SOURCE: “William March: Regional Perspective and Beyond,” in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 13, No. 4, Fall, 1977, pp. 430-43.

William March (1893-1954) has been praised as “the most underrated of all contemporary writers of fiction” and “one of the finest technicians writing the short story in English.”¹ Between 1929 and 1954 he published six novels—including the memorable Company K and the popular The Bad Seed—and some seventy short stories; he also wrote over one hundred fables, amassed a personal fortune as vice president of Waterman Steamship Corporation, and assembled one of the finest private collections of modern French paintings in the United States.² Often compared by contemporary critics to his fellow Southerner, William Faulkner, March depicted southern Alabama in both novel and short story. Since there has been no book-length study of March, this essay will be devoted to aspects of his life, the nature of his works, and the need for critical material about those works.

William March was born William Edward Campbell in Mobile, Alabama, on the corner of Broad and Conti Streets on 18 September 1893, the eldest son and second child of eleven, eight of whom lived to maturity.³ His father, John Leonard Campbell, the orphan of a Civil War soldier, was raised in Mobile. His mother, Susy March, was from a well-known Mobile family, her father being a pious Methodist remembered for his role in the building of the First Methodist Church.⁴ Because March's father was a lumberman, the family lived in a series of small sawmill towns in west Florida and south Alabama. They moved from Yellow Pine, to Pensacola, Florida, to Lockhart, Alabama, where March completed the “Intermediate Department”—the extent of Lockhart's schooling. His older sister Margaret, however, had been able to finish high school in Pensacola, and she planned to be the writer that he eventually became. March's sixth-grade report card of 1905-06, School No. 1, Escambia County, Florida, augered well for that future success; his “scholarship average” was 91, history being his best subject.⁵ About 1908, when he had won a $5.00 National Oats jingle contest, according to his sister Marie, he climbed up onto the porch roof to peer in the window of the room where she was being born to discover whether she made her appearance with a caul as he had done. His mother, convinced by a fortune teller, had told him that because of the caul he would grow up to be a great man and “eat bread in two kingdoms.”

At fourteen young William began work in his commercial kingdom; like Jim Tallon in his future novel, The Tallons, he left school and took a job in the lumber mill in grim little Lockhart. At fifteen he began work in his literary kingdom; he started a novel that he considered “a profound indictment of prostitution,” his “proletarian phase” having come a bit early.⁶ He also began to write short stories with such titles as “There Fate Is Hell” and “Bet's Bravery.” He even completed a long poem, “Rhoecus Seeks for His Soul.”⁷

Reading, story telling, and acting were a part of the Campbell family life that centered around schools with Friday afternoon recitations and church socials with skits and pageants. William's sister Marie tells of their father's lengthy recitations from Poe's poems. When he was slightly drunk, he made all the family sit around the dining table to listen to “Annabel Lee.” William loved to improvise skits and character portrayals that imitated neighbors and friends, especially when he and Margaret were left to care for the younger children. Marie's first memory was of William standing on the dining table in a pair of Margaret's long drawers acting out a story. One thing is certain: March's approach to writing was often oral, and many of his New Orleans friends attest that in the last years of his life he still liked to try out ideas for a story on a small group of listeners.⁸

At sixteen March left his immediate family and set out for Mobile, where he attended a business college, learning typing and bookkeeping. To pay his expenses he worked in a law office. At nineteen he and a friend left Alabama for Indiana because Valparaiso University would admit them without a high school diploma. After one year, his funds exhausted, he returned to Mobile to work in the law office of Greg Smith. But in the fall of 1916 young Campbell went to New York, where he had always intended to live, and found a job with the law firm of Nevins, Brett, and Kellogg as a law clerk and subpoena server, like the young protagonist in his story, “Old Sorority Sister.”

