• FAULKNER’S TECHNIQUES
• FAULKNER’S REVISING
• CRITICAL RECEPTION
• NOTES

FAULKNER’S TECHNIQUES

Over the course of his career Faulkner became, as dozens of other writers who have written about him have stated, a master at many technical aspects of writing fiction. The simplest judgment on his career is that of French novelist Claude Simon, who said, “Faulkner is the Picasso of literature.”¹ Like Pablo Picasso, Faulkner made use of techniques derived from recent discoveries in many realms of thought: ethnology, psychology, philosophy, music, and of course painting, sculpture, and writing. From the first, he made unusual applications of techniques first explored by the writers of psychological fiction, that is, fiction in which the play of mind becomes as important as, or more important than, the play of action.

Drawing on earlier psychological fiction, Faulkner made innovative use of the interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness techniques, two slightly different modes of portraying the inner thoughts or feelings of a character. (The psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry James, coined the term stream of consciousness in 1890 to refer to the flow of unorganized thought at the deepest levels of cognitive activity, “the deep well of unconscious cerebration.”) Interior monologue involves the representation of a character’s thoughts and feelings in monologue form. The stream-of-consciousness technique reproduces in writing the often disjointed or chaotic course of a character’s various impressions. Whereas interior monologue usually presents the character’s thoughts in a somewhat organized and rational fashion, stream of consciousness attempts to show the full range of the mind’s activity, including irrational or incoherent thoughts.

In using language to simulate the flow of feeling, recollection, and self-narration, Faulkner was following many writers who had already explored the technique in various ways. Examples include Edouard Dujardin (Les lauriers sont coupé, 1888), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, 1925; To the Lighthouse, 1927), and James Joyce (Ulysses, 1922).

Faulkner’s contribution to the techniques of psychological fiction was to thrust the reader into minds of an even stranger nature than those explored by Woolf or Joyce: a thirty-three-year-old “idiot,” Benjy Compson, in The Sound and the Fury; a clairvoyant farm boy, Darl Bundren, in As I Lay Dying, whose mother’s death unravels his ego-sense; an ambiguous and haunted man, Joe Christmas, in Light in August, who violently seeks to come to terms with the cruel and false racial codes of the South; and Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses, a messianic hunter who wishes to repudiate his family’s heritage of ownership and exploitation of land and people but fails to stop the cycle because he has never known or understood the meaning of love. By virtue of his exploration of this technique of rendering the mind at work, Faulkner carried forward what the Southern poet and critic John Crowe Ransom acknowledged in 1924 as one of the great accomplishments of modern literature. Ransom argued that the stories of Faulkner’s mentor Sherwood Anderson, seen in the light of Sigmund Freud’s theories, had the effect of granting complex minds to simple people. Ransom admitted that there were elements in Freud’s ideas, and in the works of his literary cousins, that were “repulsive to the reading public,”² and Faulkner found this to be true. Reviewers less discerning than Ransom found some of the characters and episodes in Faulkner’s books gratuitously violent or bizarre.

Publishing practices in his day also prevented Faulkner from carrying his innovation with stream of consciousness as far as he could conceive of taking it. The only device at his disposal to indicate to the reader that a consciousness was making a leap in time was to alternate between roman and italic typefaces. When Ben Wasson, Faulkner’s old college friend who partially edited The Sound and the Fury, failed to understand and changed everything to roman type, Faulkner complained bitterly, made Wasson put the work back the way it was, and lamented that the publishing industry was not grown up enough yet to allow him the luxury of presenting through different colors of ink, for example, the many different levels of mental time he sought to portray.³ Such a departure from standard publishing practice would have given him a texture that portrayed simultaneously the unbroken flow of deep interior mental activity and its apparently chaotic free-associational leaps and returns through the realm of memory.

Faulkner’s other major technical experiments involved the narrative and time structures of his novels. From the very first, he juxtaposed the lives of different characters in scenes that did not proceed linearly or chronologically. In his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, scenes overlapped so that he could cover the same narrative ground from differing points of view. Such overlays also dramatized simultaneous events in different settings.

The reading public’s lack of understanding of his innovative techniques never deterred Faulkner. No two of his novels are exactly alike in structure or narrative form. Even his trilogy of novels about the rapacious Snopes family—The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion— shows considerable variety of formal structure among the three texts. Radical departure from narrative convention is Faulkner’s most characteristic personal signature as a writer. Although most of his fiction is set in the fictional north Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, his books, like Picasso’s works of visual art, are constantly reinvented in both formal and emotional terms.

At various levels of expression and construction in his nineteen novels Faulkner also used techniques first exploited by writers whom one may identify by using the following different terms: realist, naturalist, symbolist, impressionist, expressionist, imagist, futurist, cubist, and, more generally, modernist and even postmodernist. He was a realist because he found usually simple ways to depict everyday reality, though he was not a slave to exactitude. Faulkner followed writers such as Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James in paying close attention to surface reality, as aware as these writers of reality’s commonsensical nature as well as the ways the physical world is filtered by the coloration of emotion and symbolic meaning. If naturalism is a pessimistic realism with a deterministic bent, as it has been called, then some of Faulkner’s work is naturalistic—Sanctuary and Light in August, for example, are somber novels of driven characters whose lives end badly. He spoke of many writers who influenced him, including such realists as Balzac and Flaubert, but he singled out the American realist and naturalist writers as his most direct forefathers: Anderson “was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on…. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.”⁴

As a symbolist Faulkner’s credentials come from reading the French symbolist poets and admiring such novelists as Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The title of Faulkner’s first publication in a national magazine, the poem “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” was taken without variation from a poem by the French symbolist Stephane Mallarme. Faulkner’s use of symbolist technique is seen in some of his early poetry but is most effective in the nightmarish, decadent scenes of such novels as Mosquitoes, Pylon, and Absalom, Absalom! and in the comedy of As I Lay Dying.⁵

The literary impressionists and expressionists had unique forms of writing that do not correspond exactly to the meanings of the same terms when applied to painting. But the analogy to painting is nonetheless useful. Impressionism involves the representation of the fleeting impressions of life in motion. Conrad and his friend Ford Madox Ford are credited with the invention of literary impressionism, a way of rendering a character’s experience that seemed truer to life than the linear, logical narratives of realism. Literary impressionism seeks to render the haphazard way in which human beings experience the world and then, retrospectively, reassemble their recollections into a version of what occurred. Many of Faulkner’s novels follow some version of this technique, compounding the looseness and uncertainty of impressionism by representing the thoughts of aberrant or highly stressed minds.

