Sanctuary (35 page)

The following notes were prepared by Joseph Blotner and are reprinted from
Novels 1930–1935
, one volume of the edition of Faulkner’s collected works published by The Library of America, 1985. Numbers refer to page and line of the present volume (the line count includes chapter headings). For further information on
Sanctuary
, consult
Sanctuary: The Original Text
, edited, with an Afterword and Notes, by Noel Polk (New York: Random House, 1981); Gerald Langford,
Faulkner’s Revision of “Sanctuary”: A Collation of the Unrevised Galleys and the Published Book
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972); and
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sanctuary: A Collection of Critical Essays
, ed. by J. Douglas Canfield (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982).

1.
SANCTUARY] Faulkner wrote the following misleading, but often quoted introduction to
Sanctuary
when the Modern Library reprinted it in 1932. He did not want it included in later printings by Random House.

“This book was written three years ago. To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make
money. I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought. But that was all right. I was young then and hard-bellied. I had never lived among nor known people who wrote novels and stories and I suppose I did not know that people got money for them. I was not very much annoyed when publishers refused the mss. now and then. Because I was hard-gutted then. I could do a lot of things that could earn what little money I needed, thanks to my father’s unfailing kindness which supplied me with bread at need despite the outrage to his principles at having been of a bum progenitive.

“Then I began to get a little soft. I could still paint houses and do carpenter work, but I got soft. I began to think about making money by writing. I began to be concerned when magazine editors turned down short stories, concerned enough to tell them that they would buy these stories later anyway, and hence why not now. Meanwhile, with one novel completed and consistently refused for two years, I had just written my guts into
The Sound and the Fury
though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure. I believed then that I would never be published again. I had stopped thinking of myself in publishing terms.

“But when the third mss.,
Sartoris
, was taken by a publisher and (he having refused
The Sound and the Fury
) it was taken by still another publisher, who warned me at the time that it would not sell, I began to think of myself again as a printed object. I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might just as well make some of it
myself. I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks and sent it to Smith, who had done
The Sound and the Fury
and who wrote me immediately, ‘Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.’ So I told Faulkner, ‘You’re damned. You’ll have to work now and then for the rest of your life.’ That was in the summer of 1929. I got a job in the power plant, on the night shift, from 6
P.M
. to 6
A.M
., as a coal passer. I shoveled coal from the bunker into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it in and dumped it where the fireman could put it into the boiler. About 11 o’clock the people would be going to bed, and so it did not take so much steam. Then we could rest, the fireman and I. He would sit in a chair and doze. I had invented a table out of a wheelbarrow in the coal bunker, just beyond a wall from where a dynamo ran. It made a deep, constant humming noise. There was no more work to do until about 4
A.M.
, when we would have to clean the fires and get up steam again. On these nights, between 12 and 4, I wrote
As I Lay Dying
in six weeks, without changing a word. I sent it to Smith and wrote him that by it I would stand or fall.

“I think I had forgotten about
Sanctuary
, just as you might forget about anything made for an immediate purpose, which did not come off.
As I Lay Dying
was published and I didn’t remember the mss. of
Sanctuary
until Smith sent me the galleys. Then I saw that it was so terrible that there were but two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. I thought
again, ‘It might sell; maybe 10,000 of them will buy it.’ So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book. It had been already set up once, so I had to pay for the privilege of rewriting it, trying to make out of it something which would not shame
The Sound and the Fury
and
As I Lay Dying
too much and I made a fair job and I hope you will buy it and tell your friends and I hope they will buy it too.”

W
illiam Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the ‘u’ to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather ‘The Old Colonel,’ a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called
The White Rose of Memphis
, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the ‘ink stain’ from him.

Never fond of school, Faulkner left at the end of football season his senior year of high school, and began working at his grandfather’s bank. In 1918, after his plans to marry his sweetheart Estelle Oldham were squashed by their families, he tried to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army but was rejected because he did not meet the height and weight requirements. He went to Canada, where he pretended to be an Englishman and joined the RAF training program there. Although he did not complete his training until after the war ended and never saw combat, he returned to his hometown in uniform, boasting of war wounds. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi, where he began to publish his poetry.

After spending a short time living in New York, he again returned to Oxford, where he worked at the university post office. His first book, a collection of poetry,
The Marble Faun
, was published at Faulkner’s own expense in 1924. The writer Sherwood Anderson, whom he met in New Orleans in 1925, encouraged him to try writing fiction, and his first novel,
Soldier’s Pay
, was published in 1926. It was followed by
Mosquitoes
. His next novel, which he titled
Flags in the Dust
, was rejected by his publisher and twelve others to whom he submitted it. It was eventually published in drastically edited form as
Sartoris
(the original version was not issued until after his death). Meanwhile, he was writing
The Sound and the Fury
, which, after being rejected by one publisher, came out in 1929 and received many ecstatic reviews, although it sold poorly. Yet again, a new novel,
Sanctuary
, was initially rejected by his publisher, this time as ‘too shocking.’ While working on the night shift at a power plant, Faulkner wrote what he was determined would be his masterpiece,
As I Lay Dying
. He finished it in about seven weeks, and it was published in 1930, again to generally good reviews and mediocre sales.

In 1929 Faulkner had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, after her divorce from her first husband. They had a premature daughter, Alabama, who died ten days after birth in 1931; a second daughter, Jill, was born in 1933.

With the eventual publication of his most sensational and violent (as well as, up till then, most successful) novel,
Sanctuary
(1931), Faulkner was invited to write scripts for MGM and Warner Brothers, where he was responsible for much of the dialogue in the film versions of Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not
and Chandler’s
The Big Sleep
, and many other films. He continued to write novels and published many stories in the popular magazines.
Light in August
(1932) was his first attempt to address the racial issues of the South, an effort continued in
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), and
Go Down, Moses
(1942). By 1946, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print in the United States (although they remained well-regarded in Europe), and he was seen as a minor, regional writer. But then the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, who had earlier championed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others of their generation, put together
The Portable Faulkner
, and once again Faulkner’s genius was recognized, this time for good. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as many other awards and accolades, including the National Book Award and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s Legion of Honor.

In addition to several collections of short fiction, his other novels include
Pylon
(1935),
The Unvanquished
(1938),
The Wild Palms
(1939),
The Hamlet
(1940),
Intruder in the Dust
(1948),
A Fable
(1954),
The Town
(1957),
The Mansion
(1959), and
The Reivers
(1962).

William Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is buried.