In 1917 World War I changed his life: William E. Campbell volunteered for the Marines. After training at Brooklyn and Parris Island, he was hurled into the cruel stalemate that the war had become. With the 5th Regiment, 43d Company, he participated in every major engagement of his outfit—Mont Blanc, Soissons, Verdun, Chateau Thierry, Belleau Woods, among others. He received almost every award for personal bravery including a Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross, and Croix de guerre. After the armistice he remarked to relatives that the first thing the front line knocks out of a man is his conceit—war deals in elementals.⁹

Later when he wrote in defense of his story “Nine Prisoners,” about the shooting of German captives, he said: “I resent bitterly any inference that because I have written such a story I lack either patriotism or physical courage. … it is futile and it is hopeless for any man who has actually served on the line to attempt to make well-meaning romantic folk share his knowledge; there is, simply, no common denominator.”¹⁰ Despite the fact that he had seen hundreds of men die and had felt his own helmet blown to pieces in the midst of sheets of machinegun fire, he did find moments of peace in “unscarred” France. In Vichy, where he was recuperating from wounds, he met a charming family who tutored him in French under the flowering almond trees. In 1918, during an educational respite at the University of Toulouse (where he had been sent despite his request for the course of lecture in common law pleading at Oxford), he helped create the lyrics for a kind of Hasty Pudding show called variously “Two Loose Sports” and “Too Loose in Toulouse.” And finally from the Army of Occupation in Germany he reported in letters home that he had not changed a great deal physically except that he was thinner and that he had seen things too hard to forget.

Back in Mobile in August 1919 March began an association with the company that was to become Waterman Steamship Corporation. Tied up in the Alabama-Tensaw river system was a war-surplus shipping fleet. Purchasing these ships from President Wilson's newly created Emergency Fleet Corporation and soliciting freight to ship in them became a profitable Alabama business. Soliciting the freight, particularly in the East and Midwest to ship from Mobile to Europe, soon became March's job. Beginning at a salary of around $100 per month, he worked his way up from traffic manager to vice president. Following the rapid growth of the Mobile, Miami, and Gulf Steamship Company into the Waterman Corporation, March was put in charge of the overseas offices in Hamburg and London in the 1930s. It was during these years of hard work—putting three times the money he took out as salary back into company stock—that William Campbell, the astute young businessman, became William March, the serious writer.

During his business travels March always found time to read and to write. Particularly did he admire the stories of de Maupassant and Chekhov and the novels of Dreiser.¹¹ During the late 1920s, when he found himself spending more and more of his time in New York, March began to lean seriously toward a writing career; he attended a few creative writing classes taught by Helen Hull at Columbia, but he decided that her method was not for him. He began also to regard writing as therapy, a personal exorcism. He started turning his world war experiences into fiction that he sent out to magazines under pseudonyms: William Randolph, William Hamilton, and William March. When a piece under the March pseudonym received commendation, he adapted that pseudonym permanently.¹²

With the publication of his first two stories in Forum and in Midland in 1929 and 1930 March tapped the two sources that were to be his main interests: the ironic cruelty of war and the normal abnormality of each individual coping with his own psyche. In “The Holly Wreath” a soldier dressed in green fatigues ironically lies dead in a pool of his own red blood because he dreamed that he was five years old and hanging his mother's Christmas wreath at the high window: “‘See, I'm all right, Mother. I'm not hurt at all. I'll hang the other wreaths, too!’ … There came a quick tapping from the German gun and a rush of bullets. …” In “The Little Wife” a traveling salesman tries to keep his wife alive by talking about her to everybody on the train from Montgomery to Mobile; yet he knows she lies dead in Mobile. William March had struck his dominant note and had begun to create his fictional world.¹³ With the success of “The Holly Wreath” March turned to other vignettes of the war, and before the 1933 publication of Company K he had tried out forty-four sections of that novel in various magazines such as Midland, Contempo, Forum, and Prairie Schooner.¹⁴

When Company K finally appeared in 1933, readers were already tired of war novels; they had read Dos Passos, Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, O'Flaherty, Barbusse, Aldington, Remarque, Zweig, Latzko. But here belatedly was something new. As Harold Strauss observed in the New York Times, “Realizing the limitations of a single eye and a single mind in the confrontation of an event as vast as the war, [March] has drawn up Company K, 113 officers and men, and to each has given, round-robin fashion, a bit of a vast unwritten novel … that lies behind ‘Company K’.”¹⁵ The London Times said simply, “The idea behind March's story is so obviously effective that it is curious that it has not been thought of before.”¹⁶ Instead of chapter titles there is a “Roster” of 113 men speaking passages varying from nine lines to ten pages; and instead of the merely cumulative effect of an anthology like Spoon River, here is beginning, middle, and end: Company K trains in America, crosses the Atlantic, arrives in France, fights in Belleau Woods, Verdun, Soissons, and elsewhere, and then after the armistice waits to return home—to civilian life and to reminiscences of the war.¹⁷

