this brief introduction—who often face the harshest of con- flicts and struggles. Many of Faulkner’s major works, such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light
in August, Go Down, Moses, and Absalom, Absalom!,
are viewed as exemplary modernist texts and pre- cursors to postmodernism. Faulkner’s “little postage stamp” has grown to planetary size. He is translated and read in many languages throughout the world, and his literary influence on later writers endures.
Critical Companion to William Faulkner provides
readers easy access to information on a wide range of topics directly related to the study of Faulkner’s life and works. However, this reference book, like all reference guides, is not a substitute for the enjoyment of reading Faulkner; it is meant to aid and enrich the reading experience.
With the exception of Soldiers’ Pay (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1997), Mosqui-
toes (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), Knight’s Gambit (New York: Random House, 1949), and Sartoris (Random House, 1956), citations from
Faulkner’s writings are from the Vintage editions of his works.
P
ART
I Biography
Biography 3 William Faulkner (1897–1962) OUND AND THE URY
Novelist, author of The S F , IGHT IN UGUST BSALOM BSALOM O OWN
L A , A , A !, G D , OSES AMLET M , The H , and other works, winner of OBEL PRIZE
IN LITERATURE
the 1949 N (awarded 1950), and by critical consensus a leading literary artist of the 20th century.
EW LBANY
Born William Cuthbert Falkner in N A ,
ISSISSIPPI
M , on September 25, 1897, he was the
first child of M C and M B
- URRY UTHBERT AUD UT
LER ALKNER
F and the great-grandson of the soldier,
ILLIAM LARK
author, banker, and railroad builder W C
ALKNER
F , known as the Old Colonel, a near-legend- ary figure and the prototype of Colonel John Sarto-
EFFERSON
ISSISSIPPI
ris of Faulkner’s fictional J , M , and
OKNAPATAWPHA OUNTY Y C .
The novelist’s mythic Yoknapatawpha has become a permanent feature of the world’s literary geography, a suffering, defeated place, a haunt of grotesque and villainous Snopeses and Sutpens, with a troubled heritage of slavery and war. But it is an enduring and timeless place too, peopled with
Colonel William Clark Falkner’s monument, Ripley,
ordinary men and women such as Dilsey Gibson,
Mississippi (Harriett and Gioia Fargnoli)
V. K. Ratliff, and Isaac (Ike) McCaslin who rise to heroic stature and in whom hope has not died.
Faulkner’s ancestry was mostly Scots or Scots- Denied reelection to the regimental command Irish. He evidently regarded the violent, impul- in the spring of 1862, probably on account of sive, grasping, creative Old Colonel as his spiritual his martinet approach to discipline, he returned father. W. C. Falkner, born in 1825, migrated from to Mississippi, raised a regiment of irregular cav- North Carolina via Missouri to northern Missis- alry, and carried out intermittent raids on federal
IPLEY
ISSISSIPPI
sippi, settling in R , M , in the early communications lines before leaving the army for 1840s. He read law, served in the Mississippi militia good in October 1863. His early retirement did during the Mexican War, and established himself not, however, deter federal troops from burning during the 1850s as a prosperous, slaveholding law- his Ripley home in 1864. yer, businessman, and farmer. After the war, the Old Colonel rebuilt his law
With the coming of the Civil War, a calam- practice and, like the fictional John Sartoris, gained ity that would live in his great-grandson’s imagi- influence, power, and prosperity as a banker and nation, Falkner raised a volunteer company, the railroad developer. He also found time to write; his
AGNOLIA
IFLES
M R , and in May 1861 won elec- melodramatic novel The White Rose of Memphis, tion as colonel of the 2nd Mississippi Infantry. In published in 1881, remained in print for 30 years July 1861 he fought at the battle of First Manas- and reportedly sold 160,000 copies. He followed up
ULL UN
sas (see B R ), where his rather ostenta- this publishing success with The Little Brick Church, tious bravery (he had two horses shot from under another novel, in 1882, and Rapid Ramblings in him) caught the attention of his superior officers. Europe, an account of his travels, in 1884.
