Notes on the Textual History of
The Sound and the Fury
James B. Meriwether

 

    The publishing history of William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury is not complex. The text of the original edition, published in 1929, was a careful and accurate one in most respects, and neither authorial revision nor an unusual amount of textual corruption appear to have occurred in any of the later editions and impressions in English.1 Yet for several reasons The Sound and the Fury provides an opportunity for particularly useful textual study. The relationship between the novel and a commentary upon it which Faulkner wrote in 1945 has been often misunderstood, and the text of the most widely used edition is less reliable than it should be, and is commonly assumed to be a matter of some importance, it would seem, though the corruption involved is minor, for a book which demands so close a reading as does The Sound and the Fury. Probably no twentieth-century American novel has elicited more intense critical analysis, and it is obvious that we need to know as much as possible about the text of a work where every italic, every capital, every point of punctuation may carry an important burden of meaning. Careful study of the broken time-sequence of the interior monologues in the first two of the book's four sections,2 or of its much-disputed symbolism,3 or of the complex, elliptical, densely textured style 4 must rest upon as firm a textual foundation as can be established. The purpose of this article is to assist the critical study of The Sound and the Fury by bringing together here certain information about its text, including details of its writing, of its publishing history, and of Faulkner's comments upon it. 
    Faulkner often referred to The Sound and the Fury as his own favorite among his books, the one which represented his most ambitious, uncompromising attempt at perfection in the novel, and the one which had moved him most in the writing.5 (In the writing rather than in the reading. Faulkner was extremely reluctant to reread his books when they were finished, and it is possible that he never read The Sound and the Fury again after its original publication.6) The fourth of his novels, it was published 7 Oct. 19297 by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith in New York, approximately a year after Faulkner had finished it, perhaps a year and half after it had been begun. 
    Since there has been conflicting testimony concerning the date when Faulkner wrote it8 and what happened to the manuscript before it was accepted by Cape and Smith,9 it is worthwhile to determine what we can about the prepublication history of The Sound and the Fury. Despite some confusion about the length of time involved in writing it, there is good reason to accept the statement that Faulkner at least twice made, that it took him six months. In answer to the question "How long does it take you to write a book?" he told a class at the University of Mississippi in 1947, according to a student who made careful notes, that the time varied-he wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, The Sound and the Fury in six months, and Absalom, Absalom! in three years.10 Ten years later at the University of Virginia he said that the novel had been written in the six months between the spring and fall of 1928, and that it had been "finished in all the hooraw of Smith and Hoover in November."11 
    The time when the book was written was one when personal problems had placed him under severe strain, Faulkner told Maurice Edgar Coindreau in 1937,12 and earlier he had noted that it was conceived at a period of crisis in his career as a writer too. His third novel, Sartoris, had been finished in the early fall of 1927,13 but had been rejected by Boni and Liveright, publishers of his first two novels, with whom he had a three-book contract.14 "I believed . . . that I would never be published again. I had stopped thinking of myself in publishing terms," Faulkner wrote in 1932 of his discouragement at the continued rejection of Sartoris by various publishers.15 Under these circumstances he had written The Sound and the Fury-"written my guts" into it, he said, "though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure." About 1933 Faulkner recalled that "When I began it I had no plan at all. I wasn't even writing a book. I was thinking of books, publication, only in reverse, in saying to myself, I wont have to worry about publishers liking or not liking this at all." One day, he said, after Sartoris had been turned down again and again, "I seemed to shut a door between me and all publishers' addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write."16 
    Years later, Faulkner's old friend Phil Stone, the Oxford lawyer who was so close to him, and who did so much for him, during the first part of his career, recalled that Faulkner had told him nothing about The Sound and the Fury until it was finished. Although he had kept in close touch with Stone during the writing of Sartoris, Stone had not even known he was writing anything until the completion of The Sound and the Fury.17 But afterward came the experience, still cherished by Stone, of sitting "night after night in Bill's little room in the little tower of the old Delta Psi chapter house" at the University of Mississippi while Faulkner read aloud The Sound and the Fury to him page by page.18 
    Presumably it was the original manuscript, not his later typescript, that Faulkner read to Stone in Mississippi, for it was in New York, in his friend (and literary agent) Ben Wasson's room on Macdougal Street, opposite the Provincetown Playhouse, that Faulkner completed typing the novel. According to Wasson, Faulkner brought the manuscript to New York and there typed the final version himself.19 On the last page of the carbon which he bound and retained for his files, Faulkner added by hand, at the end of the typed text, the place and the date: "New York, N.Y. | October 1928".20 Wasson recalls that when he finished it, Faulkner offered him the whole typescript with the words "Read this, Bud. It's a real sonofabitch.''21 
    In addition to a carbon of his final typescript, Faulkner preserved among his papers a manuscript, lacking only one page of being complete.22 As was his custom, he used thin sheets of legal-size paper, leaving a wide left-hand margin for corrections.23 A page-by-page comparison, with spot collation, of manuscript, carbon typescript, and published book reveals that each version follows the previous one closely, though with a great deal of verbal polishing and minor revision from manuscript to typescript, and a certain amount of further polishing from typescript to published book. The manuscript itself gives evidence of very extensive rewriting, with many passages added, some canceled, and with its pagination revealing that many of the pages Faulkner preserved represent revisions and expansions of previous ones. Apparently the manuscript represents finished work, Faulkner not troubling to preserve anything prior to it. In typing it out in New York, Faulkner inevitably gave it a certain amount of revising, and at some point after this typing revised it yet further, producing the differences between the carbon typescript and the finished book either by later changes in the ribbon copy (which presumably went to the publisher and eventually became printer's setting copy) or by changes in the proofs. 
    One or more complete drafts, or none; extensive working notes, or none, may have preceded the extant manuscript but not have been preserved. For this particular novel, we might well suppose such measures a necessity; for this particular novelist, we may well assume that they were not.24 In the case of another work in which there are complex dislocations of time, A Fable, we know that Faulkner used such notes, putting on the wall of his study a day-by-day chronology of the action of the novel.25 But when in Japan in 1955 he was twice asked if he had worked from notes in writing the first section of The Sound and the Fury, he once ignored the question, once replied with a curt "No." We might be tempted to agree with the unbelief of the questioner who on that occasion stated, "I made a thorough study of the first section and I felt that it was humanly impossible to write it down from the very beginning without notes," and Faulkner did admit to his Japanese audience that he occasionally used such notes, throwing them away when he was through with them.26 But lacking proof to the contrary it seems unwise to assume that Faulkner could not have constructed the novel in his head and set it down without working notes, even if he did not do so in the case of A Fable.27 
    If Faulkner "had no plan at all" when he sat down to write at this time, save the ambition to create for himself something moving and imperishable, he did have in mind when he began writing a basic image which was to dominate the work. This was "the picture of the little girl's [Caddy's] muddy drawers," as she climbed the pear tree to look in the window while her brothers waited below.28 But Faulkner conceived it as a short story before it became a novel. As he said in Japan in 1955, 

      it began as a short story, it was a story without plot, of some children being sent away 
      from the house during the grandmother's funeral . . and then the idea struck me to see 
      how much more I could have got out of the idea of the blind, self-centeredness of innocence, 
      typified by children, if one of those children had been truly innocent, that is, an idiot. So the 
      idiot was born and then I became interested in the relationship of the idiot to the world that 
      he was in but would never be able to cope with and just where would he get the tenderness, 
      the help, to shield him in his innocence.... And so the character of his sister began to emerge, 
      then the brother, who . . . represented complete evil . . . appeared. Then it needs the 
      protagonist, someone to tell the story, so Quentin appeared. By that time I found out I 
      couldn't possibly tell that in a short story . . . 

