Complete works of willia.., p.106
Complete Works of William Faulkner, page 106
He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people didn’t go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn’t go crazy. We never did go crazy. We didn’t go to Jackson either. Darl
I hear the cow a long time, clopping on the street. Then she comes into the square. She goes across the square, her head down clopping. She lows. There was nothing in the square before she lowed, but it wasn’t empty. Now it is empty after she lowed. She goes on, clopping. She lows. My brother is Darl. He went to Jackson on the train. He didn’t go on the train to go crazy. He went crazy in our wagon. Darl She had been in there a long time. And the cow is gone too. A long time. She has been in there longer than the cow was. But not as long as empty. Darl is my brother. My brother Darl
Dewey Dell comes out. She looks at me.
“Let’s go around that way now,” I say.
She looks at me. “It ain’t going to work,” she says. “That son of a bitch.”
“What ain’t going to work, Dewey Dell?”
“I just know it won’t,” she says. She is not looking at anything. “I just know it.”
“Let’s go that way,” I say.
“We got to go back to the hotel. It’s late. We got to slip back in.”
“Can’t we go by and see, anyway?”
“Hadn’t you rather have bananas? Hadn’t you rather?”
“All right.” My brother he went crazy and he went to Jackson too. Jackson is further away than crazy
“It won’t work,” Dewey Dell says. “I just know it won’t.”
“What won’t work?” I say. He had to get on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the train, but Darl has been on the train. Darl. Darl is my brother. Darl. Darl
DARL
DARL HAS GONE to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. “What are you laughing at?” I said.
“Yes yes yes yes yes.”
Two men put him on the train. They wore mis-matched coats, bulging behind over their right hip pockets. Their necks were shaved to a hairline, as though the recent and simultaneous barbers had had a chalk-line like Cash’s. “Is it the pistols you’re laughing at?” I said. “Why do you laugh?” I said. “Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?”
They pulled two seats together so Darl could sit by the window to laugh. One of them sat beside him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding backward. One of them had to ride backward because the state’s money had a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are riding on the state’s money which is incest. A nickel has a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I don’t know what that is. Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what that is. “Is that why you are laughing, Darl?”
“Yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
The wagon stands on the square, hitched, the mules motionless, the reins wrapped about the seat-spring, the back of the wagon toward the court-house. It looks no different from a hundred other wagons there; Jewel standing beside it and looking up the street like any other man in town that day, yet there is something different, distinctive. There is about it that unmistakable air of definite and imminent departure that trains have, perhaps due to the fact that Dewey Dell and Vardaman on the seat and Cash on a pallet in the wagon-bed are eating bananas from a paper bag. “Is that why you are laughing, Darl?”
Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.
“Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
DEWEY DELL
WHEN HE SAW the money I said, “It’s not my money, it doesn’t belong to me.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“It’s Cora Tull’s money. It’s Mrs. Tull’s. I sold the cakes for it.”
“Ten dollars for two cakes?”
“Don’t you touch it. It’s not mine.”
“You never had them cakes. It’s a lie. It was them Sunday clothes you had in that package.”
“Don’t you touch it! If you take it you are a thief.”
“My own daughter accuses me of being a thief. My own daughter.”
“Pa. Pa.”
“I have fed you and sheltered you. I give you love and care, yet my own daughter, the daughter of my dead wife, calls me a thief over her mother’s grave.”
“It’s not mine, I tell you. If it was, God knows you could have it.”
“Where did you get ten dollars?”
“Pa. Pa.”
“You won’t tell me. Did you come by it so shameful you dare not?”
“It’s not mine, I tell you. Can’t you understand it’s not mine?”
“It’s not like I wouldn’t pay it back. But she calls her own father a thief.”
“I can’t, I tell you. I tell you it’s not my money. God knows you could have it.”
“I wouldn’t take it. My own born daughter that has et my food for seventeen years, begrudges me the loan of ten dollars.”
“It’s not mine. I can’t.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“It was give to me. To buy something with.”
“To buy what with?”
“Pa. Pa.”