4 Critical Companion to William Faulkner
Ripley sent Falkner to the Mississippi legisla- ture on November 5, 1889, but he did not live to take his seat. Late on the afternoon of elec- tion day, his business and political rival R
ICHARD
J. T HURMOND shot and fatally wounded him on the Courthouse Square, an assassination Faulkner would fictionalize in the novels S ARTORIS (1929) and The U NVANQUISHED (1938). The Old Colonel’s son, J OHN W ESLEY T HOMPSON
F ALKNER (1848–1922), expanded the family’s bank- ing and railroad enterprises and made successful forays into Mississippi politics. He married S ALLIE M C A LPINE M URRY (F ALKNER ) in 1869; she delivered their first child, Murry Cuthbert F ALKNER , the fol- lowing year. The Young Colonel moved his family from Ripley 40 miles southwest to the L AFAYETTE C OUNTY town of O
XFORD , M
ISSISSIPPI , in late 1885
and established a law practice there. His legal, busi- ness, and political affairs flourished into the early years of the new century, in spite of the near-legend- ary drinking bouts that sent him from time to time to the K EELEY
I NSTITUTE of Memphis for “the cure.” The Young Colonel’s alcoholism would pass from him through his son Murry to his novelist grandson.
(See ALCOHOLISM , F AULKNER AND .) A good deal less is known of the background of Faulkner’s mother’s family. The Butlers were among the earliest settlers of Lafayette County. Maud Falkner, born in 1871, the daughter of Charles Edward and Lelia Swift B UTLER , claimed Texas patriot Sam Houston and the Confederate general Felix Zollicoffer as kinsmen and boasted of several forebears who had fought in the Civil War. Charles Butler served for a dozen years as the Oxford town marshal. He abandoned his wife and two children in 1887, vanishing with as much as $3,000 in town funds and, so the gossip ran, with a beautiful young octoroon mistress. Faulkner never knew his maternal grandfather, and he remained always reticent about his Butler antecedents.
The infant Willie, as his parents called him at first, was a colicky newborn, and his mother recalled rocking him in a stiff-backed chair for many hours a night during the first year of his life. He survived early frailties to grow up tough and durable, if small in size. The Falkners moved from New Albany to
G ULF & C HICAGO R AILROAD , in November 1898. Two more sons—Billy’s brothers Murry Charles (known as Jack) and John Wesley Thompson III (known as Johncy)—were born there before the family removed permanently to Oxford, the Young Colonel’s seat, on September 24, 1902, a day before Billy Falkner reached his fifth birthday.
Murry Falkner’s decline began in this period. His father’s abrupt and unexpected sale of the Gulf & Chicago, for $75,000 in May 1902, robbed him of his vocation, and he mourned the loss. Though the Young Colonel backed Murry financially in a suc- cession of small businesses, nothing could replace his beloved railroad. His wife vetoed his dream of resettling in Texas and raising cattle, and he slipped ever deeper into the shadow of his powerful and successful father.
Strains in the Falkners’ marriage were only too evident. They were temperamentally incompatible. Maud Falkner was steely and determined, her hus- band feckless and alcoholic. Her interests lay in books and pictures; his in guns, dogs, and horses. Billy Falkner grew up in a tense, emotionally edgy household in which his mother held dominion. She ran the place on Second South Street with the assistance of a capable, ever-present lieuten- ant, C AROLINE (Callie) B ARR , who had been born into slavery and who was known as Mammy. Murry seemed to fail at everything he attempted. Weak or absent fathers modeled on Murry Falkner would recur in Faulkner’s fiction; the theme of family decline would run through much of his work.
The elder Falkner ran a livery stable and a cot- tonseed oil mill, sold coal oil, and operated a hard- ware store on Confederate Square in Oxford. The coming of factory-made automobiles doomed the livery stable. Murry sold the South Street house and moved the family into a more modest place on North Street to raise money to buy himself into the hardware business. But he chafed at the sedentary life of a merchant and showed no aptitude for the work.
