[The Compson Appendix should be prefaced with a note of caution: Faulkner
wrote it in 1945, sixteen years after the 1929 publication of The Sound
and the Fury. The Appendix and the novel differ in many details, and
although the Appendix was intended to clarify the novel, these differences
may confuse the reader on some points. For a complete discussion of the
discrepancies between the two works, see "'The
Key to the Whole Book': Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the Compson
Appendix, and Textual Instability," by Philip Cohen.]
IKKEMOTUBBE. A dispossessed American king. Called "l'Homme" (and sometimes "de l'homme") by his fosterbrother, a Chevalier of France, who had he not been born too late could have been among the brightest in that glittering galaxy of knightly blackguards who were Napoleon's marshals, who thus translated the Chickasaw title meaning "The Man"; which translation Ikkemotubbe, himself a man of wit and imagination as well as a shrewd judge of character, including his own, carried one step further and anglicised it to "Doom." Who granted out of his vast lost domain a solid square mile of virgin North Mississippi dirt as truly angled as the four corners of a cardtable top (forested then because these were the old days before 1833 when the stars fell and Jefferson Mississippi was one long rambling onestorey mudchinked log building housing the Chickasaw Agent and his tradingpost store) to the grandson of a Scottish refugee who had lost his own birthright by casting his lot with a king who himself had been dispossessed. This in partial return for the right to proceed in peace, by whatever means he and his people saw fit, afoot or a horse provided they were Chickasaw horses, to the wild western land presently to be called Oklahoma: not knowing then about the oil. JACKSON. A Great White Father with a sword. (An
old duellist, a brawling lean fierce mangy durable imperishable old lion
who set the wellbeing of the nation above the White House and the health
of his new political party above either and above them all set not his
wife's honor but the principle that honor must be defended whether it was
or not because defended it was whether or not.) Who patented sealed and
countersigned the grant with his own hand in his gold tepee in Wassi Town,
not knowing about the oil either: so that one day the homeless descendants
of the dispossessed would ride supine with drink and splendidly comatose
above the dusty allotted harborage of their bones in specially built scarletpainted
hearses and fire-engines.
These were Compsons: QUENTIN MACLACHAN. Son of a Glasgow printer, orphaned and raised by his mother's people in the Perth highlands. Fled to Carolina from Culloden Moor with a claymore and the tartan he wore by day and slept under by night, and little else. At eighty, having fought once against an English king and lost, he would not make that mistake twice and so fled again one night in 1779, with his infant grandson and the tartan (the claymore had vanished, along with his son, the grandson's father from one of Tarleton's regiments on a Georgia battlefield about a yea; ago) into Kentucky, where a neighbor named Boon or Boone had already established a settlement. CHARLES STUART. Attainted and proscribed by name and grade in his British regiment. Left for dead in a Georgia swamp by his own retreating army and then by the advancing American one, both of which were wrong. He still had the claymore even when on his homemade wooden leg he finally overtook his father and son four years later at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, just in time to bury the father and enter upon a long period of being a split personality while still trying to be the schoolteacher which he believed he wanted to be, until he gave up at last and became the gambler he actually was and which no Compson seemed to realize they all were provided the gambit was desperate and the odds long enough. Succeeded at last in risking not only his neck but the security of his family and the very integrity of the name he would leave behind him, by joining the confederation headed by an acquaintance named Wilkinson (a man of considerable talent and influence and intellect and power) in a plot to secede the whole Mississippi Valley from the United States and join it to Spain. Fled in his turn when the bubble burst (as anyone except a Compson schoolteacher should have known it would), himself unique in being the only one of the plotters who had to flee the country: this not from the vengeance and retribution of the government which he had attempted to dismember, but from the furious revulsion of his late confederates now frantic for their own safety. He was not expelled from the United States, he talked himself countryless, his expulsion due not to the treason but to his having been so vocal and vociferant in the conduct of it, burning each bridge vocally behind him before he had even reached the place to build the next one: so that it was no provost marshal nor even a civic agency but his late coplotters themselves who put afoot the movement to evict him from Kentucky and the United States and, if they had caught him, probably from the world too. Fled by night, running true to family tradition, with his son and the old claymore and the tartan. JASON LYCURGUS. Who, driven perhaps by the compulsion
of the flamboyant name given him by the sardonic embittered woodenlegged
indomitable father who perhaps still believed with his heart that what
he wanted to be was a classicist schoolteacher, rode up the Natchez Trace
one day in 1811 with a pair of fine pistols and one meagre saddlebag on
a small lightwaisted but stronghocked mare which could do the first two
