Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (102 page)

Repositories: JFSA, mss. fragments; ROUM, 8-pp. ms., tss. fragments, and 30-pp. ts.

Faulkner sent this story to
The Saturday Evening Post
on 17 November 1930. They refused it, as
Scribner’s
and
The American Mercury
did subsequently. On 8 May 1931 it was accepted by
Harper’s
, where it appeared in Volume CLXIII (Aug. 1931), 266–74. In 1934 it was reprinted in
Doctor Martino and Other Stories
, now out of print. In the late winter of 1938–39, Faulkner interpolated it into
The Hamlet
. The most striking change was Ernest Cotton’s new name and identity: he was no longer a bachelor; he was now Mink Snopes, with a wife and two children. In part 1 of Chapter One, in Book Three, “The Long Summer,” Faulkner set up the conflict between him and Jack Houston. Rather than penning up Houston’s hog and winning a court judgment against Houston of one dollar as a pound fee, as Cotton had done in the story, Mink allowed his scrub yearling bull to stray into Houston’s pasture, where Houston wintered it and then won a court judgment against Snopes of three dollars for pasturage. There were other changes, such as the elimination of the men’s colloquy on the porch of Varner’s store about Houston’s disappearance, and the addition of the unsuccessful intrusion of Lump Snopes into Mink’s attempts to dispose of the body, Lump being determined to find the fifty dollars he was convinced Houston had been carrying. Though many of the passages were identical with those in the story, Faulkner had expanded it considerably and deepened the portraiture of both Snopes and Houston. He would recount the story again in both
The Town
(1957) and
The Mansion
(1959) as he completed the Snopes trilogy. By the time he was writing
The Mansion
, he was telling the story for the fourth time, and discrepancies in these accounts in the trilogy presented a problem for Faulkner’s editor, Albert Erskine. Faulkner was perfectly amenable to the idea of changes which would reconcile this last version with the others, but he was not seriously concerned about them. He wrote Erskine: “When I first wrote the story of Houston’s murder, Mink was a bachelor named Something Cotton. Apparently changing his name and his condition (possibly his motivation too, though I have forgot the original story, called THE HOUND) hasn’t
outraged too many academical gumshoes, so I doubt if this will either.”

This story provides another example of the indefatigable persistence with which Faulkner worked at his short stones. At some time between the late fall of 1926 and early 1927, he was at work on the beginnings of two novels.
³
One of them,
Flags in the Dust
, he would go on to complete, and it would be published as
Sartoris
(1929). The other,
Father Abraham
, he put aside, but it would eventually be completed as
The Hamlet
. Faulkner had stopped work on
Father Abraham
after writing 14,000 words which introduced Flem Snopes as a successful banker in Jefferson and then, in an extended flashback which made up most of the twenty-five legal-size pages of the manuscript, introduced the Varners and other residents of Frenchman’s Bend and went on to recount Flem’s return from Texas, followed by the auction of the spotted horses and the immediate aftermath. At some point Faulkner wrote the story of the horse auction in a version told solely through dialogue, without quotation marks and with many phonetic spellings, a typescript whose pages were numbered 204–23, as though they had been extracted from a collection of some sort. He called this version “As I Lay Dying.” In another recasting, he used the title “Abraham’s Children.” It was probably early November of 1928 when Faulkner took to Alfred Dashiell, an editor at
Scribner’s Magazine
, a twenty-one-page typescript also entitled “As I Lay Dying.” In this one, a man driving for his uncle on a political junket (as Faulkner said he himself had done) told the story of the auction. Dashiell refused it. On 25 August 1930 Faulkner sent
Scribner’s
a 15,000-word version of the story under the title “The Peasants.” It was the most effective version yet, but now it was too long for
Scribner’s
. In early January of 1931, however, the editor Kyle Crichton wrote Faulkner that if he could cut it to 8,000 words and still retain its flavor,
Scribner’s
would take it. Encouraged by Dashiell as well, Faulkner revised the story and renamed it “Aria Con Amore” but sent it on 2 February 1931 to
The Saturday Evening Post
. When the
Post
refused it, Faulkner sent the sixteen-page version to
Scribner’s
. Now the story was told by yet another narrator, V. K. Suratt, who spoke directly to the reader as to another resident of Frenchman’s Bend. On 20 February, Dashiell wrote Faulkner that they would take it but asked if he could change the title. Faulkner suggested simply “Horses” and apparently set to work on a revision which expanded the sixteen-page version to 8,000 words. It finally appeared as “Spotted Horses” in Volume LXXXIX (June 1931), 585–97. An eight-page fragment entitled “The Peasants” begins with the first sighting of the ponies by the men on the porch of Varner’s store and
breaks off as Henry Armstid is about to compel his wife to help him catch the pony he has bought from the Texan—not yet named Buck Hipps. Told in the third person, the fragment is divided by Roman numerals into six parts. It is difficult to determine if this was the manuscript which preceded the 15,000-word typescript which Faulkner sent to
Scribner’s
on 25 August 1930 or if it was another treatment of the story which he attempted later. In September of 1939 Faulkner retold the story once more as part 1 of Chapter One of “The Peasants,” Book Four of
The Hamlet
. Using an omniscient narrator instead of Ratliff, he recast the story, expanding it to thirty-seven pages and bringing it closer to
Father Abraham
than to “Spotted Horses.” This retelling in general resembled the narrative line of the eight-page manuscript fragment called “The Peasants,” though the treatment was fuller and more detailed, with minor variations in the order of incidents and dialogue. Now the Texan had a name, Buck Hipps. Jody Varner appeared on the scene, as did others from Frenchman’s Bend. In two changes, Admiral Dewey Snopes was replaced by Wallstreet Panic Snopes and I. O Snopes’s place was taken by Lump Snopes. Ratliff was still very much in evidence, urging the others not to buy the horses and still carrying some of the narrative burden in his dialogue. But now, released by the switch to an omniscient narrator from the constant constraint of Ratliff’s dialect, Faulkner was free to use his poetic prose to the fullest advantage. The comic, satiric, and poignant elements of the tale all benefited from these changes and from its expansion.