So the novel grew, Faulkner said, with the three brothers each permitted to tell their version of the story, "and then I had to write another section from the outside . . . to tell what had happened on that particular day."29 
    When Faulkner showed the completed typescript of the novel to Ben Wasson in the fall of 1928 he remarked that he did not expect it to be published,30 and it was in fact rejected by Harcourt, Brace. But Harrison Smith, who as an editor at Harcourt, Brace had been influential in the firm's decision to accept Sartoris earlier that fall,31 had in the meantime set up in the publishing business himself, and he decided to gamble upon the book, and its author,32 though he warned Faulkner when he accepted it that The Sound and the Fury would not sell.33 
    The new firm of Cape and Smith published its first book, Evelyn Scott's Civil War novel The Wave, on 1 July 1929.34 At about that time Faulkner wrote from Pascagoula, Mississippi, a letter about the proofs - presumably the galley proofs - of The Sound and the Fury, which he had just corrected. His letter was in reply to one from Wasson, who had joined the Cape and Smith staff as an assistant editor,35 who seems to have made certain editorial changes in the first section of the book which Faulkner, in correcting the proofs, had restored to his original readings. 
    Wasson had apparently copy edited the interior monologue of Benjy, the idiot, which opens the book, in order to indicate the breaks in time sequence by means of wider spacing between lines in the text, instead of adhering to Faulkner's original system (which appears in both the manuscript and the typescript he preserved) of indicating these shifts by means of a change from roman to italic type, or back from italic to roman. Wasson in his letter must have argued that this was unsatisfactory because there were at least four different times referred to in Benjy's section, for Faulkner replies that his roman-to italic-and-back system, far from being intended to represent only two different dates, was simply meant to indicate to the reader that some sort of shift in time was occurring. He said that he could recall without difficulty far more than the four dates Wasson had noted, and added that a more important reason for rejecting the device of breaks in the text is that the breaks changed the pace too abruptly, whereas the surface of the narration should have continuity. Faulkner felt that the italics did a better job of indicating to the reader the superficially unbroken confusion of Benjy's mind; to establish this when breaks were used to indicate time changes, Faulkner said, he would have to write a separate beginning for each change. 
    Faulkner went on to say that he wished it were possible to print the section in different colors of ink to indicate time levels or time shifts, an argument he recalled making to Wasson and Smith on a former occasion. But at any rate, he said, he had to reject Wasson's device of the breaks, which was aesthetically displeasing because of its dullness and disjointedness. If a change had to be made in his original device, he felt it would be better to rewrite the first section in the third person, like the final section. 
    He warned Wasson not to add anything else to the text, noting that he had struck out the few examples present in the proofs. And in conclusion he returned to his justification for the device of italics in the first section, emphasizing again that he had not intended to indicate thereby any specific time, but simply a shift in time, letting the material of each scene imply its own date.36 
    It is obvious from this letter that Faulkner, a proud and in some ways supremely confident craftsman, was thoroughly aware of the difficulties in design and printing caused by his book, and it is interesting to see that he could entertain the idea of several radically different solutions to these problems in Benjy's section. His decisive rejection of the possibility of indicating the time shifts by breaks in the text is revealing. A writer who would admit the possibility of rewriting the whole section in the third person, or of writing a new induction or beginning to each new time sequence, can hardly be called inflexible in his thinking about the book, and his two reasons for rejecting the breaks in the text have important implications. His concern with book design appears both in his argument that the breaks in the type page were displeasing to the eye, and in his explanation that such a break would distort the impression he was trying to give of the real confusion of time in the idiot's mind, a confusion that Faulkner wanted to emphasize by the seeming continuity of his interior monologue. Such a concern is not surprising in an author who had several times during the past decade made up little booklets of his verse, fiction, or drama, doing all the illustrating, lettering, and binding himself.37 One of them, "Mayday," has drawings in color by Faulkner, and though he early discovered that he wrote better than he drew,38 and though he apparently never attempted to illustrate his serious mature work, he had a natural interest in the Blakean combination of picture and word, which helps explain his anxiety that the design in type of the Benjy section should match as closely as possible his conception of the idiot's associative thought processes. We can imagine that Faulkner deeply regretted the impossibility of achieving this by printing in colors, and since he proposed such differing alternative methods of handling the problem, we can imagine too his satisfaction when The Sound and the Fury eventually attained a certain degree of popular as well as critical success and so confirmed the validity of the method he had insisted upon in 1929. In 1955 he was asked his present opinion of his original idea of using ink of various colors, and he replied that his "original fear that the reader might need such a device seems not to have been valid," and that he now had "no desire to see the novel so printed."39 
    It would be extremely interesting to see a set of the galley proofs of the book, if a set were ever to turn up. Early in the letter to Wasson Faulkner states that he has made additions to the italics in the first section of the novel where the original seemed unclear upon rereading, and there are cryptic references later on in the letter to the necessity for repunctuating in the italic passages, and to inconsistencies in Wasson's changes. It seems possible that certain puzzling or inconsistent places in the published novel may be due to editorial changes which Faulkner overlooked, or corrected inconsistently, in the proofs. 
    What the first few proof sheets of the book looked like before Faulkner corrected them may be inferred from an examination of a printer's sample octave gathering (title-page, copyright page, and first fourteen pages of text) for The Sound and the Fury now in the Faulkner Collection of the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. In the published book the first italic passage occurs on p. 3.40 On p.3 of the sample gathering the passage appears in roman type, leaded out to form a gap of between one and two lines' width at the beginning and ending of the passage. With one exception, the remaining italic passages in the first fourteen pages of the published book (including the two fragments on lines 6 and 8 of p. 8) all appear in roman, with the breaks, in the sample gathering. The exception - one wonders why - is the second of the italic passages in the book, that on p.5. As Faulkner told Wasson, the leading out creates and ugly type page and a disruption of the reader's experience of Benjy's interior monologue. 
    To assist in publicizing the novel, Cape and Smith sent a set of the galleys (Wasson recalls that he returned them) to Evelyn Scott for comment, since The Wave had become something of a critical and popular success. She responded so enthusiastically in a letter that Wasson asked her to revise and expand her remarks, particularly on the Benjy section. She did this, and her commentary was issued in a little pamphlet, its cover carrying out the black-and-white design of the covers of the novel, which was distributed along with the book.41 Paperbound prepublication copies were also circulated. All in all, Cape and Smith were to be congratulated on the way they brought out a novel which represented a considerable gamble for a new firm. It was published 7 Oct. 1929, an autumn for greater optimism concerning America's literary than financial condition, and received very good reviews, upon the whole; but it did not sell. The first printing, only 1,789 copies, sufficed until the publication of Sanctuary in February 1931. In that month a small second printing of 518 copies was made, and the following November a third printing, of 1,000 copies, was made from a copy of the second impression by offset lithography.42 
    This final printing of 1,000 copies appears to have lasted several successive publishers for more than a decade. By the late fall of 1931 Cape and Smith were out of business, to be succeeded, as Faulkner's publishers, first by Smith and Haas, then by Random House. The volumes of the Publishers, Trade List Annual record the continued availability, at $2.50, of The Sound and the Fury from Smith and Haas through 1935, and from Random House from 1936 through 1943. 
    Granted the exceptional difficulty of the text, the complications caused by a number of individual or idiosyncratic features of Faulkner's spelling and punctuation, the distance of author from publisher, and the inconsistencies of copy editing noted by Faulkner in his letter to Wasson, it would have been a small miracle had the text of the first edition of The Sound and the Fury been less imperfect than it actually was. Despite a certain number of demonstrable minor printer's errors and inconsistencies, and a larger number of possible or debatable ones, it is on the whole a very good text, and much better than any of the four later, and unfortunately much more widely available, editions. 
    Listed below in Table A are the obvious or demonstrable errors in the 1929 Cape and Smith edition. It is noteworthy how few misspellings due to printer's errors there are; for a careful collation to turn up only three (those on pp. 93, 120, and 216) in a novel of 400 pages is an indication of careful printing and proofreading. Since Faulkner varied his usage, from section to section and even within the section, depending upon the state of mind of the subject of the interior monologue, it is not at all surprising that there are real inconsistencies, as well as apparent ones, in matters of punctuation, the handling of direct quotations, and the use of apostrophes. For example, it would seem that Faulkner intended to indicate something about the quality of Benjy's perception of the world about him by uniformly omitting the question marks in the questions that are asked in the dialogue of his section of the novel. Akin to this devices but not employed with complete consistency, is the separation of dialogue from its adjunctive "he said" or "she said" by periods, instead of commas. That is, Benjy's mind appears to be recording the finality of a statement, in dialogue, by putting a period at the end of the statement; its connection to the following "he said" appears only in the lower case letter of the "he." but where there is inconsistency in the practice, is Faulkner attempting to indicate some subtle difference in the situation, or Benjy's perception of it, or did copy editor or printer make a change? Again, it seems obvious that nothing but errors of commission by printers, omission by proofreaders, are involved in the occasional appearance in one-syllable contractions like wont of the apostrophes which Faulkner, it is clear from his manuscripts and typescripts, prefers to omit. But it is lessclear what is involved in the occasional omission of apostrophes in syllable contractions like wouldn't; some of them appear to be meaningless omissions, others might just possibly be related to the changes of punctuation that appear in the italicized passages of Benjy's and Quentin's sections. 
    Other problems in the text of this novel, as in other books by Faulkner, occur from his preference for omitting the periods after the contractions Mr., Mrs.' and Dr.; his preference for occasional -our for s (humor, labouring) and the -ise ending for certain verbs (do these reflect the author's taste for earlier American forms, or more recent English practice?); his liking for awhile and anymore instead of a while and any more; and so on. There is even one apparently deliberate Gallicism: quai for quay
    In a work where symbolism, imagery, and literary allusions are so densely, and often so inconspicuously, woven into the texture of the prose, a high degree of editorial conservatism would be called for if a new edition of the novel were to be brought out now. Consistency might mistakenly urge the smoothing out of spelling, punctuation, and other features of the style which could significantly enrich the reader's understanding of a particular passage, but it is also obvious that certain inconsistencies are almost sure to be the fault of the printer and copy editor. Wherever the context, or comparison with prevailing practice elsewhere in the book, argue very strongly that the inconsistency is not substantive, it is listed in the table of errors below. Other cases are ignored, for though it is to be hoped that Table here will shed light upon the textual problems of this novel, a more thorough investigation of the whole text ought to involve collation of the published version with the extant manuscript and typescript texts. Only such a collation would reveal whether the occasionally disturbing inconsistencies, not listed here, in the use of apostrophes in contractions, in the punctuation, and in the use of italics are the fault of the author, or are due to slipshod copy editing and proofreading. 
 