furlongs in definitely under the halfminute and the next two in not appreciably
more, though that was all. But it was enough: who reached the Chickasaw
Agency at Okatoba (which in 1860 was still called Old Jefferson) and went
no further. Who within six months was the Agent's clerk and within twelve
his partner, officially still the clerk though actually halfowner of what
was now a considerable store stocked with the mare's winnings in races
against the horses of Ikkemotubbe's young men which he, Compson, was always
careful to limit to a quarter or at most three furlongs, and in the next
year it was Ikkemotubbe who owned the little mare and Compson owned the
solid square mile of land which someday would be almost in the center of
the town of Jefferson, forested then and still forested twenty years later
though rather a park than a forest by that time, with its slavequarters
and stables and kitchengardens and the formal lawns and promenades and
pavilions laid out by the same architect who built the columned porticoed
house furnished by steamboat from France and New Orleans, and still the
square intact mile in 1840 (with not only the little white village called
Jefferson beginning to enclose it but an entire white county about to surround
it because in a few years now Ikkemotubbe's descendants and people would
be gone, those remaining living not as warriors and hunters but as white
men--as shiftless farmers or, here and there, the masters of what they
too called plantations and the owners of shiftless slaves, a little dirtier
than the white man, a little lazier, a little crueller--until at last even
the wild blood itself would have vanished, to be seen only occasionally
in the noseshape of a Negro on a cottonwagon or a white sawmill hand or
trapper or locomotive fireman), known as the Compson Domain then, since
now it was fit to breed princes, statesmen and generals and bishops, to
avenge the dispossessed Compsons from Culloden and Carolina and Kentucky
then known as the Governor's house because sure enough in time it did produce
or at least spawn a governor--Quentin MacLachan again, after the Culloden
grandfather--and still known as the Old Governor's even after it had spawned
(1861) a general--(called so by predetermined accord and agreement by the
whole town and county, as though they knew even then and beforehand that
the old governor was the last Compson who would not fail at everything
he touched save longevity or suicide)--the Brigadier Jason Lycurgus II
who failed at Shiloh in '62 and failed again though not so badly at Resaca
in '64, who put the first mortgage on the still intact square mile to a
New England carpetbagger in '66, after the old town had been burned by
the Federal General Smith and the new little town, in time to be populated
mainly by the descendants not of Compsons but of Snopeses, had begun to
encroach and then nibble at and into it as the failed brigadier spent the
next forty years selling fragments of it off to keep up the mortgage on
the remainder: until one day in 1900 he died quietly on an army cot in
the hunting and fishing camp in the Tallahatchie River bottom where he
passed most of the end of his days.
And these: QUENTIN III. Who loved not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor precariously and (he knew well) only temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead as a miniature replica of all the whole vast globy earth may be poised on the nose of a trained seal. Who loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment: he, not God, could by that means cast himself and his sister both into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fires. But who loved death above all, who loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and almost perverted anticipation of death as a lover loves and deliberately refrains from the waiting willing friendly tender incredible body of-his beloved, until he can no longer bear not the refraining but the restraint and so flings, hurls himself relinquishing, drowning. Committed suicide in Cambridge Massachusetts, June 1910, two months after his sister's wedding, waiting first to complete the current academic year and so get the full value of his paid-in-advance tuition, not because he had his old Culloden and Carolina and Kentucky grandfathers in him but because the remaining piece of the old Compson mile which had been sold to pay for his sister's wedding and his year at Harvard had been the one thing, excepting that same sister and the sight of an open fire, which his youngest brother, born an idiot, had loved. CANDACE (CADDY). Doomed and knew it, accepted
the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite
him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible
corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom,
as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail
doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not
only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that
he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value
above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which
she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her
was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death
best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation
and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical
hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's child which regardless
of what its sex would be she had already named Quentin after the brother
whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead,
when she married (1910) an extremely eligible young Indianian she and her
mother had met while vacationing at French Lick the summer before. Divorced
by him 1911. Married 1920 to a minor movingpicture magnate, Hollywood California.