Yet aspects of Billy Falkner’s boyhood were idyl- lic. Woods stretched out behind the Falkners’ first Oxford home, a large one-story frame house with a barn and paddock; six blocks up the street lay the
Biography 5
times Ripley’s, Oxford in the first decade of the 20th century had a four-faced clock in the court- house tower, dry goods, confectioners and other stores on the square, a new 140-foot-high water tower, and the U NIVERSITY OF M
ISSISSIPPI .
There were the immemorial pastimes of small- town boyhood: pickup games of football and base- ball, explorations of the nearby woods and fields with Mammy Callie, hit-and-run raids on enemy neighborhoods. Billy absorbed Civil War lore from cronies of his grandfather, a leader of the S ONS
OF C ONFEDERATE
V ETERANS fraternal organiza- tion, and entertained his brothers with scraps of speeches picked up at soldier reunions. “Now what air more noble,” he used to mimic one old orator, “than to lie on the field of battle with your car-case full of canyon balls.” Their father took the boys for
Sunday afternoon rides in the trap, and on summer and autumn weekends they would journey farther afield, to the Club House, the family’s hunting and fishing lodge in the T ALLAHATCHIE R
IVER bottoms
15 miles north of Oxford. In time, he would play football for Oxford High School.
The Big Place, the Old Colonel’s home, served as the center of Falkner social life. It had wide porches and a finished attic, venues where the young Falkners gathered with the neighborhood children, among them Lida Estelle Oldham, who in due course became Billy’s particular friend.
Billy’s three brothers (D EAN S WIFT [F AULKNER ], the fourth Faulkner son, arrived in August 1907) looked up to him as the great organizer and impro- viser. One summer, he directed the boys and his cousin Sally Murry in assembling a virtually full-
Faulkner (middle row, second from left) and his schoolmates at Oxford Graded School in 1908 (Brodsky Collection,
6 Critical Companion to William Faulkner
So he picked up his novelist’s education outside the schoolroom. Helping out at his father’s livery stable, he absorbed the lore of horses and horsetrad- ing that would infuse the S NOPES T RILOGY , The R EIV
Billy Falkner, age 8, entered the first grade in Oxford’s all-white elementary school in September 1905. He did well in Miss Annie Chandler’s class— well enough to be allowed to skip second grade.
scale airplane from plans in American Boy maga- zine, using his mother’s bean poles for a frame and newspapers applied with flour paste as the skin. The boys and their cousin launched Billy from the edge of a 10-foot-deep ditch at the back of the Falkner’s lot. The frail craft broke apart on takeoff.
- - ERS , and other works. Relations with his father grew steadily more difficult as Billy reached adolescence.
Black-white relations were easy, often affec- tionate, so long as blacks made no bid to breach the racial barrier. Whites reacted fiercely to any attempt to cross the line. Race and racial identity fiction, most pervasively in the novels Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. (See RACE , F AULKNER AND .)
But he was learning in other ways, observing, experiencing, storing up material that his imagina- tion would one day transform. Oxford taught him early the nuances of the South’s rigid system of racial subordination. The majority of Oxford’s Afri- can Americans lived in Freedmantown, the black quarter north of the railroad tracks. Many, domestic servants for the most part, inhabited cabins in the yards behind the big houses of the white folks. The Falkners employed Callie Barr and other blacks as servants, and the boys always had black playmates. There may have been black Falkner cousins too, for circumstantial evidence suggests that the Old Colonel had fathered a “shadow family” with one of his former slaves, though these Falkners were never acknowledged.
Murry called him “Snake Lips,” a dig at his Butler features; Billy had the Butler physical form, short and slight. Murry only too plainly favored the second son Jack, a Falkner in build: tall, bulky, florid.
