Ole Miss Juvenilia

by William Faulkner

Overview

Faulkner's prolific publication history began at the age of 16 with poems and sketches for the Ole Miss campus newspaper, The Mississippian. The author continued to contribute to the publication throughout his student days at the university as well as after dropping out. These early works of poetry and prose reflect his gift for keen observations and the growing refinement of his voice as one of the greatest of America's Southern authors. Eighteen of Faulkner's elegant pen-and-ink drawings provide an atmospheric complement to the selections. An Introduction by noted Faulkner scholar Carvel Collins is also included.
Mississippi native William Faulkner (1897–1962) made his reputation with such psychologically intense and technically innovative novels as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August, and he received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature in addition to two Pulitzer Prizes. Faulkner is especially noted for the rich literary landscape he created in the fictional setting of Yoknapatawpha County, from which he drew characters, places, and themes that reappeared throughout his fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486822433
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	06/13/2018
Series:	Dover Thrift Editions: Literary Collections
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Mississippi native William Faulkner (1897–1962) created a rich literary landscape in his fictional setting of Yoknapatawpha County, from which he drew characters, places, and themes that reappeared throughout his fiction. He made his reputation with such psychologically intense and technically innovative novels as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August, and he received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as two Pulitzer Prizes.

Date of Birth:

September 25, 1897

Date of Death:

July 6, 1962

Place of Birth:

New Albany, Mississippi

Place of Death:

Byhalia, Mississippi

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Faulkner at the University of Mississippi

William Faulkner drew a picture for the 1916-1917 annual of the University of Mississippi. It began a series of contributions he was to make during the next eight years to that annual, to the University newspaper, and to a University humor magazine. By 1925 these three publications had brought out at least sixteen more of his drawings, sixteen of his poems, his first published short story and prose sketch, and six of his reviews and literary articles — the artistic explorations of a young man who would become the best novelist his country has produced in this century.

Faulkner's father, an officer in the administration of the University of Mississippi, which adjoins the town of Oxford, had a house on its campus, in which William Faulkner lived for much of the period under discussion here. In such close physical association with the University he found its publications open to him not only during the time he was enrolled as a student but earlier when he worked at a bank and later when he ran the University Post Office.

A former student of that era has kindly volunteered his memory that Faulkner wrote in 1916 for the University's newspaper two or three imitation "Letters of a Japanese School Boy" which were his earliest publications. A series of such letters did appear; but at its conclusion the newspaper identified its author as another man, and there seems to be little possibility of attributing individual letters from that series to Faulkner. It seems equally impossible to attribute to him with any certainty another, shorter series of imitation letters of the same period, though he may have written some of them. Even high school publications as yet unavailable may contain written juvenilia or drawings similar to ten of Faulkner's pen-and-ink school sketches which survive from 1913. But his first published work which this investigation has been able to identify is the signed drawing for the 19161917 Ole Miss annual.

It was followed the next year by two signed drawings in the 1917-1918 Ole Miss, one of them for the same "Social Activities" page his first had decorated, the other to decorate a page listing the members of a dancing group. Faulkner presumably supplied the staff of Ole Miss with these drawings before April 10, 1918; for on that day he began work as a ledger clerk at an armament company in Connecticut. Signing up with the British air force and then resigning from his job as clerk on June 15, 1918, he made a brief trip home to visit his family before leaving Mississippi on July 8, 1918, for Toronto, Canada, to begin training as a pilot. Four months later came the Armistice. When the British released him soon from training, he returned from Canada to Mississippi.

That spring and summer — according to Phil Stone, a close associate of those days — Faulkner did even more reading than usual and wrote much of the poetry he would revise for The Marble Faun of five years later. On August 6, 1919, The New Republic printed his poem "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune," his first piece of writing known to have been published and his first published draft on the Symbolist poets from whom he would draw so much. At summer's end, on September 19, 1919, he registered as a student at the University of Mississippi, enrolling in French, Spanish, and the sophomore survey of English literature.

His first contributions to the University's newspaper, The Mississippian, were a slightly revised version of "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune" in October and, on November 12, 1919, the poem "Cathay." "Cathay" illustrates some of the uncertainties which accompany reprinting these pieces: Lines of the poem in The Mississippian seem to have been disturbed by faulty typesetting, but perfect guidance for emendation is not to be found in the other three available versions. The most accessible of the three is a typescript William Faulkner loaned to the Princeton University Library for its exhibition of 1957, which now can be seen as Plate 3 among the illustrations in James B. Meriwether's excellent book The Literary Career of William Faulkner (Princeton, 1961). It differs from the printed version at points where The Mississip-plan seems not to have made typographical errors. The other two versions came to light about a decade after a 1941 fire had destroyed a house containing early Faulkner papers — when I was able, with the kind consent and help of the owners, to separate from the debris, dry out, and read more than four hundred and seventy pages, including a damaged holograph version of this poem dated 1920 and an undated, damaged typescript of it. They differ at several points not only from the version in The Mississippian but from the version Mr. Faulkner loaned to Princeton. These documents differ because William Faulkner revised and improved his early poems for several years, printing some of them as late as 1933, after he not only had become a novelist but had created that fictional masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury.

