Repository: NYPL, 12 unnumbered ts. pp.
Peter
In March of 1925, after Faulkner moved into a spare room in William Spratling’s apartment at 624 Orleans Alley, he would sometimes accompany Spratling on sketching expeditions which took him into different parts of New Orleans. A young architect teaching at Tulane University, the versatile Spratling kept busy with his own drawing and painting as well as detail drawing for local architects. Two of Faulkner’s sketches printed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune—“Out of Nazareth” and “Episode”—related encounters on such expeditions. In the former, Faulkner described Spratling as one “whose hand has been shaped to the brush as mine has (alas!) not.…”17 Although the seven unnumbered typescript pages of this story do not bear Faulkner’s name, they are certainly his work. It is difficult to date them in the sequence of New Orleans sketches that he wrote during the first half of 1925. Like “The Priest,” this one certainly contained elements that would have offended readers of the Times-Picayune. And Faulkner must certainly have realized that some of the language if not the subject matter of “Peter” would have been taboo for a newspaper in 1925. The story in this form was probably a rough draft and perhaps in part experimental, with its shift at mid-point from dialogue in quotation marks to drama-form dialogue and then back again—the kind of thing he would do in Mosquitoes (1927), his second novel, which he based on this period of his life in New Orleans. The imagery he used to describe Peter’s mother also looked forward to future work: the portrait of Charles Bon’s wife in “Evangeline” and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
Repository: NYPL.
Moonlight
According to William Faulkner, the first version of this story was written around 1919 or 1920 or 1921 and was “about the first short story I ever wrote.”18 The sixteen-page typescript of this version which survives is incomplete. In it, Robert Binford and his friend George drink drugstore Coca-Colas on a hot Saturday night as they size up two “flusies” whom they agree to try to “make” later after George has kept a date with his girl, Cecily. With Robert’s help, she has slipped out to meet George, who tries to entice her into an empty house. She resists, but when she finally yields to George’s entreaties, he changes his mind. As they walk back downtown, she promises to meet him at the house the next night. There is a resemblance between elements in this story and parts of Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), in which Cecily Saunders takes George Farr first as her lover and then as her husband. On 3 November 1928 Alfred Dashiell rejected a story called “Moonlight” which he said he had seen before at Scribner’s Magazine.19 Faulkner referred to the story again in an undated letter to his agent, Morton Goldman, which may have been written in the early spring of 1935. This version of “Moonlight” comes from a fourteen-page typescript much closer to the mature style of Faulkner than the sixteen-page version which may represent its earliest form after the manuscript.
Repository: FCVA.
The Big Shot
Like “Mistral,” “Snow,” and “Evangeline,” this story employs a first-person narrator and a confidant named Don who shares the narrative function. Don was probably based on William Spratling, the New Orleans friend with whom Faulkner traveled in 1925 to Europe, the scene of the first two stories mentioned above. “The Big Shot” was submitted unsuccessfully to The American Mercury at some time prior to 23 January 1930 and subsequently to four other magazines. The style suggests that it was written after the stories Faulkner wrote in New Orleans but before more mature writing of the later 1920’s such as Sartoris. Elements in this story would appear in several later works. The most familiar character is Popeye, whose appearance and background here are much as they would be in Sanctuary. Some of the characteristics of Wrennie Martin suggest a first study of Temple Drake, of the same novel. Dal Martin is remarkable in his foreshadowing of elements in characters as disparate as Thomas Sutpen, Wash Jones, and Flem Snopes. The slight he receives at the hands of the plantation owner whose tenant his father is anticipates Sutpen’s similar traumatic experience, which similarly motivates Sutpen in his determination to acquire possessions which will permit him to rise in the world. Martin’s relationship to the plantation owner, particularly as the latter lies in a hammock and drinks toddies mixed by Martin, suggests several scenes between Wash Jones and Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! Martin’s rise, as he becomes a merchant and achieves affluence yet retains his countryman’s ways, resembles the rise of Flem Snopes in the Snopes trilogy, and the cenotaph he raises over his wife’s grave may even foreshadow that of Eula Varner Snopes. Dr. Gavin Blount’s link with the dead past would eventually contribute to the characterization of Gail Hightower in Light in August.20
Repository: FCVA, 37-pp. ts.