The stark reality and biting irony of Company K were noted in all the reviews in major newspapers and journals. Men as varied as Dean Gilbert Mead in the Birmingham Age-Herald and F. P. Adams in his “Conning Tower” reported that though they had sworn off war novels they read this one to the end, and Christopher Morley wondered whether any other book about the war had ever really been written. Graham Greene in the Spectator summed up the situation well when he wrote: “[March] has succeeded; his book has the force of a mob protest; an outcry from anonymous throats. … It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes, not an imitation but a development of eighteenth-century prose.”¹⁸ This is high praise for a first novel so experimental in form, for despite its integral chronological structure, its parts can still be read separately, rather like those of a sonnet sequence whose poems supposedly take on new significance when read as a whole.¹⁹

From 1925 to 1928, when March centered much of his “commercial” work on soliciting freight for Waterman in Memphis, he amused himself with acting in the local Little Theater, playing leading parts in such productions as Dulcy and Outward Bound. In New York he kept himself busy with his own war stories and with meeting other writers. But in 1933, in Hamburg, he was isolated and uneasy about the Nazi movement that he saw developing around him. He wrote his sister Margaret that he was reading Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and finding it magnificent. He too was looking homeward, and had another novel, Come In at the Door, half done.²⁰ After a first novel that was more successful than Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay, March, like Faulkner, was turning toward his native region and his memories of Alabama. This second novel turned out to be a bildungsroman: the maturing of Chester Hurry on his father's plantation near Athelstan, not far from the Gulf of Mexico. After the death of his mother and the physical and spiritual disintegration of his father, the lonely boy Chester is left largely to the care of the plantation Negroes, especially Mitty, the housekeeper, and Baptiste, his tutor. After an adolescence spent in his aunt Sarah Tarleton's home and his subsequent marriage to Abbie in Bay City (a fictional Mobile), Chester finally returns to the plantation. At his father's funeral Chester comes to a partial understanding of himself when he realizes in a frenzy of madness “the cruelty [which] underlies everything and which will outlast everything that lives.”

The reception of the novel was mixed. Many reviewers felt that the parable sections titled “The Whisperer,” which marked the structural divisions, as well as the sections of extracts from Sarah Tarleton's diary were distracting and arm-twisting. But the New Yorker found this Faulknerian material fascinating, especially since it was divorced from “the Faulkner manner.” The reviewer pronounced it “a sound novel and a first-rate psychological study of the growth of a fear neurosis. … I warmly urge [March] to lock up the rolltop desk and let Mr. Roosevelt take over the shipping business. Anybody can fill out a bill of lading.”²¹

March did close his desk in Hamburg, but he continued to work for Waterman, this time in London. He set up office procedures, as he had done in Hamburg, but he felt much more at home. During his war service he had been unable to see England; now he could do so and he had the financial means to help him. He visited friends like Paul Engle at Oxford (where he had wanted to study in 1918), and he hospitably made his London apartment available to friends. In March of 1934 he wrote his sister Margaret that he had been having too good a time in London to work very hard on his writing.

He was, however, trying to finish an expanded version of “The Unploughed Patch,” which had been published in the “little” magazine Pagany in 1932-33 as a short novel of fifty-five pages. The new version, The Tallons (1936),²² is the story of two brothers, one a farmer and one a sawmill worker, in love with the same girl; marriage and murder are the outcome. The enveloping action is composed of the Hodge Brothers' takeover of the forested region south of Tarletons' store (of Come In at the Door) for their lumbering interests. March transmutes his memories of Lockhart into Hodgetown and the incident when he and his Valparaiso roommate, Yulee Mann, were in love with the same girl, Bessie Riles—March actually wrote Mann's love letters back to Miss Riles, whom Mann later married.²³ In many ways the novelette in Pagany seems better than the expanded work. The action in the first version is compressed into one Saturday afternoon: Andrew Tallon, the narrator, realizes that murdering his brother and burying him in an unploughed patch has not simplified or justified his relationship with his brother's wife.²⁴ While the new novel expands the time structure and the atmosphere of the mill town, March gives up the neat compression of the first-person point of view and becomes inordinately obsessed with applying T. S. Eliot's theory of the objective correlative in order to “suggest fathomless depths of character to all three principals.”²⁵ Not all the reviewers were pleased, but Mary Colum found it “the best American novel … since … Wolfe's Of Time and the River.” And the London Times remarked that March “seems to write with all his senses where most novelists write with one.”²⁶