Between them, Estelle Oldham and Billy’s friend P HILIP A
VERY S TONE , the son of a promi-
Maud Falkner was literate, conversant with books and the arts. She taught the Falkner boys to read and introduced them to James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Ste- venson, and the Grimm brothers and later to Shake- speare, Balzac, Poe, Kipling, and Conrad. For some reason, though, Billy turned against formal educa- tion. “I never did like school,” he would recall, “and stopped going to school as soon as I got big enough to play hooky and not get caught.” By the autumn of 1909, when he was in the sixth grade, he found himself in more or less constant trouble for skip- ping class, failing to turn in his homework, and gen- eral inattention to matters at hand. A 1911 report card, otherwise positive, noted a “lack of progress in grammar and language.”
He learned to recognize the Beethoven sonatas she played on the piano in the Oldham parlor, and he tried to dance. There were many rivals for Estelle’s attention, but even so, she and Billy seemed to have an understanding.
Falkner dropped out of high school after the 10th grade and went to work in his grandfather’s bank. He had met Phil Stone in the summer of 1914 and had tentatively shown him his adolescent verse. Four years Falkner’s senior, Stone was edu- cated at the U NIVERSITY OF M ISSISSIPPI and Yale. Cultured, cosmopolitan, and fluent, he talked lit- erature with Billy, loaned him books, and intro- duced him to classic and modern writers; in effect, he shaped the young artist’s viewpoint and style, or so he afterward claimed.
Stone’s teaching encompassed the Lafayette County hill people and the M EMPHIS underworld as readily as the literary moderns. Falkner explored the M
ISSISSIPPI D ELTA wilderness with Stone; his
father’s Delta hunting camp would form the model for the camp in the novella “The Bear” (in Go
Down, Moses ). The novelist would also exploit the
entrée Stone provided into the world of gamblers and prostitutes in a number of stories and novels, from S ANCTUARY (1931) to The Reivers (1962).
War in Europe filled Billy Falkner’s thoughts and imagination in 1915 and 1916. He had actually
nent lawyer and banker, taught him more than any Oxford school. To impress Estelle, a popular girl, Billy affected the dress and manners of a dandy.
Biography 7
paper and magazine accounts of the flying aces of the western front; he would salt his war allegory A
F ABLE
with the names of the British, French, and Canadian air aces. (See FLYING , F AULKNER AND .) The United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, but by then Falkner’s motives for action had become more personal than patriotic. L EMUEL O LDHAM refused to accept Billy Falkner as a suitor for his daughter. Estelle’s mother maneuvered her into an engagement with a young lawyer named C ORNELL F RANKLIN , and they were married in April 1918. Billy sought escape at a U.S. Army Air Corps recruiting office.
The air service turned him down, citing his short stature (he stood five feet, five inches tall), according to the biographer J OSEPH B LOTNER . He fled Oxford all the same, traveling to New Haven, Connecticut, where Phil Stone was studying law at Yale. Faulkner briefly worked as a clerk in an office of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company there before managing to pass himself off as an expatri- ate Englishman named William Faulkner (he had added the u to the family name on his application for the Winchester job) and enlisting as a cadet in the R OYAL A
IR F ORCE . Around the same time, Jack Falkner enlisted as a private soldier in the U.S.
Marine Corps.
Faulkner—he would retain the u, part of the fic- tional biography he created for the RAF—reported to ground school in Toronto, Canada, in July 1918. Jack landed in France in August. For all his later elaboration of himself as a wounded flying hero, Faulkner proved an indifferent cadet. As it hap- pened, he never came near the cockpit of an air- plane, let alone flew solo, crashed, or shot down German fighters over France, as he later suggested he had done. (He would, however, obtain a pilot’s license in 1933.) Jack was badly wounded in the Argonne Forest in early November, shot in the head and leg during the Saint-Mihiel offensive. He would need months in hospital to recover. After the armistice of November 11, 1918, the RAF moved swiftly to cut its trainees loose. Faulkner arrived home in Oxford in December with $42.58 in severance pay, a promise of an eventual honor- ary second lieutenant’s commission, and an added
For weeks afterward, Faulkner roamed about Oxford in his British officer’s uniform, playing the returned war hero and accepting the salutes of authentic veterans. He even walked with a manu- factured limp. This was the second of the many roles he would play, following that of Oxford dandy. The biographer Frederick Karl regards the RAF experience as crucial in Faulkner’s artistic devel- opment. “The war turned Billy into a storyteller, a fictionalist, which may have been the decisive turnabout of his life,” he wrote. The returned flyer retained the clipped, formal, buttoned-down pose of the English officer through the autumn of 1919, when he enrolled as a special student at Ole Miss and reprised the role of dandy.
