Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (103 page)

Repository: FCVA.

It was probably late in 1939 when Faulkner completed this story. Harold Ober received a twenty-two-page typescript of it on 4 January 1940 and sent it to
The Saturday Evening Post
. The
Post
refused it, but on 31 January it was bought by
Collier’s
, where it appeared in Volume CV (22 June 1940), 20–21, 30, 31. The typescript apparently does not survive, but another, of twenty-one pages, bearing Faulkner’s name and address, shows something of the story’s evolution. Although elements of the narrative are the same as in the magazine version, there are changes in every paragraph of the latter. Faulkner clarified references by using names rather than pronouns. He cut whole paragraphs but also added new ones, accounting for the additional page in the typescript Ober received. Some of this new material elaborated on the interplay between Lucas and Roth Edmonds and Lucas and George Wilkins. The twenty-one-page typescript is also divided into three parts by numbers which
were omitted from the
Collier’s
version. In the spring of 1941 Faulkner was at work on
Go Down, Moses
. Chapter One of “The Fire and the Hearth,” the second of the book’s seven segments, reached Robert K. Haas at Random House on 5 June. It began with nine pages revealing the threat that George Wilkins’s still posed to Lucas Beauchamp and setting forth something of the Beauchamp-McCaslin-Edmonds background which would be elaborated in the segments to come. Faulkner also laid the groundwork for another theme when Lucas discovered what he thought was buried treasure while hiding his still before informing on George Wilkins to Carothers Edmonds. In part 2 of this first chapter, Faulkner followed Lucas to Carothers Edmonds’s home, but then, before Lucas stated his business, Faulkner interpolated fourteen new pages narrating the crucial relationship, years before, between Lucas, Edmonds’s father, Zack Edmonds, and Molly Beauchamp, both Lucas’s wife and Edmonds’s foster mother. In sections 3 and 4, which completed “The Fire and the Hearth,” Faulkner finished the comic story of the moonshining case, its final disposition, and its aftermath. Some lines and even passages were identical with those in the
Collier’s
version, but Faulkner had expanded this treatment of the material. He had also made the Negro dialect less heavy, and in preparing for the more serious, and even tragic, aspects of the novel which were yet to come, he had restored one passage, only slightly altered, from the twenty-one-page typescript which did not appear in
Collier’s
. As Carothers Edmonds looked at Lucas he thought, “
I am not only looking at a face older than mine and which has seen and winnowed more, but at a man most of whose blood was pure ten thousand years when my own anonymous beginnings became mixed enough to produce me
.”

Repository: FCVA.

On 19 February 1940 Harold Ober received from Faulkner a twenty-one-page typescript of this story. It was declined by
Collier’s, Redbook, Country Gentleman, Harper’s
, and
The Saturday Evening Post
before
The American Mercury
bought it on 16 September. It appeared there in Volume CLXVI (Nov. 1940), 563–70. Although the twenty-one-page typescript apparently does not survive, there is a nineteen-page typescript which is close to the printed version. There are changes in every paragraph, but they are minor, with only two added passages differentiating the version in
The American Mercury
from that in this typescript. One of these amplifies the tracking of Edmonds’s missing mule and the other further describes the growing frenzy of the divining-machine salesman. In the summer of 1941 Faulkner used this story in writing Chapter Two of “The Fire and the Hearth.” Although he
wrote two pages of new material, and though the dialect was again much less pronounced than it had been, the material was much closer to the magazine version than was the portion of the story that had derived from “A Point of Law.”

Repository: FCVA.