Table A: Errors in the 1929 Edition of The Sound and the Fury
page page
and suggested and suggested
line error correction line error correction
3.15 don't dont 168.1 You "You
4.18 dining-room dining room 179.15 weetha. weetha."
9.3 don't dont 185.16 Geralds Gerald's
9.24 baby," she baby." she 188.9 I've Ive
10.1 Don't Dont 190.11 I'll Ill
10.25 Don't Dont 196.3 we'll well
11.1 didnt didn't 197.7 I'll Ill
11.8 Can't Cant 200.28 he'll hell
30.20 said, said. 202.12 I'm Im
33.20 barn barn." 216.16 Nom sum Non sum
38.13 don't dont 233.16 She she
38.14 can't cant 240.29 enevelope envelope
38.19 go," go." 246.18 eve'y ev'y
43.23 said, said. 252.20 don't dont
45.7 father Father 260.12 can't cant
48.10 up" up." 263.4 start. start,
56.28 Benjy," Benjy." 270.13 o'clock oclock
60.5 looney loony 273.4 childrens' children's
66.18 looneys loonies 286.22 can't cant
68.2 fire- fire 292.22 don't dont
74.22 Benjy. Benjy, 295.18 can't cant
75.5 Mr. Mr 322.11 o'clock oclock
84.5 fast, fast. 324.2 He "He
86.11 up, up. 328.7 don't dont
93.6 excrutiating-ly excruciating-ly 335.25 stove stove-
105.7 jeweler jeweller 343.10 He he
114.15 diningroom dining-room 346.16 Cahline Miss Cahline
122.12 didnt didn't 347.14 you alls' you all's
125.12 hear? hear?" 355.9 beatin' beatin
125.17 o'clock oclock 357.14 here?" here."
130.22 girls girl's 357.17 here? here?"
139.14 flat irons flat-irons 369.13 ! !"
144.8 flat irons flat-irons 393.21 somethin' somethin
144.26 May flies Mayflies 394.10 said. said,
156.25 again, again.
 
    In April, 1931 the first English edition of The Sound and the Fury was brought out in London by Chatto and Windus, in a printing of 2,000 copies.43 Faulkner's second book to be published in England (it followed Soldiers' Pay by less than a year), it had an introduction by Richard Hughes, who praised highly the novel's technique and structure. These produce, he said, an effect "impossible to describe because it is unparalleled," and he noted particularly the "exquisite care" that had been used in fitting together the pattern of Benjy's section, the parts of which had been written with such "consummate contrapuntal skill." 
    English readers might have had more confidence in Faulkner's skill if they had been given a better text by which to judge it. When Chatto and Windus brought out Sanctuary the following fall, they censored the novel by omitting 325 words, but in other respects did a more careful job of printing than had been done in America, where it had been somewhat sloppily copy edited and proofread.44 However, the English edition of The Sound and the Fury was indifferently copy edited, little consistency being exhibited in the many departures made from the original text in spelling and punctuation, and though only a few printer's errors can be identified as such, some of the many changes in the original punctuation probably should be attributed to this source rasher then to the copy editing. 
    House styling and other changes of the sort that almost invariably occur when an American book is set up in Britain (or a British book in America) account for many, perhaps the majority, of the differences between the first English and first American editions of the novel. There are the usual Anglicizations of spelling: parlour, ploughed, draught, tyre. Though gasoline does not become petrol, and curb remains curb, motor is substituted for auto. Such changes can hardly be criticized, however because of the inconsistencies in the American text caused by Faulkner's occasional use of English forms. More serious is the fact that a number of Faulkner's dialectal or colloquial words and expressions are modified (some perhaps by printer rather than editor): for hit, bein, nothin, shamed, begun, belong at are substituted it, being, nothing, ashamed, began, belong to. Apostrophes are inserted (with less than perfect consistency) in Faulkner's cant, wont, dont, and after Mr and Mrs periods are usually supplied. Hyphens are added to many compounds: thus drug store becomes drug-store, woodlot becomes wood-lot. Trivial in themselves, these changes are all away from Faulkner's practice of eliminating punctuation that breaks up or slows down the movement of the eye across the type page unless demanded by the meaning (rather than the form) of the words. And though again it is not carried through with any degree of consistency, a further modification of Faulkner's practice in this respect is the addition of apostrophes to indicate omission of unpronounced letters in spoken words: 'tis, makin', S'pose. The -ise verb ending so often preferred by Faulkner is changed to -ize: civilized, criticize, fertilizing, realize, recognize. 
    The greatest number of changes in the English edition are in punctuation. As we have seen, inconsistencies in the American edition afford some justification for this, and if the changes made by Chatto and Windus had eliminated some of the American inconsistencies there would be little ground for complaint. Unfortunately the changes produced less consistency, not more, and despite many dozens of alterations, the result is a less respectable text. Commas are inserted, commas are omitted; periods are exchanged for commas, and vice versa. 
    Although the great majority of the changes made in the English edition of the novel do not affect the basic meaning of the passages in which they occur, in sum they unquestionably mar the text of the work, particularly since most of them were made inconsistently. The English reader misses a good many of the finer shades of pronunciation and rhythm in the dialogue through changes made in spelling and rhythm in the dialogue through changes made in spelling and punctuation. He loses the chance of the closer acquaintance with Faulkner's mind which familiarity with some of the little idiosyncrasies of usage in the American text afford. And perhaps worst of all, the inconsistencies caused by careless copy editing and proofreading are apt to shake the reader's confidence in his text, and to discourage the kind of close attention the writing deserves. 
    There are also a few ordinary typographical errors. These are listed in Table B below more for the light they shed on the printing and proofreading of the book than because of their importance, though in one or two instances there is significant change in the meaning of the sentence in which the error occurs. Page and line references are to the first English and the first American editions. (A number of possible errors in the dialogue are not listed because conceivably they could represent editorial modification of dialect.) 
 
