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Notes
See Man Collecting: Manuscripts and Printed Works of William Faulkner in the University of Virginia Library, comp. Joan St. C. Crane and Anne E.H. Freudenberg (1975), pp. 20-23. Man Collecting includes in its listing three leaves consisting of a 3-page (rectos) fair ink manuscript and a 3-page (versos) pencil manuscript of "The Lilacs"; also listed is an entry isolating a "verso of a single torn leaf) in pencil." In addition, it presents a textual collation of the complete 3-page fair ink autograph manuscript titled "The Lilacs," keyed to the June, 1925 Double Dealer. See also Robert W. Hamblin and Louis Daniel Brodsky, Selections from the William Faulkner Collection of Louis Daniel Brodsky: A Descriptive Catalogue (1979), items 13-13c, 17. For purposes of identification the numbering of these items in this catalogue has been retained. Selections lists three leaves consisting of 5 pages of experimental drafts for "The Lilacs," and a hand-lettered version of the "complete" poem dated "Jan. 1 1920." Also, a photographic reproduction of experimental versions of the opening two stanzas of the published poem (13a) has been printed.
All these documents have a common origin: they were originally located in a trunk Faulkner shipped back with him from Toronto in December, 1918, and stored in the attic of his mother's home in Oxford, Mississippi. They remained there intact until shortly after Faulkner's death (his mother, Maud Falkner, predeceased him by only two years) in 1962, when various family members began acquiring artifacts from her house more or less at random. This explains why these and other chronologically related drafts were scattered; it also suggests that other drafts might still exist; especially a leaf or pages containing tentative versions for stanzas 3 and 4.
"The Lilacs" first appeared in the Double Dealer, 7 (June 1925), 185-187. Subsequently it was selected and appeared unaltered in Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1925 and Yearbook of American Poetry, ed. William Stanley Braithwaite (1925), pp. 115-118.
What exists are the burned remains of a 36-page hand-lettered booklet of poems, with red velvet cover, which Faulkner assembled and presented to Phil Stone. Hand-printed on the title page is: "THE LILACS / W. FAULKNER." The verso of the title page contains a dedication to Stone, and the date, "Jan. 1 1920." For a full description of this booklet see Hamblin and Brodsky, Selections, pp. 31-32.
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