This is the only one of the seven novels which I wrote without any accompanying feeling of drive or effort, or any following feeling of exhaustion or relief or distaste. When I began it I had no plan at all. I wasn’t even writing a book. I was thinking of books, publication, only in the reverse, in saying to myself, I wont have to worry about publishers liking or not liking this at all. Four years before I had written Soldiers’ Pay. It didn’t take long to write and it got published quickly and made me about five hundred dollars. I said, Writing novels is easy. You dont make much doing it, but it is easy. I wrote Mosquitoes. It wasn’t quite so easy to write and it didn’t get published quite as quickly and it made me about four hundred dollars. I said, Apparently there is more to writing novels, being a novelist, than I thought. I wrote Sartoris. It took much longer, and the publisher refused it at once. But I continued to shop it about for three years with a stubborn and fading hope, perhaps to justify the time which I had spent writing it. This hope died slowly, though it didn’t hurt at all. One day I seemed to shut a door between me and all publishers’ addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write. Now I can make myself a vase like that which the old Roman kept at his bedside and wore the rim slowly away with kissing it. So I, who had never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl.
[Southern Review, Autumn 1972]
* In the summer of 1933, Faulkner wrote an introduction to The Sound and the Fury for a proposed Random House edition. He sent it to his agent Ben Wasson, who sent it to Bennett Cerf on August 24. (See Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner, New York, 1977, pp. 71, 74.) The project was abandoned, but the introduction was retained in the Random House files.
When plans were made in 1946 for a Modern Library double volume of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s editor Robert Linscott found the introduction and sent it to Faulkner in the hope that it could be used, somewhat revised, in the new volume. Faulkner rejected the piece—“I had forgotten what smug false sentimental windy shit it was,” he wrote Linscott—but offered to rewrite and shorten it. However, when the book was published that December, there was no introduction in it. (Selected Letters, pp. 235–36.)
Several complete and incomplete manuscript and typescript versions survived among Faulkner’s papers. They represent at least two quite different versions. The present editor edited and published two of the complete texts: the longer one, which Faulkner dated “19 August 1933,” first appeared in Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1973, and is believed by this editor to be the one Faulkner sent to Wasson; the much shorter one was published in Southern Review, Autumn 1972, and this editor believes it to be the one Faulkner revised and rewrote in 1946. Those two texts are printed here.
Prefatory Note
TO
“APPENDIX: COMPSON, 1699–1945”
WHEN FAULKNER wrote The Sound and the Fury in 1928, he failed to finish it for anybody. In 1946, when Malcolm Cowley reached The Sound and the Fury in gathering and collating material for his portable Faulkner, Faulkner discovered that the book was not even finished for himself. Possibly he realised this in 1946 only because he was incapable of finishing it until 1946; that in 1928 and 1938 he still didn’t know enough about people to finish out his own, and so the book was actually not unconsciously willful tour de force in obfuscation but rather the homemade, the experimental, the first moving picture projector—warped lens, poor light, undependable mechanism and even a bad screen—which had to wait until 1946 for the lens to clear, the light to steady, the gears to run smooth. It was too late then, though. The book was done. It was last year’s maidenhead now. All Faulkner could do was try and make a key. He thought a page or two pages would do it. It ran nearer twenty. Here it is.
[Faulkner wrote “Appendix: Compson, 1699–1945,” an addition to The Sound and the Fury, for inclusion in the Viking Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, published in April 1946. It was republished in December 1946 in the Modern Library double volume of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and Faulkner sent an introductory note for the Appendix to his editor Robert N. Linscott, probably in May 1946. The note did not appear in the book, and the version he sent to Linscott has apparently not survived. However, a draft of it appears on the verso of a typescript page in an early draft of A Fable, and was published in “A Prefatory Note by Faulkner for the Compson Appendix,” by James B. Meriwether, in American Literature, May 1971. That text is printed here.]
[The first six reviews/essay-reviews in Part 9 of this Modern Library edition were originally published in 1920, 1921, and 1922 in the University of Mississippi student newspaper, The Mississippian. The author’s name appears, variously, as: William F. [sic] Falkner; W. Falkner; and W.F. They were collected in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962). In editing these pieces, Collins not only corrected a host of printer’s errors in Faulkner’s prose, but also made corrections in the quotations. Those corrected texts have been printed here with few changes.]
Review
OF
In April Once
BY W. A. PERCY
MR. PERCY is a native Mississippian, a graduate of the University of the South and of the Harvard Law School. He was a member of the Belgian Relief Commission in the early days of the war, then served as a lieutenant attached to the 37th Division. He now lives in Greenville.
