Extant documents relevant to the editing of Sanctuary are the holograph manuscript, the carbon typescript, and a set of the original uncorrected galley proofs, all at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia; the ribbon typescript setting copy, at the University of Mississippi; and the corrected galleys, at the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. The manuscript of Sanctuary bears the dates January–May 1929; the carbon typescript is dated, on the final page, May 25, 1929. The revisions in galley took place in the late summer of 1930. The novel was first published on February 9, 1931.
American English continues to fluctuate; for example, a word may be spelled more than one way, even in the same work. Commas are sometimes used expressively to suggest the movements of voice, and capitals are sometimes meant to give significances to a word beyond those it might have in its uncapitalized form. Since standardization would remove such effects, this volume preserves the spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and wording of the texts established by Noel Polk, which strive to be as faithful to Faulkner’s usage as surviving evidence permits.
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.”
2. Kinston] A fictional town in the Mississippi Delta (that part of the river’s flood plain extending roughly from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss.) about twenty miles west of Water Valley, not Kingston, Miss., which is southeast of Natchez.
3. Jefferson] The seat of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, resembling Oxford of Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life, and which is bounded on the south by the Yocona River. Some early maps transliterated the river’s Chickasaw name as Yockney-Patafa. According to Faulkner, it meant “water runs slow through flat land.”
4. that … mouth] In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Emma Bovary kills herself by taking arsenic. When her head is momentarily raised in her coffin, a black liquid flows from her mouth. (Part III, Ch. 9.)
5. Delta] See note2.
6. orange stick] A pointed stick of orangewood, used in manicuring.
7. F.F.V.] A member of one of the “First Families of Virginia.”
8. Starkville] A town seventy miles southeast of Oxford, the seat of what was then Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College, traditional athletic rival of the University of Mississippi.
9. “The Shack’ll be open,”] The Shack was operated at one time by Faulkner’s lifelong friend, Miss Ella Somerville.
10. use in] To live in, or stay in.
11. heaven-tree] The princess tree, or royal paulownia (Paulownia tomentosa).
12. loblollies] Mud-puddles.
13. Yoknapatawpha county] See note2.
14. was hael] An archaic drinking toast, meaning literally “be in good health,” that became associated with Christmas, particularly Twelfth Night festivities. Now generally spelled “wassail.”
15. Gordon hall] The men’s dining hall at the University of Mississippi when Faulkner worked at the post office there.
16. The Gayoso hotel] At this time Memphis’s most notable hotel.
17. kissing your elbow] That if you could actually do it, you could change your sex.
18. John Gilbert] A popular leading man who scored his greatest success in romantic silent films.
19. monkey glands] Dr. Eugen Steinach experimented with the transplantation of sex glands to produce rejuvenation.
20. Delsarte-ish] François Delsarte invented a system to produce graceful speech and elocution.
21. O tempora! O mores!] “Oh what times! Oh what standards!” Marcus Tullius Cicero, In Catilinam, I, 1.
22. Less oft is peace.] From Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To Jane: The
Recollection” (1822).
23. “Ed Pinaud.”] A line of toilet preparations was marketed under this name.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
(1897–1962)
William 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.
‘He is the greatest artist the South has produced.… Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century [yet] for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.’
—RALPH ELLISON
‘Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.’
—JOHN STEINBECK
‘For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country.’
—ROBERT PENN WARREN
‘No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.’
—EUDORA WELTY
ALSO BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
ABSALOM, ABSALOM!
One of Faulkner’s finest achievements, Absalom, Absalom! is the story of Thomas Sutpen and the ruthless, single-minded pursuit of his grand design—to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830—which is ultimately destroyed (along with Sutpen himself) by his two sons.
AS I LAY DYING
As I Lay Dying is the harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Told by each of the family members—including Addie herself—the novel ranges from dark comedy to deepest pathos.
A FABLE
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this allegorical novel about World War I is set in the trenches of France and deals with a mutiny in a French regiment.
FLAGS IN THE DUST
The complete text, published for the first time in 1973, of Faulkner’s third novel, written when he was twenty-nine, which appeared, with his reluctant consent, in a much cut version in 1929 as Sartoris.
LIGHT IN AUGUST
A novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, Light in August tells the tales of guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, an enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
THE REIVERS
One of Faulkner’s comic masterpieces and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, The Reivers is a picaresque tale that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi and their wild misadventures in the fast life of Memphis—from horse smuggling to bawdy houses.
REQUIEM FOR A NUN
The sequel to Faulkner’s most sensational novel Sanctuary, was written twenty years later but takes up the story of Temple Drake eight years after the events related in Sanctuary. Temple is now married to Gowan Stevens. The book begins when the death sentence is pronounced on the nurse Nancy for the murder of Temple and Gowan’s child. In an attempt to save her, Temple goes to see the judge to confess her own guilt. Told partly in prose, partly in play form, Requiem for a Nun is a haunting exploration of the impact of the past on the present.
THE SOUND AND THE FURY
One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the man-child Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.
THE UNVANQUISHED
The U
nvanquished is a novel of the Sartoris family, who embody the ideal of Southern honor and its transformation through war, defeat, and Reconstruction: Colonel John Sartoris, who is murdered by a business rival after the war; his son Bayard, who finds an alternative to bloodshed; and Granny Millard, the matriarch, who must put aside her code of gentility in order to survive.
Snopes Trilogy
THE HAMLET
The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman’s Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes—wily, energetic, a man of shady origins—quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.
THE TOWN
This is the second volume of Faulkner’s trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor The Hamlet, and its successor The Mansion, The Town is completely self-contained, but it gains resonance from being read with the other two. The story of Flem Snopes’ ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and of profundity.
THE MANSION
The Mansion completes Faulkner’s great trilogy of the Snopes family in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, which also includes The Hamlet and The Town. Beginning with the murder of Jack Houston and ending with the murder of Flem Snopes, it traces the downfall of the indomitable post-bellum family who managed to seize control of the town of Jefferson within a generation.