The Mississippian launched Faulkner as an author of fiction two weeks after it had printed his poem "Cathay," when it brought out on November 26, 1919, the first story he is known to have published, titled "Landing in Luck" and set at a military training aerodrome in Canada.

In the same issue the newspaper published another of his poems, "Sapphics," and in subsequent issues during the rest of that 1919-1920 academic year published ten more. Most of them were more sophisticated than the verse other students wrote for the newspaper, and the discrepancy created opposition to Faulkner's work. On February 4, 1920, the week after he published "Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues," a fellow student parodied it. After Faulkner published "Naiads' Song" and "Fantoches," which the paper mis-set as "Fantouches," the parodist struck again, with "Whotouches," signed "J." As an artist partly apprenticed to the Symbolists, Faulkner already must have learned from them to expect hostility of this sort; and one would like to imagine that, while he was learning to adapt to his own circumstances and skills some of the aesthetic practice and theory of the authors of "LyAprès-midi d'un Faune" and "Fantoches," Faulkner was also learning from les poètes maudits to cherish more and more the natural independence and self-containment within which he has recorded his aesthetic perceptions with remarkable indifference to much neglect and hostility during long early years, great adulation during recent years, and considerable misunderstanding throughout.

With his "Fantoches," on February 25, 1920, Faulkner began the publication of a group of four poems which he specifically connected with their source, in this case the work of Paul Verlaine. "Clair de Lune," the second of this group of four — all of them using Verlaine's titles — appeared on March 3, 1920, and the third, "Streets," on March 17. Faulkner's adaptation of Verlaine's "Streets" was not his only contribution to that issue of The Mississippian; in addition to a poem called "A Poplar" he published one of the very few responses he has ever made to the reactions of his readers, a reply to the student "J" who had parodied two of his earlier poems. Appearing under the title "The Ivory Tower," this reply said (in part and with the obvious typographical errors removed):

Ben Jonson, himself a strong advocate of Mirth, has said that laughter is one of our most valuable possessions. Which is quite true: Imagine what this world would be without it. Yet mirth requires two things: humor and a sense of humor. 1 flatter myself that 1 possess the latter; but — and I am sure I am unprejudiced — my unknown "affinity" has notably failed in producing the former. I will state further, that in his present vein he will never achieve it without asking — and accepting — collaboration. It were not sufficient that I boldly make this statement lest the reader justifiably cry "Wolf!"; yet the matter is scarcely worth exhausting either my vocabulary or the reader's patience, so I shall be as brief as possible.

(1.) The first poem submitted by him was stupid, for my own poem was stupid. One sees at a glance then, the utter valuelessness of an imitation of an imitation. (2.) This though, was not the only way in which the poet sinned. The most deplorable thing was his meaningless and unnecessary parading of his doubtless extensive knowledge of the Latin language. To my mind there is nothing as vulgar as a conscious mingling of two languages — unless, of course, the mingling gives shades and tones that the work would not otherwise possess. Whatever tones and shades his poem possessed could have, it seems to me, been drawn in single language (its clarity could have been enhanced, in all probability, by adhering to some simple language such as an early Aztec dialect). This though, is beside the point.

The second poem is not worthy of note, closely resembling the first in being a vulgarly stupid agglomeration of words. ... if this be humor, then I have lost my sense of it; unless humor is, like evil, in the eye of the beholder.

However, if he has, by any chance, gained the effect for which he has so palpably striven, the answer is, of course, simply de gustibus.

William Falkner.

Faulkner, in signing this response, followed the form of his family name which his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather used, as he did in signing most of his University of Mississippi pieces which are reprinted here. Discussions of who put the "u" in William Faulkner's name rival in number the renditions of that great musical question about the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder. Insignificant as the matter is, the continual confusion concerning it illustrates the immaturity of much writing about Faulkner. The customary — and wrong — explanation of the change in spelling is one of the small counterfeit coins which too many workers in the Faulkner industry have passed among themselves from the beginning to the present. For example, the most recent of the American books of Faulkner criticism, Frederick J. Hoffman, William Faulkner (New York, 1961), referring to the year 1924 in its "Chronology," says, "First book published: The Marble Faun, a book of poems, published by the Four Seas Co. of Boston. Because of printer's error, a "u" added to Faulkner's name, which he has retained." That is as untrue as an even less interesting piece of this minor coinage which once again reappears in another recent, small book, Michael Millgate, William Faulkner (Edinburgh, 1961): that in the First World War, as Millgate puts it, Faulkner "managed to join the Canadian Flying Corps," which must have taken considerable managing because in that war Canada had no air force. These bits of biographical counterfeit, of course, have no importance whatever. But when such tertiary books, drawing them from dubious secondary sources, offer them again and again, they are an obvious reminder of the existence of a more subtle, much more significant false coinage of critical judgment which such books also circulate. The "u" in Faulkner's name began to appear intermittently some years before the publication of The Marble Faun in 1924 by printers to whose error the spelling is continually attributed. According to the staff of the armament company for which Faulkner worked in Connecticut from April into June of 1918, his name appears in their records of that year's employees as "William Faulkner." His first known published literary work signed "Faulkner" is his first known published literary work: "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune," New Republic, 1919. To reduce the possibility that writers on Faulkner will attribute that insertion of the "u" — more than five years before the publication of The Marble Faun — to an error by the New Republic printers, it may be well to mention other early appearances of "Faulkner." Among the burned sheets of his early writings salvaged some years ago was a small, badly damaged, beautifully produced booklet of poems, hand-lettered as a gift to a friend, titled The Lilacs, dated January 1, 1920, and bearing, carefully lettered by its author, the name "W. Faulkner." One of the two copies I have read of the booklet titled Marionettes, which Faulkner "published" himself in pen-and-ink and circulated to a few friends, bears the date "1920" and the name "W. Faulkner," both in Faulkner's characteristic lettering. In addition to his booklet The Lilacs, other items among the fire-damaged papers of his University of Mississippi years which relate to this little matter are typescripts of poems by "William Faulkner" which bear-dates earlier than that of The Marble Faun. So, apparently, this is one puzzling spelling printers did not cause, and the answer to the question Who Put the "u" in William Faulkner's Name? is William Falkner.

