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.
it began as a short story, it was a story
without plot, of some children being sent away
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
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.)
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
39. Quoted by John Cook Wyllie in
the Richmond News Leader, 31 Jan. 1955, p. 11
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.
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."
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.
"Ce roman, a l'origine, ne devait etre qu'une nouvelle, me dit, un jour,
William Faulkner. J'avais
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.
"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.
" It's too cold out there." Versh said. " You don't
want to go out doors."
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. 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.
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