Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  Repositories: NYPL, 25-pp. ms. fragment (Father Abraham). FCVA, 51-pp. carbon ts. fragment and 54-pp. carbon ts. (Father Abraham); 3-pp. ts. fragment (“Abraham’s Children”). ROUM, 18-pp. ts. (“As I Lay Dying”). JFSA, 8-pp. ms. fragment and 58-pp. ts. (“The Peasants”); 16-pp. ts. (“Aria Con Amore”) and 21-pp. ts. (“As I Lay Dying”).

  Lion

  It was probably the late winter or early spring of 1935 when Faulkner wrote this story. He doubtless tried to sell it to at least one of the large-circulation weekly magazines, but it was Harper’s which purchased it and printed it in Volume CLXXII (Dec. 1935), 67–77. In September of 1941 Faulkner used much of the material of the story in section 3 of “The Bear,” which was really a novella and which would be the fifth and longest part of the novel Go Down, Moses (1942). Whereas the magazine version had been narrated by sixteen-year-old Quentin Compson, now Faulkner employed an omniscient narrator, and Quentin’s role was assumed by young Ike McCaslin. This permitted Faulkner to obtain the maximum dramatic effect from the climactic conflict between Old Ben and Lion and Boon by narrating it as it happened, rather than having it told as Quentin and the others heard it after the fact from old Ike McCaslin and Ad, the cook, who was now renamed Ash. Faulkner also interpolated into the story the collapse of Sam Fathers after Old Ben’s death and then Sam’s own passing. In Go Down, Moses, Ike would not then or later have produced offspring, as he obviously had done in order to have the grandson in the story named after Ike’s father. Boon was still violent, but he had not killed a Negro, as the reader had been told in the magazine version. Faulkner also expanded the liquor-buying expedition to Memphis, deriving more humor from Boon’s behavior than he had done in the earlier treatment of the material. He also enlarged and deepened the last portion of the Harper’s story, so much so that he chose to use it not in section 3, but in section 5 to conclude “The Bear,” gaining both power and resonance from Ike’s meditation and irony through Boon’s frenzy and the implied juxtaposition of past and present.

  The Old People

  Faulkner apparently sent this story to The Saturday Evening Post as soon as he finished it. When the Post refused it, he sent it to his agent, Harold Ober, who received the nineteen-page typescript on 3 October 1939. During the next five months it was refused by The American Magazine, Collier’s, Country Gentleman, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and This Week. When Faulkner asked Ober to offer it to one of the quality monthlies, he sent it to Harper’s, which bought the story on 28 June 1940 and published it in Volume CLXXI (Sept. 1940), 418–25. A typescript which survives is a seventeen-page rough draft with manuscript additions, cancellations, and numerous typographical errors. Presumably the nineteen-page typescript (and certainly the typescript, perhaps the same one, which was used as setting copy by Harper’s) was a heavily revised and expanded version of the earlier one. In the most significant single revision, the narrator’s father was no longer identified as Mr. Compson. This element in the seventeen-page typescript shows that the story was then conceived as being narrated by Quentin Compson, a function he had performed in “Fool About a Horse,” “A Justice,” and “Lion,” though it was only in the latter two that Quentin was still present in the printed version. Every page of the magazine version of the story shows variants from the typescript, and in many paragraphs there are as many deletions as additions. All of the changes, however, seem to be those of a writer who is sharpening his rendering of detail, searching for more precise depiction, and extracting all possible resonance from his tale. New individual paragraphs describe Doom’s tactics on his return to the tribe, the pursuit of the great buck by the boy and Sam Fathers, Sam’s physical appearance just before the buck manifests himself to them, and finally, a passage near the end of the story in which the boy’s father, accepting his son’s account of the reappearance of the mighty totem animal, links him to all the life lived on earth before them, conjoining him with all the blood shed, and meditating on how “suffering and grieving is better than nothing.” One of Faulkner’s smaller alterations was to change Sam’s salute to the buck from “Ole” (perhaps too reminiscent of bullfights) to “Oleh.” Editorial or authorial tidying up included the deletion of the numbers 2 and 3 which separated sections of the story and indention to create half a dozen new paragraphs. When Faulkner revised the story in the summer of 1941 to make it the fourth segment of Go Down, Moses, he enlarged it by approximately a thousand words and restored the numbers, deleted in the magazine version, dividing it into three parts. But there were many more notable changes necessitated by the integration of the material into the saga of the relationships of black and white families which formed the basis of Go Down, Moses. The heavily revised story was now told in the third person, and the magazine version’s narrator, earlier Quentin Compson, became young Ike McCaslin. General Compson took the place that had been occupied by Ike McCaslin as an old man in the Harper’s version. Ike’s cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, took the place of “father,” earlier Mr. Compson. The servant, Jimbo, became Tennie’s Jim. Now there was a closer bond between Ike and Sam Fathers than there had been between Sam and Quentin. And here Sam was the son, not the grandson, of Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief who had sold the child and his mother into slavery, into servitude under the McCaslins rather than the Compsons. In keeping with the thematic concerns of the novel of which it was now a part, the story dealt at greater length with Sam’s mixed blood, with betrayal, and with the links between past and present as well as with what Ike learned as a boy from Sam in the Big Woods, foreshadowing what Ike would do when he grew to be a man.

  Repository: FCVA.

  A Point of Law

  It was probably late in 1939 when Faulkner completed this story. Harold Ober received a twenty-two-page typescript of it on 4 January 1940 and sent it to The Saturday Evening Post. The Post refused it, but on 31 January it was bought by Collier’s, where it appeared in Volume CV (22 June 1940), 20–21, 30, 31. The typescript apparently does not survive, but another, of twenty-one pages, bearing Faulkner’s name and address, shows something of the story’s evolution. Although elements of the narrative are the same as in the magazine version, there are changes in every paragraph of the latter. Faulkner clarified references by using names rather than pronouns. He cut whole paragraphs but also added new ones, accounting for the additional page in the typescript Ober received. Some of this new material elaborated on the interplay between Lucas and Roth Edmonds and Lucas and George Wilkins. The twenty-one-page typescript is also divided into three parts by numbers which were omitted from the Collier’s version. In the spring of 1941 Faulkner was at work on Go Down, Moses. Chapter One of “The Fire and the Hearth,” the second of the book’s seven segments, reached Robert K. Haas at Random House on 5 June. It began with nine pages revealing the threat that George Wilkins’s still posed to Lucas Beauchamp and setting forth something of the Beauchamp-McCaslin-Edmonds background which would be elaborated in the segments to come. Faulkner also laid the groundwork for another theme when Lucas discovered what he thought was buried treasure while hiding his still before informing on George Wilkins to Carothers Edmonds. In part 2 of this first chapter, Faulkner followed Lucas to Carothers Edmonds’s home, but then, before Lucas stated his business, Faulkner interpolated fourteen new pages narrating the crucial relationship, years before, between Lucas, Edmonds’s father, Zack Edmonds, and Molly Beauchamp, both Lucas’s wife and Edmonds’s foster mother. In sections 3 and 4, which completed “The Fire and the Hearth,” Faulkner finished the comic story of the moonshining case, its final disposition, and its aftermath. Some lines and even passages were identical with those in the Collier’s version, but Faulkner had expanded this treatment of the material. He had also made the Negro dialect less heavy, and in preparing for the more serious, and even tragic, aspects of the novel which were yet to come, he had restored one passage, only slightly altered, from the twenty-one-page typescript which did not appear in Collier’s. As Carothers Edmonds looked at Lucas he thought, “I am not only looking at a
face older than mine and which has seen and winnowed more, but at a man most of whose blood was pure ten thousand years when my own anonymous beginnings became mixed enough to produce me.”

  Repository: FCVA.

  Gold Is Not Always

  On 19 February 1940 Harold Ober received from Faulkner a twenty-one-page typescript of this story. It was declined by Collier’s, Redbook, Country Gentleman, Harper’s, and The Saturday Evening Post before The American Mercury bought it on 16 September. It appeared there in Volume CLXVI (Nov. 1940), 563–70. Although the twenty-one-page typescript apparently does not survive, there is a nineteen-page typescript which is close to the printed version. There are changes in every paragraph, but they are minor, with only two added passages differentiating the version in The American Mercury from that in this typescript. One of these amplifies the tracking of Edmonds’s missing mule and the other further describes the growing frenzy of the divining-machine salesman. In the summer of 1941 Faulkner used this story in writing Chapter Two of “The Fire and the Hearth.” Although he wrote two pages of new material, and though the dialect was again much less pronounced than it had been, the material was much closer to the magazine version than was the portion of the story that had derived from “A Point of Law.”

