PREFACE I. Malcolm Cowley, the Portable Faulkner (New York, 1946); Revised and Expanded Edn, 1967
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Notes PREFACE I. Malcolm Cowley, The Portable Faulkner (New York, 1946); revised and expanded edn, 1967. 2. In On Native Grounds (London, 1943), p. 462. See, too, Delmore Sehwartz's 'The Fietion ofWilliam Faulkner', The Southern Review, VII (Summer 1941), pp.145-60. 3. Walter J. Slatoff, The Questfor Failure, (Ithaea, new York, 1960). CHAPTER I: WRITER IN THE FARAWAY COUNTRY I. The aeeent falls on the first syllable. 'Bayard' is pronouneed 'Baird'. Sartoris is a shortened version of the original Flags in the Dust, prepared not by Faulkner but by his agent, Ben Wasson. Now that Flags in the Dust has been published, we ean say that Wasson did his work with exemplary skilI. Every virtue of the original was retained at the expense of the repetitious and redundant. II rniglior fabbro, indeed. 2. Faulkner in the University, eds Frederiek L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville, Va., 1959), p. 285. 3. The Arnerican (London, 1949), pp.I5-17. (First published 1877; the prefaee dates from 1906-8.) 4. Faulkner in the University, p. 22. 5. J.P. Sartre, 'William Faulkner's "Sartoris''', Yale French Studies, No. 10 (1952), pp. 95-9; 96. 6. Ibid., p. 98. 7. These Thirteen, p. 213. 8. Ibid., p. 271. We notiee that this yearning for height is answered by Bayard's interest in ftying maehines, whieh refteet his enclosed, self polluting world better than anything else eould. 9. In 1926, the year before Sartoris was written, Faulkner elaborated his view that 'you don't eommit suieide when you are disappointed in love. You write a book'-a book in whieh your hero eommits suieide. (Faulkner, A Biograplry, Joseph Blotner (London, 1974), p. 228.) 10. Louis D. Rubin,J r., The Faraway Country (Seattle, Washington, 1963), p.70. 11. Blotner, op. eit., p. 811. 12. See, too, poem XVIII of A Green Bough. 13. Rubin, op. eit., p. 14. 14. I refer to Faulkner's ehildhood love and wife-to-be, Estelle Oldham, who married Cornell FrankIin, a lawyer, in April 1918. It is noteworthy that Oetober 1918, is the month Faulkner's militaryambitions eame to an end 227 228 The Art oJ William Faulkner and that he should have identified it in this way with his earIier disappointment. 15. This complex underIies the view of art developed by J ulius Kauffmann, Fairchild and Gordon. Their argument concerns Fairchildl Anderson's c10seness to rural America and art's relation to universal truths. The greatest artists express these truths (associated with passion and suffering) with the immediacy of sculpture. Being young is associated with such revelatory concreteness, with Keatsian illuminations in wh ich truth is captured but retains its particularity and potential in time rather than as an artefact. 16. Fairchild's girI, golden curls above the ordure, suggests how dangerously fragile this state iso 17. Both quotations draw from Poem xxxv of The Green Bough, where winter follows the death of the 'courtesan' summer and the poet senses 'An old sorrow sharp as woodsmoke on the air'. In Sartoris, the novelist describes September as possessing 'an ancient sadness sharp as woodsmoke on the windless air ... ' (p.27). 18. The Raven bleak and Philomel Amid the bleeding trees were fixed, His hoarse cry and hers were mixed And through the dark their droppings fell. .. This is Faulkner's own poem, no. XXVII in The Green Bough, though the reader might be forgiven for mistaking it for the genuine article. 19. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order 01 Art (London, 1967). 20. Andre Bleikasten, Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' (Bloomington, Ind., 1973), p.91. 21. In his review of The Town, Andrew Lytle drew attention to the triad composed of virgin (Linda Snopes), wife (Eula Varner) and mother (Maggie Mallison), complemented by Flem Snopes (legal husband), Manfred De Spain (physical husband) and Gavin Stevens (moral hus band). He interpreted this as signifying the 'fearful impairment of man's competency towards womankind'. ('The Town: Helen's Last Stand', The Sewanee Review, LXV (Summer 1957), p. 479.) CHAPTER 2: THE COMPSON DEVILMENT 1. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1959), p. 133. 2. See Winthrop Tilley, 'The Idiot Boy in Mississippi; Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury''', American Journal 01 Mental Deficiency, LIX Oanuary 1955), pp. 374-7. 3. Lion in the Garden, eds James B. Meriwether and Michael Miligate (New York, 1968), p. 245. 4. Faulkner, A Biography, Joseph B10tner (London, 1974), p. 571. 