FALKNERIANA

Speranza

Falkner (or, as he preferred to spell this, "Faulkner" -- "a typo that stuck," as he said) himself is to blame for the long critical disparagement of ''Sanctuary,'' the fifth novel he wrote.

''To me it is a cheap idea,'' he said in his introduction to the Modern Library edition (1932), ''because it was deliberately conceived to make money."

"I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought would be the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks and sent it to (Harrison) 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.' ''


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In fact, bits of it were in the newspapers, slightly altered.

Faulkner was so discouraged that he didn't even ask Smith to return the manuscript.

When "IL SANTUARIO" (as I prefer to call it) was published by Cape & Smith in 1931, and then reprinted in the Modern Library, Faulkner's introduction set the tone for critical evaluations during the next 30 years.

Being a ''cheap idea'' hastily executed to make money, ''Sanctuary'' could be brushed aside.

Critics and readers didn't suspect that Faulkner mightn't be telling the complete truth about it, given his early passion for astounding the public.

As Noel Polk, a Faulkner scholar and a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, reminds us in his afterword to the present edition, even the original text wasn't written in ''about three weeks'' but in four months - from January to May 1929 - with painstaking revisions.

It wasn't wholly invented.

It was, rather, largely based on a story that Falkner had heard from a woman in a New Orleans night-club about her abduction by an impotent gangster.

Then there were other bits in newspapers.

Falkner was familiar with the various backgrounds to be presented, including the Memphis underworld (Memphis then being the murder capital of the United States).

Moreover, he had on hand Horace Benbow, a character left over from ''Sartoris'' when that novel was shortened before publication.

Horace might serve as his storyteller.

With all this material, and with the help of his extraordinary imagination, he might somehow develop the cheap idea into a powerful novel.

Critics didn't consider that possibility, and for a long time they also failed to note what Faulkner had said at the end of that brief and - as regards public judgment --.

Malcolm Cowley is the author of ''The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962.''

His critical edition of "The Portable Faulkner", originally published in 1946, was instrumental in establishing Faulkner's preeminence.

It has, however, a disastrous introduction.

There he tells how Smith changed his mind, and how, more than a year later, the galley proofs of ''Sanctuary'' arrived in Oxford.

''I saw it was so terrible,'' Falkner says, ''that there were but two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. ... 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.'' He made more than a fair job; he transformed ''Sanctuary'' into a haunting study of evil triumphant; and the early reviewers made it a sensation."

"It established Faulkner as a popular (for a time) author, and the book was even sold to the movies."

--vide: The story of Temple Drake

("You got a male name!")

Ironically, the trade edition earned little money for him, since the publishing house of Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith went bankrupt before most of the royalties were due.

Falkner had to find other ways to earn a living.
What we have now, in this volume, capably edited by Mr. Polk, is the manuscript that Faulkner submitted to Hal Smith.

He kept a carbon copy, which is at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia.

Polk has transcribed the text, making changes only in spelling (Faulkner wasn't a sensationally bad speller like Fitzgerald, but he did make errors that he wouldn't have wanted to stand in print).

When there were doubtful points, Polk referred to the holograph manuscript, which has also been preserved.

The result is an admirable work of scholarship and one that will surprise the casual reader.

When Faulkner tore into the galleys of ''Sanctuary,'' he didn't change the original story, even if he had come to question it.

He did not soften its horrors, nor did he delete the comic interludes.

All of these survive unchanged in the novel as first published.

His utter disgust with the original version was a craftsman's feeling.

Obviously - to those who now read it - Falkner rejected "Sanctuary" as a story told awkwardly and ineffectively, one that confused the sequence of events and scamped its dreadful climax.

In the ''Ur-Sanctuary'' - as the critic Michael Millgate was the first to call the original version - Hor-ace Benbow had been the central character.

Much of the story had been concerned with his ineffectuality, arising from his incestuous feeling for his sister Narcissa and his stepdaughter "Little Belle".

The first six chapters were his stream of consciousness, with his mind leaping from one event to another without regard to chronology.

Falkner rewrote those chapters as simple but brilliant narration.

He let Horace recede a little - though using him as an observer - and made the novel essentially what the 1933 movie called it, ''The Story of Temple Drake.''

They thought using "Sanctuary" would be a spoiler-alert!

It is an appalling story, and it justifies Andre Malraux's often quoted remark that it ''marks the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story.''

Imagine the chorus!

Although the revised novel is vastly better, the original ''Sanctuary'' is not at all a contemptible book, as Faulkner tried to make us believe.

Polk is right, in his sensible afterword, to speak of it as essentially a different novel, ''a moody, contemplative study of one of Faulkner's favorite character types, the Prufrockian idealist.''

But is it, as he also says, ''a worthy addition to the Faulkner canon?''

One may think that the original text will be extremely useful to Faulkner students, who can now read it without making a pilgrimage to the Alderman Library.

