Repository: FCVA
Nympholepsy
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.
Frankie and Johnny
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 It was apparently condensed from part 2 of the unpublished story (which was actually untitled by Faulkner), with the first paragraph omitted and slight changes in the remainder.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.
The Priest
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.
Once Aboard the Lugger (I) and (II)
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:
We’re good at games like rugger
And snooker and lacrosse,
And once aboard the lugger
We are never at a loss.
Repository: ROUM
Miss Zilphia Gant
By mid-December of 1928, when Faulkner submitted this story to Scribner’s Magazine, it had already been there once before. It was refused both times and later rejected by The American Mercury as well. In March of 1930 it was purchased by The Southwest Review, though it would prove to be too long for that magazine, which sold it in turn to the Book Club of Texas. It appeared under that imprint, in a special edition of 300 copies, with an introduction by Henry Nash Smith on 27 June 1932.
Repository: FCVA, 9-pp. ms., 18-pp. ts., 23-pp. ts. University of Texas Humanities Research Center, 23-pp. carbon ts.
Thrift
This story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, CCIII (6 Sept. 1930), 16–17, 76, 82. It was Faulkner’s third story to appear in a national magazine (“A Rose for Emily” was published in April in Forum and “Honor” in The American Mercury in July of the same year), and it was selected for inclusion in the annual Doubleday O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories. As a predominantly comic treatment of aerial warfare in the Great War, it offers a contrast (as does “With Caution and Dispatch”) to the tragicomic “Turnabout” and the tragic “Ad Astra” and “All the Dead Pilots.”9
Repository: FCVA, ms. and ts. fragments.
Idyll in the Desert
Submitted without success to a total of seven magazines in 1930 and 1931, this story was published in a limited edition of 400 copies by Random House on 10 December 1931. Faulkner would again use the situation of a woman who left her husband and two children to flee to the west with a lover in The Wild Palms.
Repository: FCVA, 4-pp. ms. and 19-pp. ts.
Two Dollar Wife
At some point after his return from Europe in December of 1925, possibly in early 1927 when he was working on Sartoris (1929) or even, perhaps, a year or two later, Faulkner wrote three pages of a story he called “The Devil Beats His Wife.”10 He did not complete this tale of the domestic problems of a young woman named Doris and her husband, Hubert, and the successful efforts of Della, their maid, to solve them. However, something of Della’s qualities got into the character of Dilsey when Faulkner was working on The Sound and the Fury in 1928. Other elements of the story underwent various transmutations. In late 1933 or early 1934 Faulkner’s agent, Morton Goldman, asked Faulkner about a story called “Christmas Tree.” Faulkner replied, “The CHRISTMAS TREE story which you mention was a continuation of that one by the same title which you now have, the same characters who got married at the dance, with the dice and the forged license, etc. I wrote it first years ago, and I have mislaid it. I rewrote it from memory, the first part, in the short story which you now have,
and I had forgot the characters’ names: hence the difference.” Pressed for money, Faulkner told Goldman that if an editor showed an interest, he was willing to send a synopsis of the rest of the story or rewrite it from memory. At one time or another he wrote at least four versions—manuscript and typescript, complete and incomplete—under this title. In what may have been a one-page synopsis written when Faulkner worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1932, his characters were Howard Maxwell, Mrs. Houston, and her daughter, Doris. In another version of fifteen manuscript pages, Faulkner followed the story of Howard and Doris through their marriage to a happy ending. Even so, “Christmas Tree” never sold, and Faulkner was feeling the same financial pressure acutely in the spring and summer of 1935. It was probably then that he rewrote his story of the bizarre courtship of Doris Houston and Howard Maxwell, now renamed Maxwell Johns. College Life was advertising a $500 short-story contest, and this may have led to the story’s submission there. It was accepted and published in Volume XVIII (Jan. 1936), 8–10, 85, 86, 88, 90, but it won no prize in the contest.
Repositories: FCVA, 1-p. ts. ROUM, ms. fragment and 15-pp. ms. (“Christmas Tree”).
Afternoon of a Cow
Experimenting with a number of verse forms and styles following his return home at the end of World War I, Faulkner wrote a forty-line poem of frustrated love in the summer of 1919 and borrowed its title from a work by Stéphane Mallarmé, “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune.” It appeared in The New Republic on 16 August 1919 and in the University of Mississippi student newspaper, The Missisippian, in revised form on 29 October. On 28 January of the next year he published there a poem inviting comparison with one by François Villon. Faulkner’s was called “Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues.” Such poetry unsurprisingly provoked various responses. One, appearing in The Mississippian on 12 May 1920, took the form of a poem entitled “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdue,” in which the authors (probably Drane Lester and Louis M. Jiggitts), using the pen name of Lordgreyson, described the heifer Betsy, lost and wandering far from home. It was an amusing tour de force, which Faulkner may have had in mind seventeen years later, “one afternoon,” he recalled, “when I felt rotten with a terrible hangover.” He was then working unhappily for Twentieth Century-Fox. After dinner on 25 June 1937, Faulkner read to his guests a story entitled “Afternoon of a Cow,” which, he told them, had been written by a talented boy named Ernest V. Trueblood. The only one who seemed to appreciate Faulkner’s jeu d’esprit was his house guest and French translator, Maurice Coindreau. The next day Faulkner gave him a carbon copy of his typescript as a souvenir. In February of 1939, working on part 2, Chapter One, of “The Long Summer,” Book Three of The Hamlet, Faulkner apparently thought back to this story and appropriated elements of it for the mock chivalric romantic treatment of Ike Snopes’s love for Jack Houston’s cow. He completed the story in part 3, which ended the chapter. Not long afterward, when German authorities forbade the printing of American books in occupied France, “the reading of novels by Faulkner and Hemingway,” said Jean Paul Sartre, “became for some a symbol of resistance.” So it was not inappropriate that Francophile Faulkner should have approved the first publication of “Afternoon of a Cow” in Maurice Coindreau’s translation in Algiers in Fontaine, 27–28 (June-July 1943), 66–81. In early 1947 editor Reed Whittemore asked for the story for a special number of the quarterly Furioso. “Sell the piece if you can,” Faulkner wrote his agent, Harold Ober. “Maybe it is funny, as I thought myself. I suppose I tried it on the wrong people.” So “Afternoon of a Cow” finally appeared in English, under the name of Ernest V. Trueblood, in Furioso, 2 (Summer 1947), 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17, a decade after it was written and nearly three decades after “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune” and “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdue.”
