Tales in the Marketplace

By Paul Gray

UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER Edited by Joseph Blotner; Random House; 716 pages; $17.95

Although he labored in obscurity throughout his early career, William Faulkner lived to see an academic cottage industry grow up around his books. Since his death, in 1962, the business has boomed into a vast factory, belching out theses, dissertations, books, articles, catalogues of trivia, notes and querulousness. Raw material is naturally at a premium. If a single word that Faulkner wrote and neglected to destroy has not been discovered, some professorial truffle hound will doubtless find and publish it.

Yet Uncollected Stories proves that the law of diminishing returns has a loophole. Until now, only some 50 of Faulkner's short stories were available in book form. Editor Joseph Blotner has rounded up 45 more, 14 of them previously unpublished anywhere. The book as a whole rarely reaches the brilliance sustained throughout Faulkner's Collected Stories (1950). No matter. Blotner has salvaged a number of fine stories from back-issue oblivion and, in the process, presented an intriguing portrait of the artist as a commercial traveler.

Faulkner spent his prime writing years perpetually strapped for cash. The energy poured into novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) netted him almost nothing, and the private squirearchy he was establishing in Oxford, Miss., cost money. Hollywood offered him periodic stints of screen writing, and these paid some bills. The marketplace for short fiction provided another recourse. Luckily for Faulkner, at the time it was enormous: the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, American Mercury, American Magazine, This Week, Woman's Home Companion, Country Gentleman, Scribner's magazine. Faulkner received rejections from all of these journals, some now defunct, as well as from a few survivors like The New Yorker, but he also published enough to buy precious time for his novels.

As Blotner's notes make clear, Faulkner accepted editorial quibbles and orders to revise or rewrite with little complaint; it comes as something of a surprise to watch the future Nobel laureate acceding to the demands of the popular press. As a result of such proddings, Faulkner's magazine stories were usually simpler, more straightforward and less resonant than his finest work. Reprinted in Uncollected Stories, these early versions inspire a sense of deja vu, for Faulkner frequently expanded and reshaped his published stories and inserted them in novels. A tale of his called The Bear appeared in the Post in 1942, but it reads like a libretto to the famous novella of the same name that he included in Go Down, Moses later that year.

The stories that he published but then apparently forgot form the most interesting section of the book, chiefly because their quality is so uneven. When Faulkner was bad he could be horrid, and it may comfort writers everywhere to see a few gaffes of the master: " 'Whoopeee!' cheered Walter Mitchell under his breath." Or: "He would have slowed to a walk if only to prove to himself the soundness of his integral integrity." One of Faulkner's strengths was the piling on of nouns and adjectives until language reached a pitch of controlled hysteria. If he tried this effect too quickly or with inadequate preparation, the result was not intensity but self-parody: "Rousing, furious, her hands clenched at her sides, the covers flung back and her opened thighs tossing, she would violate her ineradicable virginity again and again with something evoked out of the darkness immemorial and philoprogenitive..."

Yet the story containing this gabble (Miss Zilphia Gant) also breaks occasionally into Faulkner's best, incantatory prose. A woman goes to Memphis to murder her husband and the woman he has run off with: "She had been accosted more than once during her sojourn in those equivocal purlieus of Memphis, where, with a deadly female intuition, an undeviating conviction for sin (who had never been further away from home than the county seat and who had read no magazines and seen no movies), she sought Gant and the woman with the capability of a man, the pertinacity of a Fate, the se rene imperviousness of a vestal out of a violated temple, and then returned to her child, her face cold, satiate and chaste.''

Blotner deserves thanks for making such moments generally available. Faulk ner may not have wanted all these pieces trucked out for public scrutiny, but the fact is that he sold or tried to sell nearly all of them. Financial pressures bent some of his stories without breaking them; he was capable of being merely workmanlike but never slick. As clearly as any single book by or about Faulkner, Uncollected Stones reveals a writer who was both craftsman and genius.

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