Dull Tale
This reworking of “The Big Shot” was sent to The Saturday Evening Post on 14 November 1930 but met with no more success than the earlier story. Typed on the same machine, it shows many other similarities: the resemblance of Martin and Flem Snopes, Blount and Hightower, and, in his “eager face sick with nerves and self-doubt,” a similarity between Blount and the Horace Benbow of Sartoris and Sanctuary. As a child, hiding in a dark closet and later retching, Blount also suggests Joe Christmas in Light in August. The theme of women’s affinity for evil would also recur in Light in August and Sanctuary. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story for the student of Faulkner’s work is the opportunity it affords, when compared with “The Big Shot,” to observe him doing what he did so often and so indefatigably: changing his narrative point of view—here even his ending—in his unremitting search for the most effective way to tell a story.
Repositories: JFSA, 33-pp. ts. ROUM, fragments of mss. and ts.
A Return
On 7 November 1930 Faulkner sent a story entitled “Rose of Lebanon” to The Saturday Evening Post, which rejected it. He tried twice more in the next year to sell it, without success. But these efforts were not without worthwhile results, for it appears that something of the obsession with the past of Gavin Blount, M.D., went into the creation of Gail Hightower, D.D., in Light in August. Similarly, the death of Charley Gordon in a Holly Springs chicken roost foreshadowed that of Hightower’s grandfather. Subsequently Faulkner reworked the material, retelling it in “A Return.” Faulkner’s agent, Harold Ober, received the story from Faulkner on 13 October 1938. He apparently tried unsuccessfully to sell it, and a letter from Ober to Faulkner on 2 November 1938 applauds Faulkner’s decision to rewrite the story. Whether or not he actually did so, the story was never published. In the thirty-one-page typescript of “Rose of Lebanon,” Faulkner began in present time, with Dr. Gavin Blount telling one of his patients the story of Lewis Randolph. In the fifty-three typescript pages of “A Return,” he not only changed the chronology but identified the Major commanding Charles Gordon’s unit as an earlier Gavin Blount and also made him Gordon’s unsuccessful rival for Lewis Randolph’s hand. He also greatly intensified Dr. Gavin Blount’s feeling for that lady. (In this story, contrary to Faulkner’s usual practice, he used the apostrophe in can’t and don’t more often than he omitted it, possibly in an attempt to conform to magazine style. The inconsistencies have been preserved here.)
Repositories: FCVA, ms. fragment (“Rose of Lebanon”). ROUM, 10-pp. ms. and 31-pp. ts. (“Rose of Lebanon”), and 53-pp. ts. (“A Return”).
A Dangerous Man
This story was sent on 6 February 1930 to The American Mercury, which rejected it. There had been several earlier treatments of the material, complete and incomplete, in both manuscript and typescript. The story had apparently originated with Estelle Faulkner. Called “A Letter” and then “A Letter to Grandmamma,” it had been at least partially typed with Estelle’s name on the title page. It was about a woman with a difficult past: a hard father and a cruel husband who was perhaps a murderer. The couple lived on money sent by his mother, and when he left his wife he concealed the fact for fear his mother would stop the money. The wife was befriended by
a railroad agent, but here the manuscript and typescript fragments of that version broke off. This version, with its shift of emphasis to Mr. Bowman, may have involved some of Faulkner’s memories of his father, who ran a livery stable and transfer company in Faulkner’s youth and who had himself been a freight agent in Faulkner’s infancy. Like Mr. Bowman, Murry Falkner was also known for his violent temper and his readiness to use his fists and, if necessary, the pistol he carried.