Table B: Errors in the First English Edition of The Sound and the Fury
English American
14.26 They they 18.13 Then they
19.26 fell 24.28 I fell
26.30 Gid 34.1 Git
48.2 I have just to 60.25 I just have to 
71.12 unbottoned 86.29 unbuttoned
93.33 Will 117.27 Was. Will
107.28 necessarily 134.29 unnecessarily
127.9 Dog 159.13 Doc
131.22 shiny 164.28 shiny tight
135.2 go 169.8 go back
171.6 girl 213.25 girl Girl
175.23 and it 219.19 and i it
191.14 in 238.23 on
207.17 'is, 258.13 is,"
212.4 shes ays 264.4 she says
216.25 your own 269.24 your
227.25 arrangement 283.17 agreement
260.32 next 325.10 about next
291.9 cycamores 363.5 sycamores
313.15 you. 391.7 you."
 
    One of the most interesting chapters in the publishing history of The Sound and the Fury concerns the special edition of the novel which Random House proposed to bring out in 1933. Beginning with his ninth novel, Absalom, Absalom!, in 1936, Random House became Faulkner's publishers for all his books, but his connection with the firm dates from several years earlier. In 1931 they had brought out one of his short stories, "Idyll in the Desert", in a little limited edition signed by the author, and early in 1932 they issued Sanctuary, with a special introduction by Faulkner, in their low-priced Modern Library series. If may have been the success of these two projects which encouraged Random House to contemplate bringing out The Sound and the Fury in a new, limited edition with an introduction by the author. 
    In this edition the first section was to be printed in ink of various colors to help clarify the chronology, as Faulkner had proposed when the novel was first published, and for it he underlined his copy of the book in crayon of different colors and sent it, with the introduction, to Random House.45 The 1933 Publishers' Trade List Annual carried a Random House "tentative advance announcement for the fall of 1933" which listed "A new limited Edition" of The Sound and the Fury, "With a new introduction by William Faulkner. Typography by the Grabhorn Press . 500 copies, signed by William Faulkner. Ready in November. $7.50." 
    Random House deserves great credit for even contemplating such a project during depression times, for it would have entailed a heavy printing bill indeed. But though the edition was announced again in the 1934 Trade List Annual for fall, 1934, publication, it was abandoned before completion. No trace of either Faulkner's introduction or the copy of the book with the crayon underlining can now be found at Random House.46 
    Reference has already been made to the incomplete, four-page typescript among Faulkner's papers which appears to be a draft of his introduction for this edition, and it is worth further comment here. The first page is lacking. The second begins in mid-sentence with a reference to the reading he had done a decade and more before he wrote Sanctuary but from which he was still learning. In writing Sanctuary, and later As I Lay Dying, he noted, he had found something missing from the experience that writing The Sound and the Fury had been. This - a feeling hard to define but including an actual physical emotion, faith and joy and ecstasy and an eager looking forward to what the process of creation would release from the paper before him - this, he felt, might have been missing with As I Lay Dying because he had known so much about that book before writing it. He waited nearly two years before beginning his next novel, and then tried to recreate for Light in August the conditions of writing The Sound and the Fury by sitting down to face the first blank sheet with only a single image in mind instead of the whole book, in this case the image of a pregnant girl making her way along an unfamiliar road. 
    But the new novel failed to bring him the feeling he had had with The Sound and the Fury, though it progressed satisfactorily Realizing that he had now become a far more conscious, deliberate craftsman, more aware of the standards and achievements of his great predecessors among novelists in French and English, he wondered if he were not now in the situation of knowing too much about the techniques of fiction, and if he had not already made use of the only image, that of Caddy in her muddy drawers trying to see the funeral from the pear tree while her brothers waited below, which had the power to move him as he wanted the act of writing to do. 
    Faulkner concluded the piece with the description already quoted of the writing of The Sound and the Fury, describing his reaction to he continued rejection of Sartoris which eventually determined him to forget about being published and to create then a work of art which would be for himself to cherish. And so, lacking either sister or daughter, he had set himself to create the tragic, lovely figure of Caddy.Though we cannot be absolutely certain that this was designed for the introduction to the 1933 limited edition of The Sound and the Fury, it fits in date and in scope, as far as we can tell from the internal (and incomplete) evidence of the typescript itself, and it is difficult to imagine anything else that it would fit. It is altogether a remarkably self-revelatory piece, for Faulkner; it is equally far in tone and attitude from the protective mask of tough, hard-boiled cynicism he had worn in introducing a lesser work, Sanctuary, a short time before, and from the pose of being an untutored rustic, or ignorant natural genius, which he was already finding useful. 
    Even with the lack of the first page, this is an important document for the understanding of Faulkner, and it is to be hoped that his estate will permit its publication. The picture it gives of Faulkner the widely read, ambitious, consecrated artist makes it tempting to speculate what might have been the effect of the publication of such an introduction with a beautifully prepared and printed Random House-Grabhorn Press edition of The Sound and the Fury in the 1930's. It seems reasonable to suppose that it might have changed radically, perhaps effaced, the picture which so many of his American readers derived from an unperceptive reading of Sanctuary and its Modern Library introduction. The whole course of the reception of his books in this country might have been swayed, not so much perhaps in the direction of winning for him a larger audience, but at any rate of producing a better one. Instead, misapprehensions about Faulkner the man went far toward confirming a certain fashionable condescension toward his work which prevailed for long in the literary circles of America, and which encouraged too many readers and too many critics in a superficial approach to his fiction. (As a French admirer of Faulkner put it in 1937, comparing the relative popularity of Sanctuary and The Sound and the Fury in America, "Certains esprits aiment les plaisirs faciles."47) It is mortifying to Americans to compare the reputation of Faulkner in his own country with that to be found in France at this period. Knowing very little about the man, the French judged him by his work, and accordingly placed him at or very near the top among writers in English in the twentieth century, almost from the beginning.48 
    That Faulkner's reputation in France was so high, so early, was due to the work of Maurice Edgar Coindreau more than to any other single person. Beginning in 1931 a series of superb translations and critical articles by Coindreau led the way in introducing Faulkner to his audience in France. Important among these were his translation of The Sound and the Fury, which no study of the text of this work can afford to overlook, and his preface to this translation, which it has been the misfortune of American critics of the novel largely to ignore. 
    To Coindreau, Faulkner wrote early in 1937 that "After reading 'As I Lay Dying,'49 in your translation, I am happy that you are considering undertaking S&F." To his most recent novel, Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner had appended a short "Chronology" of dates and "Genealogy" of main characters, and he may have had something of the sort in mind when he offered to give Coindreau "any information you wish and I can about the book," adding "I wish you luck with it and I will be glad to draw up a chronology and genealogy and explanation, etc. if you need it...."50 
    Coindreau did not take up Faulkner on the offer of a chronology and genealogy, but for the explanation he journeyed to California - Faulkner at the time was serving one of his stretches in Hollywood, writing for the movies - in June 1937 and stayed a few days with him at his Beverly 
Hills duplex, 129 Ledoux Boulevard, while working on the translation. Although Faulkner would not reread the book, he cooperated wholeheartedly in the task of translation freely discussing difficult passages with Coindreau, who was delighted, and somewhat astonished, at Faulkner's grasp of the details of the novel. Nearly eight years after its publication, the author's memory of the book was almost perfect. On only two occasions, according to Coindreau, did Faulkner's memory fail to produce the solution to the ambiguities in the novel which so often posed a problem for the translator.51 