Divorced by mutual agreement, Mexico 1925. Vanished in Paris with the German
occupation, 1940, skill beautiful and probably still wealthy too since
she did not look within fifteen years of her actual fortyeight, and was
not heard of again. Except there was a woman in Jefferson, the county librarian,
a mousesized and -colored woman who had never married who had passed through
the city schools in the same class with Candace Compson and then spent
the rest of her life trying to keep Forever Amber in its orderly
overlapping avatars and Jurgen and Tom Jones out of the hands
of the highschool juniors and seniors who could reach them down without
even having to tip-toe from the back shelves where she herself would have
to stand on a box to hide them. One day in 1943, after a week of a distraction
bordering on disintegration almost, during which those entering the library
would find her always in the act of hurriedly closing her desk drawer and
turning the key in it (so that the matrons, wives of the bankers and doctors
and lawyers, some of whom had also been in that old highschool class, who
came and went in the afternoons with the copies of the Forever Ambers
and the volumes of Thorne Smith carefully wrapped from view in sheets of
Memphis and Jackson newspapers, believed she was on the verge of illness
or perhaps even loss of mind) she closed and locked the library in the
middle of the afternoon and with her handbag clasped tightly under her
arm and two feverish spots of determination in her ordinarily colorless
cheeks, she entered the farmers' supply store where Jason IV had started
as a clerk and where he now owned his own business as a buyer of and dealer
in cotton, striding on through that gloomy cavern which only men ever entered--a
cavern cluttered and walled and stalagmitehung with plows and discs and
loops of tracechain and singletrees and mulecollars and sidemeat and cheap
shoes and horselinament and flour and molasses, gloomy because the goods
it contained were not shown but hidden rather since those who supplied
Mississippi farmers or at least Negro Mississippi farmers for a share of
the crop did not wish, until that crop was made and its value approximately
computable, to show them what they could learn to want but only to supply
them on specific demand with what they could not help but need--and strode
on back to Jason's particular domain in the rear: a railed enclosure cluttered
with shelves and pigeonholes bearing spiked dust-and-lintgathering gin
receipts and ledgers and cottonsamples and rank with the blended smell
of cheese and kerosene and harnessoil and the tremendous iron stove against
which chewed tobacco had been spat for almost a hundred years, and up to
the long high sloping counter behind which Jason stood and, not looking
again at the overalled men who had quietly stopped talking and even chewing
when she entered, with a kind of fainting desperation she opened the handbag
and fumbled something out of it and laid it open on the counter and stood
trembling and breathing rapidly while Jason looked down at it--a picture,
a photograph in color clipped obviously from a slick magazine--a picture
filled with luxury and money and sunlight--a Cannebière backdrop
of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive
chromium/rimmed sports car, the woman's face hatless between a rich scarf
and a seal coat, ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned; beside
her a handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German
staffgeneral--and the mousesized mousecolored spinster trembling and aghast
at her own temerity, staring across it at the childless bachelor in whom
ended that long line of men who had had something in them of decency and
pride even after they had begun to fail at the integrity and the pride
had become mostly vanity and selfpity: from the expatriate who had to flee
his native land with little else except his life yet who still refused
to accept defeat, through the man who gambled his life and his good name
twice and lost twice and declined to accept that either, and the one who
with only a clever small quarterhorse for tool avenged his dispossessed
father and grandfather and gained a principality, and the brilliant and
gallant governor and the general who though he failed at leading in battle
brave and gallant men at least risked his own life too in the failing,
to the cultured dipsomaniac who sold the last of his patrimony not to buy
drink but to give one of his descendants at least the best chance in life
he could think of.