For many years March, like most novelists, had been interested not only in the motivations of other people but also in his own psyche. He wrote his sister Margaret in 1933 from Hamburg that if he got to Berlin he planned to consult the best psychiatrists—Eitigur or Reid. He assured her that there was nothing particularly the matter with him—he merely wanted to find out all he could about himself. In London, when he began to suffer from symptoms that seemed to have no cure from the Harley Street specialists, he turned to the famous Edward Glover, one of England's best analysts. He said that he hoped an analyst would help dissolve all his hatred and fears of engulfing personal relations—he really wanted to marry someday and have children. It was in this frame of mind that he started plans for the most elaborate novel of his career, The Looking-Glass.

Instead of the external violence in Company K, or the hero's madness resulting from the hanging of his Negro tutor in Come In at the Door, or the fratricide in The Tallons, with The Looking-Glass March turned to a reflective analysis of the search for three dollars to pay a physician to examine Wesley Boutwell's head that he hurt in a drunken fall on a hot Saturday afternoon in September 1916. With this search as a point of stasis, March examines several decades of the interwoven relationships of people, families, and events over several generations in Reedyville. A fictional novelist with the help of the highschool principal and the local society “editress” on the Courier reflects auctorial opinions about Freudian psychiatry, using the town lake, the Looking-Glass, as a central figure to study the narcissicism of all the characters. The novel is the longest March ever wrote: each character in each family, from the town prostitute Mattress May to the aristocrats like the Porterfields and the Wentworths, has a tale to tell. The town thus becomes the real “hero”—the town that is the county seat of Pearl County with Tarleton's store and Hodgetown in its hinterland.

The novel is dedicated to March's sister Margaret, whom he often urged to seek “analysis” as he had done with Dr. Glover. Though many critics saw The Looking-Glass as another Kings Row or a “pseudo-scientific sex shocker,” the New York Times was nearer right when William Du Bois stated, “It may well amaze you with its pyrotechnics.”²⁷ And Stanley Edgar Hyman in the New Republic found the novel “in the great tradition … centrally concerned with the theme of guilt and expiation.”²⁸ March remarked to his sister Margaret that this interpretation was “fairly correct” even though he meant the water imagery to suggest narcissicism rather than atonement. At any rate, this novel needs closer study, for it is the heart of March's world and his ideas.

Well before The Looking-Glass was finished William March had returned to the United States with his principal business office again in New York. There, after resigning from Waterman in 1938, he devoted all his time to writing. In 1939 he published his second book of short stories, Some Like Them Short. He worked hard during the next decade in New York, finishing The Looking-Glass and writing about twenty-five short stories, twenty-two of which appeared in Trial Balance (1945), his collected stories that included in addition to the new ones most of the stories from his two earlier volumes. He worked also on revising his hundred fables, some of which he published in “little” magazines and newspapers.

His personal life, however, had little of the happiness he had hoped to gain. He found that actually he accomplished little more than when he worked for Waterman by day and wrote in his spare time. His personal relationships also became more complicated: he both needed and rejected close friends, and his relation with women he found increasingly difficult. An occasionally lavish entertainer in his Manhattan apartment, he would leave his own parties when he had had enough of them, abandoning his guests to his strong martinis served by Mayor Jimmie Walker's former houseboy. In 1947 there settled on him a melancholia so black that his friends arranged his return to the South for medical care and rest. He spent many months at the fashionable Point Clear Hotel, then owned by Waterman; and with his pictures and books and the warm Gulf climate he gradually restored himself to physical health and peace of mind. In October of 1948 he wrote his sister Margaret at her New Jersey home to send him copies of all the stories he had written since the publication of Trial Balance, especially a copy of “The Practiced Hand.” As soon as he had finished the latter, he would have enough for another short story volume, he said.