Expressionism presents the world of experience through the psychological and emotional medium the observer represents. This style expresses a condition of being, one that the character may not comprehend herself or himself. It attempts to express how the world of experience can make us feel or react. The distortions of expressionist work give the reader insight into a character’s feelings or state of mind. Edvard Munch’s well-known painting The Scream (1893) is a vivid example of expressionism in the visual arts. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying many scenes are expressionist, none more so than the little boy Vardaman’s perplexed thought equating his mother’s death and the only death he has previously experienced: “My mother is a fish.”⁶ In Light in August Joe Christmas undertakes an intense recollection of his life while standing beneath a tree as the Jefferson court-house clock strikes the chimes of midnight. In the literature of Faulkner’s time various overwrought scenes in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Hairy Ape (1922) express the inchoate feelings of characters under great stress.

Faulkner was briefly intrigued by the imagist poets, who came to prominence in the 1910s. They wrote verse that presented in direct, concrete terms the poet’s response to some image or scene. Faulkner found in the more traditional work of A. E. Housman a poetry he eventually liked better. Nonetheless, the language in Faulkner’s early poetry owes a debt to such imagists as Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound; T. S. Eliot, a powerful influence on Faulkner, was himself influenced by the imagists. When Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury crawls through a fence and feels that “the flowers rasped and rattled against”⁷ him, he is using language appropriate to imagist poetry. Even a work as late as Pylon, written in 1935, is filled with unusual words slammed together in imagist juxtaposition.

The futurist movement in Italy, with its focus on speed and the new mechanical devices constructed to achieve it—automobiles and airplanes—intrigued Faulkner briefly, as it did many other writers and intellectuals seeking to throw off the dead weight of the past over which, they believed, World War I had been fought. Pylon, Faulkner’s novel about the dangerous world of barnstorming aviation, reveals the influence of futurist ideas. It expresses a fascination with speed and the ways in which the daring pilots become as impersonal and fearless as their machines. Corrupt politics and an air of the Roman circus reduce their endeavor and sacrifice to absurdity.

Faulkner refers to cubism not only in letters from Paris, where he describes having seen modern artwork by Picasso and Henri Matisse in private collections, but also in As I Lay Dying. Darl, the Bundren brother wounded in World War I, sees his mother’s coffin, under construction outside her window, as a “cubistic bug.” The cubist paintings of Picasso and Georges Braque had the effect of reassembling multidimensioned objects on a two-dimensional surface. The context is not just the three dimensions of illusionist three-point perspective, but three dimensions of remembered space, another dimension of time, and a final dimension of psychological reference. John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy of novels (The 42nd Parallel, 1930; 1919, 1932; and The Big Money, 1936) is a good literary example, but Faulkner was trying something similar at the same time. Constructed as they are, both The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying might, without too much damage to art history, claim influence by, and perhaps even considerable reference to, cubism.

Art in the early twentieth century, including popular art, embraced the results, if not the specific techniques, of various kinds of scientific and philosophical exploration of the world, the cosmos, and human existence: anthropology, biology, physics, and psychology. Anthropology reappraised what once was called primitive or savage culture—its graphic and plastic art, music, religion, communal customs, legends, and tales. Biology reap-praised the development of species and what have been called races. Psychology reappraised what had been called hysteria, perversity, and deviant behavior. The world of humankind and the world of nature—from the microcosmic to the cosmic—were not what they had seemed, and Captain Ahab’s terse rejoinder to his first mate, Starbuck, in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) took on new significance: “The little lower layer, Star-buck, the little lower layer,” the captain says when Starbuck tries to convince him that he is in pursuit of nothing more than a dumb ocean beast. When asked in 1927 as a fresh new novelist what book he wished he had written, Faulkner responded, “Moby Dick. The Greek-like simplicity of it: a man of forceful character driven by his sombre nature and his bleak heritage, bent on his own destruction and dragging his immediate world down with him with a despotic and utter disregard of them as individuals; the fine point to which the various natures caught… in the fatality of his blind course are swept… all against the grave and tragic rhythm of the earth in its most timeless phase: the sea.”⁸

World War I ground down millions of young men in countries that had reached undreamed of levels of prosperity and cultural refinement. The war did not put an end to imperial domination of—and condescension to—“different” cultures in all parts of the less industrially developed world. Yet, after the war many could see these cultures in a totally new light, could see their own cultures mirrored in them, and found ways to incorporate their insights into the art of the time. Picasso and other artists used images from the tribal masks and icons of Africa and the Pacific Islands.

Modernization—the accelerating pace of industrial society and the regimentation of the lives of those who served this society—actually prompted the modernist response. Modernism is, or was, a set of styles, postures, and points of view—what one writer has suggested were searches for a style—that arose in reaction to the modernization of society. Modernism is still the name given to the collection of artistic movements and styles that appeared in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. Faulkner was an important participant in the modernist project, if not a leader. He came along too late to be considered one of the original modernists; there were already too many candidates for that honor when he hit New Orleans and Paris in 1925, before he had even attempted a novel. Faulkner’s art was the art of that period, however, and it has all the hall-marks that have been identified in writing about modernism.

A passage from an excellent collection of essays, Modernism: 1890–1930 (1976), edited by the novelist Malcolm Bradbury and the critic James McFarlane, should make clear the degree to which Faulkner’s art was in accord with the fiction of his time:

[Modernism] is an art of a rapidly modernizing world, a world of rapid industrial development, advanced technology, urbanization, secularization and mass forms of social life. Clearly, too, it is the art of a world from which many traditional certainties had departed, and a certain sort of Victorian confidence not only in the onward progress of mankind but in the very solidity and visibility of reality itself has evaporated.