Mr. Percy—like alas! how many of us—suffered the misfortune of having been born out of his time. He should have lived in Victorian England and gone to Italy with Swinburne, for like Swinburne, he is a mixture of passionate adoration of beauty and as passionate a despair and disgust with its manifestations and accessories in the human race. His muse is Latin in type—poignant ecstasies of lyrical extravagance and a short lived artificial strength achieved at the cost of true strength in beauty. Beauty, to him, is almost like physical pain, evident in the simplicity of this poem which is the nearest perfect thing in the book—
I heard a bird at break of day
Sing from the autumn trees
A song so mystical and calm,
So full of certainties,
No man, I think, could listen long
Except upon his knees.
Yet this was but a simple bird
Alone, among dead trees.
The influence of the frank pagan beauty worship of the past is heavily upon him, he is like a little boy closing his eyes against the dark of modernity which threatens the bright simplicity and the colorful romantic pageantry of the middle ages with which his eyes are full. One can imagine him best as a violinist who became blind about the time Mozart died, it would seem that the last thing he saw with his subjective intellect was Browning standing in naive admiration before his own mediocrity, of which Mr. Percy’s “Epistle from Corinth” is the fruit. This is far and away the best thing in the book, and would have been better except for the fact that Mr. Percy, like every man who has ever lived, is the victim of his age.
As a whole, the book sustains its level of lyrical beauty. Occasionally it becomes pure vowelization, for it is not always the word that Mr. Percy seeks, but the sound. There is one element that will tend more than anything else to help it oblivionward, this is the section devoted to war poems. How many, many, many reams of paper that have been ruined with poetry appertaining to the late war no one, probably, will ever know, yet still the nightingales wear swords and Red Cross brassards.
Mr. Percy has not written a great book,—there is too much music in it for that, he is a violinist with an inferior instrument—yet (and most unusual as modern books of poetry go) the gold outweighs the dross. How much, I would not undertake to say, for he is a difficult person to whom to render justice; like Swinburne, he obscures the whole mental horizon, one either likes him passionately or one remains forever cold to him.
[Mississippian, November 10, 1920]
Review
OF
Turns and Movies
BY CONRAD AIKEN
IN THE FOG generated by the mental puberty of contemporary American versifiers while writing inferior Keats or sobbing over the middle west, appears one rift of heaven sent blue—the poems of Conrad Aiken. He, alone of the entire yelping pack, seems to have a definite goal in mind. The others—there are perhaps half a dozen exceptions—are so many loud sounds lost in a single depth of privet hedge; the others lay about them lustily with mouth open and eyes closed, some in more or less impenetrable thickets of Browningesque obscurity, others hopelessly mired in the swamps of mediocrity, and all are creating a last flurry before darkness kindly engulfs them.
Many of them have realized that aesthetics is as much a science as chemistry, that there are certain definite scientific rules which, when properly applied, will produce great art as surely as certain chemical elements, combined in the proper proportions, will produce certain reactions; yet Mr. Aiken alone has made any effort to discover them and apply them intelligently. Nothing is ever accidental with him, he has most happily escaped our national curse of filling each and every space, religious, physical, mental and moral, and beside him the British nightingales, Mr. Vachel Lindsay with his tin pan and iron spoon, Mr. Kreymborg with his lithographic water coloring, and Mr. Carl Sandburg with his sentimental Chicago propaganda are so many puppets fumbling in windy darkness.
Mr. Aiken has a plastic mind, he uses variation, inversion, change of rhythm and such metrical tricks with skillful effect, and his clear impersonality will never permit him to write poor verse. He is never a press agent as are so many of his contemporaries. It is rather difficult to quote an example from him, as he has written with certain musical forms in mind, and any division of his work corresponding to the accepted dimensions of a poem is as a single chord to a fugue; yet the three quatrains from “Discordants”:
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,—
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.
This is one of the most beautifully, impersonally sincere poems of all time.
The most interesting phase of Mr. Aiken’s work is his experiments with an abstract three dimensional verse patterned on polyphonic music form: The Jig of Forslin and The House of Dust. This is interesting because of the utterly unlimited possibilities of it, he has the whole world before him; for as yet no one has made a successful attempt to synthesize musical reactions with abstract documentary reactions. Miss Amy Lowell tried a polyphonic prose which, in spite of the fact that she has created some delightful statuettes of perfectly blown glass, is merely a literary flatulency; and it has left her, reed in hand, staring in naive surprise at the air whence her bubbles have burst.
Mr. Aiken has never been haphazard, he has developed steadily, never for a moment at a loss, yet it is almost impossible to discover where his initial impulse came from. At times it seems that he is completing a cycle back to the Greeks, again there seem to be faint traces of the French symbolists, scattered through his poems are bits of soft sonority that Masefield might have formed; and so at last one returns to the starting point—from where did he come, and where is he going? It is interesting to watch, for—say in fifteen years—when the tide of aesthetic sterility which is slowly engulfing us has withdrawn, our first great poet will be left. Perhaps he is the man.
