Repository: ROUM, 10-pp. ms. and 32-pp ts.
The Unvanquished
This story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, CCIX (14 Nov. 1936), 12–13, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130. In the late spring of 1937, when Faulkner revised it, he used tearsheets from the Post, pasting one column on each page and typing in other parts. The proportions of tearsheets to typescript were about equal, and there were no significant differences in the text between the magazine form and the book form apart from the insertion of three numerals to divide Chapter IV. The material was retitled “Riposte in Tertio,” and the original title was used to give the new book its name.
Repository: ROUM, 13-pp. ms.
Vendée
When this story first went to The Saturday Evening Post in September of 1934, editor Graeme Lorimer liked it but requested that Faulkner “bring about the boys’ revenge on Grumby more swiftly and keep Grumby in character throughout.” Faulkner did so and made a number of other clarifying changes in the first half of the story. He carefully rewrote passages from typescript pages 8–13 and 18–19, totaling more than a thousand words in all. He described Uncle Buck, Ringo, and Bayard as they tracked Ab Snopes toward Grenada at the same time that they pursued Grumby and his men. This material also included the first meeting with Grumby and the treatment of the wound he inflicted on Uncle Buck. Yance’s name was changed to Joby, and more than two dozen new paragraphs were created by indention. The end of the magazine version told the reader only that Grumby was pegged out on the door of the old compress, whereas deleted material from the typescript plainly said that he looked like a flayed coon, and one passage, here included in brackets, describes obliquely what seems to have been the process by which the boys flayed Grumby and partially cured his hide before they pegged it to the compress door. After a long interval the story finally appeared in Volume CCIX (5 Dec. 1936), 16–17, 86, 87, 90, 92, 93, 94. In revising the story to become Chapter V of The Unvanquished, Faulkner supplied additional material about the pursuit of Grumby, the kill, and the placing of his severed hand on Rosa Millard’s grave. Faulkner also supplied numbers to divide the chapter into four parts.
Repository: ROUM, 12-pp. ms. and 32-pp. ts.
Fool About a Horse
It may have been in the late winter or early spring of 1935 that Faulkner wrote a ten-page manuscript which he entitled “Fool About a Horse.” A nameless narrator relayed the story told in the disused law office of “Grandfather” while a servant named Roskus operated the fan against the summer heat and served the drinks. The only Roskus in Faulkner’s work is Roskus Gibson, who works for the Compsons and figures in The Sound and the Fury. This suggests that this story, like several others, began with one of the Compson children, in this case Quentin MacLachan Compson III, who related the tale told by the sewing-machine agent V. K. Suratt to Grandfather, presumably Jason Lycurgus Compson, Jr., and Doc Peabody. It was the story of the losing encounter of Pap, his father Lum Suratt, with Pat Stamper, to the considerable disadvantage not only of Pap but also the boy’s Mammy, Vynie Suratt. Later, in an undated letter Faulkner probably wrote in March of 1935 to Morton Goldman, he said he did not know whom to try a new story (“Lion”) on, “since I made such a bust about the Post with FOOL ABOUT A HORSE.…” Whatever the bust was, Faulkner did not give up on the story, and in the summer of 1935 he asked Goldman to send it to Scribner’s Magazine with the assurance that he would rewrite it if necessary. Scribner’s bought the story, and it appeared there in Volume C (Aug. 1936), 80–86. A surviving thirty-three-page typescript is different enough from the Scribner’s version to suggest that Faulkner did a very thorough job of revision. In the magazine there was no narrator interposed between the reader and the witness of the trading contest who described it in the first person. This witness was no longer identified as Suratt, and the passages describing Suratt were deleted. Faulkner thus eliminated not only the conjectural Quentin Compson but also Grandfather and Doc Peabody and the setting in Grandfather’s office. The other changes were many without being major. One thing Faulkner did was to smooth out the narrator’s dialect. Whereas he pronounced the impersonal pronoun “hit” in the typescript, in the magazine it usually became “it,” and “misdoubted” became “thought.” Some changes worked in the opposite direction, however, as “might” became “mought” and “fire” became “fahr.” But most of the paragraphs of the typescript underwent changes of some kind as Faulkner sharpened the story, working meticulously to convey the narrator’s speech precisely as he wanted it. In the winter of 1938–39, at work on what would become his novel The Hamlet, Faulkner revised the story, incorporating it into part 2 of Chapter Two in Book One, “Flem.” Now the nameless narrator, who had been Suratt in the typescript, became V. K. Ratliff. And Lum Suratt, who had become just Pap, had been replaced as the story’s protagonist by Ab Snopes. Vynie Suratt, later just Mammy, had become “Miz Snopes.” Faulkner made at least as many revisions between the magazine version and the book version as he had earlier made between the typescript version and the magazine version. Most of the changes came in the first half of the story, where he compressed a number of pages. There were obvious changes: Varner’s store became Whiteleaf; McCaslin’s store became Cain’s store, and Uncle Ike McCaslin was replaced by Cain. Faulkner also eliminated the Roman numerals II and III which had separated the parts of the magazine story. Although he had not altered the main facts of the trading match between Ab Snopes and Pat Stamper and its consequences, he had, in effect, had Ratliff retell the whole story, with many changes in diction, sentence structure, and sequence to sharpen his tale yet again.