Knowledge becomes “pluralistic and ambiguous,” and experience appears to “outrun … the orderly control of the mind.”⁹

According to Bradbury and McFarlane the modernist novel “has shown, perhaps, four great preoccupations: with the complexities of its own form, with the representation of inward states of consciousness, with a sense of the nihilistic disorder behind the ordered surface of life and reality, and with the freeing of narrative art from the determination of an onerous plot.”¹⁰ One desire expressed in the experiments of the modernist novelists is, as Bradbury and John Fletcher have noted, “to free the novel from its earlier limitations—its flat, external realism, its dependence on the material world and the loose contingencies of prose—and to probe more freely and intensely the fact of life and the orders of modern consciousness.”¹¹ In the same volume British novelist David Lodge summarizes the features of the modernist novel more thoroughly:

First, it is experimental or innovatory in form, exhibiting marked deviations from existing modes of discourse, literary and non-literary. Next, it is much concerned with consciousness, and also with the subconscious or unconscious workings of the human mind … [making] room for introspection, analysis, reflection and reverie. Frequently, therefore, a modern novel has no real “beginning,” since it plunges us into a flowing stream of experience with which we gradually familiarize ourselves by a process of inference and association; its ending is usually “open” or ambiguous, leaving the reader in doubt as to the characters’ final destiny. By way of compensation for the weakening of narrative structure and unity, other modes of aesthetic ordering become more prominent—such as allusion to or imitation of literary models, or mythical archetypes; or repetition-with-variation of motifs, images, symbols, a technique often called “rhythm,” “leitmotif,” or “spatial form.” Lastly, modern fiction eschews the straight chronological ordering of its material, and the use of a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator. It employs, instead, either a single, limited point of view, or multiple viewpoints, all more or less limited and fallible; and it tends toward a complex or fluid handling of time, involving much cross-reference back and forward across the temporal span of the action.¹²

The Sound and the Fury matches this description of the modern novel completely, but even Faulkner’s first two novels, Soldiers’ Pay and Mosquitoes, confirm that he had absorbed, and could apply, many of the modernists’ techniques. Lodge’s list of general qualities is an excellent guide to what an attentive reader may expect to find in a Faulkner novel, though his way of

using these techniques changed from book to book. As Faulkner explained to a young English teacher and novelist in 1941, his concern was to make his technique match his subject, “reconciling method and material.”¹³ He was critical of writers who dropped into self-imitation, telling a Japanese audience in 1955 that “Steinbeck is just a reporter, a newspaperman, not a writer,”¹⁴ and telling a University of Mississippi English class in 1947 that Hemingway “has no courage”¹⁵—meaning courage for taking risks with the language, structure, and characters of his novels.

The testimony in praise of Faulkner’s experimentation with the technique of structuring novels, writing prose, or depicting characters is strong and from good authority.¹⁶ Flannery O’Connor, the Georgia author who pushed the Southern grotesque into realms of the spirit, wrote of Faulkner’s intimidating technical achievements in a witty warning to other writers: “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”¹⁷

FAULKNER’S REVISING

A few of the professional book reviewers who encountered Faulkner’s novels for the first time thought that he was out of control, a careless Mississippi Dostoyevsky driven by whiskey and the gothicism of the South. Faulkner’s manuscripts and typescripts belie this impression. There are forty-five published facsimile volumes of the working drafts Faulkner or others saved. Several additional volumes reproduce or catalogue manuscripts or typescripts of everything from his juvenilia—his first attempts at poetry, drawing, and drama—to his collaborative writing for motion-picture productions. Many other manuscripts and prepublication materials are accessible in collections at colleges and universities. Considerable firsthand evidence of how carefully Faulkner wrote thus exists from every stage of his writing career. The evidence is that he wrote neatly, carefully, and easily, often at a remarkably fast and steady pace. He wrote in longhand, using a fountain pen, on unlined white sheets of paper, in a manner that suggests preparation and control. As early as the period when he was working on his first two novels, Faulkner developed the habit of leaving wide left margins in which he could neatly enter revisions of passages he lined out or make additions. Sometimes he dated the first and last pages of his manuscripts. Occasionally he dated his daily stints of work or marked daily progress by marginal notation every hundred words, one to six hundred and then starting over, as if he were setting himself a minimum daily goal of production.

Faulkner’s handwriting is neat, running as straight across the unlined pages as if he had used a ruler, but it is also miniscule—he could fit more than one hundred characters on a line—and difficult to decipher. He used an idiosyncratic kind of shorthand for common word endings and did not cross the letters t or f, though they can be differentiated by height. Anyone examining Faulkner’s manuscripts today must puzzle over many words, wondering, for example, whether they contain a u or n or end in -ing or -ly. His own testimony is that he had to type over the handwritten draft material every day, because he could not read it himself if it got “cold.” In composing novels and stories he typically wrote drafts, some-times revising them, and then preliminary typescripts, which were them-selves retyped into work suitably clean for submission to a publisher.¹⁸ Faulkner often made revisions during each of these stages. The evidence of his typescripts is that his typing was as neat and steady as his handwriting.

Of course Faulkner did not save every piece of paper to which he set his pen, so the full story of the composition of any of his works is hard to document. There is, nonetheless, considerable evidence for his general practice as a craftsman going confidently at a first draft, as well as plenty of examples of how he revised. In building a novel, Faulkner often changed overall narrative structure, polished diction and syntax, rewrote entire scenes to make them more dramatic, and corrected mistakes. In a few instances he used scissors to cut out a paragraph, occasionally even a sentence, which apparently was the only writing on the page with which he was satisfied, and pasted it onto a blank manuscript or typescript sheet where he then wrote up to and after it, saving himself a little effort and time. If he was working on more than one piece at a time, as was the case with “Elmer,” an unfinished novel about an American in Paris, and Mosquitoes, he would try out passages or entire scenes in both works.

