Press: Faulkner Item

IDYLL IN THE DESERT—William Faulkner—Random House ($3.50). If you are collecting Faulkner items, Idyll in the Desert would be a good morbid one to get. An unpublished short story by the author of Sanctuary and The Sound and the Fury, it was limited to 400 copies, each signed by the author, has already been sold out. The story, told by an old mail-carrier of the Southwest with many false starts and digressions, relates the sad fate of a nameless woman. Married to a rich husband in the East, with two children, she left them to come out to the desert to nurse her “lunger” lover, ten years younger than herself. He recovered and one fine day up & left her. She stayed on in the lonely cabin by herself, waiting for him to come back. He never did. She contracted tuberculosis herself, caught from him, and gradually wasted away. As she was being taken to a California hospital to die, a honeymoon couple passed the open door of the baggage car where she was lying on a stretcher. The man was her lover. He looked at her, did not recognize her, but she knew him. At the next station she was dead.