    "Ambiguity is one aspect of Faulknerian obscurity," Coindreau has noted. As translator of Faulkner, one of his major problems was that "it is more difficult to be obscure in French than in English"; therefore, since the "English language lends itself readily to multiple interpretations," but the French language does not, it required constant care on his part to minimize the clarifying effect of the French tongue in passages of deliberate original ambiguity.52 In accomplishing this, according to Coindreau, Faulkner's explanations of the ambiguities were of the greatest assistance. 
    The French translation of The Sound and the Fury, then, is - or should be - of concern to any careful critic of the novel for several reasons. The preface is of enduring interest. The French text, like any really good translation, is itself a kind of commentary upon the original English, one which in this case is particularly valuable because of Faulkner's association with the process of translating it. Significant too is Faulkner's ready offer to provide Coindreau with the same sort of chronological-genealogical guide to the novel which had appeared in Absalom, Absalom!, and which he was a few years later to supply at some length for the readers of the Viking Portable Faulkner. But how many American critics have examined the text, or even read the preface, of Le bruit et la fureur (This is to my knowledge the only occasion when Faulkner assisted in the translation of one of his works, but a number of the translations are undeservedly neglected by American critics, for they contain valuable and otherwise unavailable introductions.) 
    Just as Faulkner's interest in the Random House limited edition in the early 1930's revealed his continued interest in the typographical problems of the most effective way of handling Benjy's interior monologue, his reaction in 1945 to Malcolm Cowley's proposal to include an excerpt from The Sound and the Fury in a Faulkner anthology he was editing showed that he had not forgotten the idea he had broached to Coindreau in 1937 of providing for the novel some sort of reader's guide to its cast of characters. Cowley wanted to use part of the fourth section, and Faulkner sent him in October 1945 a kind of summary commentary upon the main characters which in addition traced back the Compson family line through a number of generations not mentioned in the original book. In the Viking Portable Faulkner, where it is printed at the end of the volume at some remove from the excerpt from The Sound and the Fury, it makes a very pleasant addition to the anthology's collection of high spots from Faulkner's fiction. 
    In the letter to Cowley (now in the Yale University Library) which accompanied the piece, Faulkner apologized for any discrepancies with the novel it might contain, saying that he had no copy of The Sound and the Fury but that if the errors were too extreme Cowley might correct them himself, or send it back to him for whatever revision Cowley wanted. He mentioned the chronology, including the ages of the characters, and the total sum of the money Miss Quentin steals from Jason, as possible points of error. Obviously Faulkner was pleased by the piece; he told Cowley he liked it and remarked that he ought to have done something: of the sort to tie it together when he first wrote the novel. Cowley, noting many discrepancies between novel and Appendix, wrote Faulkner on 10 Nov. suggesting various changes, including the restoration to Miss Quentin of the pear tree down which she climbed in the novel (in the Appendix Faulkner had made it a rainpipe). But Faulkner excused the discrepancies by saying that he had written the Appendix from the standpoint of a dispassionate genealogist, recording Compson before moving on to the next family tree. 
    Faulkner gave an additional excuse for the differences between the two Compson accounts several months later, when he wrote to Cowley that rather than reread The Sound and the Fury in order to catch the discrepancies with the Appendix, which was now supposed to be printed in the new Modern Library edition of the novel, he would prefer to let them stand, with some sort of statement to the effect that the inconsistencies were proof that the book was still alive and growing, and that since he was more familiar with the characters now, after fifteen years, than he was where he wrote the novel, it was the novel rather than the appendix that was inconsistent.53 
    Though Faulkner's correspondence with Cowley about the Portable Faulkner is of great interest, it will not do to accept all his statements at face value. It is difficult to be certain exactly what reservations he may have had about Cowley's introduction to the Portable Faulkner and his design in editing it, arid we must allow for the possibility of a certain amount of caginess in his remarks to Cowley about the Compson Appendix. On the whole it seems safe to say that Faulkner was intrigued at the notion of writing something that would serve to introduce a fragment of The Sound and the Fury to readers of the anthology; that in the writing it became more an afterword upon the Compson family than an introduction to the excerpt; that he was quite aware that his vision of the book had changed in the years since he had written it; and that he expected anyone who read the Appendix in conjunction with the novel to be aware of the differences between them, especially the important differences in point of view. His willingness to permit the Appendix to be printed as a kind of introduction to a new edition of the novel is another matter. 
    After a hiatus of three years, The Sound and the Fury was brought back into print late in 1946 by Random House in their Modern Library series, in a double volume with As I Lay Dying. Faulkner wrote Malcolm Cowley in January 1946 that he had been offered $250 to write a new introduction for The Sound and the Fury by Random House, which also wanted to include the Compson Appendix from the Viking Portable Faulkner. Faulkner turned down the offer to do a new introduction, arid in a letter to Cowley in March he voiced the hope that his earlier introduction, the one designed for the limited edition planned in the 1930's, had been lost. He suggested that Cowley do the introduction. At about the same time Cowley wrote to Robert Linscott at Random House, suggesting either Conrad Aiken or Jean Paul Sartre for the introduction, and informing him that he was sending a copy of the Compson Appendix.54 
    Cowley warned Linscott about the discrepancies between the Appendix and the text of the novel, but Random House wisely decided to print the original unedited version of the Appendix, rainpipe and all, which has caused a certain amount of critical unrest. But the decision by the publisher to print the Appendix at the beginning of the novel seems considerably less judicious. In effect the Appendix was made to serve the function that had been envisaged for the introduction Faulkner refused to supply; the title-page of the volume claims for it "A NEW APPENDIX AS A FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR." 
    The text of the Modern Library edition of The Sound and the Fury is thus off to a very poor start, spoiling the effect of the original beginning of the novel with Benjy's interior monologue, and failing to make it clear to the reader that this "Foreword by the Author" had been written originally to clear up the questions raised by printing in an anthology a part of one of the book's four sections. In defense of the Appendix as an introduction to the novel is the fact that in every way it is different from the novel itself in tone, in form, in style, as well as content. It bears much the same relationship to the novel that the historical prologues do to the dramatic sections of Requiem for a Nun. But although the sophisticated reader, aware of its origin, can enjoy the Appendix as the forty-seven-year-old author's commentary upon the thirty-one year-old author's book, it is of dubious service to less wary readers and to students to present them with what appears to be a five-part novel, the first part of which relieves them of the burdens which the second part was designed to impose upon them in the way of careful and creative reading. 
    The Modern Library text suffers from more than just the presence of this Appendix-as-Foreword. Collation with the 1929 edition reveals the presence of no authorial revision or correction, and though a few minor corrections of errors and inconsistencies in the original were made,55 a great many new printer's errors were committed. As Table C reveals, most of them are in themselves unimportant, but a few affect substantively the meaning of the passages in which they occur, and when added to the lesser errors of the original edition, the total effect is demonstrably unfortunate. The Sound and the Fury is one of the most exactingly written and precisely demanding novels in English, but it can fail to achieve its effect if the reader, conscious of a large number of inconsistencies and errors, is discouraged from the search for meaning in complex and difficult passages.56 
    Not listed in the table are a number of minor editorial changes, like a while for awhile and any more for anymore, which are made inconsistently, and where the first edition was likewise inconsistent. Also not listed are the numerous places where the Modern Library edition omitted the spaces which in the original, in Quentin's section, server as a kind of punctuation. Again, there is sufficient inconsistency in the way the matter is handled in the original to make it appear not worthwhile to note the variations in the Modern Library edition. 
 