[Mississippian, February 16, 1921]
Review
OF
Aria da Capo: A Play in One Act
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Something new enough to be outstanding in this age of mental puberty, this loud gesturing of the aesthetic messiahs of our emotional Valhalla who have one eye on the ball and the other on the grandstand. In newspaper parlance Miss Millay might be said to have scored a “beat”; truly so in the sense that her contemporaries (those of them who will ever become aware that she has done something “different”) will each wonder to himself why he or she did not think of it first, which is very natural. Here is an idea so simple that it does give to wonder why under heaven no one has thought of it before. Its simplicity is doubtless the reason.
The play is a slight thing in itself; the surprising freshness of the idea of a pastoral tragedy enacted and concluded by interlopers against a conventional background of paper streamers and colored confetti in the midst of a thoroughly artificial Pierrot and Columbine suite alone makes it worth a second glance. Yet, this is an unjust statement; for about all modern playwrights and versifiers offer us is a sterile clashing of ideas innocent of imagination; a species of emotional shorthand. Aria da Capo possesses more than a clever idea skilfully carried out, yet it is difficult to put the hand on just what makes it go; there is no unusual depth of experience, either mental or physical, to be traced from it other than those characteristics acquired without conscious effort by every young writer, from the reading done during the period of his mental development, either from choice or compulsion. The language is good; the rhyme neither faltering through too close attention, nor careless from lack of it; the choice of words, with one exception—a speech of Pierrot’s which I do not remember contains a word of inexcusable crudeness—is sound: and—heaven sent genius—the play is not too long; i.e., no padding, no mental sofa pillows to break the fall of the doomed and tiring mind. A lusty tenuous simplicity; the gods have given Miss Millay a strong wrist; and though an idea alone does not make or mar a piece of writing, it is something; and this one of hers will live even though Miss Amy Lowell intricately festoons it with broken glass, or Mr. Carl Sandburg sets it in the stock yards, to be acted, of a Saturday afternoon, by the Beef Butchers’ Union.
[Mississippian, January 13, 1922]
American Drama:
Eugene O’Neill
SOME ONE has said—a Frenchman, probably; they have said everything—that art is preeminently provincial: i.e., it comes directly from a certain age and a certain locality. This is a very profound statement; for Lear and Hamlet and All’s Well could never have been written anywhere save in England during Elizabeth’s reign (this is proved by the Hamlets that have come out of Denmark and Sweden, and the All’s Well of French comedy) nor could Madame Bovary have been written in any place other than the Rhone valley in the eighteenth century; and just as Balzac is nineteenth century Paris. But there are exceptions to this, as there are to all rules holding a particle of truth; two modern ones being Conrad and Eugene O’Neill. These two men are anomalies, Joseph Conrad especially; this man has overturned all literary tradition in this point. It is too soon yet to be committed about O’Neill, though young as he is, he is already a quantity to make one wonder at the truth of the above assertion.
It is not especially difficult—after a man has written and passed on—to trace the threads which were drawn together by him and put on paper in the form of his own work. It can be seen how Shakespeare ruthlessly took what he needed from his predecessors and contemporaries, leaving behind him a drama which the hand does not hold blood that can cap; the German playwrights have obviously and logically followed their destinies according to the Teutonic standards of thought down to the work of Hauptmann and Moeller; Synge is provincial, smacking of the soil from which he sprang as no other modern does (Synge is dead now); while the one man who is accomplishing anything in American drama is a contradiction to all concepts of art.
This may be because of the fact that America has no drama or literature worth the name, and hence no tradition. If thi
s be the reason, one must perforce believe that the Fates have indeed played a scurvy trick upon him in casting into twentieth century America a man who might go to astounding lengths in a land possessing traditions. Facts about Conrad, however, who is even more of a contradiction than O’Neill, supply a basis for hoping that chance is not diabolical enough to perpetrate such a thing; and also show what an incalculable, indefinable quantity genius—horrible word—is.
The most unusual factor about O’Neill is that a modern American should write plays about the sea. We have had no salt water traditions for a hundred years. The English are the wanderers, while we essentially are not. Yet here is a man, son of a New York political “boss,” raised in New York City and a student at Princeton, who writes of the sea. He has been, through accident, a sailor himself: he was shanghaied aboard a South American bound vessel and was forced to make a voyage as an able seaman from Rio to Liverpool in order to get home. He is not physically strong, having congenitally weak lungs, hence must lead a careful life as regards hardship and exposure; and yet his first writing phase was dominated by the sea.