13
“A Golden Book”
The Portable Faulkner, September 1945–April 1946
Native Haunts
Faulkner arrived home having missed the suffocatingly hot weather and went to work on his fable. He often did significant writing in the hottest periods, when even taking a long walk seemed unwise. He would sit at a window and look out at the pasture. He could see his nephew Jimmy and other boys playing. Sometimes he joined them.1 Other times, he’d bolt out of a chair and go out shirtless to chop down the bitterweed. After an hour, he would return to his typewriter. Then he would shower, put on a coat and tie, and sit on the east verandah in the evening sipping a gin and tonic.
Missing July Fourth did not matter so much. It was not a holiday for Mississippians in those days—too many memories of Grant’s occupying army. July 14, Bastille Day, on the other hand, became an opportunity for him to wear his RAF uniform on a walk into town to pick up his mail. In the evening, again on the east verandah, he would uncork the champagne and toast France.
On Halloween, children gathered to hear ghost stories. Dorothy Oldham, in a sheet, made an impressive ghost descending the Rowan Oak steps. Malcolm remembered a Halloween when Faulkner scared the younger ones so much with ghost stories that he had to drive them home. His favorite was about Judith Sheegog, daughter of Rowan Oak’s first owner, who had fallen in love with a Yankee soldier. He sneaked over to Judith’s window, threw her a rope, and she descended, breaking her neck when the rope broke.2 Faulkner described the awful silence as her lover listened for a heartbeat but heard only the sounds of night birds. They buried Judith beneath the magnolia at the far end of the cedar walk. Sometimes a piano could be heard playing. “That has to be Judith,” Pappy said. He did a hauntingly beautiful portrait in charcoal of Judith that entranced his step-granddaughter, Vicki, who wondered what happened to it after his death.3
One Halloween night when, as usual, Faulkner had extinguished most of the lights, Cho-Cho saw a “filmy swirl” of the gown of a woman with “dark hair and exquisite features”—it had to be Judith. Cho-Cho arose from bed to follow the departing figure onto the balcony when the ghost just drifted away to the arching cedars and the magnolia tree.4 Such stories suited the nostalgic side of Faulkner’s fealty to the past and his desire to keep it alive in the minds of children. Every time he returned home from Hollywood, he found something new. “The place is changing fast,” he said.5
Pappy took Jill, Vicki, and Dean for hayrides along Old Taylor Road, with more ghost stories at night. During a tea dance at the Oldhams, Faulkner played Prince Charming to Dean, the damsel in distress when she became confused and took both lemon and milk in her tea, which curdled. Asked for his preference, Pappy said he would take his tea with both too. He amused Dean at a dinner party when a lady, a bit drunk, missed her chair and fell on the floor. He sat down next to her and offered her a drink from his glass saying, “You know, I’ve always wondered what it was like to have dinner on the floor.”6
Dean remembered that he could go for long periods as a social drinker and then lapse into a binge—sometimes stopping himself by “digging up bitterweeds in the pasture. He used a hand spade and worked steadily to keep the demons at bay.” That he worked at home puzzled the children. They could have ridden horses through the house, and he would not have noticed while he was writing.
To Dean, Jill was as reticent as her father: “Even as a little girl Jill had donned her invisible armor, her protection from the pressures she would endure for a lifetime: too much to live up to, too much to live down, and no means of escape. We never shared a secret.” What secrets? Once, when Jill was twelve or thirteen, she overheard her parents arguing upstairs at the stair landing by her father’s room. Estelle “didn’t want him to go out, said he wasn’t going out, and he took her by both arms and pushed her down the stairs, breaking her collar bone.”7 Only once at the onset of an alcoholic binge did Jill dare to entreat her father, “Please don’t start drinking.” He was walking away from her but turned and said, “You know, no one remembers Shakespeare’s child.” She never again asked him to stop.8 Jill said her father “didn’t really care about people. I think he cared about me. But, I also think I could have gotten in his way and he would have walked on me.”9 Jill was old enough to realize her family did not quite fit in. She “was made to feel unwelcome at some friends’ homes,” she later admitted to an interviewer. “No one took her to church or Sunday School, but she went with friends to different churches. She ‘ached for mediocrity.’ . . . What she wanted more than anything else was to be just like the others, to be accepted.”10
Perhaps with her mother prone to debilitating periods, Jill seemed to her cousin Dean like the lady of house, perfect in every way, a straight-A student, and an accomplished horsewoman—her father’s pride. She played the piano and spoke with an adult vocabulary. At twelve she was editor of her school newspaper. Dean admired her exquisite taste in clothes and welcomed Jill’s hand-me-downs. Faulkner’s archive at the University of Virginia includes doll cutouts that show Jill’s interest in ensembles, cultivated by her mother.