 
Table C: Errors in the Modern Library The Sound and the Fury
Cape Cape
Modern and Modern and
Library Smith Library Smith
23.19 went went back 154.2 oh Oh
25.18. wonder. wonder 155.26 and mud the mud
38.16 up on up 158.30 got a a
41.30 It was I was 161.1 curb curb,
46.28 ain't aint 175.33 window windows
47.2 back black 193.25 I wouldnt have I wouldnt have
47.4 Mr. Mr 194.29 right. right
52.24 Frony, Frony 199.7 her her.
57.4 nobody aint nobody 202.5 her; her,
59.24 Cad Caddy 227.29 trying tr-trying
59.27 said Benjy said, Benjy 228.15 Rogers." Rogers'."
63.19 door door. 229.12 can cant
63.34 whispered whispered. 270.21 fom fum
66.25 whispered whispered. 272.24 from fum
68.34 ain't aint 273.26 ask act
69.18 lost lost." 281.1 CHILL. CHILL,
71.31 Don't Dont 285.2 less less,
74.22 can't cant 285.29 H'h Hah
74.34 firedoor fire door 286.11 breadboard bread board
82.6 Hush.' Hush." 289.2 what whar
99.15 flatiron flat-iron 289.4 last Last
109.9 that it would that would 291.6 'lawd Lawd
123.33 to too 292.16 you yo
124.18 that breathed that breathed 294.24 yo you
125.26 that than 297.18 have yet have
127.33 hit off hit it off 298.18 other the other
130.4 Massachusetts in Massachusetts 300.15 ready - read -
134.34 razor, razor 300.26 and on and
144.30 stage stage, 317.29 don't dont
145.8 standing just standing 321.30 nor nor of
145.33 took took up 327.4 your eye your
146.12 dirty-dress dirty dress 327.5 an eye a human eye
147.15 horse white horse 331.31 dont done 
147.25 Feetsoles Feet soles 336.6 They Then
149.14 facade facade
[The last item in column 3, "facade", should have a tail on the "c". We were unable to reproduce it.] 

    The Modern Library text of The Sound and the Fury has been a number of times reprinted, and has also been reissued in the cheaper format of the Vintage and Modern Library Paperback imprints. There have also been two new American editions,57 both of them negligible, textually speaking, being based on the Modern Library text without any particular effort at the correction of errors or elimination of inconsistencies. Of the two, the best text is that in the 1954 Faulkner Reader, which has the added advantage of printing the Appendix at the end of the book instead of the beginning. The Appendix appears at the beginning of the 1959 Signet edition; it is omitted entirely from the English Four Square paperback of the same year, which is based upon, but adds many new errors to, the text of the original English edition. 
    The Sound and the Fury was a critical success when it was first published and its author was almost unknown, and since that time its reputation has grown, with its authors, until perhaps no American novel of this century is esteemed more highly throughout the world. But despite the large amount of criticism that has appeared, it is obvious that we have as yet hardly seen a beginning to the intensive investigation of the book: of its sources, its imagery, perhaps even of such basic matters as its structure, and the function of its three interior monologues. There is every reason to expect The Sound and the Fury to be accorded increasingly close reading, increasingly careful critical study; and surely such a work deserves a better text than is now available to the public. We must mourn the opportunity that was lost during the depression of bringing it out under the author's supervision in an edition commensurate with its significance. But fortunately the manuscript and typescript versions were preserved, and these, with a meticulous examination of the first published text, would make it possible to bring out The Sound and the Fury in an edition worthy of the feeling which its author had for it. Perhaps it might appear as the first volume in a carefully prepared collected edition, which we need so badly in this country. (There are substantially complete collected editions in England, France, and Italy, but not here. In such an edition of The Sound and the Fury the Appendix could be removed from the novel, an operation which would benefit the patient enormously, though of course it should be preserved for inspection elsewhere, to be considered in the same light as those other related writings, like "That Evening Sun" and Absalam, Absalom!, which tell us other things about the characters of the novel. Perhaps no more fitting memorial to Faulkner might now be made than an edition of The Sound and the Fury which came as close as possible to realising in type the intent that its author reveals in the manuscript, typescript, and the first printed version of the text of this book, which he so often referrerd to as the one closest to his heart of all he wrote. 

NOTES 

1. There have been four separate editions in America, two in England. In order of publication these are: (1) New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929; (2) London: Chatto and Windus, 1931; (3) New York: Modern Library, 1946; (4) The Faulkner Reader [including 
The Sound and the Fury], New York: Random House, 1954; (5) New York: New American Library (a Signet paperback), 1959; (6) London: Landsborough Publications (a Four Square paperback), 1959. 

2. George R. Stewart and Joseph M. Backus have attempted this for the first section alone, in "'Each in Its Ordered Place': Structure and Narrative in 'Benjy's Section' of The Sound and the Fury," American Literature XXIX (Jan. 1958), [440]-56. But several of the authors' time-level identifications are open to dispute, and as Carvel Collins has pointed out, it is dangerous to ignore the evidence of the other sections of the novel in concentrating upon the study of one of them. "Miss Quentin's Paternity Again," Texas Studies in Literature and Language II (Autumn 1960), [253]-60. 

3. Most of the recent studies of this novel have dealt at least in part with the symbolism. For two of the most penetrating, see Carvel Collins, "The Interior Monologues of The Sound and the Fury," English Institute Essays, 1952, New York: Columbia University Press, 1954, pp. [293]-56; and "The Pairing of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying," Princeton University Library Chronicle XVIII (Spring 1957), 114-23. 

4. No detailed study of the style of The Sound and the Fury has yet been made. But such a study must be based on as good a text as possible. An example of the danger of relying upon a faulty text occurs in The Modern Novel in America, by Frederick ]. Hoffman, Chicago: Regnery (a Gateway paperback), 1956, pp. 178-79, where the complexity and versatility of Faulkner's style are praised, and the beginning of the fourth section of The Sound and the Fury is quoted as "a brilliant example of Faulkner's skill" with language. The passage is quoted from the Modern Library edition (p. 281), where it appears as two sentences plus a long, dangling fragment. But in the original Cape and Smith edition (p. 330) the passage appears as two long sentences; the dangling fragment is not feature of Faulkner's style, but was created by a printer's error in the Modern Library edition, which substituted a period for a comma in the first sentence of the section. 

5. It is well to be cautious before accepting at face value some of Faulkner's remarks about his own and other people's work. He delighted in smoothly sidestepping questions he did not want to answer. For example, when asked in Japan which of his works did he "like the least," he replied "The one that gave me no trouble . . . was As I Lay Dying." (Faulkner at Nagano, ed. Robert A. Jelliffe, Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1956, p. 162.) But there is abundant evidence that The Sound and the Fury meant something specia1 to him. He described it to an audience at Virginia as his "best failure. It was the one that I anguished the most over, that I worked the hardest at, that even when I knew I couldn't bring it off, I still worked at it." (Faulkner in the University, edd. F. L. Gwynn and J. L. Blotner, University of Virginia Press, 1959, p. 61.) In so often speaking of the book as a failure, Faulkner may be calling attention to his standards, not his achievements. 

6. Faulkner's last two editors, Albert Erskine and the late Saxe Commins, have both described to me on several occasions Faulkner's reluctance to reread his earlier works, even when, as in the Snopes trilogy, there was some professional and artistic reason to do so. 

7. Publication dates of American editions of Faulkner in this article are taken from Publishers' Weekly; of English editions, from the English Catalogue of Books. 

8. In one interview Faulkner was quoted as saying that it took him "five years of reworking and re-writing." (Cynthia Grenier, "An Interview with William Faulkner - September, 1955," Accent XVI [Summer 1956], p. 172.) On another occasion he said, "I struggled and anguished with it for a year." (Faulkner in the University, p. 207.) Interviews are not the most reliable source of information, and different critics have followed different sources in assigning a period of time to the writing of the book. 

9. Lenore Marshall, in "The Power of Words," Saturday Review, 28 July 1962, p. 16, gives an account of receiving The Sound and the Fury at Cape and Smith in 1929 after thirteen rejections and calling it to the attention of Smith, who is said to have asked, "What's it about?" (See n. 32.) 

