Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (106 page)

Repositories: JFSA, ts. DCPA, carbon ts.

Faulkner’s friend Anthony West had sent him a photograph Walker Evans had made of a shaded cemetery. In the foreground were a half-dozen life-sized marble effigies. Not long after Faulkner arrived in New York about mid-September of 1954, West met him one day in the offices of
Harper’s Bazaar
. Faulkner told him that it was a fine photograph. Hoping for a piece for the
Bazaar
, West asked Faulkner if he wanted to write anything about it. Though he was noncommital, he set to work on it not long afterward. Fragments remain of one version called “Sepulchure South: in Gaslight” and another entitled “Sepulchre South: Gaslight.”
¹¹
Faulkner finished the piece before the end of the month and sent it to West. It appeared as “Sepulture South: Gaslight,” in
Harper’s Bazaar
, LXXXVIII (Dec. 1954), 84–85, 140–41.

Repository: DCPA, ms. and ts. fragments.

Very early in his career Faulkner had composed poems which followed conventional pastoral and ballad models. Then, on 17 March 1922, he published an essay extolling American materials and language as sources of dramatic art.
¹²
A sketch published a week earlier had employed an itinerant laborer as its sole human figure.
¹³
Faulkner later said that he wrote “Adolescence” in the early 1920’s. Though it contains imagery suggesting particular Faulkner poems, it moves in the same direction as the essay and the sketch while foreshadowing future fiction. Joe Bunden’s wife anticipates Addie Bundren of
As I Lay Dying
in her marriage to a man beneath her, in her childbearing, and in her death. Her daughter, Juliet, has the slim boyish figure of a number of Faulkner women to come, such as Pat Robyn in
Mosquitoes
. Juliet’s relationship with Lee Hollowell, with the developing erotic overtones reinforced by nude swimming and bundling in a rustic setting, suggests elements in the relationships between Donald Mahon and Emmy in
Soldiers’ Pay
and Harry Wilbourne and Charlotte Rittenmeyer in
The Wild Palms
.

Repository: FCVA, 26-pp. ts.

In the late winter of 1925 Faulkner cemented his friendship with Sherwood Anderson. The two enjoyed not only telling stories to each other, they also exchanged letters which were conscious exercises in the tradition of the tall tale. When Anderson read the first letter, he suggested that Faulkner rewrite it.
¹⁴
When he did, Anderson wrote a reply elaborating on the story and introducing a fishherd named Flu Balsam who had become involved with Faulkner’s character, Al Jackson, and a Texas horse trader.
¹⁵
Faulkner replied with the second letter.
¹⁶
He would introduce some of the material into his novel
Mosquitoes
.

Repository: The Newberry Library, two 3-pp. tss.

This story was apparently intended, like a number of others Faulkner wrote in New Orleans in the first half of 1925, for the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
. On the first page he typed his name and the address “624 Orleans Alley/ New Orleans.” Though the story was never published, Faulkner characteristically salvaged parts of it for use in perhaps three novels. The protagonist, Herbie, would become Mr. Talliaferro in Faulkner’s second novel,
Mosquitoes;
Morrison would become Dawson Fairchild; the unnamed writer would become the sculptor Gordon; and Miss Steinbauer would become Jenny. Morrison and the writer, inhabiting the same building, suggest Faulkner’s friends Sherwood Anderson and William Spratling, the latter Faulkner’s New Orleans host. Herbie’s thinning hair and faulty digestion are reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who would be alluded to even more directly in
Mosquitoes
. In Miss Steinbauer’s repulse of Herbie, she employs the tactics Eula Varner would use on the schoolteacher, Labove, in
The Hamlet
. The description of the telephone in the last lines of the story would be repeated in
Pylon
. In Faulkner’s typescript he began with a paragraph which he repeated verbatim—the fifth paragraph of the story as it is printed here—but neglected to delete it at the first occurrence. It has been deleted here.

Repository: NYPL, 12 unnumbered ts. pp.