Repository: DCPA, 17-pp. carbon ts.
Mr. Acarius
Faulkner delivered a nineteen-page typescript of this story to Harold Ober on 19 February 1953, shortly after he completed it. It was then called “Weekend Revisited.” Ober had it retyped and wrote Faulkner that he was sending it to The New Yorker to Lillian Ross, who had discussed the story with Faulkner and expected to recommend it. On 5 March, however, William Shawn wrote Ober that they could not use it. On 7 April, Collier’s made the same decision, as Esquire would too. Faulkner remained confident about the story. When he wrote Ober on 11 November 1954 he asked if there was any news about it, and added, “I think [it] is not only funny but true.…” But he would not live to see it published. It finally appeared in his favorite market for short fiction, The Saturday Evening Post, CCXXXVIII (9 Oct. 1965), 26–27, 29, 31.
Repositories: JFSA, ts. DCPA, carbon ts.
Sepulture South: Gaslight
Faulkner’s friend Anthony West had sent him a photograph Walker Evans had made of a shaded cemetery. In the foreground were a half-dozen life-sized marble effigies. Not long after Faulkner arrived in New York about mid-September of 1954, West met him one day in the offices of Harper’s Bazaar. Faulkner told him that it was a fine photograph. Hoping for a piece for the Bazaar, West asked Faulkner if he wanted to write anything about it. Though he was noncommital, he set to work on it not long afterward. Fragments remain of one version called “Sepulchure South: in Gaslight” and another entitled “Sepulchre South: Gaslight.”11 Faulkner finished the piece before the end of the month and sent it to West. It appeared as “Sepulture South: Gaslight,” in Harper’s Bazaar, LXXXVIII (Dec. 1954), 84–85, 140–41.
Repository: DCPA, ms. and ts. fragments.
Adolescence
Very early in his career Faulkner had composed poems which followed conventional pastoral and ballad models. Then, on 17 March 1922, he published an essay extolling American materials and language as sources of dramatic art.12 A sketch published a week earlier had employed an itinerant laborer as its sole human figure.13 Faulkner later said that he wrote “Adolescence” in the early 1920’s. Though it contains imagery suggesting particular Faulkner poems, it moves in the same direction as the essay and the sketch while foreshadowing future fiction. Joe Bunden’s wife anticipates Addie Bundren of As I Lay Dying in her marriage to a man beneath her, in her childbearing, and in her death. Her daughter, Juliet, has the slim boyish figure of a number of Faulkner women to come, such as Pat Robyn in Mosquitoes. Juliet’s relationship with Lee Hollowell, with the developing erotic overtones reinforced by nude swimming and bundling in a rustic setting, suggests elements in the relationships between Donald Mahon and Emmy in Soldiers’ Pay and Harry Wilbourne and Charlotte Rittenmeyer in The Wild Palms.
Repository: FCVA, 26-pp. ts.
Al Jackson
In the late winter of 1925 Faulkner cemented his friendship with Sherwood Anderson. The two enjoyed not only telling stories to each other, they also exchanged letters which were conscious exercises in the tradition of the tall tale. When Anderson read the first letter, he suggested that Faulkner rewrite it.14 When he did, Anderson wrote a reply elaborating on the story and introducing a fishherd named Flu Balsam who had become involved with Faulkner’s character, Al Jackson, and a Texas horse trader.15 Faulkner replied with the second letter.16 He would introduce some of the material into his novel Mosquitoes.
Repository: The Newberry Library, two 3-pp. tss.
Don Giovanni
This story was apparently intended, like a number of others Faulkner wrote in New Orleans in the first half of 1925, for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. On the first page he typed his name and the address “624 Orleans Alley/ New Orleans.” Though the story was never published, Faulkner characteristically salvaged parts of it for use in perhaps three novels. The protagonist, Herbie, would become Mr. Talliaferro in Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitoes; Morrison would become Dawson Fairchild; the unnamed writer would become the sculptor Gordon; and Miss Steinbauer would become Jenny. Morrison and the writer, inhabiting the same building, suggest Faulkner’s friends Sherwood Anderson and William Spratling, the latter Faulkner’s New Orleans host. Herbie’s thinning hair a
nd faulty digestion are reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who would be alluded to even more directly in Mosquitoes. In Miss Steinbauer’s repulse of Herbie, she employs the tactics Eula Varner would use on the schoolteacher, Labove, in The Hamlet. The description of the telephone in the last lines of the story would be repeated in Pylon. In Faulkner’s typescript he began with a paragraph which he repeated verbatim—the fifth paragraph of the story as it is printed here—but neglected to delete it at the first occurrence. It has been deleted here.