From 1926 to the publication in 1936 of Absalom, Absalom!, the ninth of his nineteen novels, Faulkner wrote confidently to editors and friends about his compositional process. His reports in his letters, which can be read in Selected Letters of William Faulkner (1977), indicate that he worked steadily and rapidly, with absolute confidence in what he was doing. Things were not always easy: the working papers for Light in August show substantial and repeated relocation of chapters and scenes. Absalom, Absalom! required a major transformation that included abandoning one set of weak characters in the frame of the novel in favor of using Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate, Shreve, who had appeared in The Sound and the Fury, in which Quentin committed suicide. But Faulkner always seemed sure that the solution to various compositional problems would come. As his financial, personal, and health problems increased in the late 1930s, however, he expressed increasingly negative feelings about his writing. He was not pleased with the cobbled-together Saturday Evening Post magazine stories that he turned into The Unvanquished. Faulkner wrote his editor, Robert Haas, about the just finished If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (first published as The Wild Palms in 1939),

I have lived for the last six months in such a peculiar state of family complications and back complications that I still am not able to tell if the novel is all right or absolute drivel. To me, it was written just as if 1 had sat on the one side of a wall and the paper was on the other and my hand with the pen thrust through the wall and writing not only on invisible paper but in pitch darkness too, so that I could not even know if the pen still wrote on paper or not.¹⁹

Such uncertainty affected the composition and revision of much of Faulkner’s later work. He was proud of The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses, saying of the first that it showed him to be the “best in America, by God,” and of the second, which he held back from his publisher after he had announced it finished, that he was writing “a section now that 1 am going to be proud of.”²⁰ But he sent both of these novels piecemeal to New York, partly to show he was working but also for feedback, and his financial problems were so severe as he finished Go Down, Moses that he mailed it off to Random House without making a carbon copy, probably because he could not afford carbon paper and second sheets.

During the dozen difficult years from 1942 to 1954 when Faulkner was working on A Fable, which he hoped would be his greatest work, he constantly asked his editors for positive reinforcement and wondered if silence from New York meant that the bits he was sending were not good. Faulkner worked with five different publishing houses in the first decade of his career as a novelist (from 1926 to 1936, when he joined Random House), a circumstance that did not help his career but he never lost confidence. The reasons for changing publishers were both artistic and economic; two of the four publishers before Random House dropped him because they could not make any money on his novels. The other two went out of business during the Great Depression. None of the editors at these publishing houses fully comprehended what Faulkner was trying to accomplish, though Harrison Smith, who published The Sound and the Fury and brought Faulkner to Random House when that firm absorbed his second firm, Smith and Haas, gave the writer free rein. Other editors, such as Ben Wasson, who worked for Smith, tended to damage Faulkner’s work by uninformed interference. Saxe Commins at Random House did not catch the deliberate ambiguities in Absalom, Absalom! and attempted to edit the book toward consistency. Faulkner fought back. His last editor, Albert Erskine at Random House, wanted to make the three volumes of the Snopes trilogy consistent, too, though Faulkner had published the first in 1940 and did not get around to writing the second and third until the mid 1950s. Faulkner argued, finally offering that Random House could publish The Town and The Mansion first as he himself wanted the books—with inconsistencies—as “standard” editions and then do whatever they wished. He wrote a brief foreword to the third volume, even after some editorial damage had been done, disclaiming consistency:

This book is the final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925. Since the author likes to believe, hopes that his entire life’s work is a part of a living literature, and since “living” is motion, and “motion” is change and alternation and therefore the only alternative to motion is un-motion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four-year progress of this particular chronicle; the purpose of this note is simply to notify the reader that the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will—contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then.²¹

The overwhelming documentary evidence, then, is that Faulkner did revise and polish, considerably and with good effect, but that once a work was published, he chose not to look at it again or second-guess his instinct for what constituted a finished work. He resisted as much as possible editorial intervention in his work. Even when he was working helpfully with the Princeton University French professor Maurice E. Coindreau, who came to Hollywood to stay with the author while translating The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner refused to read the novel. Similarly, when in 1945 he created the “Appendix: Compson, 1699–1945” for The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner felt so restored to his best capacity as an artist that he refused Cowley’s repeated requests to make what he wrote about the Compsons in 1945 jibe with what he had written about them in 1928. His final explanation to Cowley is worth quoting:” I dont want to read TSATF again. Would rather let the appendix stand with the inconsistencies, perhaps make a statement (quotable) at the end … viz: the inconsistencies in the appendix prove that to me the book is still alive after 15 years, and being still alive is growing, changing…,”²² This obstinacy is an interesting revelation of craft: Faulkner did not look back at published work because he knew, as he matured in his skill as a writer and his knowledge of human nature, that he would want to change it. He was more concerned, and excited, about attempting a new work. What he did revise in works in progress, however, were those characters, events, and chronologies that he had used in previous books, never feeling bound by his past conceptions as he worked on something with different demands and requirements. Critics have discovered that they cannot often speak of Faulkner’s recurrent characters as if they were the same figure in each text in which they reappear. An example is the transformation of Ike McCaslin, referred to briefly in The Hamlet as a planter with wife and children in a remote part of the county, into the celibate hunter of Go Down, Moses who repudiates the farm he is supposed to inherit. Such transformations made Faulkner nearly immune to the self-imitation he so much deplored in writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

As with any renowned writer from the past, the critical reception of Faulkner’s fiction takes two forms: the reviews that appeared as his books were first published and the body of academic commentary that began even before he won the 1950 Nobel Prize in literature. Academia continues to produce a steady torrent of Faulkner scholarship and critical analysis.