“It’s just a loan. God knows, I hate for my blooden children to reproach me. But I give them what was mine without stint. Cheerful I give them, without stint. And now they deny me. Addie. It was lucky for you you died, Addie.”
“Pa. Pa.”
“God knows it is.”
He took the money and went out.
CASH
SO WHEN WE stopped there to borrow the shovels we heard the graphophone playing in the house, and so when we got done with the shovels pa says, “I reckon I better take them back.”
So we went back to the house. “We better take Cash on to Peabody’s,” Jewel said.
“It won’t take but a minute,” pa said. He got down from the wagon. The music was not playing now.
“Let Vardaman do it,” Jewel said. “He can do it in half the time you can. Or here, you let me — —”
“I reckon I better do it,” pa says. “Long as it was me that borrowed them.”
So we set in the wagon, but the music wasn’t playing now. I reckon it’s a good thing we ain’t got ere a one of them. I reckon I wouldn’t never get no work done a-tall for listening to it. I don’t know if a little music ain’t about the nicest thing a fellow can have. Seems like when he comes in tired of a night, it ain’t nothing could rest him like having a little music played and him resting. I have seen them that shuts up like a hand-grip, with a handle and all, so a fellow can carry it with him wherever he wants.
“What you reckon he’s doing?” Jewel says. “I could ‘a’ toted them shovels back and forth ten times by now.”
“Let him take his time,” I said. “He ain’t as spry as you, remember.”
“Why didn’t he let me take them back, then? We got to get your leg fixed up so we can start home to-morrow.”
“We got plenty of time,” I said. “I wonder what them machines costs on the instalment.”
“Instalment of what?” Jewel said. “What you got to buy it with?”
“A fellow can’t tell,” I said. “I could ‘a’ bought that one from Suratt for five dollars, I believe.”
And so pa come back and we went to Peabody’s. While we was there pa said he was going to the barber-shop and get a shave. And so that night he said he had some business to tend to, kind of looking away from us while he said it, with his hair combed wet and slick and smelling sweet with perfume, but I said leave him be; I wouldn’t mind hearing a little more of that music myself.
And so next morning he was gone again, then he come back and told us get hitched up and ready to take out and he would meet us and when they was gone he said,
“I don’t reckon you got no more money.”
“Peabody just give me enough to pay the hotel with,” I said. “We don’t need nothing else, do we?”
“No,” pa said; “no. We don’t need nothing.” He stood there, not looking at me.
“If it is something we got to have, I reckon maybe Peabody,” I said.
“No,” he said; “it ain’t nothing else. You all wait for me at the corner.”
So Jewel got the team and come for me and they fixed me a pallet in the wagon and we drove across the square to the corner where pa said, and we was waiting there in the wagon, with Dewey Dell and Vardaman eating bananas, when we see them coming up the street. Pa was coming along with that kind of daresome and hangdog look all at once like when he has been up to something he knows ma ain’t going to like, carrying a grip in his hand, and Jewel says,
“Who’s that?”
Then we see it wasn’t the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and Jewel says, “He got them teeth.”
It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip — a kind of duck-shaped woman all dressed up, with them kind of hard-looking pop eyes like she was daring ere a man to say nothing. And there we set watching them, with Dewey Dell’s and Vardaman’s mouth half open and half-et bananas in their hands and her coming around from behind pa, looking at us like she dared ere a man. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little graphophones. It was for a fact, all shut up as pretty as a picture, and every time a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life.
“It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,” pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs. Bundren,” he says.
Sanctuary
Considered to be one of Faulkner’s most controversial works, his sixth novel concerns the rape and abduction of a well-bred Mississippi college girl, Temple Drake, during the Prohibition era. First published in 1931, Sanctuary was Faulkner’s commercial and critical breakthrough, establishing his literary reputation. He later admitted that he wrote the novel for financial gain and was not motivated by “internal passion”. He completed the first draft in a three-week period in 1929 and later redrafted the text with toned-down elements when the publisher expressed reluctance to publish the manuscript.
