Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (104 page)

Repository: FCVA.

In July of 1941 Faulkner began work on a story, really a novella, which would become the fifth and longest segment of
Go Down, Moses
. By 9 September the first two parts of it had reached Random House in New York. In the interval before section 3 followed them on 9 November, Faulkner had taken time to fashion some of this material into a story, bearing the same title as the novella, which he hoped would alleviate his perennial financial problems. He used most of the first section of the novella and the initial pages of the second section up to the point at which the fyce had attempted to attack Old Ben. Faulkner added material to end the story: material which would later form a part of section 4 of the novella, where Ike’s cousin and father surrogate, McCaslin Edmonds, would quote Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to help the boy understand courage and forbearance and something of truth as well. Simplifying for the magazine’s audience, Faulkner now called Ike simply “the boy,” and McCaslin became simply his father. Harold Ober received the story on 27 October and sent it to
The Saturday Evening Post
. On 5 November he wrote Faulkner that the editors wanted him to clarify the ending, to make clear that the truth referred to was the actions of the boy, the old man, the bear, and the dog, because these things had come from the heart, and the boy’s father had said that truth was all things that touched the human heart. Faulkner replied that the story was “a rewritten chapter of a book under way.” It was a hurriedly written first draft, he said, and he proceeded to rewrite, closely following the editors’ suggestion. On 14 November, Ober was able to write Faulkner that the
Post
had accepted the story as revised. It was printed in Volume CCXIV (9 May 1942), 30–31, 74, 76, 77.

After Faulkner completed this story he took it to Harold Ober on 21 September 1954. It was intended for
The Saturday Evening Post
, which bought it two days later and published it in Volume CCXXVII (5 March
1955), 26–27, 103, 104, 106. In early 1955 Random House decided to publish a collection of Faulkner’s hunting stories. He would provide new intercalated material to link them together. With the addition of a little more than a dozen new lines within the story, it became the fourth and last in the book entitled
Big Woods
(1955).

Repository: DCPA, 20-pp ts.

It may have been October of 1954 when Faulkner wrote this story. It resembled some of the stories collected in
Knight’s Gambit
(1949), in which Charles “Chick” Mallison narrated episodes of his Uncle Gavin Stevens’s detective work in Yoknapatawpha County. A twenty-five-page rough draft in typescript survives. On 13 March 1955 a typescript was received at the Harold Ober office, where the story was retyped in twenty-eight pages and sent to
Life
. On 29 January,
Life
refused it, as did
Collier’s
two weeks later. It remained in Harold Ober’s files until Faulkner asked Ober to send it to him for revisions which would make it a part of
The Mansion
(1959), completing the Snopes trilogy. “Hog Pawn” was returned to him on 13 March 1958, but it was late that year or early in the next when he reached the point in Chapter Fourteen of “Flem,” the novel’s third and final book, at which he could integrate the story into the novel. Faulkner rewrote and expanded, making numerous changes. As in some of the other stories in
Knight’s Gambit
, Charles Mallison was in the forefront with his Uncle Gavin without being the narrator. (He had not been identified by name in the story, but his relationship to Stevens coupled with his tone made it clear that he was.) However, the third-person narration presented many of the events as they impinged upon his consciousness and sensibilities. Now he participated in more of the action, keeping the early morning vigil in the car with his uncle and then rushing into the Meadowfill house just before the shot rang out. There were numerous minor changes: Essie Meadowfill worked for a bank rather than the telephone company, and her suitor was demoted from being an ex-Marine Corps sergeant to a corporal. But the major thematic elaboration was to work this story of Snopes villainy (he now had a first name: Res, short for Orestes) into the Snopes saga and the fight waged against Snopesism by men such as Gavin Stevens and V. K. Ratliff. Faulkner also brought Jason Compson back into his fiction and used the motif of land deals and returned war veterans to link this material with other parts of the novel.

Repository: FCVA

On 10 March 1922 Faulkner published a prose sketch entitled “The Hill” in
The Mississippian
, the student newspaper of the University of Mississippi, where he had published a poem entitled “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune” two and a half years earlier. “Nympholepsy,” which James B. Meriwether dates from “early in 1925, within the first month or two of his arrival in New Orleans,”
⁴
not only combines elements of the two earlier works but also foreshadows the courthouse of Yoknapatawpha County and some of its less fortunate inhabitants.