5. Luster, we notice, thinks of Benjy as deaf and dumb, which shows how far from realistic such a mute iso Further proof of Benjy's metaphorical status may be gleaned from the fact that, although Quentin, Jason and Caddy appear in 'That Evening Sun' and 'AJustice', stories wh ich were probably first written before The Sound and the Fury, Benjy does not. 6. Benjy's name is changed in 1900, when he is five years old and his deficiency apparent. Damuddy dies in 1898 (in his nütes für the büok, Notes to Chapter 2 229 Faulkner dated it 1900). Hence their assoeiation. 7. Nor only her. Versh teils Benjy his name has been altered because the family are 'making a bluegum out ofyou', i.e. abogy. 8. Irene Kaluza, The Functioning ofSentence StTUcture in the Stream-oj-Gonsciousness Teehnique of William Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury' (Krakow, 1967). 9. In 'Each in Its Ordered Place: Structure and Narrative in "Benjy's Section" of "The Sound and the Fury'" (Ameriean Literature, XXIV Oanuary 1958), pp. 440-56), George R. Stewart andJoseph M. Backus suggest that Mr Compson's death coincides with the second anniversary of Caddy's marriage and that his funeral takes place on Mississippi's Memorial Day. His death thus marks the tragedy of the Confederacy and makes hirn a more substantial figure of interest than is usually allowed for. 10. A Prufrockian echo. 'Philoprogenitive' (p.121) and 'dust and desire' (p.122) also owe something to Eliot. Ida Fasel's 'A "Conversation" between Faulkner and Eliot' (The Mississippi Quarterly, xx (Fall 1967), pp. 195-207) offers an indiscriminate list ofsupposed correspondences, though Benjy's description of Caddy (p.70) and the fis hing of the three boys (possibly Jason's hearing the lock at the end of his section) are more convincing examples suggested by her. 11. Elliott Coleman, quoted in Robert D. Jacobs, 'Faulkner's Tragedy of Isolation', Southern Renaseence, eds Louis D. Rubin and Robert D. Jacobs (Baltimore, 1953), p. 174. 12. Blotner, op. eit., p. 573. 13. In 'Mayday', an allegory presented to Helen Baird in 1926, Faulkner also has the soldier-questor Sir Galwyn of Arthgyl join Little Sister Death by drowning hirnself. 14. 'Caddy' is 'Candace', an unusual name although it has a literary precedent in Charlotte Bronte's Villette Qust as Temple Drake in Sanctuary may borrow her name from one of Jane Eyre's teachers at Lowood). Paulina Home's doll is called Candace 'far, indeed, it's begrimed complexion gave it much of an Ethiopian aspect', Candace being queen of the Ethiopians (Acts, 8, 27). In this, Caddy also owes something to Helen Baird, a dark-skinned, candid, vivaeious woman with whom Faulkner fell in love in 1925. She contributes to the portraits of Cecily Saunders in Soldiers' Pay, Patricia Robyns in Mosquitoes (the novel is dedicated to her) and Charlotte Rittenmeyer in The Wild Palms. 15. Faulkner, A Golleetion ofGritical Essays, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood Cliffs, NJ., 1966), p. 252. 16. Richard Chase, The Ameriean Novel and fts Tradition (New York, 1957) p. 232. 17. Blotner, op. cit., p. 568. 18. Cleanth Brooks, 'Primitivism in "The Sound and the Fury''', English Institute Essays, 1952, ed. Alan S. Downer (New York, 1954), p.25. 19. Blotner, op. cit., p. 571. 20. Blotner, op. eit., p. 811. 21. Ibid., p. 811. 22. Lion in the Garden, pp. 147, 222 and 245 respectively. 23. James B. Meriwether, The Literary Gareer of William Faulkner (Princeton, NJ., 1961), p. 16. 24. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (London, 1967). 230 The Art of William Faulkner 25. Carvel Collins, 'The Interior Monologues of"The Sound and the Fury"', English Institute Essays, 1952. 26. Leon Edel, The Psychological Nove11900-1950 (London, 1955), p. 102. 27. BIotner, op. cit., p. 811. 28. Faulkner at West Point, eds Joseph L. Fant III and Robert Ashley (New York, 1964), pp. IO~II. 29. Robert M. Adams, 'Poetry in the Novel: or Faulkner Esemplastic', The Virginia Quarterly Review, XXIX (Spring 1953), pp. 430--1. 30. Richard Chase, 'The Stone and the Crucifixion: Faulkner's "Light in August"', in William Faulkner: Two Decades 0] Criticism, eds Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing, Mich., 1951), p. 216. CHAPTER 3: THAT TIME AND THAT WILDERNESS I. Essays, Speeches and Public Letters by William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether (London, 1967), pp. 62-4. 2. Gerald Langford, Faulkner's Revision o]'Sanctuary' (Austin, Texas, 1972), pp. 82-3. 3. More Eliot was lost in galley-revision: 'man's life ravels out in half measures' (Prufrock); man is 'a shadow with an armful offeathers in a gale, on a black plain .... ' ('The Hollow Men'). 4. Pertinently enough, he did so by capitalising on the method of retrospec tive biography first used to describe the Memphis gangster. 5. It is from such observations that the imagery of the Nobel Prize address derives. 6. Malcolm Cowley, The Portable Faulkner (New York, 1946); revised and expanded edn, 1976, p. xxii. 7. See Thomas L. McHaney, '''Sanctuary'' and Frazier's (sie) Slain Kings', The Mississippi Quarterly, XXIV (Summer 1971), pp.