November was hog-killing time. After a big breakfast of meat, grits, eggs, and toast with Dundee marmalade and hot, black Louisiana coffee, Faulkner set out with his black neighbor Wallace. Fifty-gallon oil drums placed on sandstones and filled with water to boil over roaring fires awaited the hog Faulkner shot with his rifle while Wallace slit its throat, and then with block and tackle suspended it from an oak tree, swinging it over the blackened drums for scalding, then scraping it with butcher knives and rinsing it with a garden hose, readying the carcass for butchering. Various cuts were placed in a salt bin for a week before transfer to the smokehouse. Bourbon and fresh meat also made up a meal right then. Even in November, with the sun out, “you were almost hot,” Malcolm remembered.
Next: the Thanksgiving bird hunt with Colonel Hugh Evans, Bill Fielden, Faulkner, and Dorothy Oldham in the old Ford he had driven to California twice—now with a leaky canvas top—followed by Malcolm with more gear in a jeep. Home with the day’s shoot piled up on the kitchen table, they enjoyed a drink, a crackling fire in the library, welcoming neighbors Kate and Bill Baker for dinner, at a table with a holly centerpiece. Norfleet in a starched white coat entered with roast duck on a silver platter, followed by Boojack with a platter of squirrel and dumplings, and then collard greens, cornbread, and butter. Cognac was served in the library, with Norfleet bringing in the delicate little glasses.11
Right after Thanksgiving, Faulkner embarked on a two-week deer hunt. He spotted seven deer, all does, and did not shoot them. Every day they ran the dogs and rode their horses, at one point tracking an old buck almost fifty miles from seven in the morning until three, when the dogs “gave out,” and the buck, even with three bullets in him, got away, Faulkner was “glad to know.” He didn’t seem to care about killing animals but only the sport of tracking them. Usually a quiet man in camp, he did not indulge in “hoorahing and storming and all that.” He enjoyed a laugh and liked to tell stories.12 Hawks, who hunted with both Faulkner and Hemingway, said: “Ernest was always trying to prove what a man he was. Bill didn’t give a damn about proving that—just enjoying himself and being with people that he liked.”13 A letter to Jill illustrates what Hawks meant:
Mr and Mrs Hawks, Clark Gable and I went to Calexico and shot doves, came back that Sunday night with 120 doves among us. Mrs Hawks is a good shot, a good hunter, cleans everybody’s game that will let her. Mr Gable is a fine shot but lazy, he sits under a tree to hunt. Mr. Hawks hunts like I do, early and late, dont mind walking in the sun, is a fine shot. I used his 20 gauge gun, like Buddy’s [Malcolm’s] then I used Mr Gable’s handmade 410 gauge, almost as a small and light as my pistol. I sure wish I could get one now like it for Missy to start on. Mr Gable said he thought he could find me one. He is a good fellow, not conceited at all, anybody can come up and talk to him and get an autograph. Not at all a swell-headed matinee idol but more like a university senior.14
Faulkner seldom brought home game from his hunts. He “liked to watch the dogs work” but did not like killing things, Jill said.15 He liked to watch Jill and her dogs and published in the Oxford Eagle an obituary for one of them, “His Name was Pete”: “He was standing on the road waiting for his little mistress on the horse to catch up, to squire her safely home.” A hit-and-run driver in a hurry could not have heard “only a dog flung broken and crying into a roadside ditch. . . . But Pete has forgiven him. In his year and a quarter of life he never had anything but kindness from human beings; he would gladly give the other six or eight or ten of it rather than make one late for supper.”16
Most of the time that fall of 1945 had been spent getting “Malcolm Cowley’s Viking Faulkner into shape. It is going to be a good book,” Faulkner told Robert Haas. He had produced a new work for Cowley’s anthology, the “Compson Appendix.” He had also produced sixty-five pages of his fable, rewritten and edited three times and “pretty good”—maybe even “good enough for me to quit writing books on, though I probably won’t quit yet.”17 He still had Warner Brothers insisting he return to fulfill his contract, his “biblical seven year servitude.”18 He knew his own value: “In France, I am the father of a literary movement. In Europe, I am considered the best modern American and among the first of all writers. In America, I eke out a hack’s motion picture wages by winning second prize in a manufactured mystery story contest [“An Error in Chemistry” for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine].”19
