(4 of 5)
When Miss Prall, who had recently married Sherwood Anderson, came to New Orleans, Faulkner visited her, became Anderson's close friend. He turned to novels, under Anderson's influence, wrote Soldiers' Pay. Mrs. Anderson volunteered to get Sherwood to read the book, to recommend it to Publisher Horace Liveright if he liked it. Next day she brought it back, saying. "Sherwood says if he isn't required to read this, he'll try to get Liveright to publish it." Liveright accepted it, gave Faulkner advances of $200 apiece on the next two. He dashed off Mosquitoes, was halfway through his third novel, Sartoris, when something happened. He was writing about his own country when suddenly "I discovered that writing was a mighty fine thing," he says; it enabled you "to make men stand on their hind legs and cast a shadow." Sartoris was rejected.
By the summer of 1929, Faulkner was back in Oxford, and his financial situation was getting desperate. He had written a brilliant, bitter, difficult book, The Sound and the Fury, which Publisher Harrison Smith assured him would not sell. He had married Mrs. Estelle Oldham Franklin, an Oxford girl who had two children by a previous marriage. To make money he wrote a horror story, Sanctuary. It was rejected, too. He got a job shoveling coal at the Oxford power plant for $100 a month, working from 6 p. m. to 6 a. m. From midnight until 4 a. m. he wrote, using an upturned wheelbarrow for a desk. On it he wrote As I Lay Dying, rewrote Sanctuary, laid out his series of connected novels dealing with the mythical, haunted, decadent Southern town of Jefferson.
Ghost Town. Jefferson is saturated with the memory of old feuds and old sins. In eight of his books Faulkner has traced its history through the stories of its once-great families whose descendants still hold on, whose legends still remain. Violent, formless, the books are packed with scenes of murder, suicide, insanity, horror, give as unsparing a picture of social decay as any U. S. novelist has drawn.
Southern decay in Faulkner's novels is no more romantic than decayed teeth. In the broadest terms, his picture of Jefferson's social history is this: Jefferson's men & women of the Civil War generation were strongwilled, ambitious, quixotic, ruined not so much by the War as by their own feudal code; their sons tended to linger long over the achievements of their ancestors as wealth and position slipped away; members of the third generation turned savagely on their parents when they found that the traditions they inherited did not square with the bitter actualities of life. So his books are full of melodrama: the last descendants of old families lie awake in crumbling houses; pompous parents like Mr. Compson deliver half-drunken lectures to their children; elderly spinsters of gentle birth talk hysterical nonsense to impressionable youngsters; young girls creep through the wisteria vines to meet lovers their parents will not accept; young men split their minds trying to make sense of the hodgepodge of Southern traditions, gossip, inaccurate history and pompous moralizing that is given them for their guidance.