1. Interview in The Paris Review, Spring, 1956, reprinted in Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Viking Press, 1958, pp. 122-141; p. 141.
2. Carvel Collins, ed., William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, Rutgers University Press, 1958, p. 54.
3. I am not suggesting that Portrait of the Artist was an influence on Faulkner when he was writing Mosquitoes, only that the two books are comparable in their relation to the developing careers of the two writers. I know of no evidence that Faulkner had read Joyce’s Portrait by 1925. That he read Ulysses about this time seems to me very likely from internal evidence. Faulkner himself has dated his reading of the novel only roughly—as the middle of the twenties (Robert A. Jelliffe, ed., Faulkner at Nagano, Tokyo, Kenkyusha, Ltd., 1956, p. 203). He once denied having read it before writing The Sound and the Fury, while admitting that he might have been influenced by what he had heard about it. See William Van O’Connor, The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner, University of Minnesota Press, 1954, pp. 42-43, n.
4. Both Hemingway and Faulkner were personally indebted to Anderson for his efforts to help them in their careers, both paid him the compliment of imitating him, Hemingway in “My Old Man” and Faulkner in his newspaper sketch “Cheest,” and both parodied him. Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring concentrates on the absurdities of Anderson’s less successful works, particularly Marching Men and Dark Laughter, absurdities that generally fall under the heading of romantic primitivism. Faulkner’s parody in Mosquitoes, as in the work which he did with his friend Spratling, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, concentrates on the qualities of the man who produced the works. But the two young writers came to essentially similar conclusions: Anderson was to be respected, but by no means to be followed.
Faulkner’s several recent comments on Anderson do not suggest that he has basically changed his mind about the older writer. Depending on the situation, and presumably also on Faulkner’s mood, the recent comments either alternate between or mingle praise for the man, vague statements about his importance as a writer, and specific praise for one book and several short stories. A feeling of guilt for having parodied a benefactor may be what complicates the statements and makes them at times seem self-contradictory, but behind them I think we may discern an essentially unvarying estimate. To the interviewer for The Paris Review Faulkner speaks of Anderson as “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on.” (Writers at Work, p. 135.) And he adds, apparently in the interest of justice to one who has been injured, “He has never received his proper evaluation.” But to his questioners in Japan, with what would seem to be less thought of making a statement for the record, he said:
Why, [Anderson] was one of the finest, sweetest people I ever knew. He was much better than anything he ever wrote. I mean by that he was one of those tragic figures that had just one book, which was Winesburg, Ohio. . . . [Several of the short stories are also] very fine, but after that it got worse and worse and he tried and he tried and he tried—that was the tragedy. And I think that’s what he died of.
(Faulkner at Nagano, pp. 54-56.)
The son who achieves independence of the father without incurring guilt is rare indeed. Faulkner’s repeated judgments of Anderson achieve rough justice. In general, Faulkner’s early judgments anticipated what has come to be widespread critical agreement. See, for example, Faulkner’s 1925 Dallas Morning News article containing specific comments on Anderson’s works; the article is reprinted in the William Faulkner Number of The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 18 (Spring, 1957), 89-94.
5. It would seem from internal evidence that Faulkner was first strongly impressed by Eliot about 1925. Any attempt to date the reading from Faulkner’s poems is complicated by the fact that the publication dates of Faulkner’s poems are misleading if taken as evidence of date of composition. The Marble Faun, published in 1924, was written in 1919. It shows no influence of Eliot or the “new” poetry; its influences are from the nineteenth century. The poems in Salmagundi, published in 1932, were written, apparently, in the early and middle twenties and show some new influences. “Portrait,” dated June, 1922, suggests, though faintly, that Faulkner may have read “Prufrock” as early as this. “Lilacs,” dated June, 1925, is the earliest poem clearly showing the influence of the new poetry. Most of the Eliot echoes in Faulkner’s poetry are to be found in A Green Bough, published in 1933 but made up of poems written in the twenties. They are undated, but I suspect that they were written, most of them at least, in the middle years of the decade. For the clearest Eliot echoes see the following (the poems are numbered, not titled): II (cf. “La Figlia che Piange”) ; XIX (cf. the ending of “Prufrock”) ; XXVII (cf. “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”).