In March of 1925, after Faulkner moved into a spare room in William Spratling’s apartment at 624 Orleans Alley, he would sometimes accompany Spratling on sketching expeditions which took him into different parts of New Orleans. A young architect teaching at Tulane University, the versatile Spratling kept busy with his own drawing and painting as well as detail drawing for local architects. Two of Faulkner’s sketches printed in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
—“Out of Nazareth” and “Episode”—related encounters on such expeditions. In the former, Faulkner described Spratling as one “whose hand has been shaped to the brush as mine
has (alas!) not.…”
¹⁷
Although the seven unnumbered typescript pages of this story do not bear Faulkner’s name, they are certainly his work. It is difficult to date them in the sequence of New Orleans sketches that he wrote during the first half of 1925. Like “The Priest,” this one certainly contained elements that would have offended readers of the
Times-Picayune
. And Faulkner must certainly have realized that some of the language if not the subject matter of “Peter” would have been taboo for a newspaper in 1925. The story in this form was probably a rough draft and perhaps in part experimental, with its shift at mid-point from dialogue in quotation marks to drama-form dialogue and then back again—the kind of thing he would do in
Mosquitoes
(1927), his second novel, which he based on this period of his life in New Orleans. The imagery he used to describe Peter’s mother also looked forward to future work: the portrait of Charles Bon’s wife in “Evangeline” and
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936).

Repository: NYPL.

According to William Faulkner, the first version of this story was written around 1919 or 1920 or 1921 and was “about the first short story I ever wrote.”
¹⁸
The sixteen-page typescript of this version which survives is incomplete. In it, Robert Binford and his friend George drink drugstore Coca-Colas on a hot Saturday night as they size up two “flusies” whom they agree to try to “make” later after George has kept a date with his girl, Cecily. With Robert’s help, she has slipped out to meet George, who tries to entice her into an empty house. She resists, but when she finally yields to George’s entreaties, he changes his mind. As they walk back downtown, she promises to meet him at the house the next night. There is a resemblance between elements in this story and parts of Faulkner’s first novel,
Soldiers’ Pay
(1926), in which Cecily Saunders takes George Farr first as her lover and then as her husband. On 3 November 1928 Alfred Dashiell rejected a story called “Moonlight” which he said he had seen before at
Scribner’s Magazine
.
¹⁹
Faulkner referred to the story again in an undated letter to his agent, Morton Goldman, which may have been written in the early spring of 1935. This version of “Moonlight” comes from a fourteen-page typescript much closer to the mature style of Faulkner than the sixteen-page version which may represent its earliest form after the manuscript.

Repository: FCVA.

Like “Mistral,” “Snow,” and “Evangeline,” this story employs a first-person narrator and a confidant named Don who shares the narrative function. Don was probably based on William Spratling, the New Orleans friend with whom Faulkner traveled in 1925 to Europe, the scene of the first two stories mentioned above. “The Big Shot” was submitted unsuccessfully to
The American Mercury
at some time prior to 23 January 1930 and subsequently to four other magazines. The style suggests that it was written after the stories Faulkner wrote in New Orleans but before more mature writing of the later 1920’s such as
Sartoris
. Elements in this story would appear in several later works. The most familiar character is Popeye, whose appearance and background here are much as they would be in
Sanctuary
. Some of the characteristics of Wrennie Martin suggest a first study of Temple Drake, of the same novel. Dal Martin is remarkable in his foreshadowing of elements in characters as disparate as Thomas Sutpen, Wash Jones, and Flem Snopes. The slight he receives at the hands of the plantation owner whose tenant his father is anticipates Sutpen’s similar traumatic experience, which similarly motivates Sutpen in his determination to acquire possessions which will permit him to rise in the world. Martin’s relationship to the plantation owner, particularly as the latter lies in a hammock and drinks toddies mixed by Martin, suggests several scenes between Wash Jones and Thomas Sutpen in
Absalom, Absalom!
Martin’s rise, as he becomes a merchant and achieves affluence yet retains his countryman’s ways, resembles the rise of Flem Snopes in the Snopes trilogy, and the cenotaph he raises over his wife’s grave may even foreshadow that of Eula Varner Snopes. Dr. Gavin Blount’s link with the dead past would eventually contribute to the characterization of Gail Hightower in
Light in August
.
²⁰