He studied French, Spanish, and English, tak- ing only the classes that interested him, indifferent to much of the college life around him. Faulkner’s earliest published works date from this time: two drawings in the Ole Miss yearbook and an adapta-
William Faulkner in 1914 (Brodsky Collection, Center for Faulkner Studies, Southeast Missouri State University)
8 Critical Companion to William Faulkner
on December 15, 1924. Stone wrote the preface; Faulkner dedicated the book to his mother. (“Phil Stone and Mother were the first ones to believe in Bill,” Johncy Falkner would write.) He presented a signed copy to Estelle Oldham Franklin, by now the mother of two young children: a girl, M ELVINA
, eventually published as S OLDIERS ’ P AY . He followed a disciplined writing
All the while, Faulkner worked on his first novel, originally titled M AYDAY
“I have turned in 5 of my stories and collected $20 for them,” he wrote home proudly. “I write one in about 3 hours. At that rate I can make $25 a week in my spare time.” He was writing constantly, drinking heavily, and playing the part of wounded war hero to the hilt. He persisted in walking with a limp and let it be known that he had suffered a seri- ous head wound.
O RLEANS T IMES -P ICAYUNE newspaper—and was even paid for the privilege.
published there. He also placed a series of vignettes of local life in the N EW
D EALER ,
Through Elizabeth Prall, he met Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans, and he found an outlet for verse, essays of criticism, and prose sketches in the new little magazine, The D OUBLE
V ICTORIA F RANKLIN , and a boy, M ALCOLM A RGYLE F RANKLIN . She and Franklin had settled first in Hawaii and then in Shanghai, but by the mid-1920s their marriage was in trouble and she was spend- ing long furloughs at home in Oxford. When not attending to the Oxford boy-scout troop he headed or going off to immerse himself in the bohemian world of N EW O RLEANS ’s Vieux Carré, eight hours from Oxford by train, Billy was as attentive to her as ever.
The New Republic of August 6, 1919. In Novem-
ber, the student newspaper, The M ISSISSIPPIAN
F AUN , a collection of poems. The F OUR S EAS C OM -
Meantime, Phil Stone arranged and subsidized the publication of Faulkner’s first book, The M ARBLE
“I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life,” he said afterwards, “but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son-of-a-bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”
Faulkner converted the post office into a pri- vate club. He and his cronies read, played cards, drank, and sometimes shut down the office alto- gether to play the university’s “golfing pasture.” He mishandled the mail. He tossed magazines and journals into the trash. He set aside periodi- cals that caught his fancy to read himself before passing them on. He ignored the requests of patrons. “It was amazing,” Jack Falkner recalled, “that under his trusteeship any mail ever actu- ally got delivered.” Astonishingly, he held onto the job for three years. A postal inspector finally tion. Whether he was fired or arranged for his own removal, Faulkner took the loss of the job— and the salary—with equanimity.
He journeyed to New York in the fall of 1921 at the invitation of the author S TARK Y OUNG , an Oxford native. Faulkner worked briefly in the Doubleday Bookstore at a Lord & Taylor depart- ment store for E LIZABETH P RALL , a future wife of S HERWOOD A NDERSON . Phil Stone worried that his friend would lose his artistic bearings in the great city and recalled him to Oxford after a few weeks. In the interval, Stone and others had arranged the job of University of Mississippi postmaster for him, a sinecure with a salary of $1,500 a year.
Murry Falkner had been business manager at Ole Miss, a patronage appointment, since 1918. The job came with a house on campus, and Billy would keep a room at his parents’ home for a full decade. This secure base gave him the freedom to wander and to perfect the latest of his poses, that of the hard-drinking bohemian poet.