For dates of first publication of Faulkner’s poems, see James B. Meriwether, “William Faulkner: A Check List,” the William Faulkner Number of The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 18 (Spring, 1957), 136-158. See also George P. Garrett, Jr., “An Examination of the Poetry of William Faulkner” in the same issue. Mr. Garrett discusses the apparent influences on the poems (“Among the principals were Eliot, Housman, Cummings, Hart Crane, Rossetti, and Swinburne.”), the evidence of Faulkner’s frequent revisions, and the conjectural dates of composition of some of them.
6. Writers at Work, p. 135. Carvel Collins has commented on Faulkner’s debt to Joyce in “The Pairing of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 18 (Spring, 1957), 114-123.
7. Writers at Work, p. 132.
8. See Karl E. Zink, “Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner’s Prose,” PMLA, 71 (June, 1956), 285-301; and Walter J. Slatoff, “The Edge of Order: The Pattern of Faulkner’s Rhetoric,” Twentieth Century Literature, 3 (October, 1957), 107-127.
1. The Explicator, 14 (April, 1956), 7.
2. Faulkner has Horace Benbow in Sanctuary say of Dreiser, expressing what one suspects was Faulkner’s own opinion at the time, “Nobody ever had more to say and more trouble saying it than old Dreiser.”
3. O’Connor, The Tangled Fire, p. 86.
4. The Eliot allusions that run through Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes continue in Sartoris, though less frequently and less obviously. One of them, on page 55 of the 1951 edition, is to a poem also alluded to in The Sound and the Fury, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” On the same page of Sartoris there is an image that I suspect was derived from “La Figlia che Piange.”
1. Robert Coughlan, The Private World of William Faulkner, Harper, 1954, p. 89.
2. Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E. Foster, William Faulkner, The University of Oklahoma Press, 1951, pp. 51-52.
3. Writers at Work, p, 130.
4. George R. Stewart and Joseph M. Backus, in “‘Each in Its Ordered Place’: Structure and Narrative in ‘Benjy’s Section’ of The Sound and the Fury,” American Literature, 29 (January, 1958), 440-456, have analyzed the “clues” to the order of events in Benjy’s section. They present a table by which the various events may be dated in the story, if one wishes to date them precisely. One of their conclusions is that “The evidence seems to show that the section was consciously constructed as a puzzle or a mystery story, or both combined.” I doubt it; but whatever may have been in Faulkner’s mind when he wrote the section, I can see no reason for reading it as either a puzzle or a mystery story. The kind of order Mr. Stewart and Mr. Backus try to clarify is not the kind of order that is aesthetically important in the section.
5. An interesting discussion of Benjy’s redemptive role is to be found in Lawrence E. Bowling, “Faulkner and the Theme of Innocence,” Kenyon Review, 20 (Summer, 1958), 466-487.
6. For a discussion of Christian parallels in The Sound and the Fury, see Sumner C. Powell, “William Faulkner Celebrates Easter, 1928” Perspective, 2 (Summer, 1949), 195-218.
7. Writers at Work, pp. 123-124, 132.
8. An excellent analysis leading to the conclusion that it is Dilsey who supplies order and moral perspective in the novel is to be found in Olga W. Vickery, “The Sound and the Fury: A Study in Perspective,” PMLA, 69 (December, 1954), 1017-1037. See also Peter Swiggart, “Moral and Temporal Order in The Sound and the Fury,” Sewanee Review, 61 (Spring, 1953), 221-237.
9. Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study, Random House, 1951, p. 119.
10. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, Harcourt, Brace, 1950 ed., p. 380.
11. Quentin even uses a word in his revery that one suspects Faulkner of having picked up from “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”—“philoprogenitive,” with the “poly” which prefixes the word in the poem lopped off because it does not apply to one who has loved only Caddy. There are other Eliot echoes in the section in addition to this, including of course Quentin’s choice of death by water.
I suspect that Faulkner’s conception of Benjy also owes something to Eliot. In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Eliot had written: “Midnight shakes the memory/ As a madman shakes a dead geranium.” It would seem to be not too far from this to Benjy cherishing his memories and bawling as he shakes his narcissus or jimson weed. Compare Faulkner’s early picture of an idiot clutching a broken flower in “The Kingdom of God” in New Orleans Sketches, Carvel Collins, ed., Rutgers University Press, 1958.
12. As do the Snopeses of Faulkner’s world. If it seems an exaggeration to suggest that Jason has become a Snopes (since he is the only “sane” Compson) we may compare his statement on Negroes and Jews with the following by Flem Snopes in Sanctuary: “‘I’m an American,’ he said. ‘I don’t brag about it, because I was born one. And I been a decent Baptist all my life, too. Oh, I aint no preacher and I aint no worse than lots of folks that pretends to sing loud in church. But the lowest, cheapest thing on this earth aint a nigger: it’s a jew.’” The best discussion of Faulkner’s attitude toward the Jasons and Snopeses of the modern world is still George Marion O’Donnell’s 1939 essay, “Faulkner’s Mythology,” reprinted in Hoffman and Vickery, ed., William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism, Michigan State College Press, 1951, pp. 49-62.