Harold Ober received a twenty-four-page typescript of this story from Faulkner on 18 March 1940. He tried unsuccessfully to place it with
Collier’s, The American Magazine, Redbook,
and
The Saturday Evening Post
before selling it to
Harper’s
on 9 August. It was published in Volume CLXXXI (Oct. 1940), 503–13. A carbon copy of the typescript reveals that apart from three sentences and two phrases deleted from the dialogue between the deputy sheriff and his wife, the changes in the published version were minor and consisted chiefly of creating twenty-one new paragraphs. When Faulkner used the story as the third segment of
Go Down, Moses
, he may have had the carbon typescript in front of him. He added a few phrases in addition to one of the sentences that had been cut from the typescript to produce the magazine version. He also changed Mayfield to Maydew and canceled almost every one of the new paragraphs that had been introduced into the magazine version.

Repository: FCVA.

Faulkner wrote this story in July of 1940. Pressed for money, he told Harold Ober on 24 July that he had sent it directly to
The Saturday Evening Post.
It was refused there, but on 17 September
Collier’s
bought it, and the story appeared there in Volume CVII (25 Jan. 1941), 19–20, 45, 46. In an early fourteen-page typescript Faulkner had at first called the murderer Henry Sutpen Coldfield, and he had told the census-taker that his grandmother’s name was Rosa Sutpen. On the next page Faulkner changed his name to Carothers Edmonds Beauchamp and then to Samuel Worsham Beauchamp, his grandmother becoming Mollie Beauchamp and her brother becoming Hamp Worsham rather than Hamp Benbow. Faulkner grafted these two pages onto a version of the story which had begun in Gavin Stevens’s office rather than the murderer’s cell. A seventeen-page typescript, a carbon copy, probably of the one that went to the
Post
, retained these changes. The
Collier’s
version varied only slightly from this one. Two passages from the typescript not in the magazine version and not restored by Faulkner for inclusion in
Go Down, Moses
are printed in brackets. Three new spaces were added in the magazine version to separate segments of the story. By late August of 1941 Faulkner had sent to Robert K. Haas at Random House the version that he wanted to use as the seventh and concluding portion of
Go Down, Moses
. Now he used numbers to divide the scene in the cell from the rest of the story. The other changes, like this one, were minor, and they were fewer than those he made in any of the other stories which became a part of
Go Down, Moses
.

Repository: FCVA.

Harold Ober received an eighteen-page typescript of this story on 16 December 1940.
The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury
, and
The American Magazine
all declined it before
Story
bought it on 2 December 1941 and published it in Volume XX (May-June 1942), 46–55. A rough typescript of eighteen pages shows that Faulkner had made many revisions before typing the version that went to Ober. They were stylistic changes which occurred in nearly every paragraph. In one substantive change, Faulkner deleted the name Coughlin from Don Boyd’s listing of types of potential American dictators and added the names of Yokohama, Smith, and Jones. On a Sunday in December of 1941, probably the 7th, Faulkner wrote his Random House editor, Saxe Commins, “DELTA AUTUMN needs to be rewritten to get matter into it pertinent to the story this mss. tells.” The manuscript was, of course,
Go Down, Moses
, and the rewriting by which it would become the sixth section of the novel involved several crucial changes: Don Boyd became Carothers “Roth” Edmonds, great-great-great-grandson of old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (the grandfather of Ike McCaslin); and Edmonds’s mulatto mistress became the great-great-great-granddaughter of old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Thus Roth repeated the old man’s miscegenation and incest. Ike was ten years older than he had been in the magazine story, and, in keeping with other parts of
Go Down, Moses
, he had had a wife, the reader was told, but not children, as in the story. New passages picked up threads such as his unhappy marriage and the contrast between past and present, as seen in the land, the hunt, and the men themselves. New dialogue between Ike and Roth’s mistress emphasized the McCaslin family history, including the old wrongs now in part repeated. Contrary to Faulkner’s practice in some other stories, he broke up long paragraphs from the magazine
version into shorter paragraphs, but he restored one visual element that had been dropped in the magazine: from an earlier typescript: the hunt took place in a “Δ-shaped section of earth between hills and River.…” And the list of potential dictator types was changed again, as Faulkner deleted Pelley and Yokohama and added “Roosevelt or Willkie.…”