Repository: NYPL, 8-pp. ts.

On 4 January 1925 Faulkner left Oxford for New Orleans, planning to work his passage across to Europe and support himself with his writing until he made his reputation abroad as Frost and Eliot had done. His stay lengthened into six months, however, while he wrote in the congenial atmosphere of New Orleans and published his work in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
and a new magazine based there called
The Double Dealer
. His first appearance was in the latter. It was a 3,000-word piece in the January-February number entitled “New Orleans” and it comprised eleven sketches.
⁵
The third of them, entitled “Frankie and Johnny,” was a first-person account in 450 words by a young gangster of his meeting with the yellow-haired, grey-eyed girl who briefly becomes his sweetheart. It was apparently condensed from part 2 of the unpublished story (which was actually untitled by Faulkner), with the first paragraph omitted and slight changes in the remainder. Later Faulkner would rework and expand material from “Frankie and Johnny” for “The Kid Learns,” which appeared on May 31 in the
Times-Picayune
.
⁶
There the liaison resulted in Johnny’s death, and though his girl friend was renamed Mary and called “Little Sister Death” at the end, she was still unmistakably the grey-eyed girl of the original story. In the last paragraph of this story, the pregnant Frankie, “a strip of fecund seeded ground,” will remind some readers of Dewey Dell Bundren in
As I Lay Dying
, “a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”

Repository: FCVA, 23-pp. ts. This story was first published by James B. Meriwether with an introduction and editorial corrections in “Frankie and Johnny,”
The Mississippi Quarterly
, XXXI (Summer 1978), 453–64.

During his New Orleans stay Faulkner worked on what he hoped would be a series of short stories and prose sketches for the Sunday magazine section of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
to be entitled “The Mirror of Chartres Street.” Although only the first of the pieces he published there bore the title “Mirrors of Chartres Street,” Faulkner used his projected general title for the series on typescripts of stories which actually appeared simply under their own titles. “The Priest” bore the number five, and according to James B. Meriwether, it was intended to follow “Jealousy,” which appeared on 1 March 1925 as the fourth in the series of stories. Meriwether suggests that “ ‘The Priest’ was rejected for fear of offending some readers of the paper” and notes that Faulkner made use of some of its elements as well as its title in a 222-word segment of “New Orleans” in
The Double Dealer
.
⁷

Repository: NYPL, 8-pp. carbon ts., unnumbered.

On many occasions Faulkner told of working as a bootlegger during his 1925 stay in New Orleans. He knew an Italian family, he said, whose sons brought in Cuban alcohol for their mother to transform into gin, Scotch, and bourbon for sale in the family café. Faulkner’s brother Jack thought that his bootlegging experience was not extensive, that he might have made a trip or two out into the gulf primarily as a passenger. Whatever the extent of his involvement, it gave him material for fiction, from characters such as Pete Ginotta, in
Mosquitoes
, to those in these two stories. When he came to write his semi-autobiographical “Mississippi”
⁸
nearly thirty years later, he would recount the material in a cohesive summary of the two stories without the violence of the latter one (violence of a sort that recalls the relationship of Popeye and Tommy in
Sanctuary
). Faulkner once told Frederick L. Gwynn that he had destroyed two novels. These two stories may constitute all he was able to salvage from one of those novels. Less than a dozen manuscript pages and four dozen typed pages
survive. However, the same material that constitutes the second of these stories, whose typed pages are numbered 1–14, had also been typed out in another version whose numbering ran from 11–27. Then Faulkner had crossed out these typed numbers and renumbered them by hand from 252–268, where they seemed to serve as the end of the book. (One manuscript page also bears the subtitle “The Prohibition Industry in Southern Waters.”) The first of the stories was apparently submitted unsuccessfully to
Scribner’s Magazine
in November of 1928 and finally published in
Contempo
I (1 Feb. 1932), 1, 4. In mid-December of 1928 Faulkner again sent a story entitled “Once Aboard the Lugger” to
Scribner’s
and it too was refused. It seems likely that it was the second, unpublished, story. The young engineer-narrator may remind some readers of the young steward, David West, of
Mosquitoes
. It seems likely that “Once Aboard the Lugger” may date from about the same time. Faulkner seems to have taken his title, for purposes of ironic contrast, from an English school song: