1. SANCTUARY] Faulkner wrote the following misleading, but often quoted introduction to Sanctuary when the Modern Library reprinted it in 1932. He did not want it included in later printings by Random House.
“This book was written three years ago. To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought. But that was all right. I was young then and hard-bellied. I had never lived among nor known people who wrote novels and stories and I suppose I did not know that people got money for them. I was not very much annoyed when publishers refused the mss. now and then. Because I was hard-gutted then. I could do a lot of things that could earn what little money I needed, thanks to my father’s unfailing kindness which supplied me with bread at need despite the outrage to his principles at having been of a bum progenitive.
“Then I began to get a little soft. I could still paint houses and do carpenter work, but I got soft. I began to think about making money by writing. I began to be concerned when magazine editors turned down short stories, concerned enough to tell them that they would buy these stories later anyway, and hence why not now. Meanwhile, with one novel completed and consistently refused for two years, I had just written my guts into The Sound and the Fury though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure. I believed then that I would never be published again. I had stopped thinking of myself in publishing terms.
“But when the third mss., Sartoris, was taken by a publisher and (he having refused The Sound and the Fury) it was taken by still another publisher, who warned me at the time that it would not sell, I began to think of myself again as a printed object. I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might just as well make some of it myself. I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks and sent it to Smith, who had done The Sound and the Fury and who wrote me immediately, ‘Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.’ So I told Faulkner, ‘You’re damned. You’ll have to work now and then for the rest of your life.’ That was in the summer of 1929. I got a job in the power plant, on the night shift, from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., as a coal passer. I shoveled coal from the bunker into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it in and dumped it where the fireman could put it into the boiler. About 11 o’clock the people would be going to bed, and so it did not take so much steam. Then we could rest, the fireman and I. He would sit in a chair and doze. I had invented a table out of a wheelbarrow in the coal bunker, just beyond a wall from where a dynamo ran. It made a deep, constant humming noise. There was no more work to do until about 4 A.M., when we would have to clean the fires and get up steam again. On these nights, between 12 and 4, I wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, without changing a word. I sent it to Smith and wrote him that by it I would stand or fall.
“I think I had forgotten about Sanctuary, just as you might forget about anything made for an immediate purpose, which did not come off. As I Lay Dying was published and I didn’t remember the mss. of Sanctuary until Smith sent me the galleys. Then I saw that it was so terrible that there were but two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. I thought again, ‘It might sell; maybe 10,000 of them will buy it.’ So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book. It had been already set up once, so I had to pay for the privilege of rewriting it, trying to make out of it something which would not shame The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much and I made a fair job and I hope you will buy it and tell your friends and I hope they will buy it too.”
2.
Kinston] A fictional town in the Mississippi Delta (that part of the river’s flood plain extending roughly from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss.) about twenty miles west of Water Valley, not Kingston, Miss., which is southeast of Natchez.
3.
Jefferson] The seat of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, resembling Oxford of Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life, and which is bounded on the south by the Yocona River. Some early maps transliterated the river’s Chickasaw name as Yockney-Patafa. According to Faulkner, it meant “water runs slow through flat land.”
4.
that … mouth] In Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
(1856), Emma Bovary kills herself by taking arsenic. When her head is momentarily raised in her coffin, a black liquid flows from her mouth. (Part III, Ch. 9.)
5.
Delta] See note
2.
6.
orange stick] A pointed stick of orangewood, used in manicuring.
7.
F.F.V.] A member of one of the “First Families of Virginia.”
8.
Starkville] A town seventy miles southeast of Oxford, the seat of what was then Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College, traditional athletic rival of the University of Mississippi.
9.
“The Shack’ll be open,”] The Shack was operated at one time by Faulkner’s lifelong friend, Miss Ella Somerville.
10.
use in] To live in, or stay in.
11.
heaven-tree] The princess tree, or royal paulownia (
Paulownia tomentosa
).
12.
loblollies] Mud-puddles.
13.
Yoknapatawpha county] See note
2.
14.
was hael] An archaic drinking toast, meaning literally “be in good health,” that became associated with Christmas, particularly Twelfth Night festivities. Now generally spelled “wassail.”
15.
Gordon hall] The men’s dining hall at the University of Mississippi when Faulkner worked at the post office there.
16.
The Gayoso hotel] At this time Memphis’s most notable hotel.
17.
kissing your elbow] That if you could actually do it, you could change your sex.
18.
John Gilbert] A popular leading man who scored his greatest success in romantic silent films.
19.
monkey glands] Dr. Eugen Steinach experimented with the transplantation of sex glands to produce rejuvenation.
20.
Delsarte-ish] François Delsarte invented a system to produce graceful speech and elocution.
21.
O tempora! O mores!] “Oh what times! Oh what standards!” Marcus Tullius Cicero,
In Catilinam
, I, 1.
22.
Less oft is peace.] From Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To Jane: The Recollection” (1822).
23.
“Ed Pinaud.”] A line of toilet preparations was marketed under this name.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
(1897–1962)
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the ‘u’ to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather ‘The Old Colonel,’ a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called The White Rose of Memphis, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the ‘ink stain’ from him.