University of Virginia Library

Jean Stein, "An Interview with William Faulkner," Paris Review, XII (1956), 39-40. Cynthia Grenier, "An Interview with William Faulkner," Accent, XVI (1956), 172-173. Robert A. Jelliffe, ed., Faulkner at Nagano (Tokyo, 1956), pp. 103-105. F. L. Gwynn and J. L. Blotner, edd., Faulkner in the University (1959), pp. 1-2, and 84. Joseph L. Fant, III and Robert Ashley, edd., Faulkner at West Point (1964), pp. 109, 111. For example, Faulkner said during this interview that the novel had begun with an image of Caddy's muddy drawers, and that he had thought it was going to be "a ten-page short story. The first thing I knew I had about a hundred pages. I finished, and I still hadn't told that story. So I chose another one of the children, let him try. That went for a hundred pages, and I still hadn't told that story. So I picked out the other one, the one that was the nearest to what we call sane to see if maybe he could unravel the thing. He talked for a hundred pages, he hadn't told it, then I let Faulkner try it for a hundred pages. And when I got done, it still wasn't finished, and so twenty years later I wrote an appendix to it, tried to tell that story." The skeleton of the answer is the same as on all other occasions. In this instance the variation is the description of the number of pages; the existing manuscript numbers 148 pages, and it is likely that Faulkner's use of numbers was a device to show the audience that the work expanded in scope during composition.

A full description of both the manuscript and the carbon typescript can be found in James B. Meriwether, "Notes on the Textual History of The Sound and the Fury," The Papers of the BSA, LVI (1962), 285-316. The typescript does differ from the first edition in some important respects, but the omissions discussed in this paper occur only in the manuscript. Quotations from the printed edition are from the first, published by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith (New York, 1929). In the text page references to this edition are identified as JC, and are followed by page references to the more inaccurate but widely available Modern Library edition.

A large number of revisions of the manuscript fall under the various headings of verbal polishing. Faulkner sometimes tried a piece of dialogue or a phrase in more than one position, occasionally even assigning it first to one, then to another speaker. A few revisions make the use of certain images more consistent. A number of sentences are more rhythmic in the final version and reveal the sensitivity of Faulkner's ear to the music of speech. Finally, the changes of diction, of single words, are enormous in number. All of these revisions would properly be evaluated in a full-scale discussion of the manuscript.

In an undated, four-page typescript fragment, probably written sometime in the early 1930's (See Meriwether, p. 306), Faulkner spoke of himself as "still reading by repercussion the books which I had swallowed whole ten years and more ago." The effect of reading upon his style is more evident in The Sound and the Fury than in any other of his works.

About twenty-seven single paragraphs in the manuscript were divided, occasionally into as many as eleven, in the first edition. In each case the new paragraph signifies a shift in person, and thus serves to distinguish dialogue from conversation remembered in interior monologue. The manuscript of the second section contains only nine italicized passages. The remainder were added in the typescript and first edition, and each use of italics serves to mark a shift in time. The tendency of this type of revision is to force a distinction between Quentin's active life and the life he lived in memory. A paper dealing with these and other revisions in the second section of The Sound and the Fury is forthcoming.

Permission to cite passages from the manuscript has kindly been granted by Mrs. Paul Summers. I am indebted to the American Philosophical Society and to Boston University for grants to cover travel expenses.

Christian references are largely absent from the second section of the manuscript as well.

Gwynn and Boltner, p. 17; and see also p. 68. Both Faulkner's reply and the evidence from the manuscript would make a primarily doctrinal emphasis on the Christian aspects of the novel seem arbitrary indeed.

John Faulkner, in My Brother Bill (1963), provides information on pp. 47f. and elsewhere about Callie Barr, the Faulkner mammy who was the origin of Dilsey.

No manuscript of Soldiers' Pay or Mosquitoes suvives. The typescript of Mosquitoes, however, shows sixteen manuscript additions of some length, the longest about two hundred words. The manuscript of Sartoris (entitled "Flags in the Dust") shows several pages added in two places, and eight marginal additions; a few more passages were added in the margins of the typescript.

On the subject of the increased use of italics, see Meriwether, 298. The first italicized paragraph in the printer's sample octavo gathering, which is the second in the typescript and in the book and occurs on JC: 5; ML: 26, coincides with the first italicized paragraph in the manuscript.

The letter is closely paraphrased by Meriwether, 294f.

Benjamin's failure to make a distinction between the world and his experience of it is nicely emphasized in a small revision of the final sentence of the novel. In the first edition it reads: "The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place" (JC: 401; ML: 336); and in the manuscript: ". . . cornice and [balcony deleted] wall [interlined] and facade [each deleted] flowed smoothly once more across his mind from left to right, post and tree, lamp and sign and door each in its ordered place" (fol. 148).

Compare, for example, these forms from the fourth section: gwine, bofe, befo, de, hit cole dis mawnin, pastuh, case (because), cuiser (curiouser), yo egvice (your advice), vilyun (villain).

Paris Review, XII, 40f.

Benjamin is not, however, a mere abstraction. An Oxford model is described by John Cullen, in Old Times in the Faulkner Country (1961), pp. 79f.

Information about Joyce's methods of revision is contained in Joseph Prescott's "Stylistic Realism in Joyce's Ulysses," in A James Joyce Miscellany, Second Series, Marvin Magalaner, ed. (1959), pp. 15-66; and A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1961), pp. 1-7 and notes.