Faulkner’s books appeared in small editions, and his publishers rarely sold many books until he won the Nobel Prize, with the single exception of Sanctuary (and because of the bankruptcy of his publisher at the time, Cape and Smith, he received almost none of the royalties for the novel). But the books, almost without exception, received several reviews praising his courage, profundity, moral sense, and breathtaking style. Even reviewers who could not imagine that Faulkner’s style was under control and thus commented that he could not write, often mentioned the “impact” of his writing. At a 1972 conference at the University of Mississippi, the critic Cleanth Brooks put this contradiction into context by asking, Where did the critics who doubted Faulkner’s capacity to write but raved about the impact of his novels think the impact was coming from? It came, Brooks stated emphatically, from the style and the technique of the books. Still, because a few influential reviewers in widely circulated magazines pilloried and even parodied Faulkner vividly, the impression may be that Faulkner continually received a bad press. This is not true.

Just as he did not reread his published books, Faulkner claimed not to read reviews.²³ It is likely, nevertheless, that he could not escape some of their influence, if only because friends, editors, or family members occasionally called his attention to a review. A selection of significant reviews, both favorable and unfavorable, is available in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews (1995), edited by M. Thomas Inge. Lists of reviews may be found in several Faulkner bibliographies, in some cases with summaries of the reviews. Even the title of a review often reveals something about the reviewer’s opinion. Together with such reference publications as Book Review Digest or The New York Times Index, these resources provide the reader with convenient access to typical contemporary responses to Faulkner’s work.

John McClure, a New Orleans newspaper writer and an editor of The Double Dealer magazine, which published several of Faulkner’s poems and nonfiction pieces beginning in 1922, said of Faulkner’s first book, The Marble Faun, that the poems in the collection represented “an excursion into direct experience” and showed promise of finer things to come. But in Faulkner’s “home” daily newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, book editor Monte Cooper took him to task for worshiping at the shrines of such discredited poets as Algernon Charles Swinburne and using awkward diction. Faulkner did not turn to fiction because of such negative reviews as Cooper’s, but they may explain why he waited so long to bring out the second book of poems he claimed to be working on when the first was published.

The turn to fiction provided more opportunity for a response from reviewers, if only because the publisher of Faulkner’s first novel, Boni and Liveright, was a well-known firm and already had a distinguished list of authors, including Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, Robinson Jeffers, and Ernest Hemingway. Reviewers of Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, were sympathetic in that fledgling age of modern American fiction. (Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt had appeared in 1922; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s In Our Time were both published in 1925; and in 1930 Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature.) The reviewer for the New York Sun saw Soldiers’ Pay as a postwar novel centered on a dying aviator, but “whirled around him is a picture of postwar social life. And the burden of this life is sex released from the prewar restraints.”²⁴ Poet and critic Louis Kronenberger, reviewing Soldiers’ Pay for the Literary Digest International Book Review, observed that if Faulkner’s characters were fantastic, in a novel that might have been called “What Price Victory?” (an allusion to the 1924 play “What Price Glory?” by Anderson and Laurence Stallings), it was because they represented a generation coming back from war to “an overturned world of bitter inverted fantasy.” “The war, annihilating conventions, moralities and ideals, not only left them primitives; it left them abnormal primitives.” Giving a useful definition of one aspect of the modernist spirit, Kronenberger concluded by judging the book to be “a rich combination of imagination, observation and experience. In an isolated world of Faulkner’s own making, shadows having the reality of men grope through a maze complex enough to be at once pitiful and comic, passionate, tormenting and strange.”²⁵

Closer to home, the Vanderbilt poet Donald Davidson, who had been in the war himself, saw Soldiers’ Pay as an advance over the postwar fiction of Dos Passos. Because the novel “deals with people in a Southern town,” Davidson felt it paid more attention to human nature, delving into “its secret as well as its obvious life, all the mingling of disillusionment and pagan recklessness that have characterized the postwar period.” Davidson perceived Faulkner to be “a sensitive, observant person with a fine power of objectifying his own and other people’s emotions, and of clarifying characters so that they possess the ’real life’ within themselves which it is one of the functions of art to present. Further-more, he is an artist in language, a sort of poet turned to prose; he does not write prose as Dreiser does, as if he were washing dishes; nor like Sinclair Lewis, who goes at words with a hammer and saw.”²⁶ John McClure, the New Orleans editor and critic, discovered that even when Faulkner’s characters say or do something the reader believes they would not say or do, “one feels that there is nevertheless a symbolic truth in the byplay—that something of this sort is what the character would like to do and, if he do.”²⁷

Critical judgments similar to those of the reviewers of Soldiers’ Pay showed up in reviews of Faulkner’s subsequent works. It is too much to say that Faulkner was always well received, because in fact he was not. But many reviewers, especially those who were writers themselves, found Faulkner to be craftsmanlike, acute in his characterizations, bold in his structures and rhetoric, poetic and symbolic in his choice of language, and a modern moralist in his philosophy.

Mosquitoes, Faulkner’s second novel, was reviewed by such writers as Davidson, Lillian Hellman, Conrad Aiken, and Elinor Wylie. Hellman noted that it “was impossible to capture in a review the humor, the delight of Mr. Faulkner’s writing … the fine kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen.“²⁸ Davidson appreciated the “slaying” satire of the book, done less with scorn than “with an easy languorousness befitting a Mississippian.” He thought the novel revealed most, however, the author’s “own remorseless mind, most painfully ill at ease in Zion, wrenching his mortal world into a beautifully distorted cast, leaving us full of admiration for the skill of the performance, but conscious of some discomfort before the performer.”²⁹ John McClure was edgy about the book, which pilloried a great many of his and Faulkner’s mutual friends in New Orleans, so he warned “Puritan readers” away from it and concluded with a reference both to a pas-sage from the book and the book itself, “This is Bill’s little joke.”³⁰

A young writer could hardly have wished for a better critical reception, but Faulkner’s books did not sell, perhaps in part because Horace Liveright of Boni and Liveright was such a poor businessman. Faulkner himself was pleased; his own capsule reviews of his first two novels came in a letter to Liveright in which he said that a book he was then starting would never be as “youngly glamorous as ’Soldiers’ Pay’ nor as trashily smart as ’Mosquitoes.’”³¹ These judgments came in the wake of Live-right’s rejection of the long novel about the Sartoris family Faulkner had just written, originally to be called “Flags in the Dust” but first published in 1929 as Sartoris, which four months before he had proclaimed to his publisher to be “THE book, of which those other things were but foals.”³²

Flags in the Dust never made it into print as Faulkner originally wrote it because the original typescript was shortened by Wasson for publication by Harcourt, Brace as Sartoris. A composite typescript, incomplete in several places, that Faulkner had assembled from drafts of a preliminary typescript was silently edited by Douglas Day and published as Flags in the Dust in 1973. Because of Faulkner’s failure to find a publisher in a timely way for the Sartoris novel, The Sound and the Fury was published just eight months later in 1929, but the two books did not help each other in the marketplace.