Whatever way he was spelling his family name, Faulkner's importing to the Mississippi campus not only the works of French Symbolists but a walking stick; his detached air of unemployment which masked his dedication to the labor of writing, which has produced more than twenty-five books and was already producing the formative published and unpublished pieces of those early years; and his awareness, common to uncommon genius, that he would one day become a first-rate artist — all these had led some of the college students to give him the nickname "Count," which the student "J" used in a letter printed in The Mississippian for March 24, 1920. This is apparently the first published commentary on Faulkner's works — and one more similar in tone to many of the commentaries on Faulkner published before the Second World War than it is pleasant to recollect:

I feel it my duty to answer an article that appeared in the last issue of your very estimable paper. This article seems to have been written by a peculiar person who calls himself William Falkner and who from all accounts undoubtedly resides in the remote village of Oxford, Miss. He says he "flatters" himself that he possesses a sense of humor. I say he flatters himself if he says he possesses anything. "I boldly make this statement lest the Editor justifiably cry 'Bull.'" I shall, of course, make this article very brief, desiring to conserve the valuable space in this paper and also my own exhaustible energy for some more serious subject.

I feel, Mr. Editor, like kicking myself three successive times, each a trifle severer than the former. I tried so hard to find what the Count was "driving at," and only that he, himself, admits his work was "stupid." Modesty forbids me using a stronger epithet than "stupid."

I have written the parodies to give Count's poems a meaning; and behold! how little he appreciates my humble efforts.

But permit me to wander. Mr. Editor, wouldn't this be a fine University if all of us were to wear sailor collars, monkey hats, and brilliant pantaloons; if we would 'mose' along the street by the aid of a walking prop; and, ye gods forbid, if we should while away our time singing of lascivious knees, smiling lute strings, and voluptuous toes? Wouldn't that be just too grand?

Since Count used a quotation, allow me the same liberty. I use the words of Lord Byron, "He brays, the Laureate of the long-eared kind."

And now, allow me to apologize for wasting your valuable time on such a subject, and permit me to remain,

Your humble servant,

— J.

Two weeks later the controversy in The Mississippian over Faulkner's poetry had not abated, for the paper carried a brief note by Faulkner wondering of "J" "where did he learn English construction?" and a lengthy defense of Faulkner by someone signing himself "F," a new participant in the controversy who seems now to our hindsight pleasantly perceptive:

I feel it my duty to answer an article that appeared in the last issue of your very estimable paper. This article seems to have been written by a peculiar person who signs himself "J" ...

I think some gentle reader should undertake to defend Count in this controversy. Of all the by-products of nature, a poet is the least able to protect himself in such a dilemma. ...

It is not intended to infer that Count could not answer this article as well as anyone else. However, he is probably now, in his fancy, with the keen discernment of a poetic eye, measuring the dimple on the knee of some fairy, figuratively speaking, so that he can convey to our thirsting souls in rhythmic verse its full significance. Rather than have him interrupted in this, I burden my weak shoulders with the task, and for once in my life perhaps place nobility under obligations to me.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Preface v

Faulkner at the University of Mississippi 3

L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune 39

Cathay 41

Landing in Luck 42

Sapphics 51

After Fifty Years 53

Une Ballade des Femmes Per dues 54

Naiads' Song 55

Fantoches 57

Clair de Lune 58

Streets 59

A Poplar 60

A Clymènc 61

Study 62

Alma Mater 64

To a Co-ed 70

Books and Things: In April One W. A. Percy 71

Books and Things; Turns and Movies Conrad Aiken 74

Co-education at Ole Miss 77

Nocturne 82

Books and Things: Aria da Capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay 84

Books and Things; American Drama: Eugene O'Neill 86

The Hill 90

Books and Things: American Drama: Inhibitions 93

Portrait 99

Books and Things: Joseph Hergesheimer 101

Appendix

On Criticism 109

Dying Gladiator 113

Verse Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage 114

The Faun 119

Notes on the Text 123