Back at his work and in human society again, March changed his writing plans. He began expanding a story he had published in Good Housekeeping in 1946. Writing from his Mobile apartment, he told his sister Margaret that he was completing October Island. Based on the story he had written during his last difficult years in New York, the new novel would allow him space to fantasize more freely in the Pacific regions of Stevenson and Maugham and even to work in a bit of his native Mobile. The novel, like the magazine story, would concern the turn-of-the-century New England missionaries Samuel and Irma Barnfield and their attempt to convert the natives of October Island to Christianity and Christian culture. Among other things, March amused himself with adding an episode about the heroine's sister Lurline, who has come to live in Mobile, having been paid $100,000 by the wealthy family of her husband to leave their native city of Philadelphia. For the main characters the result of this ironic comedy is that Mrs. Barnfield, after the death of her husband, becomes for the island natives a reincarnation of the female consort of their god Rahabaat. And thus it provided what C. P. Snow called “one of the civilized enjoyments of the year.”²⁹

What is impressive about this novel is the simple technique of a good story, with suitable ironic overtones, that unfolds itself in a subtle omniscience without devices March had used earlier: the multiple complexity of more than a hundred points of view of Company K, the fabled Whisperer and the diarist of Come In at the Door, the web of objective correlatives of The Tallons, and the involved Freudianisms of The Looking-Glass. March seems to have found a way to persuade his readers to accept his belief in the unending cruelty of rigid cultural patterns imposed from without and at the same time to have a little “civilized enjoyment” in the realization of the ironic attempt to impose them. His method is the simplest of narrative devices—the well-managed auctorial omniscience.

This same technique serves March well in his last novel, The Bad Seed. The story of an attractive blonde child who commits murder in cold blood is the more chilling because the author has found the way to stylistic simplicity—a device he had long used in short stories, but had only recently learned how to sustain in the novel. Rhoda Penmark seems the more convincing because her story is laid in the simple middle-class environment of a Southern town (with striking similarities to Mobile) and told in a flat, level tone. The novel shocks the reader just as March shocked his youngest sister by telling her in 1953 flatly and simply that he had come to believe that all major crimes are committed in the name of love.³⁰

During the last three years of his life March spent increasingly more of his time in New Orleans. He had purchased in the French Quarter the only house he ever owned and had hung his valuable collection of modern French art that he had been purchasing over the years with the encouragement and help of Klaus Perls of New York. He found in New Orleans a place where he could write and ventilate his spirit—where he could both retreat and have the stimulus of a few intimate friends. And most important of all, it was here that he had discovered the effective use of what Dan Wickenden calls “a starched prose with its occasional glints of sardonic humor.”³¹ In The Bad Seed, then, he had found a formula of combining enthralling plot with understatement of style, and he had sacrificed none of the potency of his central idea that all men of good will are essentially helpless when face to face with pure evil.³² Melville had succeeded brilliantly in this same arena using a convoluted, undulating style; March had taken an opposite route and he foreshadowed a “Hells Angels” cult that led from In Cold Blood to Blue Denim.

As he was beginning at sixty to undertake the “five more books” he had told family and friends he was now ready to write, March died suddenly of a heart attack. In his typewriter was what appeared to be the opening page of one of those new books, “The Ragged Stranger” or “Poor Pilgrim, Poor Stranger.”³³

William Faulkner began his literary career in New Orleans with the encouragement of Sherwood Anderson. March ended his career there. These two Southerners of about the same age had much in common. They created mythical counties in their native states and peopled them with characters that appear many times in their short stories and novels. Both were, in the main, self-educated, neither having much formal education; both were loners by personality and habits. Both Faulkner and March conceived of much of their fiction through the episodic approach of the short tale, often combined in ingenious patterns; both published about seventy short stories. Faulkner, however, created some nineteen novels, March six. Faulkner's style is convoluted and rhetorical while March's is direct and pithy. Faulkner has been investigated voluminously during the last twenty-five years and is now acknowledged the leading Southern, and perhaps American, writer of fiction between world wars. March awaits detailed investigation, and while his ultimate place will not be so exalted as Faulkner's, he merits more serious rereading and study.