Repositories: JFSA, ms. and ts. fragments. ROUM, 13-pp. ts. and fragments of mss. and tss.
Evangeline
Faulkner had mentioned his New Orleans friend William Spratling in the New Orleans sketches “Out of Nazareth,” “Episode,” and “Peter.” He had also used him as a model for one of the characters in “Don Giovanni.” After the two men traveled together from Genoa to Paris in 1925, Faulkner had used Spratling as the basis for the character Don in “Mistral,” which was refused by magazines in June and July of 1930 and finally published by Faulkner in These 13 in 1931. “Snow,” which Faulkner sent to his agent, Harold Ober, in 1942 (but which may have been a revision of an earlier version), likewise employed Don and an “I” narrator to tell the story. Using the two again in “Evangeline,” Faulkner sent it on 17 July 1931 to The Saturday Evening Post, which refused it, and then on 26 July to The Woman’s Home Companion, which also refused it. In the early months of 1934 he returned to the material, substituting two characters named Chisholm and Burke for the “I” narrator and Don, and ultimately replacing Chisholm and Burke with Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon to tell the Sutpen story in what would become Absalom, Absalom! The title of the story would reappear as the name of the wife and one of the daughters of Calvin Burden when Light in August was published in October of 1932.
Repositories: ROUM and JFSA, 15-pp. ms. and 40-pp. ts.
A Portrait of Elmer
By August of 1925 Faulkner was spending most of his working hours in Paris on a novel entitled Elmer. On 10 September he wrote his mother, “The novel is going elegantly well—about 27,500 words now.” Three days later, however, he wrote that he had put the novel away and was about to start another one. But Elmer was still on his mind, for when he wrote his mother again on 21 September he told her that he had put it away temporarily and that it was half done. He seemed well satisfied with it. “Elmer is quite a boy,” he wrote. “He is tall and almost handsome and he wants to paint pictures. He gets everything a man could want—money, a European title, marries the girl he wants—and she gives away his paint box. So Elmer never gets to paint at all.” He resumed work on the manuscript, but when it had reached 31,000 words, probably in October or November, he put it aside for good. Faintly autobiographical, written in an experimental style including passages heavy with Freudian imagery, the story had begun to founder when Faulkner introduced decadent British aristocrats into his plot. Many years later he told James B. Meriwether that it was “funny, but not funny enough.”21 Not all of this work was lost, however, for elements of the novel were used in Mosquitoes, The Wild Palms, and The Hamlet. Nor did he abandon his efforts to salvage the original conception. Fragments entitled “Growing Pains” and “Elmer and Myrtle” may represent early efforts to start the novel, but they may also represent false starts at short-story treatments of the material. Another fragment, “Portrait of Elmer Hodge,” was certainly an attempt at a short-story version. “A Portrait of Elmer” dates from the middle 1930’s. On 30 October 1935 Faulkner’s agent, Morton Goldman, offered a fifty-seven-page typescript of the story to Bennett Cerf of Random House. On 7 November, Cerf wrote Faulkner that he was sorry they had not received it in time to make a limited edition for Christmas and that they might possibly do it the following fall. But Cerf had some reservations about undeveloped themes and about the ending especially. He told Faulkner he thought that at the story’s present length “you are squandering some of the finest material you ever had for a longer book as well as some of the best writing of yours I have ever seen.” Nothing came of the plan to publish the story as a limited edition in the fall of 1936, by which time Faulkner had become a Random House author.
Repository: ROUM; the 123-pp. typescript of Elmer is in FCVA.