  Repository: FCVA.

  Pantaloon in Black

  Harold Ober received a twenty-four-page typescript of this story from Faulkner on 18 March 1940. He tried unsuccessfully to place it with Collier’s, The American Magazine, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post before selling it to Harper’s on 9 August. It was published in Volume CLXXXI (Oct. 1940), 503–13. A carbon copy of the typescript reveals that apart from three sentences and two phrases deleted from the dialogue between the deputy sheriff and his wife, the changes in the published version were minor and consisted chiefly of creating twenty-one new paragraphs. When Faulkner used the story as the third segment of Go Down, Moses, he may have had the carbon typescript in front of him. He added a few phrases in addition to one of the sentences that had been cut from the typescript to produce the magazine version. He also changed Mayfield to Maydew and canceled almost every one of the new paragraphs that had been introduced into the magazine version.

  Repository: FCVA.

  Go Down, Moses

  Faulkner wrote this story in July of 1940. Pressed for money, he told Harold Ober on 24 July that he had sent it directly to The Saturday Evening Post. It was refused there, but on 17 September Collier’s bought it, and the story appeared there in Volume CVII (25 Jan. 1941), 19–20, 45, 46. In an early fourteen-page typescript Faulkner had at first called the murderer Henry Sutpen Coldfield, and he had told the census-taker that his grandmother’s name was Rosa Sutpen. On the next page Faulkner changed his name to Carothers Edmonds Beauchamp and then to Samuel Worsham Beauchamp, his grandmother becoming Mollie Beauchamp and her brother becoming Hamp Worsham rather than Hamp Benbow. Faulkner grafted these two pages onto a version of the story which had begun in Gavin Stevens’s office rather than the murderer’s cell. A seventeen-page typescript, a carbon copy, probably of the one that went to the Post, retained these changes. The Collier’s version varied only slightly from this one. Two passages from the typescript not in the magazine version and not restored by Faulkner for inclusion in Go Down, Moses are printed in brackets. Three new spaces were added in the magazine version to separate segments of the story. By late August of 1941 Faulkner had sent to Robert K. Haas at Random House the version that he wanted to use as the seventh and concluding portion of Go Down, Moses. Now he used numbers to divide the scene in the cell from the rest of the story. The other changes, like this one, were minor, and they were fewer than those he made in any of the other stories which became a part of Go Down, Moses.

  Repository: FCVA.

  Delta Autumn

  Harold Ober received an eighteen-page typescript of this story on 16 December 1940. The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury, and The American Magazine all declined it before Story bought it on 2 December 1941 and published it in Volume XX (May-June 1942), 46–55. A rough typescript of eighteen pages shows that Faulkner had made many revisions before typing the version that went to Ober. They were stylistic changes which occurred in nearly every paragraph. In one substantive change, Faulkner deleted the name Coughlin from Don Boyd’s listing of types of potential American dictators and added the names of Yokohama, Smith, and Jones. On a Sunday in December of 1941, probably the 7th, Faulkner wrote his Random House editor, Saxe Commins, “DELTA AUTUMN needs to be rewritten to get matter into it pertinent to the story this mss. tells.” The manuscript was, of course, Go Down, Moses, and the rewriting by which it would become the sixth section of the novel involved several crucial changes: Don Boyd became Carothers “Roth” Edmonds, great-great-great-grandson of old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (the grandfather of Ike McCaslin); and Edmonds’s mulatto mistress became the great-great-great-granddaughter of old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Thus Roth repeated the old man’s miscegenation and incest. Ike was ten years older than he had been in the magazine story, and, in keeping with other parts of Go Down, Moses, he had had a wife, the reader was told, but not children, as in the story. New passages picked up threads such as his unhappy marriage and the contrast between past and present, as seen in the land, the hunt, and the men themselves. New dialogue between Ike and Roth’s mistress emphasized the McCaslin family history, including the old wrongs now in part repeated. Contrary to Faulkner’s practice in some other stories, he broke up long paragraphs from the magazine version into shorter paragraphs, but he restored one visual element that had been dropped in the magazine: from an earlier typescript: the hunt took place in a “Δ-shaped section of earth between hills and River.…” And the list of potential dictator types was changed again, as Faulkner deleted Pelley and Yokohama and added “Roosevelt or Willkie.…”

  Repository: FCVA.