Repository: FCVA.
Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard
The evolution of this story shows how painstakingly Faulkner worked on his fiction and how many stages might separate the inception and the final version of a story. Perhaps as early as the late 1920’s Faulkner began a manuscript entitled “Omar’s Eighteenth Quatrain.” (It was actually the seventeenth in Edward FitzGerald’s first edition of his translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, eighteenth in the third, fourth, and fifth editions.) One six-page fragment, a two-page fragment, and three separate pages testify to Faulkner’s determination to get the story right. With no internal divisions, the six-page fragment in Faulkner’s tiny script follows Suratt from Mrs. Littlejohn’s boarding house to Henry Armstid’s farm. Joined by a third man named Vernon, they drive in Suratt’s buckboard with its sewing-machine housing out to the Old Frenchman’s place, where Faulkner paused for a philosophical disquisition on the now anonymous early settler who gave the tract its name. The three men squat hidden in the bushes listening to the shoveling, which Suratt assures them is the sound of Flem Snopes searching for buried treasure. Soon afterward, when the sound ceases, Suratt dispels some of Vernon’s doubts by accosting a lone departing rider in the dark night, who turns out to be Flem on his way back to Frenchman’s Bend. With Vernon still skeptical and Henry a fanatical believer, Suratt returns the next night to Henry’s farm with Uncle Dick, the dowser. The two eat hurriedly and set out once again for the Old Frenchman’s place. Joined by Vernon, the three men complete the journey and then take pick and shovels from Suratt’s buckboard to begin digging wherever Uncle Dick might find a lode. There the fragment breaks off. The other single pages are slight variants of the episodes at Henry’s house, of Uncle Dick’s appearance, and of the skulking in the bushes at the Old Frenchman’s place. On one of the pages Flem had installed one Elmer Vance as caretaker at the place. This was followed by Suratt’s dickering with Flem over a sale price. On the two connected pages (the second of them actually comprising only eight lines), Vernon discovers that the oldest coin in the sack he had found had been minted in 1901; Suratt’s, in 1894. Here Faulkner brought the story swiftly, almost abruptly, to an end, as Henry keeps digging madly in his hole, visited once a day by his gaunt wife bringing him food. To the lounging onlookers he digs with “the regularity of a mechanical toy … with something monstrous in his unflagging
motions.…” The only complete manuscript, eight unnumbered pages entitled “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard,” shows, on seven of the pages, one or more paste-ons cut from a previous manuscript. Part I introduces Suratt and follows him through the goat-buying deal (which took place three years before) to his learning of Flem’s purchase of the Old Frenchman’s place. Part II shows him there, spying on Flem, then bringing Vernon Tull and Henry Armstid with him. When Uncle Dick, the dowser, finds buried coins, they determine to buy the place from Flem. Part III relates the purchase, for $3,000, the unsuccessful search for more coins, and Ratliff’s realization that they have been duped. Part IV describes the crowd watching Armstid dig and then the men on the porch of Varner’s store commenting on Flem and his triumph. A number of typescript fragments of varying lengths show Faulkner trying different arrangements and development of his material. The only complete typescript, one of thirty pages (which could antedate the eight manuscript pages), begins with a description of the Old Frenchman’s place and Suratt and then goes on to the goat-buying deal. This section ends with Suratt learning of Flem’s new purchase. Only a space rather than Roman numerals separates the parts of this version. Next Faulkner shows Suratt and his two partners spying on Flem. Another section is devoted to Uncle Dick. In the next section, Suratt dickers with Flem. In the next, the three men buy the place. The sixth section shows them digging. Then Suratt realizes they have been tricked, while Armstid continues his furious efforts. The seventh and last part shows the spectators observing Armstid and ends with the comments of the men at Varner’s Store. The last six lines of dialogue are almost identical with those in the eight-page manuscript version. On his sending schedule Faulkner noted that he sent the story