His social life was hit or miss. He joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and a drama club known as the Marionettes but ran afoul of many of the Ole Miss hearties, his mannerisms and airs earning him the unflattering sobriquet of “Count No-’Count.” His “decadent” poems inspired a set of parodies, including “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdu,” about the lost and wandering heifer Betsey. Bored, feeling out of place, he withdrew from Ole Miss in mid-November 1919.
accepted the short story “Landing in Luck,” his first published prose work. Nine Faulkner poems appeared in The Mississippian during the spring semester of 1920.
,
PANY of Boston released an edition of 1,000 copies
Biography 9
“It is diffuse and non-integral with neither very much plot development nor character develop- ment,” Liveright wrote. “We think it lacks plot, dimension and projection.” Faulkner sank into depression and gloom, but he recovered quickly from this episode and set about scheming to free himself from Boni & Liveright and to find a pub- lisher for the Sartoris novel. (H ARCOURT , B RACE AND
I L AY D YING ,
Fury, published in October 1929; A S
“Twilight” touched off an astonishing creative explosion. Faulkner would produce much of his best work between 1928 and 1936: The Sound and the
Faulkner claimed long afterward that Liveright’s rejection (a new firm, C APE & S MITH , would pub- lish the tale of the Compsons) had freed him to approach what would become arguably his finest work, and the one nearest his heart—“the book I feel tenderest towards,” he told an interviewer many years later. He forgot, he said, about com- mercial publishing, about making money, about recognition.
He turned to two stories, “That Evening Sun Go Down” and “A Justice,” that introduced a family called the Compsons. Early in 1928, he began a story called “Twilight” about a little girl named Candace (Caddy) Compson and her broth- ers Quentin, Jason, and Benjy, the genesis of The Sound and the Fury.
C OMPANY would publish it as Sartoris in Jan- uary 1929.)
By then, Faulkner had put aside a manuscript he called F ATHER A BRAHAM , in which the fate- ful Flem Snopes made his first appearance, and turned to work on a novel originally titled F LAGS IN THE D UST , launching the Sartoris saga. The two works were the origin of Faulkner’s legend- ary Yoknapatawpha County. A recent biographer suggests that Faulkner envisioned a Yoknapataw- pha cycle from the start. “He had been read- ing Dickens and Balzac,” Jay Parini writes, “and wished to create a shelf of books that had some unity and purpose.” Faulkner completed Flags in late September and sent it on to Liveright, whose letter of rejection reached him late in Novem- ber. The publisher judged the novel hopeless, and advised the author to withdraw it altogether.
clacking away. Sometimes he kept a glass of whis- key and water at hand. He did not permit interrup- tions. “His concentration was a formidable engine,” recalled his Vieux Carré flatmate, the painter W IL - LIAM
see-born artist and sculptor named H ELEN B AIRD . He completed the manuscript on September 1, with a dedication “To Helen.” Liveright published it on April 30, 1927. Helen Baird married the New Orleans lawyer Guy Lyman on May 4.
M OSQUITOES , and ineffectually courted a Tennes-
Boni & Liveright published Soldiers’ Pay on February 25, 1926. Reviews were mixed, but the novel did anticipate themes and even scenes of more powerful work to come. Faulkner spent part of the spring in New Orleans and the summer at the Stones’ beachfront house in P ASCAGOULA , M ISSISSIPPI , where he worked on his second novel,
He traveled in Italy, Switzerland, France, and England, working fitfully on short stories and a manuscript titled E LMER , which would grow to novel length but never be published during his life- time. He spent time in Paris but shied from making an approach to J AMES J OYCE or lesser expatriate lit- erary figures settled there. “I knew of Joyce,” he said many years later, “and I would go to some effort to go to the café that he inhabited to look at him. But that was the only literary man that I remember see- ing in Europe in those days.” With money running short, he sailed for home from Cherbourg, France, on December 9.
Europe with Spratling in July.