Henry Nash Smith, an English professor and literary historian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas (and later the author of the prize-winning Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, 1950), championed Faulkner as an unexpected phenomenon from the deep South. Smith saw Faulkner mastering the writer’s craft novel by novel and stated that both his eloquence and his philosophical depth, uncharacteristic of the “hard-boiled” writers of his time, suggested that he could give “the definitive utterance of the generation who went to war and came back when it was over.”³³ As Eudora Welty Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren did later, Smith responded strongly to Faulkner’s poetry of a “keenly sensed” Southern world: “His is a Southern countryside with the smell of boiling cane juice, of salt pork fried over a fireplace … of the banker’s cigar smoke floating over a bed of salvia in the dark.” In Sartoris, Smith concluded, Faulkner had turned from portraying ideas to “the eternal task of the novelist—people themselves.”³⁴ Donald Davidson perceived, like Smith, that Faulkner’s was “a major style” waiting for material worthy of it. There was tragedy in every sentence of Sartoris, Davidson wrote, and possibly an allegory for the age in the central action about a man “whose only mortal satisfaction is in doing himself to death with machines.”³⁵ In Commonweal Mary Ellen Chase found the book memorable and the Sartoris family one “whose troubled, overwhelming personality was so prodigal that even the dead Sartorises could not stay in heaven, must come back to linger on in their pipes, in the odor of the honeysuckle, in the rooms where they had once lived, and above all in the perturbed and desperate desires of their grandchildren. Thus they insure their own immortality and ensure … the torturing mortality of succeeding generations.”³⁶

Without telling his readers much about The Sound and the Fury, Henry Nash Smith praised the melding of provincialism and modernism in the novel, as well as its dramatization of tragedy.³⁷ Like the Texas-based Smith, a Philadelphia reviewer believed that Faulkner used the methodology of Joyce and Woolf without any hint of simple imitation. “No tale here-tofore told by an idiot was nearly so sad or so beautiful,” he writes of the first section.³⁸ Another Philadelphia reviewer, however, objected throughout to the willful difficulties Faulkner flung at the reader, though he relented at the end to write that the portrait of Jason Gompson the younger, “one of the most poisonous men 1 know,” was “bold and true.”³⁹ From Cleveland, Ohio, a reviewer puzzled about the effect of the book, seeing it as a combination of Joyce’s work and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) but speculating that the striking technique “helps to veil much of what would be too painful if directly stated.”⁴⁰ From Providence, Rhode Island, Winfield Townley Scott (then an under-graduate

at Brown and eventually a distinguished journalist and poet) thought the novel was written in the manner of Joyce, Aiken’s Blue Voyage (1927), and Gertrude Stein and dismissed it, as did Clifton Fadiman (founder of the Book-of-the-Month Club) in The Nation.⁴¹ In New Orleans, Faulkner fared better: Julia Baker raved about the difficult book for its force, its economy, and the true “note of tragedy, not marred by a cynical tone of self-pity.” And Caddy, she wrote, is “something uncanny” as a portrayal of a feminine heart: “Ask women how true his rendering is. They know it, men can merely sense it.”⁴²

Since Faulkner published nineteen novels and three collections of short stories in his lifetime, the record of his contemporary critical reception is large. After he won the Nobel Prize in 1950, and without even counting the body of academic criticism that began to expand at that time, the record of reviews alone is vast. The pattern established with the reviews of the first four books, however—The Marble Faun, Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitoes, and Sartoris— is essentially the general picture over time. Almost no middle ground existed in the reception of Faulkner’s work. Reviewers either expressed astonishment and profound delight or resentment, confusion, and strong disapproval.

Faulkner did not respond to the negative criticism, and he rarely responded to the positive, except in the way he constantly had to reshape his career and modify his intended path to becoming a ground-breaking novelist. That is, he learned how to write commercially when that was not his ambition. Faulkner learned how to create the typical action story of the mass-circulation magazines, although this kind of story went against his whole interest in probing deeply into the lives of his characters. Even in his attempts to cash in on the popular American taste of the times, however, he sometimes created books that European audiences found significant and compelling. Sanctuary, published in 1931, was a scandal in America, but in France the noted philosophical writer Andre Malraux said it represented the infusion of the spirit of Greek tragedy into the detective novel.⁴³

Because he almost always aimed for the best-paying, and thus most mass-audience-oriented, magazines, Faulkner’s collections of short stories include pedestrian as well as a few remarkable examples of the popular magazine story. This may be considered a response to his critics, too, since such magazine stories are clear, direct, psychologically simplified versions of life. But Faulkner’s critics seem not to have noticed that he could write stories for popular magazines at the same time he was writing novels such as The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! The seven-episode cycle of stories published as The Unvan quished in 1938, which he contracted as a novel and of which six stories were crafted specifically for The Saturday Evening Post, was his least favorite work. The detective stories of Knight’s Gambit (1949), similarly intended for a popular market, he saw as potboilers, too, but the morally and psychologically richer Intruder in the Dust (1948) transcended the detective genre and received high praise from many reviewers. In 1999, in fact, when a story extracted from the first chapter of the novel was, after fifty years, pulled out of a file and published with some fanfare in The Virginia Quarterly Review, an editorial in The New York Times made the following judgment:

[I]n Faulkner’s words, undiminished by time, is all the texture, the back-country manners, the flavor and scent of a racial structure long collapsed, a way of life forever gone. It is stunning, reading it, how the past rushes back. One can smell the dark, rich nuances and tensions of Mississippi, 1948. It is even more poignant to finish this story and realize how far we still are from achieving its end.