to The Saturday Evening Post on 16 May 1930, but then he canceled that date and substituted “5-27-30.” Faulkner’s correspondence with the Post2 reveals that he sent in two versions of the story, that the editors liked the first one rather than the second, and that they had indicated acceptance by 5 August 1930 and confirmed this on 18 August, although Faulkner recorded on his sending schedule an acceptance date of 7 August. Because of the radical difference in the Post version—putting the mad Armstid and his observers first rather than last—it seems likely that the typescript the editors accepted was substantially different from the one discussed above. The story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, CCIV (27 Feb. 1932), 12–13, 52, 57. It was probably the winter of 1938–39 when Faulkner began to use elements of the story in The Hamlet. The most obvious change was in Suratt’s name: he was now V. K. Ratliff. And Odum Bookwright had replaced Vernon Tull as one-third owner of the Old Frenchman’s place. There were other changes deriving from Faulkner’s integration of the materials of the short story into his novel. For one, Flem Snopes did not buy the Old Frenchman’s place; Will Varner deeded it to Mr. and Mrs. Flem Snopes as a part of his daughter Eula’s dowry. Faulkner expanded the goat-buying story which is section II of the magazine story to become part 2 of Chapter Three in Book One of the novel, and he ended it with Flem sitting proprietorially in front of the Old Frenchman’s place. Then, in part 1 of Chapter Two of Book Four, he launched into the much expanded tale. In rewriting sections III and IV of the magazine story he made a number of specific changes. For example, the purchase price in dollars of the Old Frenchman’s place was not specified, but the presumptive date of the coins to be found, 1861, was specified, presumably to make more immediately apparent the meaning of the clue that tells Ratliff for certain that they have been duped into buying a salted mine. Finally, Faulkner took section I of the magazine story, rearranged and expanded it, and used it in part 2 of the chapter to end the novel.
Repositories: JFSA, mss. fragments; ROUM, 8-pp. ms., tss. fragments, and 30-pp. ts.
The Hound
Faulkner sent this story to The Saturday Evening Post on 17 November 1930. They refused it, as Scribner’s and The American Mercury did subsequently. On 8 May 1931 it was accepted by Harper’s, where it appeared in Volume CLXIII (Aug. 1931), 266–74. In 1934 it was reprinted in Doctor Martino and Other Stories, now out of print. In the late winter of 1938–39, Faulkner interpolated it into The Hamlet. The most striking change was Ernest Cotton’s new name and identity: he was no longer a bachelor; he was now Mink Snopes, with a wife and two children. In part 1 of Chapter One, in Book Three, “The Long Summer,” Faulkner set up the conflict between him and Jack Houston. Rather than penning up Houston’s hog and winning a court judgment against Houston of one dollar as a pound fee, as Cotton had done in the story, Mink allowed his scrub yearling bull to stray into Houston’s pasture, where Houston wintered it and then won a court judgment against Snopes of three dollars for pasturage. There were other changes, such as the elimination of the men’s colloquy on the porch of Varner’s store about Houston’s disappearance, and the addition of the unsuccessful intrusion of Lump Snopes into Mink’s attempts to dispose of the body, Lump being determined to find the fifty dollars he was convinced Houston had been carrying. Though many of the passages were identical with those in the story, Faulkner had expanded it considerably and deepened the portraiture of both Snopes and Houston. He would recount the story again in both The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959) as he completed the Snopes trilogy. By the time he was writing The Mansion, he was telling the story for the fourth time, and discrepancies in these accounts in the trilogy presented a problem for Faulkner’s editor, Albert Erskine. Faulkner was perfectly amenable to the idea of changes which would reconcile this last version with the others, but he was not seriously concerned about them. He wrote Erskine: “When I first wrote the story of Houston’s murder, Mink was a bachelor named Something Cotton. Apparently changing his name and his condition (possibly his motivation too, though I have forgot the original story, called THE HOUND) hasn’t outraged too many academical gumshoes, so I doubt if this will either.”