Running out of money again, Faulkner nevertheless remained at home. “I hope the soil of Mississippi has acted as a tonic and that you are feeling tip-top,” Finlay McDermid wrote on January 24.20 Faulkner appreciated McDermid’s efforts to rid him of William Herndon, the agent who kept asserting a claim on Faulkner’s Hollywood earnings: “I thank you for having a shot at Herndon. He wants his pound of flesh, no matter how much blood and skin come off with it. It’s a curious situation to me. It’s like having a woman fasten onto you for alimony for the rest of your life: not like a man. I am well, doing some quail shooting, training a pointer pup, a good deal of resting and reading, waiting for spring.”21 McDermid’s interoffice correspondence reflects the efforts of an executive who deeply respected Faulkner but expressed some futility about the failure to secure a better contract for the writer. McDermid even considered abandoning the contract altogether.22 In March, Faulkner sent the studio sixty-four pages of his fable, asking for more time to finish it rather than report for more screenwriting. Warner agreed but expected him to report for work as soon as he finished his own book. “Random House and Ober lit a fire under Warner, I dont know how,” Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley, “and I am here until September anyway, on a dole from Random House, working on what seems now to me to be my magnum o.”23
Success
Most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print when Malcolm Cowley first wrote to him in January 1944 in a letter addressed to Oxford. Three months later, in Hollywood, Faulkner replied, saying he would “like very much” for Cowley to write the long essay rectifying what the critic saw as an imbalance between the writer’s worth and his reputation. After so much hard work, a dismayed Faulkner regretted that he seemed to leave “no better mark on this our pointless chronicle than I seem to be about to leave.” So, in fact, he did not feel he could afford to wait. He approved the project, except for the biography part, which seemed to him nugatory: “if what one has thought and hoped and endeavored and failed at is not enough, if it must be explained and excused by what he has experienced, done or suffered, while he was not being an artist, then he and the one making the evaluation have both failed.”24
After completing work on The Portable Hemingway, Cowley wrote again in July 1944 to say he was shopping his proposed essay to various magazines and could give Faulkner a market report on his standing as a literary figure. His name was “mud” in publishing circles because he did not sell, and the critics “did a swell job of uncomprehending and unselling you.” Writers, on the other hand, had nothing but admiration for him. All this meant that Cowley saw a wide-open opportunity for a new approach. But before embarking on his work, he wanted to settle a basic point. Had Faulkner intended to write a kind of allegory or legend about the South?
By the time Faulkner replied in November 1944, he had read Cowley’s essay “William Faulkner’s Human Comedy” in the New York Times Book Review (October 29): “It was all right.” His so-called “formless ‘style’ ” had to do with his trying to “say it all in one sentence,” putting it all, so to speak, on “one pinhead.” And to do that, each time he had a try at “new way.” As to the South, he was “inclined to think that my material . . . is not very important to me.” It is just what he knew, and he didn’t have the time to “learn another one [new material] and write at the same time.” Life was the same “frantic steeple-chase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.” As to his characters, he left them to their own devices that were not his own. Quentin brooded, not Faulkner. To make that distance even greater between author and character, Faulkner resorted to speculation: “Quentin probably contemplated Sutpen as the hyper-sensitive, already self-crucified cadet of an old long-time Republican Philistine house contemplated the ruin of Samson’s portico. He grieved and was moved by it but he was still saying ‘I told you so’ even while he hated himself for saying it.” Faulkner did not take full ownership of his own work: “I accept gratefully all your implications, even though I didn’t carry them consciously and simultaneously in the writing of it. In principle I’d like to think I could have.”25 It apparently did not occur to Faulkner, or he did not want to admit the possibility, that an understanding of his own biography might reveal what he had hidden from himself.