It should be of service to apprentice writers, who will profit, if they can, from learning how a brilliant technician who happened to be a genius in other ways could work with disappointing galley proofs, save all the type that could be saved and come out with a new and more effective novel.

One may hesitate, however, to recommend it as a book for the general reader.

But fortunately, as Aristotle often reminds us, the general reader does not exist (Plato disagreed).

Falkner distinguishes himself from most writers of his time - and of any time, especially the present -by his singleminded devotion to ''the books,'' his own books.

To him they were more important than his life.

They were his hope of living beyond the grave.

He said in a letter, ''It is my ambition to be, as an individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. ...

It is my aim and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both."

"He wrote the books and he died.''

Yet Faulkner writes what is truly an autobiography, if we can decipher it.

This is simply his books, the whole collection of them, from ''The Marble Faun'' (1924) to ''The Reivers'' (1962) - not in their contents, which may or may not embody episodes from his life, but in their style, their structure, their changing moods.

It is a tempting project (though Faulkner wouldn't have liked it) to reinterpret the books from his life and, reciprocally, to reconstruct his inner life from what he wrote over the years while waiting, as he wrote (in a letter to the Academy of Arts and Letters in June 1950) for ''the moment, instant, night: dark: sleep: when I would put it all away forever that I anguished and sweated over, and it would never trouble me anymore.''

All this explains the purpose of David Minter's new biography of Faulkner.

''My claim to the reader's attention,'' Minter says, ''stems from the story I try to tell - of deep reciprocities, of relations and revisions, between Faulkner's flawed life and his great art.''

That is a respectable purpose, and it should have produced a better book than Minter has written after years of research.

Apparently he has read everything published about Falkner in English, whether in books or in scholarly journals, as well as many of the French studies.

One can forgive him for missing the interesting work that has been done in Japan.

Nobody can read everything -- not even the Japanese!

Minter is faced, however, with substantial difficulties in establishing connections, since Faulkner worked to conceal his inner life.

When interviewed about his books, he was likely to give conflicting answers.

''In some moods,'' Minter says rightly, ''he simply enjoyed being outrageous; in others he tended to be evasive and deceptive; in still others he became deliberately misleading.''

Too often Mr. Minter forgets that statement and takes Faulkner's comments at their face value, especially if they support his own interpretations.

One example is his remark on the original text of ''Sanctuary.''

What surprised Faulkner, he says, ''was the crude transparency of his motives and the obvious cheapness of his work.''

He quotes the author to that effect, without asking himself whether this was one of the points at which Faulkner was deliberately misleading.

Then Mr. Minter goes on to say that the speed of writing ''suggests what the manuscript shows - that Faulkner wrote and revised it with less care than he had lavished on its predecessor.''

But did Mr. Minter look hard at the manuscript?

Mr. Polk, who did look hard at it, tells us in his afterword that ''the manuscript and typescript refute absolutely Faulkner's implication that it was a hasty, facile, and therefore shoddy job.''

Except for that of ''Absalom, Absalom!,'' the holograph of ''Sanctuary'' is ''the most complicated of all of Faulkner's complete manuscripts.''

The dean of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., Minter writes what we have come to recognize, on a bad day only, as academic prose, abstract, humourless, long-winded and full of quotations from other scholars, each identified in a foot-note.

He often begins several sentences in a row with a participial phrase (''Preoccupied with ...''; ''Knowing that ...'').

And he misquotes, on at least one occasion significantly, as when he writes that Ike ''contents himself with being 'uncle to half a county and father to no one.' ''

What Faulkner wrote was ''uncle to half a county and still father to none.''

One can forgive Minter for spoiling the rhythm of Faulkner's prose, since in this case he retained its meaning.

Often, however, his own meaning is obscured for the reader by the tomtom beat of sentences each beginning with a heavy accent.

Much of what he says is sensible and informative.

Still, given the present redundancy and pleonasm of "Faulkner S tudies" (and that's why I prefer "FALKNERIANA") this book doesn't succeed in making itself essential.

The essential books in the field are few in number.

There is first of all (for the life) Joseph Blotner's two-volume biography (1974), with its 1,846 pages of narrative text.

It covers almost everything except the novelist's Hollywood love affair.

For the novels, there is nothing else as good as Cleanth Brooks's two interrelated volumes, ''William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country'' (1963) and ''Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond'' (1978).

Those two works cover almost everything about the novels, including the dissenting opinions of other scholars.

For those who prefer a single volume, the best is still Michael Millgate's ''The Achievement of William Faulkner'' (1966), though it should be revised to incorporate the results of later and more specialized studies.

Some of these are valuable, while others are mistaken or crotchety.

One I might mention is John T. Irwin's ''Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge,'' a meta-Freudian reading of the novels, full of brilliant insights and wild speculations.

These four are essential works in the field.

Though Mr. Minter's ''William Faulkner'' contains some illuminating passages, notably its discussion of Mr. Minter's favorite novel, ''Absalom, Absalom!,'' it doesn't earn a place in this little pantheon, alas, or at least someone may think!