JASON IV. The first sane Compson since before Culloden and (a childless bachelor) hence the last. Logical rational contained and even a philosopher in the old stoic tradition: thinking nothing whatever of God one way or the other and simply considering the police and so fearing and respecting only the Negro woman, his sworn enemy since his birth and his mortal one since that day in 1911 when she too divined by simple clairvoyance that he was somehow using his infant niece's illegitimacy to blackmail its mother, who cooked the food he ate. Who not only fended off end held his own with Compsons but competed and held his own with the Snopeses who took over the little town following the turn of the century as the Compsons and Sartorises and their ilk faded from it (no Snopes, but Jason Compson himself who as soon as his mother died--the niece had already climbed down the rainpipe and vanished so Dilsey no longer had either of these clubs to hold over him-- committed his idiot younger brother to the state and vacated the old house, first chopping up the vast oncesplendid rooms into what he called apartments and selling the whole thing to a countryman who opened a boardinghouse in it), though this was not difficult since to him all the rest of the town and the world and the human race too except himself were Compsons, inexplicable yet quite predictable in that they were in no sense whatever to be trusted. Who, all the money from the sale of the pasture having gone for his sister's wedding and his brother's course at Harvard, used his own niggard savings out of his meagre wages as a storeclerk to send himself to a Memphis school where he learned to class and grade cotton, and so established his own business with which, following his dipsomaniac father's death, he assumed the entire burden of the rotting family in the rotting house, supporting his idiot brother because of their mother, sacrificing what pleasures might have been the right and just due and even the necessity of a thirty-year-old bachelor, so that his mother's life might continue as nearly as possible to what it had been this not because he loved her but (a sane man always) simply because he was afraid of the Negro cook whom he could not even force to leave even when he tried to stop paying her weekly wages, and who despite all this, still managed to save almost three thousand dollars ($2840. 50) as he reported it on the night his niece stole it, in niggard and agonised dimes and quarters and halfdollars, which hoard he kept in no bank because to him a banker too was just one more Compson, but hid in a locked bureau drawer in his bedroom whose bed he made and changed himself since he kept the bedroom door locked all the time save when he was passing through it. Who, following a fumbling abortive attempt by his idiot brother on a passing female child, had himself appointed the idiot's guardian without letting their mother know and so was able to have the creature castrated before the mother even knew it was out of the house, and who following the mother's death in 1933 was able to free himself forever not only from the idiot brother and the house but from the Negro woman too, moving into a pair of offices up a flight of stairs above the supplystore containing his cotton ledgers and samples, which he had converted into a bedroom- kitchen-bath, in and out of which on weekends there would be seen a big plain friendly brazenhaired pleasantfaced woman no longer very young, in round picture hats and (in its season) an imitation fur coat, the two of them, the middleaged cottonbuyer and the woman whom the town called, simply, his friend from Memphis, seen at the local picture show on Saturday night and on Sunday morning mounting the apartment stairs with paper bags from the grocer's containing loaves and eggs and oranges and cans of soup, domestic, uxorious, connubial, until the late afternoon bus carried her back to Memphis. He was emancipated now. He was free. 'In 1865,' he would say, 'Abe Lincoln freed the niggers from the Compsons. In 1933, Jason Compson freed the Compsons from the niggers.' BENJAMIN. Born Maury, after his mother's only brother: a handsome flashing swaggering workless bachelor who borrowed money from almost anyone, even Dilsey although she was a Negro, explaining to her as he withdrew his hand from his pocket that she was not only in his eyes the same as a member of his sister's family, she would be considered a born lady anywhere in any eyes. Who, when at last even his mother realised what he was and insisted weeping that his name must be changed, was rechristened Benjamin by his brother Quentin (Benjamin, our lastborn, sold into Egypt). Who loved three things: the pasture which was sold to pay for Candace's wedding and to send Quentin to Harvard, his sister Candace, firelight. Who