Over the next nine months Cowley published his long essay in sections, feeding the market with enough material to attract the interest of Viking Press. On August 9, 1945, he announced the good news to Faulkner. A Portable would mean the opportunity to present a full selection of work—about two hundred thousand words. From the start, Cowley proposed a chronological scheme rather than just a “best of Faulkner” anthology. He presented various choices for Faulkner’s consideration, noting, however, that they had to be complete units even if they were excerpts from novels. Fortunately, the Mississippi work hung together: “there is nothing like it in American literature.” Cowley would not go ahead without Faulkner’s say-so. The critic knew his man, for he ended the letter with what Jean-Paul Sartre had said: “Pour les jeunes en France, Faulkner c’est un dieu.” To which Cowley added, “Roll that over on your tongue.”
A week later, Faulkner, again in Hollywood, replied: “The idea is very fine. . . . By all means let us make a Golden Book of my apocryphal county.” He had expected to do as much in his old age. Now he relished the idea of sorting out what should go where. He accepted many of Cowley’s suggestions but also thought the Jason section of The Sound and the Fury would work as a representation of the New South. “Write me any way I can help,” Faulkner concluded.26
The back-and-forth of the correspondence reflects Faulkner’s deep commitment to the project, even though he ignored many of Cowley’s obtuse remarks, such as that Absalom, Absalom! “would be better if cut by about a third, maybe all the early parts of it omitted, leaving only Quentin’s story to his roommate.”27 But Cowley had stimulated in Faulkner another way of looking at his own work, and the result was the “Compson Appendix,” which put not only The Sound and the Fury but nearly all that had gone before in Faulkner’s work into a new historical perspective—one that came, as he wrote from Oxford on October 18, at a telling moment in his career: “I think it [the “Appendix”] is really pretty good, to stand as it is, a piece without implications. Maybe I am just happy that that damned west coast place has not cheapened my work as much as I probably believed it was going to do.”28
Cowley fretted about inconsistencies and puzzling details, and Faulkner provided some clarifications, including dates for the excerpts, although he was not overly concerned, since the differences in details reflected different points of view and an evolving conception of the characters. “I never made a genealogical or chronological chart, perhaps because I knew I would take liberties with both—which I have,” Faulkner wrote on November 7. As Cowley later realized, “the true Compson story was the one that lived and grew in his imagination.”29 Or, as Faulkner said, his work kept “growing, changing” as he understood more about his people.30
To a remarkable degree, Faulkner permitted Cowley to do as he wished. When Cowley decided to include “Raid” from The Unvanquished because without those “black people tramping the road to Jordan, it wouldn’t be the book I want it to be,” Faulkner wrote in the margin “GOOD!!! Would have done so myself to begin with.” Cowley wanted to excise Faulkner’s reference in the “Appendix” to T.P. wearing clothes manufactured by “Jew owners of Chicago and New York sweatshops,” noting, “I’d rather not see a false argument over anti-Semitism injected into the reviews.” Faulkner wrote in the margin, “all right.”31 In Hollywood, a Jewish writer had once accused him of not liking Jews. And Faulkner had said, “You’re right,” and then paused before saying, “But I don’t like gentiles either.”32
When Cowley presented copy ready to be printed, Faulkner replied on December 8: “It’s not a new work by Faulkner. It’s a new work by Cowley all right though.” He still insisted on as little biography as possible and provided the critic with a few paragraphs, eliding exactly what he did in uniform and still pretending he had injured himself in a crash. Was it for his own amusement that he included at the very end of his sketch: “Oh yes, was a scout master for two years, was fired for moral reasons.”33 He did not seem at all troubled by the faults Cowley and others found in his work, many of which he attributed to the solitude in which he worked and the lack of a significant literary tradition in the South. “I am not always conscious of bad taste myself,” he confessed to Cowley, “but I am pretty sensitive to what others will call bad taste. I think I have written a lot and sent it off to print before I actually realized strangers might read it.”34 As the book neared publication, Faulkner, who had addressed the critic as “Cowley” or occasionally “Maitre,” now wrote “Dear Brother.”35 Faulkner asked for a dozen copies and inscribed one, “Mother with love Billy.”36