1. Writers at Work, p. 139.
2. Roma A. King, Jr., in “The Janus Symbol in As I Lay Dying,” The University of Kansas City Review, 21 (Summer, 1955), 287-290, interprets Addie’s role in part in terms of horse symbolism in classic myth. The result reinforces the redemptive aspect of Addie and the humanistic aspect of the theme of the novel.
3. William Van O’Connor in his balanced and perceptive discussion of the novel seems to me to have offered the strongest case for finding a clearer meaning than I am here suggesting. He concludes that “The theme . . . would seem to invite the dividing of people into those who accept the bitterness and violence of living and those who do not.” See The Tangled Fire, p. 53.
1. Introduction to the Modern Library Edition, and Faulkner at Nagano, pp. 62-65.
2. The Tangled Fire, p. 57.
3. An interesting discussion of the moral theme of Sanctuary in terms of the idea of initiation is to be found in George Monteiro, “Initiation and Moral Sense in Faulkner’s Sanctuary,” Modern Language Notes, 73 (November, 1958), 500-504.
4. Lena’s last name, one recalls, is Grove. For comments on her relation to nature, see, for instance, Cleanth Brooks, “Notes on Faulkner’s Light in August,” The Harvard Advocate, 135 (November, 1951), 10-11, 27 (special Faulkner Issue); and Karl E. Zink, “Faulkner’s Garden: Woman and the Immemorial Earth,” Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (Autumn, 1956), 139-149 (special Faulkner Issue).
5. For a perceptive comment on Byron as the “engaged” man, committed to life in all its impurity, see Richard Chase, “The Stone and the Crucifixion,” in William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism.
6. Faulkner uses this image of light coming, or seeming to come, from the earth itself at least twice again, in later works, once in The Hamlet, on page 207 of the original edition, and once, in a key passage, in The Town, on page 315.
7. I am not unaware that the passage can be defended on the allegorical level as appropriate to the symbolic meaning of the character of Christmas. Allegorically, it is shocking to Christmas to discover that there are people for whom the difference between black and white is not important, who do not share his demand for purity. But when Faulkner is writing at his best we do not need to try to defend in allegorical terms what offends our sense of character.
1. The Portable Faulkner, Viking Press, 1946, p. 540.
2. Quoted in O’Connor, The Tangled Fire, p. 92.
3. Many of the features of modern life described in such a way in Pylon as to imply rejection are discussed from a neutral point of view as a “democratization of culture” by the late Karl Mannheim in his posthumous Essays on the Sociology of Culture, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956. See also Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, Oxford University Press, 1953.
4. For a reading of the novel stressing Faulkner’s sympathy with the fliers, see George Monteiro, “Bankruptcy in Time: a Reading of Faulkner’s Pylon,” Twentieth Century Literature, 4 (April-July, 1958), 9-20.
5. Writers at Work, p. 133. See also W. R. Moses, “The Unity of The Wild Palms,” Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (Autumn, 1956), 125-131.
6. The Tangled Fire, p. 105.
7. Writers at Work, p. 133.
1. Kathleen Nott, The Emperor’s Clothes, Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 5.
2. For a discussion of the way in which the style (i.e., grammar and rhetoric) is functional, see Robert H. Zoellner, “Faulkner’s Prose Style in Absalom, Absalom!,” American Literature, 30 (January, 1959), 486-502.
1. William Faulkner, pp. 27, 34-35.
2. The only exception to this that I am aware of is Andrew Lytle’s brief excursion on The Unvanquished in the course of his review of A Fable, in the Sewanee Review, 63 (Winter, 1955), 114-137.
3. The Tangled Fire, pp. 100-102.
4. For the best discussions of the moral and social meanings implicit in the structure of Yoknapatawpha, see the essays by George Marion O’Donnell, Robert Penn Warren, and Malcolm Cowley in Hoffman and Vickery, William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism.