Anderson agreed to recommend the book, com- pleted in May 1925, to his publisher, H ORACE L IV - ERIGHT . Liveright accepted it on behalf of the firm of B ONI & L IVERIGHT . With publication assured and a $200 advance in hand, Faulkner sailed for
S PRATLING , “and one could not get in its way. Bill would not even see you or hear you if you tried to get his attention.” Faulkner regarded 3,000 words as a good day’s work. He would allow himself afternoons off for long walks around the city. At night, he drank heavily.
written in a short burst—47 days—during his night- shift supervisory job at the Ole Miss power plant and published in October 1930; Sanctuary, pub- lished in February 1931; Light in August, published in October 1932; and Absalom, Absalom!, published
10 Critical Companion to William Faulkner
OWAN
The historical marker outside of College Church. (Harriett and Gioia Fargnoli)
To a degree, Rowan Oak enabled Faulkner to shut out these changes. He could work there, allow his imagination to shape his surroundings as he wanted them to be. Sanctuary, anyway, brought a
But Faulkner loved Rowan Oak. The house and the grounds represented shelter from a hostile world. Even Oxford was changing. The Square had been paved over, the horse troughs removed, the elm trees felled. Faulkner’s grandfather, the Young Colonel, had died in 1922, and the Big Place, once a proud landmark, afterward knew indignity and abuse, a metaphor for Falkner family decline: The mansion was cut up into apartments, and the cor- ner lot sold off for a gasoline station.
, after a tree that represents good fortune, safety, and security in Scottish folklore. At first, Rowan Oak represented anything but security. Estelle did not like the house: It lacked running water and electricity; the windows would not open; there were rumors that it was haunted. Faulkner went further into debt fixing the place up. Estelle became pregnant that summer; Faulkner corrected proofs of As I Lay Dying and saw the book into print in October. The Faulkners’ first child, Alabama, named for a favorite Faulkner great-aunt, was born prematurely on January 11, 1931, and lived only nine days.
AK
O
He achieved both money and literary fame against a backdrop of private agonies: alcoholism, financial troubles, and an impending marriage to Estelle Franklin, a mésalliance that would prove destructive for each partner. The impressionistic and technically difficult The Sound and the Fury was an immediate critical success. “A great book,” Faulkner’s friend Lyle Saxon called it in a New
York Herald Tribune review, a judgment that has
He and Estelle returned to Oxford in the autumn of 1929, taking a two-bedroom apartment on University Avenue, handy to Faulkner’s new job as night supervisor at the Ole Miss power plant. Faulkner set out deliberately to create a “master- piece” during the long overnights in the boiler room; the result, in six weeks, was As I Lay Dying.
nervy and out of sorts. He became withdrawn and silent, and he drank heavily. Estelle’s nerves were raddled, and she executed what may have been an attempt to drown herself by walking far out into the bay one evening. Faulkner’s shouts alerted a neighbor, who pulled her to safety on the shore.
The Sound and the Fury there, a project that left him
The newlyweds went off to Pascagoula for their honeymoon. Faulkner corrected the galley proofs of
Work provided Faulkner an escape from his torments. With pen in hand, he could forget his miseries—or at least transform them into fictions. Estelle’s divorce had come through finally in late April 1929. A single woman with two children, she had been intensely uncomfortable in conser- vative Oxford, and her family, working through her sister D OT O LDHAM , brought pressure to bear on her longest-running beau, William Faulkner. They were married in the parsonage of the Col- lege Hill Presbyterian Church in Oxford on June 20, 1929.
stood the test of time, and Sanctuary, when it appeared in 1931, eased his financial burden, at least for a time.
In the spring of 1930, Faulkner, on the strength of several short-story sales, bought the “old She- gog place,” a dilapidated antebellum house on the outskirts of Oxford, for $6,000, payable in monthly installments of $75 each. The Faulkners took pos- session in June. Rather grandly, Faulkner renamed it R A partial view of Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak. (Harriett and Gioia Fargnoli)
Light in August at Rowan Oak in February 1932,
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