On April 29, 1946, Viking Press published The Portable Faulkner, an anthology almost two years in the making. A week earlier, Faulkner had written to Malcolm Cowley: “The job is splendid. Damn you to hell anyway. But even if I had beat you to the idea, mine wouldn’t have been this good. By God, I didn’t know myself what I had tried to do, and how much I had succeeded.”37
The headline for Caroline Gordon’s front-page assessment in the New York Times Book Review (May 5, 1946) established the importance of The Portable Faulkner: “Mr. Faulkner’s Southern Saga: Revealing His Fictional World and the Unity of Its Patterns.” The O’Donnell thesis propounded in 1939 of a clash between the old and the new order, represented by the Sartoris, Millard, and Compson families versus the Snopes clan, had been subsumed in Cowley’s portrayal of an epic poet of Balzacian proportions. For Gordon, Faulkner could be divided in cycles and phases in the lives of the planters and their descendants, the townspeople of Jefferson, the poor white people, black people, and Indians. In effect, Cowley argued the whole of the Yoknapatawpha saga, as he termed it, was greater than its parts, as presented in the novels and stories, which were, in Gordon’s words, like the limbs of one great tree. Cowley’s chronological, decade-by-decade approach meant much rearrangement of the Yoknapatawpha fiction to justify calling it a “saga.” The Portable excerpts did not do justice to the full scope of Faulkner’s talent, Gordon emphasized, to the “brooding intensity” of the full-length novels “moving backward and forward in time,” hovering over characters from “every conceivable angle.”
The Portable Faulkner received few reviews, but it drew the attention of significant critics and novelists like Gordon, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. “A new kind of Faulkner book,” wrote Wilson in a one-paragraph New Yorker notice (July 27), “a real contribution to the study of Faulkner’s work.” Cowley had “unscrambled” Faulkner, Wilson observed, presenting Yoknapatawpha’s phases from 1820 to 1945. “An original approach,” declared the Nashville Tennessean (May 12). Other brief mentions in newspapers recognized that the Portable signaled Faulkner’s growing reputation “nationally and internationally.”38 In the Chicago Tribune (May 26), Will Davidson endorsed Cowley’s argument that the saga, not the novels (problematic in structural terms), constituted Faulkner’s highest achievement. The Winnipeg Tribune (August 4) suggested that the Portable portrayed an America that is “far different to the loud optimism and easy confidence which the American mind fondly believes its own,” and possibly served as “a more reliable guide to the extremes of which it is capable.”
In the most lengthy and insightful review, Robert Penn Warren in the New Republic (August 26) praised Cowley’s selections that show the “principles of integration in the work.” But he also cautioned that while “no writer is more deeply committed to a locality than Faulkner, the emphasis on the southern elements may blind us to other elements, or at least other applications of deep significance.” Cowley’s legend-of-the-South approach should not obscure that Faulkner’s fiction constituted a “legend of our general plight and problem. The modern world is in moral confusion. It does suffer from a lack of discipline, of sanctions, of community, of values, of a sense of a mission.” Such words hit hard after victory in World War II. If the traditional order did not prevent the world from ruin, it offered, in Faulkner’s fiction, a “notion of truth, even if man in the flow of things did not succeed in realizing that truth.’’
To illustrate his point, Warren selected the passage in Go Down, Moses in which Ike invokes Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The lines, “She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss” and “Forever will thou love, and she be fair,” are Ike’s belief that “truth is one” and “doesn’t change. It covers all things which touch the heart—honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love.” For Warren, Faulkner via Keats contended that “human effort is what is important, the capacity to make the effort to rise above the mechanical process of life, the pride to endure, for in endurance there is a kind of self-conquest.” This notion of self-conquest led Warren to the deepest reading so far of Faulkner’s view of nature as expressed in “The Bear,” the beast “pursued for years” that is also “an object of love and veneration, and the symbol of virtue” that is part of a “ritual of renewal” during the deer hunt, which expresses the paradoxical closeness of man to the nature that he masters and kills.