5. The first version of the story appeared in Harper’s, 163 (August, 1931), 266-274. Reprinted in Doctor Martino, it was revised before being used in The Hamlet. In the original version there was a stronger suggestion that the murderer’s situation as a sharecropper was sufficient to account for his rage and his deed. But not all sharecroppers, however “underprivileged,” become murderers. In revising the story, Faulkner lessened, but did not entirely eliminate, his reliance on this cliché of the early Depression; traces of it remain as one of the elements of simplistic thinking in the episode.
1. Writers at Work, p. 123.
2. “Faulkner’s Vision of Human Integrity,” The Harvard Advocate, 135 (November, 1951), 8-9, 28-33 (special Faulkner Issue). “Faulkner burdens his characters with the integral human state; he will not let them off. . . . [his] imagination seems to be characterized by a velocity of memory that one finds only in writers of genius. . . . what I see and hear in the soar and thud of these details is an effort to present—not merely to the consciousness of a single mind but along the whole circuit of time and thought through which we move—that which is our life in all its presentness. . . . Faulkner’s insistence on embracing all actuality in the moment is . . . an attempt to realize continuity with all our genesis, our “progenitors” . . . with all we have touched, known, loved.” Mr. Kazin’s article is one of the most perceptive, and most important, comments ever made on Faulkner’s fundamental strategy, and on an important aspect of his achievement.
3. The Burning Fountain, Indiana University Press, 1954.
4. Except as noted later, all the stories discussed in this chapter are to be found in Collected Stories and Go Down, Moses, and it is these versions of the stories that I have in mind.
5. Writers at Work, p. 141.
6. Once again, the reference is to the version in Go Down, Moses, which incorporates an earlier, shorter story, “The Bear,” published in The Saturday Evening Post, May 9, 1942, and “Lion,” Harper’s Magazine, December, 1935. A later version of the story, without the fourth section, is reprinted in The Big Woods.
7. The Tangled Fire, pp. 129-133.
8. The Saturday Evening Post, 227 (March 5, 1955), 26ff.
9. “A Note on Sanctuary,” The Harvard Advocate, Faulkner Issue, p. 16.
1. “On Privacy . . . The American Dream: What Happened to It?” Harper’s Magazine, 211 (July, 1955), 33-38.
2. Ibid. By “humanitarian” Faulkner seems to mean, judging from the context, a practitioner in what are called, in academic circles, “the humanities,” as contrasted with the natural and social sciences.
3. The issue of November-December, 1954.
4. “What Price Glory?” The Hudson Review, 7 (Winter, 1955), 602-606. Mr. Flint goes on, in his valuable review, to make a more general point that bears on the failure of A Fable: “Faulkner’s good instincts are profoundly temperate as well as orderly, but they deal profoundly only with experienced realities, not, as in A Fable, with received ideas. He is wisely critical of modern life, but to a degree unusual even among novelists, can criticize convincingly only in terms of tone, character, temperament, and conduct.” (p. 603.)
5. In “Race at Morning,” published shortly after A Fable came out, Faulkner has his wise character say: “‘Maybe . . . The best word in our language, the best of all. That’s what mankind keeps going on: Maybe.’”
6. “Is death from ‘natural causes’ inevitable? No one can say categorically that it is. . . . The attainment of human immortality must be the goal of medical research.” Life, 38 (April 25, 1955), 55.
7. As Roma A. King, Jr., has argued in “Everyman’s Warfare: A Study of Faulkner’s Fable,” Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (Autumn, 1956), 132-138.
8. Faulkner at Nagano, p. 186.
1. Shenandoah, 3 (Autumn, 1952), 55.
2. “By the People,” Mademoiselle (October, 1955), 86-89, 130-139.
3. For example, Randall Stewart, American Literature and Christian Doctrine, Louisiana State University Press, 1958, pp. 136-142.
4. “On Privacy . . .”
5. Faulkner at Nagano, p. 186.
6. Ibid., p. 23.
7. Writers at Work, p. 132.
8. Edwin A. Penick, Jr., arrives at a similar conclusion in his discussion of Faulkner’s theology in “The Testimony of William Faulkner,” The Christian Scholar, 38 (June, 1955), 121-133.
9. “Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art,” in Carl Michalson, ed., Christianity and the Existentialists, Scribner’s, 1956, p. 147.
1. Sonya Rudikoff, “Freud’s Letters,” Hudson Review, 7 (Winter, 1955), 630.
2. From a letter to The New York Times, reprinted in Time, January 3, 1955, p. 19.
3. Writers at Work, p. 135.
4. Ibid.
5. “Hawthorne and Faulkner,” College English, 1 (February, 1956), 258-262.
6. Writers at Work, p. 130.