  The Bear

  In July of 1941 Faulkner began work on a story, really a novella, which would become the fifth and longest segment of Go Down, Moses. By 9 September the first two parts of it had reached Random House in New York. In the interval before section 3 followed them on 9 November, Faulkner had taken time to fashion some of this material into a story, bearing the same title as the novella, which he hoped would alleviate his perennial financial problems. He used most of the first section of the novella and the initial pages of the second section up to the point at which the fyce had attempted to attack Old Ben. Faulkner added material to end the story: material which would later form a part of section 4 of the novella, where Ike’s cousin and father surrogate, McCaslin Edmonds, would quote Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to help the boy understand courage and forbearance and something of truth as well. Simplifying for the magazine’s audience, Faulkner now called Ike simply “the boy,” and McCaslin became simply his father. Harold Ober received the story on 27 October and sent it to The Saturday Evening Post. On 5 November he wrote Faulkner that the editors wanted him to clarify the ending, to make clear that the truth referred to was the actions of the boy, the old man, the bear, and the dog, because these things had come from the heart, and the boy’s father had said that truth was all things that touched the human heart. Faulkner replied that the story was “a rewritten chapter of a book under way.” It was a hurriedly written first draft, he said, and he proceeded to rewrite, closely following the editors’ suggestion. On 14 November, Ober was able to write Faulkner that the Post had accepted the story as revised. It was printed in Volume CCXIV (9 May 1942), 30–31, 74, 76, 77.

  Race at Morning

  After Faulkner completed this story he took it to Harold Ober on 21 September 1954. It was intended for The Saturday Evening Post, which bought it two days later and published it in Volume CCXXVII (5 March 1955), 26–27, 103, 104, 106. In early 1955 Random House decided to publish a collection of Faulkner’s hunting stories. He would provide new intercalated material to link them together. With the addition of
a little more than a dozen new lines within the story, it became the fourth and last in the book entitled Big Woods (1955).

  Repository: DCPA, 20-pp ts.

  Hog Pawn

  It may have been October of 1954 when Faulkner wrote this story. It resembled some of the stories collected in Knight’s Gambit (1949), in which Charles “Chick” Mallison narrated episodes of his Uncle Gavin Stevens’s detective work in Yoknapatawpha County. A twenty-five-page rough draft in typescript survives. On 13 March 1955 a typescript was received at the Harold Ober office, where the story was retyped in twenty-eight pages and sent to Life. On 29 January, Life refused it, as did Collier’s two weeks later. It remained in Harold Ober’s files until Faulkner asked Ober to send it to him for revisions which would make it a part of The Mansion (1959), completing the Snopes trilogy. “Hog Pawn” was returned to him on 13 March 1958, but it was late that year or early in the next when he reached the point in Chapter Fourteen of “Flem,” the novel’s third and final book, at which he could integrate the story into the novel. Faulkner rewrote and expanded, making numerous changes. As in some of the other stories in Knight’s Gambit, Charles Mallison was in the forefront with his Uncle Gavin without being the narrator. (He had not been identified by name in the story, but his relationship to Stevens coupled with his tone made it clear that he was.) However, the third-person narration presented many of the events as they impinged upon his consciousness and sensibilities. Now he participated in more of the action, keeping the early morning vigil in the car with his uncle and then rushing into the Meadowfill house just before the shot rang out. There were numerous minor changes: Essie Meadowfill worked for a bank rather than the telephone company, and her suitor was demoted from being an ex-Marine Corps sergeant to a corporal. But the major thematic elaboration was to work this story of Snopes villainy (he now had a first name: Res, short for Orestes) into the Snopes saga and the fight waged against Snopesism by men such as Gavin Stevens and V. K. Ratliff. Faulkner also brought Jason Compson back into his fiction and used the motif of land deals and returned war veterans to link this material with other parts of the novel.