Faulkner’s humor, Warren pointed out, cut across class lines from the Jason section of The Sound and the Fury to Miss Reba’s scenes in Sanctuary to the frontier humor of “Spotted Horses”—all designed not merely to be amusing in their own right but also to provide an ironic perspective. Although Faulkner’s treatment of poor white people was so often connected to the Snopeses, Warren noted that As I Lay Dying portrayed this class with “sympathy and poetry.” Similarly, Warren saw “pathos or heroism” in figures like the runaway black man in “Red Leaves” and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Joe Christmas, in Warren’s view, is a “mixture of heroism and pathos.” Most telling, he cited the passage in Go Down, Moses when Ike says to McCaslin Edmonds that blacks have got their virtues “not even despite white people because they had it already from the old free fathers a longer time free than us because we have never been free.” Even works that Cowley viewed as disjointed had, in Warren’s estimation, a thematic and symbolic unity.
Warren’s effort to distinguish different kinds of technique from the objective presentation of character and scene to the dramatic (using the characters’ own voices), to the episodic with a narrative voice providing a sense of unity, had the effect of shifting attention away from subject matter per se and on to polarities and paradoxes that were part of a dialectical principle in Faulkner’s fiction. Warren presented Faulkner’s importance in terms that went considerably beyond Cowley’s: “The study of Faulkner is the most challenging single task in contemporary American literature for criticism to undertake. Here is a novelist who, in mass of work, in scope of material, in range of effect, in reportorial accuracy and symbolic subtlety, in philosophical weight, can be put beside the masters of our own past literature.” Cowley’s work might well mark a turning point in the appreciation of Faulkner, but Warren was so confident as to imply that Faulkner ultimately had no need of Cowley’s assistance.
The “Compson Appendix”
Reviewers did not reckon with the significance of the “Appendix,” “done at the same heat as the book,” Faulkner assured Cowley.39 It also constituted the only work Faulkner had written exclusively for the Portable. The “Appendix” differs markedly from The Sound and the Fury in that it approaches the form of a chronicle. It specifically dates the period of time it covers (1699–1945), and it includes accounts of Ikkemotubbe (“A dispossessed American king”), of Jackson (“A Great White Father with a sword”), and of the generations of Compsons who precede the Compsons of the novel. By opening his “chronicle” just before the beginning of the eighteenth century and carrying it down to the middle of the twentieth (exactly two hundred years after Quentin MacLachan “fled to Carolina from Culloden Moor”), Faulkner reverses the method of The Sound and the Fury in which the family’s history is discovered and interpreted solely from the family’s point of view. That history is now seen as a larger process out of which the family has developed (or failed to develop) as one particular unit.
Mr. Compson’s fatalism, for example, has its historical place in an “Appendix” that recounts the family’s penchant for lost causes, which seem to a latter-day Compson an illusion revelatory of man’s “folly and despair.” Mrs. Compson’s fatalism, her “dreading to see this Compson blood beginning to show” in her favorite, her second son, the fourth Jason, is reified in the “Appendix.” “Who can fight against bad blood,” she wonders as she dwells on Caddy’s misbehavior and looks for a way to help Jason escape “this curse.” All the children absorb the mother’s hapless surrender to fate even as they try to resist it. “There’s a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault,” Quentin says to Caddy. “I’m bad anyway you can’t help it,” she resignedly confides to Quentin. Jason, who feels the least like a Compson, nevertheless acts cornered and cramped by time and expresses a sense of futility that links him to the time-obsessed Compsons.
Quentin has evolved not only out of the Compson saga but out of the national history evoked in the “Appendix,” for his obsession with Caddy has its historical analogue in the portrayal of Andrew Jackson, a “rough-edged-soldier with a chivalric streak,” determined to protect his wife and “the principle that honor must be defended whether it was or not because defended it was whether or not.” Similarly, Jason Compson is defined in the “Appendix” in relation to an actual historical event. He is described as “the first sane Compson since before Culloden and (a childless bachelor) hence the last.” He is the “first sane Compson” because he accepts what is inevitable and refuses to keep fighting the lost battle of Culloden—standing for all doomed romantic causes—and in so doing partially frees himself from the fatality and helplessness of the latter-day Compsons. Having abandoned principle and tradition in the interest of “practicality,” he is able to compete and hold his own with the Snopeses, the new economic men. But Jason’s selling of the Compson house and property not only characterizes his attitude toward the past; it also marks the culmination of a historical process of which the Compsons are only a part.
