October 7: On
this day in 1929, William Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury, his
fourth novel and the second of his fifteen "Yoknapatawpha County"
books, was published. Early reviewers compared it to Dostoevsky and Euripides,
but a first printing of 1,789 copies lasted for a year and a half. Even this
was more than Faulkner expected: having had so little interest from publishers
for his previous books, he had decided to forget all about them when he began The Sound and the Fury:
One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all
publishers' addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write. Now I
can make myself a vase like that which the old Roman kept at his bedside and
wore the rim slowly away with kissing it. So I, who never had a sister and was
fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and
tragic little girl.
The daily writing was "ecstasy," and the
particular image which provided the genesis of the book, eventually
incorporated into the early pages of the story, became "the only thing in
literature which would ever move me very much: Caddy climbing the pear tree to
look in the window at her grandfather's funeral while Quentin and Jason and
Benjy and the negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers."
Faulkner maintained his folksy, self-deprecating view that
the book was a "splendid failure" right to the end, even after
worldwide fame and the Nobel. In a 1957 interview, he described his
experimental, four-part telling of the story as a decision forced upon him by
his lack of talent:
I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn't
enough. That was Section One. I tried with another brother, and that wasn't enough.
That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me
too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that
it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes, I thought.
And that failed and I tried myself—the fourth section—to tell what happened,
and I still failed.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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