With Caution and Dispatch
Faulkner made extensive use of his brief R.A.F. experience, most notably in short stories such as “All the Dead Pilots” and his novel A Fable. He said that this story had its inception about the time of “Turn About,” which was published in The Saturday Evening Post for 5 March 1932. “With Caution and Dispatch” was still unsold in 1939, however, when Faulkner rewrote at least part of it on the back of pages of the typescript setting copy of The Hamlet. An incomplete forty-seven-page typescript of the story which may date from that time supplies a bridge in the activities of young John Sartoris between his early R.F.C. service and his fatal mission as related in “All the Dead Pilots” and Sartoris. This forty-seven-page version has elements in common with a hundred-page unproduced film script entitled A Ghost Story which Faulkner wrote for Howard Hawks, particularly in its treatment of Sartoris’s wartime love affairs, carried out for the most part in competition with brother officers who outrank him. Faulkner revised the forty-seven-page version chiefly by means of judicious cutting (though he did add a little over a page of new material), eliminating a detailed description of Sartoris’s efforts to evade Flight Commander Britt, an account of their visit to a country home in Kent, and then Sartoris’s unauthorized excursion to London for a farewell to a girl named Kit, as well as the immediate aftermath. The forty-seven-page fragment breaks off as Sartoris’s Camel is about to crash on the ship’s deck in the Channel. The typescript of the revised version, printed here, is divided into two segments, each numbered sequentially beginning with the number 1. Part 1 of the story consists of seventeen typed pages. Parts 2 and 3 of the story comprise a twenty-one-page typed segment of the story, the first page of which bears the story’s title together with Faulkner’s name and address, as though he had concluded that the whole of “With Caution and Dispatch” was too long for magazines such as the Post and Collier’s unless divided into two installments. Faulkner’s agent, Harold Ober, offered the story for sale but had to inform Faulkner on 23 April 1940 that it had been rejected as “too dated.”
Repositories: FCVA, 47-pp. ts. Estate of Howard Hawks, 100-pp. ts. JFSA, 38-pp. ts.
Snow
Faulkner’s trip to Europe in 1925 with William Spratling provided him with useful material for later work. In “Mistral,” which may have been written not long after his return home, a first-person narrator and his friend, Don, tried to solve an Alpine murder case. No magazine bought it, and so Faulkner included it in his short-story volume These 13 (1931). At some time during that year Faulkner used the two principals of “Mistral” in another mystery story, “Evangeline.” These factors suggest that Faulkner may well have thought of the present story of love and death in the Alps as early as the time of “Mistral,” perhaps even written it, tried unsuccessfully to sell it, and later revised it, principally by an updated introduction, although there is at present no concrete evidence to support this conjecture. (The portraits of the Prussian general and his fiancée will remind some readers of Caddy Compson and her German general as Faulkner sketched them in October of 1945 in the Appendix, “The Compsons,” which he wrote for Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner [1946].) Harold Ober’s records reveal that he received a twenty-one-page version of “Snow” on 17 February 1942. Ober wrote back that it was a beautiful story but he was afraid that it was suited only for a literary magazine. The next day, when he wrote Faulkner that Harper’s had rejected “Knight’s Gambit,” he said that both that story and “Snow” would have a much better chance of selling if Faulkner could simplify them. On 21 February, Faulkner replied that he could probably simplify “Snow” although it did not seem too obscure to him. Ober submitted it as it was, and on 15 April, when he wrote Faulkner to say that The American Mercury had declined it, he quoted a paragraph of detailed criticism f
rom editor Edward Weeks. Busy with other work, Faulkner did not revise it. On 6 May, Ober informed him that one editor had called the story an example of Faulkner’s writing at its “elliptical worst” and another had declared it “confused.” It was 22 July when Ober received another version of “Snow” consisting of eighteen typed pages. “It is rewritten,” Faulkner told Ober, “simplified, still an implied story as before, but I have tried to fill the gaps, etc. and make it explicit as well.” The most noticeable change was from third-person narration to first, so that the form of this story now followed that of “Mistral” and “Evangeline.” The deletions included peripheral descriptions of Don’s appearance and his efforts to speak French as well as a sketch of the train that he and the narrator boarded. The anti-Nazi sentiments were still clear but more effective because less heavy-handed. The revision was to no avail. Ober could not sell it, and the story appears here for the first time.22