Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (107 page)

Repository: FCVA, 37-pp. ts.

This reworking of “The Big Shot” was sent to
The Saturday Evening Post
on 14 November 1930 but met with no more success than the earlier story. Typed on the same machine, it shows many other similarities: the resemblance of Martin and Flem Snopes, Blount and Hightower, and, in his “eager face sick with nerves and self-doubt,” a similarity between Blount and the Horace Benbow of
Sartoris
and
Sanctuary
. As a child, hiding in
a dark closet and later retching, Blount also suggests Joe Christmas in
Light in August
. The theme of women’s affinity for evil would also recur in
Light in August
and
Sanctuary
. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story for the student of Faulkner’s work is the opportunity it affords, when compared with “The Big Shot,” to observe him doing what he did so often and so indefatigably: changing his narrative point of view—here even his ending—in his unremitting search for the most effective way to tell a story.

Repositories: JFSA, 33-pp. ts. ROUM, fragments of mss. and ts.

On 7 November 1930 Faulkner sent a story entitled “Rose of Lebanon” to
The Saturday Evening Post
, which rejected it. He tried twice more in the next year to sell it, without success. But these efforts were not without worthwhile results, for it appears that something of the obsession with the past of Gavin Blount, M.D., went into the creation of Gail Hightower, D.D., in
Light in August.
Similarly, the death of Charley Gordon in a Holly Springs chicken roost foreshadowed that of Hightower’s grandfather. Subsequently Faulkner reworked the material, retelling it in “A Return.” Faulkner’s agent, Harold Ober, received the story from Faulkner on 13 October 1938. He apparently tried unsuccessfully to sell it, and a letter from Ober to Faulkner on 2 November 1938 applauds Faulkner’s decision to rewrite the story. Whether or not he actually did so, the story was never published. In the thirty-one-page typescript of “Rose of Lebanon,” Faulkner began in present time, with Dr. Gavin Blount telling one of his patients the story of Lewis Randolph. In the fifty-three typescript pages of “A Return,” he not only changed the chronology but identified the Major commanding Charles Gordon’s unit as an earlier Gavin Blount and also made him Gordon’s unsuccessful rival for Lewis Randolph’s hand. He also greatly intensified Dr. Gavin Blount’s feeling for that lady. (In this story, contrary to Faulkner’s usual practice, he used the apostrophe in
can’t
and
don’t
more often than he omitted it, possibly in an attempt to conform to magazine style. The inconsistencies have been preserved here.)

Repositories: FCVA, ms. fragment (“Rose of Lebanon”). ROUM, 10-pp. ms. and 31-pp. ts. (“Rose of Lebanon”), and 53-pp. ts. (“A Return”).

This story was sent on 6 February 1930 to
The American Mercury
, which rejected it. There had been several earlier treatments of the material,
complete and incomplete, in both manuscript and typescript. The story had apparently originated with Estelle Faulkner. Called “A Letter” and then “A Letter to Grandmamma,” it had been at least partially typed with Estelle’s name on the title page. It was about a woman with a difficult past: a hard father and a cruel husband who was perhaps a murderer. The couple lived on money sent by his mother, and when he left his wife he concealed the fact for fear his mother would stop the money. The wife was befriended by a railroad agent, but here the manuscript and typescript fragments of that version broke off. This version, with its shift of emphasis to Mr. Bowman, may have involved some of Faulkner’s memories of his father, who ran a livery stable and transfer company in Faulkner’s youth and who had himself been a freight agent in Faulkner’s infancy. Like Mr. Bowman, Murry Falkner was also known for his violent temper and his readiness to use his fists and, if necessary, the pistol he carried.

Repositories: JFSA, ms. and ts. fragments. ROUM, 13-pp. ts. and fragments of mss. and tss.

Faulkner had mentioned his New Orleans friend William Spratling in the New Orleans sketches “Out of Nazareth,” “Episode,” and “Peter.” He had also used him as a model for one of the characters in “Don Giovanni.” After the two men traveled together from Genoa to Paris in 1925, Faulkner had used Spratling as the basis for the character Don in “Mistral,” which was refused by magazines in June and July of 1930 and finally published by Faulkner in
These 13
in 1931. “Snow,” which Faulkner sent to his agent, Harold Ober, in 1942 (but which may have been a revision of an earlier version), likewise employed Don and an “I” narrator to tell the story. Using the two again in “Evangeline,” Faulkner sent it on 17 July 1931 to
The Saturday Evening Post
, which refused it, and then on 26 July to
The Woman’s Home Companion
, which also refused it. In the early months of 1934 he returned to the material, substituting two characters named Chisholm and Burke for the “I” narrator and Don, and ultimately replacing Chisholm and Burke with Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon to tell the Sutpen story in what would become
Absalom, Absalom!
The title of the story would reappear as the name of the wife and one of the daughters of Calvin Burden when
Light in August
was published in October of 1932.

Repositories: ROUM and JFSA, 15-pp. ms. and 40-pp. ts.

By August of 1925 Faulkner was spending most of his working hours in Paris on a novel entitled
Elmer
. On 10 September he wrote his mother, “The novel is going elegantly well—about 27,500 words now.” Three days later, however, he wrote that he had put the novel away and was about to start another one. But
Elmer
was still on his mind, for when he wrote his mother again on 21 September he told her that he had put it away temporarily and that it was half done. He seemed well satisfied with it. “Elmer is quite a boy,” he wrote. “He is tall and almost handsome and he wants to paint pictures. He gets everything a man could want—money, a European title, marries the girl he wants—and she gives away his paint box. So Elmer never gets to paint at all.” He resumed work on the manuscript, but when it had reached 31,000 words, probably in October or November, he put it aside for good. Faintly autobiographical, written in an experimental style including passages heavy with Freudian imagery, the story had begun to founder when Faulkner introduced decadent British aristocrats into his plot. Many years later he told James B. Meriwether that it was “funny, but not funny enough.”
²¹
Not all of this work was lost, however, for elements of the novel were used in
Mosquitoes, The Wild Palms
, and
The Hamlet
. Nor did he abandon his efforts to salvage the original conception. Fragments entitled “Growing Pains” and “Elmer and Myrtle” may represent early efforts to start the novel, but they may also represent false starts at short-story treatments of the material. Another fragment, “Portrait of Elmer Hodge,” was certainly an attempt at a short-story version. “A Portrait of Elmer” dates from the middle 1930’s. On 30 October 1935 Faulkner’s agent, Morton Goldman, offered a fifty-seven-page typescript of the story to Bennett Cerf of Random House. On 7 November, Cerf wrote Faulkner that he was sorry they had not received it in time to make a limited edition for Christmas and that they might possibly do it the following fall. But Cerf had some reservations about undeveloped themes and about the ending especially. He told Faulkner he thought that at the story’s present length “you are squandering some of the finest material you ever had for a longer book as well as some of the best writing of yours I have ever seen.” Nothing came of the plan to publish the story as a limited edition in the fall of 1936, by which time Faulkner had become a Random House author.

Repository: ROUM; the 123-pp. typescript of
Elmer
is in FCVA.