10. The student was R. M. Allen, who shortly afterward prepared a careful draft of his notes with the assistance of another member of the class, D. P. Butler. Other students made copies of these notes, not always accurately, according to Allen, and in the Summer 1951 issue of Western Review (Vol.XV, 300-4) one of the students who had been in the class, Lavon Rascoe, published "An Interview with William Faulkner," which Allen felt was derived from his notes. This interview became well known and widely quoted, and therefore in 1954 Allen mimeographed thirty copies of his notes and distributed some of them in order to make available a more accurate text of Faulkner's remarks. Faulkner's statement cited here is from p. 2 of these 1954 notes; in the corresponding passage in the Rascoe version (p. 301) Faulkner is quoted as saying that As I Lay Dying took six weeks, The Sound and the Fury three years, with Absalom, Absalom! not mentioned. There is a photocopy of set 10 of Allen's notes in the Faulkner Collection at the Princeton University Library. 

 11. See F. L. Gwynn, "Faulkner's Raskolnikov," Modern Fiction Studies IV (Summer I958), 169n. There are errors in the table on p. 170 which gives dates of composition for Faulkner's first six novels, but although Faulkner's memory for specific dates or years was often unreliable, it seems reasonable to take seriously his statement about the span of time required by the writing; to confirm the recollection of the Hoover-Smith election, fall 1928, as the date the writing was finished, we have the corroborative evidence of the carbon typescript. 

12. Interview with M. Coindreau, May 1962. Coindreau had referred to this situation in the preface to his 1938 French translation of The Sound and the Fury, which he described there as 
"Ecrit alors que l'auteur se debattait dans des difficultes d'ordre intime" (Le bruit et la fureur, Paris: Gallimard, p. 14). 

13. James B. Meriwether, The Literary Career of William Faulkner, Princeton University Library, 1961, p. 65. 

14. Letter, Phil Stone to C. P. Rollins, 27 Jan. 1927. A carbon of this letter is in the Faulkner Collection of the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas. Stone states in the letter that 
Faulkner's three-book contract with Liveright called for a $200 advance on the first book, with $400 in advance on the next two. 

15. Faulkner, introduction to the Modern Library issue of Sanctuary (New York, 1932). 

16. Meriwether, Literary Career, p. 16. The quotation is taken from what appears to be a version of the introduction Faulkner wrote for an unpublished, limited edition of The Sound and the Fury. Preserved among the papers Faulkner loaned to the 1957 Princeton University Library Faulkner exhibition, it is now on deposit at the University of Virginia Library. 

17. Interview with Mr. Stone, July 1956. 

18. Letter, Phil Stone to James B. Meriwether, 7 July 1960. 

l9. Interview with Mr. Wasson, Sept. l959. 

20. Meriwether, Literary Career, p. 65. 

21. Interview with Mr. Wasson, Sept. 1959. 

22. Meriwether, Literary Career, p. 65. The missing page is no. 5. 

23. Pages of this manuscript (pp. 34, 70, 148) have been reproduced in Meriwether's Literary Career, Figs. 10 and 11; and in the Princeton University Library Chronicle XVII, (Spring 1957), Plate III. 

24. Faulkner often stated that As I Lay Dying had been a tour de force in conception and execution "I knew when I put down the first word what the last word . . . would be," he said at Virginia in 1957 (Faulkner in the University, p. 207). Though As I Lay Dying is a much shorter and simpler novel than The Sound and the Fury, it will not do to underestimate the capacities of the mind that so completely conceived it before the writing began. In the introduction to the Modern Library Sanctuary he made the statement that As I Lay Dying had been written "in six weeks, without changing a word." As George Garrett has shown ("Some Revisions in As I Lay Dying'" Modern Language Notes 73 [June 1958], 414-17), the novel actually underwent a good deal of minor polishing and revision at every stage, from manuscript to typescript to printed book. It will not do, then, to take too literally the words of the Sanctuary introduction (which Faulkner often repeated elsewhere). One logical way of taking the statement would be to assume that Faulkner expected sensible readers to understand that the book could not possibly have been written literally "without changing a word," and was using this way - a by no means uncharacteristic blend of honesty, modesty, and ambiguity - to call attention to his quite extraordinary feat of concentration and control in the planning and writing. 

25. Life XXXVII (9 Aug. 1954) [77]-78. 

26. Faulkner at Nagano, pp. 102, 103, 105. 

27. One reason that Faulkner might well have followed a different rule in writing A Fable is that for various reasons it took him much longer to write than did The Sound and the Fury. At the end (p. 437) of A Fable (New York: Random House, 1954) Faulkner gives Dec. 1944, as the date it was begun, Nov. 1953, as the date it was finished. 

28. Faulkner in the University, p. [1]. 

29. Faulkner at Nagano, pp. 103-5 In 1937 Faulkner gave M. E. Coindreau the same account of the book's inception as a short story. (Le bruit et la fureur, p. 174. See Plate I.) 

30. Interview with Mr. Wasson, Sept. 1959. 

31. Interview with Mr. Wasson, Aug. 1957. 

32. According to Wasson, Smith knew about The Sound and the Fury when still at Harcourt, Brace. Some time after he had left to set up his own business, knowing that The Sound and the Fury had been submitted to them, he sent Wasson to Harcourt, Brace to ask what had happened. Wasson was told that the book had been rejected, and he brought the typescript back to Smith himself (telephone conversation with Mr. Wasson, July 1962). 

33. Faulkner, introduction to Modern Library Sanctuary, p. vi. The contract with Cape and Smith was signed 18 Feb. 1929 (information supplied from records at Random House, Mar. 1957, by Saxe Commins). 

34. Publishers' Weekly, 13 July 1929, p. 207. 

35. Publishers' Weekly, 23 Feb. 1929, p. 880. 

36. This letter is not in the Massey collection of Faulkner at the University of Virginia Library. It was lent to the Princeton University Library in 1957 for their Faulkner exhibition and is briefly described in Meriwether, Literary Career, p. 17. 

37. He made several copies of one of these, the play "The Marionettes," about 1920. A page from one is reproduced in Meriwether, Literary Career, Fig. 1. "Mayday," a later work, is described briefly by Carvel Collins in the introduction to his edition of Faulkner's New Orleans Sketches, Rutgers University Press, 1958, pp. 21, 29. 

38. In 1925 he praised, not without envy, the skill of his artist friend William Spratling, "whose hand has been shaped to a brush as mine has (alas!) not...." (New Orleans Sketches, p. 102.) The 
best of Faulkner's drawings are far from contemptible in design and execution, however, and as one would expect, even the poorer ones have individuality, even those heavily reminiscent of Beardsley and Held. 

39. Quoted by John Cook Wyllie in the Richmond News Leader, 31 Jan. 1955, p. 11 
 
40. See Plates II and III. For permission to reproduce the material in these plates, thanks are due to Random House, Faulkner's publisher in this country, and to the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. For permission to reproduce Plate I, thanks are due to Gallimard, publisher of the French translation, and to Maurice Edgar Coindreau. 

41. Evelyn Scott, On William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." Publishers' Weekly, 21 Sept. 1929, p. 1138, carried a statement by Cape and Smith in their announcement of fall books that "After reading the galleys of this remarkable book, EVELYN SCOTT wrote us enthusiastically, 'His idiot is better than Dostoyevsky's!'" Other information from interview with Mr. Wasson, Sept. 1959. 

42. Dates of printing appear on the copyright pages of the second and third impressions. For the number of copies In all three printings, I am indebted to Mrs. Evelyn Harter Glick, formerly of Cape and Smith, and of Smith and Haas, who collected the information with the intention of publishing a Faulkner bibliography in collaboration with Kenneth Godfrey. (The project, begun with great thoroughness, was unfortunately abandoned sometime in 1932.) Mrs. Glick also provided, from the Cape and Smith records, the information that no textual changes were made in the second and third impressions a fact confirmed by both oral and machine collation, though in the third printing commas were inserted between the date of the month and the year in the headings of the second, third , and fourth sections For their assistance with the task of collating these impressions, and also the texts of the Modern Library, Chatto and Windus, and Faulkner Reader editions, I wish to thank Mrs. Mary C. Bozeman, Mr. James B. Davis, Miss Margaret Meriwether, and Mrs. Nancy C. Meriwether. 

