Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (105 page)

By mid-December of 1928, when Faulkner submitted this story to
Scribner’s Magazine
, it had already been there once before. It was refused both times and later rejected by
The American Mercury
as well. In March of 1930 it was purchased by
The Southwest Review
, though it would prove to be too long for that magazine, which sold it in turn to the Book Club of Texas. It appeared under that imprint, in a special edition of 300 copies, with an introduction by Henry Nash Smith on 27 June 1932.

Repository: FCVA, 9-pp. ms., 18-pp. ts., 23-pp. ts. University of Texas Humanities Research Center, 23-pp. carbon ts.

This story appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
, CCIII (6 Sept. 1930), 16–17, 76, 82. It was Faulkner’s third story to appear in a national magazine (“A Rose for Emily” was published in April in
Forum
and “Honor” in
The American Mercury
in July of the same year), and it was selected for inclusion in the annual Doubleday
O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories
. As a predominantly comic treatment of aerial warfare in the Great
War, it offers a contrast (as does “With Caution and Dispatch”) to the tragicomic “Turnabout” and the tragic “Ad Astra” and “All the Dead Pilots.”
⁹

Repository: FCVA, ms. and ts. fragments.

Submitted without success to a total of seven magazines in 1930 and 1931, this story was published in a limited edition of 400 copies by Random House on 10 December 1931. Faulkner would again use the situation of a woman who left her husband and two children to flee to the west with a lover in
The Wild Palms
.

Repository: FCVA, 4-pp. ms. and 19-pp. ts.

At some point after his return from Europe in December of 1925, possibly in early 1927 when he was working on
Sartoris
(1929) or even, perhaps, a year or two later, Faulkner wrote three pages of a story he called “The Devil Beats His Wife.”
¹⁰
He did not complete this tale of the domestic problems of a young woman named Doris and her husband, Hubert, and the successful efforts of Della, their maid, to solve them. However, something of Della’s qualities got into the character of Dilsey when Faulkner was working on
The Sound and the Fury
in 1928. Other elements of the story underwent various transmutations. In late 1933 or early 1934 Faulkner’s agent, Morton Goldman, asked Faulkner about a story called “Christmas Tree.” Faulkner replied, “The CHRISTMAS TREE story which you mention was a continuation of that one by the same title which you now have, the same characters who got married at the dance, with the dice and the forged license, etc. I wrote it first years ago, and I have mislaid it. I rewrote it from memory, the first part, in the short story which you now have, and I had forgot the characters’ names: hence the difference.” Pressed for money, Faulkner told Goldman that if an editor showed an interest, he was willing to send a synopsis of the rest of the story or rewrite it from memory. At one time or another he wrote at least four versions—manuscript and typescript, complete and incomplete—under this title. In what may have been a one-page synopsis written when Faulkner worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1932, his characters were Howard
Maxwell, Mrs. Houston, and her daughter, Doris. In another version of fifteen manuscript pages, Faulkner followed the story of Howard and Doris through their marriage to a happy ending. Even so, “Christmas Tree” never sold, and Faulkner was feeling the same financial pressure acutely in the spring and summer of 1935. It was probably then that he rewrote his story of the bizarre courtship of Doris Houston and Howard Maxwell, now renamed Maxwell Johns.
College Life
was advertising a $500 short-story contest, and this may have led to the story’s submission there. It was accepted and published in Volume XVIII (Jan. 1936), 8–10, 85, 86, 88, 90, but it won no prize in the contest.

Repositories: FCVA, 1-p. ts. ROUM, ms. fragment and 15-pp. ms. (“Christmas Tree”).

Experimenting with a number of verse forms and styles following his return home at the end of World War I, Faulkner wrote a forty-line poem of frustrated love in the summer of 1919 and borrowed its title from a work by Stéphane Mallarmé, “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune.” It appeared in
The New Republic
on 16 August 1919 and in the University of Mississippi student newspaper,
The Missisippian
, in revised form on 29 October. On 28 January of the next year he published there a poem inviting comparison with one by François Villon. Faulkner’s was called “Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues.” Such poetry unsurprisingly provoked various responses. One, appearing in
The Mississippian
on 12 May 1920, took the form of a poem entitled “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdue,” in which the authors (probably Drane Lester and Louis M. Jiggitts), using the pen name of Lordgreyson, described the heifer Betsy, lost and wandering far from home. It was an amusing tour de force, which Faulkner may have had in mind seventeen years later, “one afternoon,” he recalled, “when I felt rotten with a terrible hangover.” He was then working unhappily for Twentieth Century-Fox. After dinner on 25 June 1937, Faulkner read to his guests a story entitled “Afternoon of a Cow,” which, he told them, had been written by a talented boy named Ernest V. Trueblood. The only one who seemed to appreciate Faulkner’s
jeu d’esprit
was his house guest and French translator, Maurice Coindreau. The next day Faulkner gave him a carbon copy of his typescript as a souvenir. In February of 1939, working on part 2, Chapter One, of “The Long Summer,” Book Three of
The Hamlet
, Faulkner apparently thought back to this story and appropriated elements of it for the mock chivalric romantic treatment of Ike Snopes’s love for Jack Houston’s cow. He completed the story in part 3, which ended the chapter. Not long afterward, when German authorities forbade the printing of American books in occupied France, “the reading of novels by Faulkner and Hemingway,” said Jean Paul Sartre, “became for some a symbol of resistance.” So it was not inappropriate that Francophile
Faulkner should have approved the first publication of “Afternoon of a Cow” in Maurice Coindreau’s translation in Algiers in
Fontaine
, 27–28 (June-July 1943), 66–81. In early 1947 editor Reed Whittemore asked for the story for a special number of the quarterly
Furioso
. “Sell the piece if you can,” Faulkner wrote his agent, Harold Ober. “Maybe it is funny, as I thought myself. I suppose I tried it on the wrong people.” So “Afternoon of a Cow” finally appeared in English, under the name of Ernest V. Trueblood, in
Furioso
, 2 (Summer 1947), 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17, a decade after it was written and nearly three decades after “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune” and “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdue.”

Repository: DCPA, 17-pp. carbon ts.

Faulkner delivered a nineteen-page typescript of this story to Harold Ober on 19 February 1953, shortly after he completed it. It was then called “Weekend Revisited.” Ober had it retyped and wrote Faulkner that he was sending it to
The New Yorker
to Lillian Ross, who had discussed the story with Faulkner and expected to recommend it. On 5 March, however, William Shawn wrote Ober that they could not use it. On 7 April,
Collier’s
made the same decision, as
Esquire
would too. Faulkner remained confident about the story. When he wrote Ober on 11 November 1954 he asked if there was any news about it, and added, “I think [it] is not only funny but true.…” But he would not live to see it published. It finally appeared in his favorite market for short fiction,
The Saturday Evening Post
, CCXXXVIII (9 Oct. 1965), 26–27, 29, 31.