Repositories: NYPL, 25-pp. ms. fragment (
Father Abraham
). FCVA, 51-pp. carbon ts. fragment and 54-pp. carbon ts. (
Father Abraham
)
;
3-pp. ts. fragment (“Abraham’s Children”). ROUM, 18-pp. ts. (“As I Lay Dying”). JFSA, 8-pp. ms. fragment and 58-pp. ts. (“The Peasants”); 16-pp. ts. (“Aria Con Amore”) and 21-pp. ts. (“As I Lay Dying”).

It was probably the late winter or early spring of 1935 when Faulkner wrote this story. He doubtless tried to sell it to at least one of the large-circulation weekly magazines, but it was
Harper’s
which purchased it and printed it in Volume CLXXII (Dec. 1935), 67–77. In September of 1941 Faulkner used much of the material of the story in section 3 of “The Bear,” which was really a novella and which would be the fifth and longest part of the novel
Go Down, Moses
(1942). Whereas the magazine version had been narrated by sixteen-year-old Quentin Compson, now Faulkner employed an omniscient narrator, and Quentin’s role was assumed by young Ike McCaslin. This permitted Faulkner to obtain the maximum dramatic effect from the climactic conflict between Old Ben and Lion and Boon by narrating it as it happened, rather than having it told as Quentin and the others heard it after the fact from old Ike McCaslin and Ad, the cook, who
was now renamed Ash. Faulkner also interpolated into the story the collapse of Sam Fathers after Old Ben’s death and then Sam’s own passing. In
Go Down, Moses
, Ike would not then or later have produced offspring, as he obviously had done in order to have the grandson in the story named after Ike’s father. Boon was still violent, but he had not killed a Negro, as the reader had been told in the magazine version. Faulkner also expanded the liquor-buying expedition to Memphis, deriving more humor from Boon’s behavior than he had done in the earlier treatment of the material. He also enlarged and deepened the last portion of the
Harper’s
story, so much so that he chose to use it not in section 3, but in section 5 to conclude “The Bear,” gaining both power and resonance from Ike’s meditation and irony through Boon’s frenzy and the implied juxtaposition of past and present.

Faulkner apparently sent this story to
The Saturday Evening Post
as soon as he finished it. When the
Post
refused it, he sent it to his agent, Harold Ober, who received the nineteen-page typescript on 3 October 1939. During the next five months it was refused by
The American Magazine, Collier’s, Country Gentleman, Redbook, Cosmopolitan
, and
This Week
. When Faulkner asked Ober to offer it to one of the quality monthlies, he sent it to
Harper’s
, which bought the story on 28 June 1940 and published it in Volume CLXXI (Sept. 1940), 418–25. A typescript which survives is a seventeen-page rough draft with manuscript additions, cancellations, and numerous typographical errors. Presumably the nineteen-page typescript (and certainly the typescript, perhaps the same one, which was used as setting copy by
Harper’s
) was a heavily revised and expanded version of the earlier one. In the most significant single revision, the narrator’s father was no longer identified as Mr. Compson. This element in the seventeen-page typescript shows that the story was then conceived as being narrated by Quentin Compson, a function he had performed in “Fool About a Horse,” “A Justice,” and “Lion,” though it was only in the latter two that Quentin was still present in the printed version. Every page of the magazine version of the story shows variants from the typescript, and in many paragraphs there are as many deletions as additions. All of the changes, however, seem to be those of a writer who is sharpening his rendering of detail, searching for more precise depiction, and extracting all possible resonance from his tale. New individual paragraphs describe Doom’s tactics on his return to the tribe, the pursuit of the great buck by the boy and Sam Fathers, Sam’s physical appearance just before the buck manifests himself to them, and finally, a passage near the end of the story in which the boy’s father, accepting his son’s account of the reappearance of the mighty totem animal, links him to all the life lived on earth before them, conjoining him with all the blood shed, and meditating on how
“suffering and grieving is better than nothing.” One of Faulkner’s smaller alterations was to change Sam’s salute to the buck from “Ole” (perhaps too reminiscent of bullfights) to “Oleh.” Editorial or authorial tidying up included the deletion of the numbers 2 and 3 which separated sections of the story and indention to create half a dozen new paragraphs. When Faulkner revised the story in the summer of 1941 to make it the fourth segment of
Go Down, Moses
, he enlarged it by approximately a thousand words and restored the numbers, deleted in the magazine version, dividing it into three parts. But there were many more notable changes necessitated by the integration of the material into the saga of the relationships of black and white families which formed the basis of
Go Down, Moses
. The heavily revised story was now told in the third person, and the magazine version’s narrator, earlier Quentin Compson, became young Ike McCaslin. General Compson took the place that had been occupied by Ike McCaslin as an old man in the
Harper’s
version. Ike’s cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, took the place of “father,” earlier Mr. Compson. The servant, Jimbo, became Tennie’s Jim. Now there was a closer bond between Ike and Sam Fathers than there had been between Sam and Quentin. And here Sam was the son, not the grandson, of Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief who had sold the child and his mother into slavery, into servitude under the McCaslins rather than the Compsons. In keeping with the thematic concerns of the novel of which it was now a part, the story dealt at greater length with Sam’s mixed blood, with betrayal, and with the links between past and present as well as with what Ike learned as a boy from Sam in the Big Woods, foreshadowing what Ike would do when he grew to be a man.