For this is a story of instruction about giving and accepting on terms of mutual respect. It is the 12-year-old white boy, cold and wet from a fall in the creek, who is commanded by [a stubborn black man named Lucas] Beauchamp to follow him to his cabin. There he is wrapped in the black man’s quilt and warmed by his fire. But Beauchamp is no servant. He will not be paid, and the challenge for the boy is to accept the gift, and therefore the authority and humanity of the man who gave it. It is a story about freedom, about black strength and competence, and about white acceptance, and acknowledgment and respect. More than 50 years later, those are still issues in America and the world, as well as in Mississippi, ⁴³

The New York Times, like the South, was different in 1948 when Intruder in the Dust was published, and certainly in 1950 when Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in literature and the Times editorialized against his dramatization of racial injustice and its consequences. “Americans must fervently hope,” the editorialist wrote in 1950, that foreigners do not believe that Faulkner’s “too often vicious, depraved, decadent, corrupt” world truly reflects the United States.⁴⁵

The editorial pages of The New York Times were, however, not in harmony with the pages of The New York Times Book Review (which was, in fact, an institution to itself). Months before the 1950 editorial critical of Faulkner was published, Harry Sylvester, reviewing Collected Stories of William Faulkner, wrote in the Book Review that “one thing remains to distinguish [Faulkner] above all American writers since James and perhaps since Melville—he simply knows so much more than they.”⁴⁶ Charles Poore, an editor of the Book Review, offered proof from Random House records that Faulkner had a popular following in his own country: counting Modern Library editions, Faulkner’s books had sold 140,000 in hardcover, including more than 30,000 copies of The Sound and the Fury. In total, nearly two and-a-half million paperbacks of three titles— Sanctuary, Intruder in the Dust, and The Wild Palms— were in print, with another million about to come off the press. Paperback press runs were now in the 300,000 range per title for such recent books as Intruder in the Dust and Knight’s Gambit, and one million for Sanctuary and The Wild Palms.⁴⁷

Earlier, the poet Horace Gregory had used the publication of Intruder in the Dust to write a long piece for New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review in which he recognized Faulkner’s achievement in a long career, his international reputation, and the cumulative effect of his novels and stories. Gregory ranked him with Melville, Conrad, James, Proust, and Joyce, a writer “most ’universal’ when most ’at home.’”⁴⁸ In August of 1950, Collected Stories of William Faulkner prompted Gregory to assert that the author “had written more passages of unmistakable lucidity than any writer of his generation. He is more distinctly the master of a style than any writer of fiction living in America today.”⁴⁹

Faulkner’s reputation may have reached a plateau when he won the Nobel Prize in 1950, such is the prestige of that international award, but the record of reviews from 1929 to 1949 is fairly consistent with what came before and what came after, and the norm is variety, even violent disagreement about Faulkner’s work. It has also been said that 1939 marks the turning point in Faulkner criticism, because in that year two long, positive essays on his career were published in influential magazines. Conrad Aiken wrote a positive overview of Faulkner’s work for The Atlantic (later Atlantic Monthly), a popular intellectual magazine. A young Southern writer and teacher, George Marion O’Donnell, argued in the first issue of the less widely read Kenyon Review that Faulkner had created a dramatic Southern myth, Sartoris versus Snopes, in the Yoknapatawpha fiction, and an allegory of the effect of modern amorality in Sanctuary.⁵⁰ That same year Faulkner made the cover of the 23 January issue of Time magazine, and The Wild Palms received a laudatory review as novel of the week in The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) of 18 March. But in the Saturday Review of Literature editor George Stevens surveyed the radically opposed reviews of The Wild Palms as an example of the inconsistency and vagary of popular criticism.”⁵¹

The record as assembled by Inge in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews shows that Faulkner’s work always received some intelligent, positive criticism, not just in the South or New York but all across the country. A positive review in a journal, however, did not mean a consensus among all its editors and contributors. In 1940 an editor of the Southern Review, Donald Stanford, began his review of The Hamlet by calling the novel “Faulkner’s latest explosion in a cess pool….”⁵² Another Southern Review editor, Robert Penn Warren, had to go to John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review in order to discuss what he saw as the rich humor of the first volume about Snopeses.⁵³

Faulkner was not oblivious to criticism, nor to his growing reputation, as he told various interviewers he was. But he increasingly hid behind the persona of an ill-educated Mississippi farmer to fend off the questions academics and intellectuals asked him. By claiming not to be literary, not to know any writers, and not to have any notion of what his agent did with his work, Faulkner avoided having to intellectualize his writing process or the philosophical content of his writing. The contrary evidence of his earliest years as a writer is that he posed as a small-town bohemian intellectual and then ran happily with the artists and writers of New Orleans. His pose later in life as a farmer played well, nonetheless, in New York.

Regarding his reception, Faulkner actually cared enormously for a glorious posterity—that is, for a reputation akin to that of past literary masters. Faulkner knew firsthand the excitement of discovering the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, and Joyce, and he was pleased to find out that, for example, among the young French writers of the World War II era he was, as Cowley reported, a “god” himself.⁵⁴ In writing about his ambition Faulkner generalized, putting artistic success above making money or attaining the status of public figure. The artists ambition, he explained, should be to make something that has not been made before, and to make, in his case, a book or story so expressive that it could move other human beings even in strange cultures and distant times. By touching posterity in this way, the artist would achieve his true goal, which is to say “No” to death, to achieve immortality not for the self but for the work.⁵⁵

NOTES

1. Claude Simon, quoted in Thomas L. McHaney, “Watching for the Dixie Limited: Faulkner’s Impact upon the Creative Writer,” in Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha, edited by Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980), p. 245.

2. John Crowe Ransom, “Freud and Literature,” Saturday Review of Literature (4 October 1924): 161.

3. William Faulkner to Ben Wasson, in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 44-45.

4. “Interview with Jean Stein vanden Heuvel,” in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962, edited by James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 249-250.