Only two of March's novels are currently in print: Company K and The Bad Seed, yet each of his six deserves a full study to establish the milieu of its composition, its critical reception, and its relationship to his development as a novelist. His short stories also call for reexamination, particularly of the sort Roy S. Simmonds will shortly publish about “Personal Letter,” in which he examines this unusually subtle story about the rise of Hitler in Germany and compares it to the actual letters March wrote to the officers at Waterman.³⁴ March's ironic tales such as “Sum in Addition,” “The Little Wife,” and “Nine Prisoners” have been widely reprinted and anthologized, but his less characteristic pieces such as “The Pattern that Gulls Weave” and “The Last Meeting” merit wider study. One sign of a March revival is the recent college anthology from Oxford University Press that opens with March's “Aesop's Last Fable” as a touchstone for understanding the essentials of fiction.³⁵ In fact, all of March's fables deserve a larger audience.

There is at present a special need for the publication of a fourth collection of short stories that March himself was planning before he died. It was to be composed of those stories he had published since Trial Balance: The Collected Stories (1945) and a small group of unpublished tales and long fables. Among the published stories would have been “The Bird House,” a new approach to the famous Isadore Fink case that interested March as he began to prepare background material for The Bad Seed.³⁶ Among the unpublished stories would have been “First,” the tale of Cain and Abel told from the view of Cain as he mused in later life about his fratricide.

The greatest need, however, is for a full-length study of William March that can marshal the facts of his life as background for the fiction he created. For he was an interesting representative of that unlost Lost Generation of writers who did their major work between world wars. March educated himself largely by reading and writing on his own; he fought in the trenches during some of the bitterest engagements of World War I; he worked diligently in the shipping industry for almost thirty years and amassed a personal fortune with which he generously helped others—friends and family. He struggled back from at least three sieges of mental depression. He endured. And, most important of all, he recreated a memorable picture of his native Southern region and of the larger world beyond its borders during the first half of the twentieth century.

Notes

1. The opinions are those of Alistair Cooke, “William March—A Trial Balance,” Manchester Guardian, 10 June 1954, p. 11, and of John Farrar, “The Unimportance of Life,” Saturday Review of Literature 28 (1954): 44.

2. Novels: Company K (1933), Come In at the Door (1934), The Tallons (1936), The Looking-Glass (1943), October Island (1952), and The Bad Seed (1954); short story collections: The Little Wife and Other Stories (1935), Some Like Them Short (1939), and Trial Balance: The Collected Short Stories (1945). Since his death there have been two significant additions to the March canon: A William March Omnibus, with an introduction by Alistair Cooke (1956) and 99 Fables, edited with an introduction by William T. Going (1960). “A William March Checklist” (containing sections on Books, Biographical and Critical Articles and Unpublished Doctoral Dissertations, and Selected Contemporary Reviews) by Roy S. Simmonds is available in The Mississippi Quarterly 28 (1975): 461-88.

3. March's birth date is variously listed by him as 1893 and 1894. His tombstone in Evergreen Cemetery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, lists 1894, as do his Marine discharge papers in the University of Alabama Library. But his older sister Margaret maintained that 1893 was the actual date.

4. Interviews with March's sisters Margaret Campbell Jones in Westfield, N.J. (August 1956), and Marie Campbell Haley in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (September 1956), and with his niece Billie Sue McCrory in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (September 1956).

5. In the March Collection at the University of Alabama.

6. Wilson Library Bulletin 17 (1943): 786.

7. Ibid., where lines from “Rhoecus …” are quoted; a typed manuscript of “Bet's Bravery” is owned by Mrs. McCrory.

8. See note 33.

9. Most of my information about March's war years comes from my long interview with Margaret Campbell Jones cited above.

10. “Our Rostrum,” Forum 87 (1932): xxiii.

11. Something of the nature of March's reading tastes can be discovered from the books that constituted his library, now owned by his sister Patty Campbell Maxwell.

12. The account of the origin of March's pseudonym is known by most of his family and close friends, but none of them knows the exact story or the exact time when the name became a fixed decision with him.