The “Appendix” also deals with the dispossession of the Indians and portrays all of the manifold yet interrelated changes that occurred as a result of that dispossession: the successive transformation of the “solid square mile” of land from the time when Ikkemotubbe swapped the land for the racehorse belonging to Jason Lycurgus Compson, “the grandson of a Scottish refugee who had lost his own birthright by casting his lot with a king who himself had been dispossessed.” Then the mile was almost in the center of the town of Jefferson” when Brigadier Jason Lycurgus II put the “first mortgage on the still intact square mile to a New England carpetbagger in ’66,” which deteriorates into the “weedchoked traces of the old ruined lawns and promenades, the house which had needed painting too long already.” Finally, Quentin’s father sells part of the mile to pay for Caddy’s wedding and Quentin’s last year at Harvard, and Quentin’s brother Jason sells the remainder. Nevertheless the square mile is still “intact again in row after row of small crowded jerrybuilt individuallyowned demiurban bungalows,” still identifiable as the land Jason Lycurgus Compson obtained through a horse trade. Indeed the fate of the Compson house itself as a “boardinghouse for juries and horse- and muletraders” recalls, in an ironic way, that first horse trade. Notwithstanding all the changes, the Compson mile retains its basic shape as a physical reminder of the past. Even after Ikkemotubbe’s “lost domain” has become the “Compson Domain” and then been divided into even smaller units, Jason IV still retains his own “particular domain,” a “railed enclosure” in the farmers’ supply store. In Jason’s arrogation of his own “domain”—no matter how small or insignificant it might seem—the historical process obtains: though Jason rejects the past, the very form of his rejection fits ironically into the pattern of history as it unfolds in the “Appendix.”
In the Quentin section of the “Appendix,” his intense sense of dislocation from the mainstream of history is exacerbated by his family’s loss of land, which is tantamount to its loss of honor it created by acquiring, holding, and defending its land. Caddy stands as Quentin’s substitute for land, for the locus of his identity. She is “a miniature replica” of Compson land, honor, and identity—a compact symbol for the overwhelming history of defeats that Quentin cannot reverse. She is Quentin’s virgin wilderness, like the one out of which the family fashioned the Compson mile, and she is just as fragile, just as prone to violation as the land and the Compsons have been all along. Quentin has tried to center all of Compson history into the figure of his sister and perpetuates the family’s doom.
The “Appendix” is an inquiry into the structure of history out of which the novel emerged. For not only does Faulkner continue Caddy’s biography by connecting her to a German staff general, he also links the Compson family history to the Nazi endeavor to purify history. Serene in her prolonged beauty, Caddy also knows she is damned. In ranging so far beyond Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner confirms the universality of its history and shows that his county is a part of a greater history that Yoknapatawpha—that “keystone in the universe”—has helped to shape.
The pattern of history in the “Appendix,” however, is not the same as Malcolm Cowley’s idea of a “saga of Yoknapatawpha County.” The “Appendix” does not derive from a preconceived history of Yoknapatawpha but is an independent work in which the author creates new “facts” and sometimes contradicts old ones. Faulkner seems to have regarded Yoknapatawpha’s past, present, and future as continually developing out of each new act of creation: “I would have preferred nothing at all prior to the instant I began to write, as though Faulkner and Typewriter were concomitant, coadjutant and without past on the moment they first faced each other at the suitable (nameless) table.”40 No doubt Cowley’s “saga of Yoknapatawpha County” stimulated Faulkner to reflect upon the historical process portrayed in his fiction. Certainly the “Appendix” and the novels following it, especially Requiem for a Nun, deal with that process in a much more explicit way than The Sound and the Fury and other early novels. But the historical process presented in the “Appendix” is not specifically southern, and Faulkner never acceded to the proposition that he was recording or creating a “legend of the South.”