Spotted Horses
This story provides another example of the indefatigable persistence with which Faulkner worked at his short stones. At some time between the late fall of 1926 and early 1927, he was at work on the beginnings of two novels.3 One of them, Flags in the Dust, he would go on to complete, and it would be published as Sartoris (1929). The other, Father Abraham, he put aside, but it would eventually be completed as The Hamlet. Faulkner had stopped work on Father Abraham after writing 14,000 words which introduced Flem Snopes as a successful banker in Jefferson and then, in an extended flashback which made up most of the twenty-five legal-size pages of the manuscript, introduced the Varners and other residents of Frenchman’s Bend and went on to recount Flem’s return from Texas, followed by the auction of the spotted horses and the immediate aftermath. At some point Faulkner wrote the story of the horse auction in a version told solely through dialogue, without quotation marks and with many phonetic spellings, a typescript whose pages were numbered 204–23, as though they had been extracted from a collection of some sort. He called this version “As I Lay Dying.” In another recasting, he used the title “Abraham’s Children.” It was probably early November of 1928 when Faulkner took to Alfred Dashiell, an editor at Scribner’s Magazine, a twenty-one-page typescript also entitled “As I Lay Dying.” In this one, a man driving for his uncle on a political junket (as Faulkner said he himself had done) told the story of the auction. Dashiell refused it. On 25 August 1930 Faulkner sent Scribner’s a 15,000-word version of the story under the title “The Peasants.” It was the most effective version yet, but now it was too long for Scribner’s. In early January of 1931, however, the editor Kyle Crichton wrote Faulkner that if he could cut it to 8,000 words and still retain its flavor, Scribner’s would take it. Encouraged by Dashiell as well, Faulkner revised the story and renamed it “Aria Con Amore” but sent it on 2 February 1931 to The Saturday Evening Post. When the Post refused it, Faulkner sent the sixteen-page version to Scribner’s. Now the story was told by yet another narrator, V. K. Suratt, who spoke directly to the reader as to another resident of Frenchman’s Bend. On 20 February, Dashiell wrote Faulkner that
they would take it but asked if he could change the title. Faulkner suggested simply “Horses” and apparently set to work on a revision which expanded the sixteen-page version to 8,000 words. It finally appeared as “Spotted Horses” in Volume LXXXIX (June 1931), 585–97. An eight-page fragment entitled “The Peasants” begins with the first sighting of the ponies by the men on the porch of Varner’s store and breaks off as Henry Armstid is about to compel his wife to help him catch the pony he has bought from the Texan—not yet named Buck Hipps. Told in the third person, the fragment is divided by Roman numerals into six parts. It is difficult to determine if this was the manuscript which preceded the 15,000-word typescript which Faulkner sent to Scribner’s on 25 August 1930 or if it was another treatment of the story which he attempted later. In September of 1939 Faulkner retold the story once more as part 1 of Chapter One of “The Peasants,” Book Four of The Hamlet. Using an omniscient narrator instead of Ratliff, he recast the story, expanding it to thirty-seven pages and bringing it closer to Father Abraham than to “Spotted Horses.” This retelling in general resembled the narrative line of the eight-page manuscript fragment called “The Peasants,” though the treatment was fuller and more detailed, with minor variations in the order of incidents and dialogue. Now the Texan had a name, Buck Hipps. Jody Varner appeared on the scene, as did others from Frenchman’s Bend. In two changes, Admiral Dewey Snopes was replaced by Wallstreet Panic Snopes and I. O Snopes’s place was taken by Lump Snopes. Ratliff was still very much in evidence, urging the others not to buy the horses and still carrying some of the narrative burden in his dialogue. But now, released by the switch to an omniscient narrator from the constant constraint of Ratliff’s dialect, Faulkner was free to use his poetic prose to the fullest advantage. The comic, satiric, and poignant elements of the tale all benefited from these changes and from its expansion.