13. “The Little Wife” was selected by O'Brien for The Best Short Stories of 1930; by Blanche Colton Williams for O. Henry Prize Stories of 1930; by Martha Foley for 50 Best American Stories 1915-1965. See also my brief essay on this story in The Explicator 20 (1962): item 66.

14. See Roy S. Simmonds, “William March's Company K: A Short Textual Study,” Studies in American Fiction 2 (1974): 105-13. Even after the publication of Company K, March continued themes about the cruelty and irony that war produces: “The American Diseur,” “To the Rear,” “The Listening Post,” “Haircut in Toulouse,” and “I Broke My Back on a Rosebud.”

15. Book Review, 22 January 1933, p. 7.

16. Literary Supplement, 11 May 1933, p. 332.

17. A careful analysis of the structure of Company K can now be found in Roy S. Simmonds, “An Unending Circle of Pain: William March's Company K,” Ball State University Forum 16 (Spring 1975): 33-46.

18. Spectator 150 (7 April 1933): 508.

19. In fact, shortly after Company K, March actually wrote a sonnet sequence, one sonnet of which was published in Harper's Bazaar of February 1936. Its subject matter is the traditional one of love.

20. Interview with Margaret Campbell Jones (mentioned above) during which I was permitted to make notes on some of her letters from her brother. All references to information from Mrs. Jones come from this interview.

21. Clifton Fadiman, “Books,” New Yorker 10 (24 February 1934): 84.

22. In England, where publication occurred six weeks earlier, the novel was titled A Song for Harps.

23. This information comes from Margaret Campbell Jones, who sang at the wedding of Yulee Mann and Bessie Riles (March was apparently not so passionately in love with Miss Riles as Andrew Tallon was with Myrtle Bickerstaff—there was no murder).

24. For a discussion of this twice-told tale see my “Some in Addition: The Uncollected Stories of William March” and “William March's Alabama” in Essays on Alabama Literature (University, Ala., 1975), pp. 88-89, 102-5.

25. Richard Crowder, “The Novels of William March,” The University of Kansas City Review 15 (Winter 1948): 125. This important critical essay was apparently read by March; at least the author acknowledged letters from March explaining his own techniques.

26. Forum 97 (January 1937): 34; Times Literary Supplement, 5 September 1936, p. 711.

27. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 9 January 1945; Times Book Review, 10 January 1943.

28. New Republic 108 (1943): 187.

29. London Times, 15 June 1952.

30. Interview with Patty Campbell Maxwell in Decatur, Georgia (August 1956).

31. New York Herald-Tribune, 11 April 1954.

32. The public reacted immediately to March's approach: not since Company K had a novel of his sold so well. Maxwell Anderson requested and received permission to dramatize the book, and Hollywood followed with an elaborate movie production. Neither of these dramas conveyed the terrifying effects of understatement that the novel had created.

33. See Robert Tallant, “Poor Pilgrim, Poor Stranger,” Saturday Review 37 (17 July 1954): 9, 33-34. March had discussed the plan of this new novel, which was referred to by both working titles, with several New Orleans friends like Clint Bolton and Clay Shaw.

34. Mr. Simmonds has kindly made available to me his working draft of this essay.

35. The Short Story and the Reader, ed. Thomas S. Kane and Leonard J. Peters (New York and London, 1975). Another sign of this revival of interest is the 1970 reprinting of Trial Balance (under the author's name of William E. Campbell) by the Greenwood Press of Westport, Conn.

36. Actually “The Bird House” was first written in 1946 for Good Housekeeping, but withdrawn when the editors requested changes in the ending. When March was restudying the Isadore Fink case (upon which the story was based) while writing The Bad Seed, he saw the advertisement for a contest in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and decided to submit his old manuscript if his literary agent Harold Ober felt that “entering this sort of affair is consonant with your dignity in the community.” Ober agreed, and March was amused when he won a “Special Award” from the editors of Ellery Queen's with a full-page tribute to “the distinguished author of Company K.”

    A detailed discussion of this fourth volume can be found in “Some in Addition: The Uncollected Stories of William March” in my Essays on Alabama Literature (University, Ala., 1975), pp. 80-96. It is indeed distressing that William Campbell named no literary executor in his carefully drawn will so that such a task could be more easily accomplished.