lost none of them because he could not remember his sister but only the loss of her, and firelight was the same bright shape as going to sleep, and the pasture was even better sold than before because now he and TP could not only follow timeless along the fence the motions which it did not even matter to him were humanbeings swinging golfsticks, TP could lead them to clumps of grass or weeds where there would appear suddenly in TP's hand small white spherules which competed with and even conquered what he did not even know was gravity and all the immutable laws when released from the hand toward plank floor or smokehouse wall or concrete sidewalk. Gelded 1913. Committed to the State Asylum, Jackson 1933. Lost nothing then either because, as with his sister, he remembered not the pasture but only its loss, and firelight was still the same bright shape of sleep. QUENTIN. The last. Candace's daughter. Fatherless nine months before her birth, nameless at birth and already doomed to be unwed from the instant the dividing egg determined its sex. Who at seventeen, on the one thousand eight hundred ninetyfifth anniversary of the day before the resurrection of Our Lord, swung herself by a rainpipe from the window of the room in which her uncle had locked her at noon, to the locked window of his own locked and empty bedroom and broke a pane and entered the window and with the uncle's firepoker burst open the locked bureau drawer and took the money (it was not $2840. 50 either, it was almost seven thousand dollars and this was Jason's rage, the red unbearable fury which on that night and at intervals recurring with little or no diminishment for the next five years, made him seriously believe would at some unwarned instant destroy him, kill him as instantaneously dead as a bullet or a lightningbolt: that although he had been robbed not of a mere petty three thousand dollars but of almost seven thousand he couldn't even tell anybody; because he had been robbed of seven thousand dollars instead of just three he could not only never receive justification--he did not want sympathy--from other men unlucky enough to have one bitch for a sister and another for a niece, he couldn't even go to the police; because he had lost four thousand dollars which did not belong to him he couldn't even recover the three thousand which did since those first four thousand dollars were not only the legal property of his niece as a part of the money supplied for her support and maintenance by her mother over the last sixteen years, they did not exist at all, having been officially recorded as expended and consumed in the annual reports he submitted to the district Chancellor, as required of him as guardian and trustee by his bondsmen: so that he had been robbed not only of his thievings but his savings too, and by his own victim; he had been robbed not only of the four thousand dollars which he had risked jail to acquire but of the three thousand which he had hoarded at the price of sacrifice and denial, almost a nickel and a dime at a time, over a period of almost twenty years: and this not only by his own victim but by a child who did it at one blow, without premeditation or plan, not even knowing or even caring how much she would find when she broke the drawer open; and now he couldn't even go to the police for help: he who had considered the police always, never given them any trouble, had paid the taxes for years which supported them in parasitic and sadistic idleness; not only that, he didn't dare pursue the girl himself because he might catch her and she would talk, so that his only recourse was a vain dream which kept him tossing and sweating on nights two and three and even four years after the event, when he should have forgotten about it: of catching her without warning, springing on her out of the dark, before she had spent all the money, and murder her before she had time to open her mouth) and climbed down the same rainpipe in the dusk and ran away with the pitchman who was already under sentence for bigamy. And so vanished; whatever occupation overtook her would have arrived in no chromium Mercedes; whatever snapshot would have contained no general of staff. And that was all. These others were not Compsons. They were black: T.P. Who wore on Memphis's Beale Street the fine bright cheap intransigent clothes manufactured specifically for him by the owners of Chicago and New York sweatshops. FRONY. Who married a pullman porter and went to St Louis to live and later moved back to Memphis to make a home for her mother since Dilsey refused to go further than that. LUSTER. A man, aged 14. Who was not only capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size, but could keep him entertained. DILSEY.
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