43. Meriwether, Literary Career, p. 102. This edition appears not to have been reprinted until the 1954 "Uniform Edition" text was reproduced by photo-offset from the original impression. 

44. James B. Meriwether, "Some Notes on the Text of Faulkner's Sanctuary," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 55 (Third Quarter, 1961), 203-5. 

45. In a letter from Faulkner to Malcolm Cowley, undated save for the day of the week Saturday) but probably written late in 1945, Faulkner refers to the Random House limited edition and the copy he underlined in crayon for it. This letter is now in the Yale University Library, and I am grateful to the library, and to Mr. Cowley, for permission to use it and the other Faulkner-Cowley correspondence cited in this article. Though the letter does not state that it is the first section which was so underlined, I assume that this is the case, since elsewhere Faulkner indicated that it was only this section which he conceived would benefit from printing in color. (See Faulkner at Nagano, p. 105) 

46. Information supplied by Albert Erskine, since 1958 Faulkner's editor at Random House, in interview, Nov. 1961. 
 
47. M. E. Coindreau, preface to Le bruit et la fureur, p. 15. 

48. For the French reception of Faulkner, see S. D. Woodworth's fine study, William Faulkner en France (1931-1952), Paris: Minard, 1959. 

49. Tandis que j'agonise, Paris: Gallimard, 1934. With a preface by Valery Larbaud. Coindreau was working on this translation when he first met Faulkner, who inscribed for him his copy of the first edition (first state) of the novel: "William Faulkner | New York, N.Y. | 9 Nov 1931 | With gratitude to Dr Coindreau, the translator". (I am indebted to M. Coindreau for permitting me to use this inscription, seen May 1962.) 

50. This letter, dated 26 Feb. 1937, is reproduced in Plate II, Princeton University Library Chronicle XVIII (Spring 1957). 

51. Interviews with M. Coindreau, June 1957 and May 1962. 

52. M. E. Coindreau, "On Translating Faulkner," Princeton University Library Chronicle XVIII (Spring 1957), 110. M. Coindreau makes the same point in the preface to his translation (p. 15): "Ayant eu le privilege d'entendre M. Faulkner me commenter lui-meme les points les plus obscurs de son roman, je ne me suis derobe devant aucun obstacle " Here too M. Coindreau apologizes for the fact that "la precision de la langue francaise m'a amene, malgre moi, a eclaircir le texte." 
 
53. Faulkner made the same point exactly, in almost the same words, some years later ashen he supplied a short prefatory note to The Mansion, the third volume of his Snopes trilogy (New York: Random House, 1959), which explained any inconsistencies with the other volumes as inevitable if his work was to have life, since "the author has learned . . . more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew" before. Faulkner's attitude about the inconsistencies within the trilogy, which help define the separate identities of its individual novels, sheds additional light upon his willingness to consider the Appendix as related to The Sound and the Fury but not part of it. 

54. Faulkner-Cowley correspondence, Yale University Library. Cowley's letters reveal that he had the original typescript of the Appendix from Faulkner retyped, and it was one of the retyped copies that he appears to have sent to Random House for use in the Modern Library edition. Therefore, though the many differences between the Modern Library and Portable Faulkner texts of the Appendix reveal, in connection with the correspondence on the subject, that the Modern Library version is essentially unedited, it is still possible that some changes were made in it from Faulkner's original version. 

55. The following errors listed in Table A were corrected in the Modern Library edition: 33.20, 75.5, 84.5, 105.7, 125.12, 144.26, 168.1, 216.14, 233.16, 240.29, 273.4, 324.2, 357.14, and 369.3. 

56. For example, Stewart and Backus, in their study of the chronology of Benjy's section (see fn. 2), conclude that Faulkner's device of using the change from roman to italic type to indicate a time change to the reader is "worthless" because their study of the section revealed "that a change in type does not always indicate a break" in chronology. (" 'Each in Its Ordered Place,' '' p. 446.) But it is clear from Faulkner's letter to Wasson that this is just what he intends the change in type to mean, and it is clear from the published book that this is almost always just what it does mean. Though there are obviously some minor inconsistencies in the use of the device, and further study is needed to settle the matter, to dismiss the validity of the device and ignore it as an indication of time change is to adopt an artistically and bibliographically unsophisticated view of the text of the novel. 
 
57. See fn. 1. 

 

*
 
Plate I
PREFACE 

"Ce roman, a l'origine, ne devait etre qu'une nouvelle, me dit, un jour, William Faulkner. J'avais 
songe qu'il serait interessant d'imaginer les pensees d'un groupe d'enfants, le jour de l'enterrement de leur grand'mere dont on leur a cache la mort, leur curiosite devant l'agitation de la maison, leurs efforts pour percer le mystere, les suppositions qui leur viennent a l'esprit. Ensuite, pour corser cette etude, j'ai concu l'idee d'un etre qui serait plus qu'un enfant, un etre qui, pour resoudre le probleme, n'aurait meme pas a son service un cerveau normalement constitue autrement dit un idiot. C'est ainsi que Benjy est ne. Puis, il m'est arrive ce qui arrive a bien des romanciers, je me suis epris d'un de mes personnages, Caddy. Je l'ai tent aimee que je n'ai pu me decider a ne la faire vivre que l'espace d'un conte. Elle meritait plus que cela. Et mon roman s'est acheve, je ne dirais pas malgre moi, mais presque. Il n'avait pas de titre jusqu'au jour ou, de mon subconscient, surgirent les mots connus The Sound and the Fury. Et je les adoptai, sans reflechir alors que le reste de la. citation shakespearienne s'appliquait aussi bien, sinon mieux, a ma sombre histoire de folie et de haine." 

    On lit en effet dans Macbeth, a la scene V de l'acte V, cette definition de la vie: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.", "C'est une histoire, contee par un idiot, pleine de bruit et de fureur, qui ne signifie rien". La premiere partie du roman de William Faulkner est, elle aussi, contee par un idiot, 1e livre entier vibre de bruit et de [. . . .] 

Plate I. First page of Coindreau's preface to Le bruit et la fureur. Reproduced by courtesy of M. Coindreau and of Gallimard. 
 

Plate II

    "Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail." 

    Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benny. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. The ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry because one of them got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and knotted. 
    Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they'll get froze. You dont want your hands froze on Christmas, do you. 

    " It's too cold out there." Versh said. " You don't want to go out doors." 
    " What is it now." Mother said. 
    " He want to go out doors." Versh said. 
    " Let him go." Uncle Maury said. 
    " It's too cold." Mother said. " He'd better stay in. Benjamin. Stop that, now." 
    " It wont hurt him." Uncle Maury said. 
    " You, Benjamin." Mother said. " If you dont be good, you'll have to go to the kitchen." 

 Plate II. Page 3 of the sample gathering (1929 ) of The Sound and the Fury. Reproduced by courtesy of Random House, Inc., and of the University of Texas. 

 Plate III
    "Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail." 
    Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the powers rasped and rattled against us. The ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry because one of them got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and knotted. 
    Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they'll get froze. You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you. 
    " It's too cold out there." Versh said. " You dont want to go out doors." 
    " What is it now." Mother said. 
    "He want to go out doors." Versh said. 
    "Let him go." Uncle Maury said. 
    "It's too cold." Mother said. " He'd better stay in. Benjamin. Stop that, now." 
    " It wont hurt him." Uncle Maury said. 
    " You, Benjamin." Mother said. " If you dont be good, you'll have to go to the kitchen." 
    "Mammy say keep him out the kitchen today." Versh said. " She say she got all that cooking to get done." 

Plate III. Page 3 from the first edition (1929) of The Sound and the Fury. Reproduced by courtesy of Random House, Inc.