5. See Lothar Honnighausen, William Faulkner: The Art of Stylization in his Early Graphic and Literary Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Modernism: 1890—1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1978; second edition, 1991).

6. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 84.

7. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 4.

8. Faulkner, “To the Book Editor of the Chicago Tribune,” in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, edited by Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 197-198.

9. Bradbury and McFarlane, “The Cultural and Intellectual Climate of Modernism,” in Modemism: 1890-1930, p. 57.

10. Bradbury and McFarlane, “The Modernist Novel,” in Modernism: 1890–1930, p. 393.

11. John Fletcher and Bradbury, “The Introverted Novel,” in Modernism: 1890–1930, p. 408.

12. David Lodge, “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy,” in Modernism: 1890-1930, p. 481.

13. Faulkner to Warren Beck, 6 July 1941, in Selected Letters, p. 143.

14. “Interview at Press Club,” in Lion in the Garden, p. 91.

15. “Classroom Statements at the University of Mississippi,” in Lion in the Garden, p. 58.

16. See McHaney “Watching for the Dixie Limited: Faulkner’s Impact upon the Creative Writer”; and William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by M. Thomas Inge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

17. Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Fiction,” in her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 45.

18. For an account of Faulkner’s compositional practice that is also an essay on deciphering his handwriting, see Noel Polk, “Some Notes on Reading Faulkner’s Hand,” in William Faulkner Manuscripts, volume 1: Elmer and “A Portrait of Elmer,” introduced and arranged by McHaney (New York & London: Garland, 1987), pp. xiii-xxiii. A helpful tool for learning to read Faulkner’s manuscripts is Faulkner, Mosquitoes: A Facsimile and Transcription of the University of Virginia Holograph Manuscript, edited by McHaney and David L. Vander Meulen (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia/University of Virginia Library, 1997). This facsimile is digitally reproduced, making it clearer than previous facsimiles, and the matching transcription is printed on pages facing the appropriate manuscript page.

19. Faulkner to Robert K. Haas, 8 July 1938, in Selected Letters, p. 106.

20. Ibid., pp. 113,146.

21. Faulkner, foreword to The Mansion (New York: Random House, 1959).

22. Faulkner to Malcolm Cowley, 18 February 1946, in Selected Letters, p. 222.

23. John Cook Wyllie, “Conversations with William Faulkner,” in Conversations with William Faulkner, edited by Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 110.

24. E. Hartley Grattan, “A Book of Hatred,” New York Sun, 3 April 1926; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 11.

25. Louis Kronenberger, “Soldiers’Pay,” Literary Digest International Book Review, 4 (July 1926); reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 15.

26. Donald Davidson, “William Faulkner,” Nashville Tennessean, 11 April 1926; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 12.

27. John McClure, “Literature and Less,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 11 April 1926; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 14.

28. Lillian Hellman, “Futile Souls Adrift on a Yacht,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 19 June 1927; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 19.

29. Davidson, “The Grotesque,” Nashville Tennessean, 3 July 1927; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 20.

30. McClure, “Literature and Less,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 3 July 1927; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 21.

31. Faulkner to Horace Liveright, February 1928, in Selected Letters, p. 40.

32. Faulkner to Liveright, 16 October 1927, in Selected Letters, p. 38.

33. Henry Nash Smith, “In His New Novel William Faulkner Broadens His Art,” Dallas Morning News, 17 February 1929; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 25.

34. Ibid., p. 26.

35. Davidson, “Two Mississippi Novels,” Nashville Tennessean, 14 April 1929; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 28.

36. Mary Ellen Chase, “Some Intimations of Immortality,” Commonweal, 10 (5 June 1929); reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 28.

37. Smith, “Three Southern Novels,” Southwest Review, 15 (Autumn 1929); reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, pp. 33-34.

38. Harold W. Recht, “Southern Family Sinks into Dark Mental Decadence,” Philadelphia Record, 29 September 1929; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 34.

39. Walter Yust, “Of Making Many Books,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 4 October 1929; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 36.

40. Ted Robinson, “Full of Sound and Fury, Horror Tale Sinks Spurs into Snorting Nightmares,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 18 October 1929; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 37.

41. Winfield Townley Scott, “The Waning South,” Providence Journal, 20 October 1929; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, pp. 37-38; Clifton Fadiman, “Hardly Worth While,” Nation (15 January 1930); reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, pp. 38-39.

42. Julia K. W Baker, “Literature and Less,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 29 June 1929; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, pp. 39,40.

43. Andre Malraux, “Preface a Sanctuaire de W. Faulkner,” Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 41 (November 1933): 744-747.

44. Dudley Clendennin, “News from Faulkner: An Old Story,” New York Times, 11 July 1999, Week in Review sec., p. 16.

45. “Nobel Bedfellows,” New York Times, 11 November 1950, sec. L, p. 14.

46. Harry Sylvester, “The Dark, Bright World of William Faulkner,” New York Times Book Review, 20 August 1950, p. 1.

47. Blotner, Faulkner: A Life (New York: Random House, 1974), II: 1345; notes, p. 174.

48. Horace Gregory, “Regional Novelist of Universal Meaning,” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 26 September 1948; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 258.

49. Gregory, “In the Haunted, Heroic Land of Faulkner’s Imagination,” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 20 August 1950; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 304.

50. Conrad Aiken, “William Faulkner: The Novel as Form,” Atlantic, 164 (November 1939): 650-654; George Marion O’Donnell, “Faulkner’s Mythology,” Kenyon Review, 1 (Summer 1939): 285-299.

51. George Stevens, “Wild Palms and Ripe Olives,” Saturday Review of Literature (11 February 1939): 8.

52. Donald Stanford, “The Beloved Returns and Other Recent Fiction,” Southern Review, 6 (Winter 1941); reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 224.

53. Robert Penn Warren, “The Snopes World,” Kenyon Review, 3 (Spring 1941): 253-257.

54. Cowley The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962 (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 24.

55. The most straightforward expression of this attitude is found in Faulkner’s foreword to The Faulkner Reader (1954); reprinted in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, pp. 179–182.