Set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the narrative takes place in May 1929. Horace Benbow, a lawyer frustrated with his life and family, suddenly leaves his home in Kinston, Mississippi, hitchhiking his way back to Jefferson, where his widowed sister, Narcissa Sartoris, lives with her son and her late husband’s great-aunt, Miss Jenny. He argues with his sister and Miss Jenny about leaving his wife, and meets Gowan Stevens, a local bachelor who has recently been courting Narcissa. That night, Benbow moves back into his parents’ house, which has been sitting vacant for years. We are soon introduced to Temple Drake, a student at University of Mississippi, and the daughter of a prestigious judge. Temple is known as a vapid “fast girl” who gets in over her head when she ends up meeting Popeye and the Goodwin bootleggers.
Most contemporary reviews described the book as horrific, yet declared that Faulkner was a talented writer. Some critics also felt that he should write something “pleasant for a change”. The controversy did not stop there. As Faulkner was the head of a troop of Boy Scouts, the administrators removed him from his position after the release of the novel. Time famously commented that:
“A favorite question on Shakespeare examinations is ‘Distinguish between horror and terror.’ Sanctuary is compact of both. The horrors of any ghost story pale beside the ghastly realism of this chronicle… When you have read the book you will see what Author Faulkner thinks of the inviolability of sanctuary. The intended hero is the decent, ineffectual lawyer. But all heroism is swamped by the massed villainy that weighs down these pages. Outspoken to an almost medical degree, Sanctuary should be let alone by the censors because no one but a pathological reader will be sadistically aroused.”
The first edition
CONTENTS
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
xix
xx
xxi
xxii
xxiii
xxiv
xxv
xxvi
xxvii
xxviii
xxix
xxx
xxxi
The 1933 film adaptation
i
FROM BEYOND THE screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. A faint path led from the road to the spring. Popeye watched the man — a tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his arm — emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring.
The spring welled up at the root of a beech tree and flowed away upon a bottom of whorled and waved sand. It was surrounded by a thick growth of cane and brier, of cypress and gum in which broken sunlight lay sourceless. Somewhere, hidden and secret yet nearby, a bird sang three notes and ceased.
In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye’s straw hat, though he had heard no sound.
He saw, facing him across the spring, a man of under size, his hands in his coat pockets, a cigarette slanted from his chin. His suit was black, with a tight, high-waisted coat. His trousers were rolled once and caked with mud above mud-caked shoes. His face had a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light; against the sunny silence, in his slanted straw hat and his slightly akimbo arms, he had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin.
Behind him the bird sang again, three bars in monotonous repetition: a sound meaningless and profound out of a suspirant and peaceful following silence which seemed to isolate the spot, and out of which a moment later came the sound of an automobile passing along a road and dying away.
The drinking man knelt beside the spring. “You’ve got a pistol in that pocket, I suppose,” he said.
Across the spring Popeye appeared to contemplate him with two knobs of soft black rubber. “I’m asking you,” Popeye said. “What’s that in your pocket?”
The other man’s coat was still across his arm. He lifted his other hand toward the coat, out of one pocket of which protruded a crushed felt hat, from the other a book. “Which pocket?” he said.
“Dont show me,” Popeye said. “Tell me.”
The other man stopped his hand. “It’s a book.”
“What book?” Popeye said.
“Just a book. The kind that people read. Some people do.”
“Do you read books?” Popeye said.
The other man’s hand was frozen above the coat. Across the spring they looked at one another. The cigarette wreathed its faint plume across Popeye’s face, one side of his face squinted against the smoke like a mask carved into two simultaneous expressions.
From his hip pocket Popeye took a soiled handkerchief and spread it upon his heels. Then he squatted, facing the man across the spring. That was about four oclock on an afternoon in May. They squatted so, facing one another across the spring, for two hours. Now and then the bird sang back in the swamp, as though it were worked by a clock; twice more invisible automobiles passed along the highroad and died away. Again the bird sang.
“And of course you dont know the name of it,” the man across the spring said. “I dont suppose you’d know a bird at all, without it was singing in a cage in a hotel lounge, or cost four dollars on a plate.” Popeye said nothing. He squatted in his tight black suit, his right-hand coat pocket sagging compactly against his flank, twisting and pinching cigarettes in his little, doll-like hands, spitting into the spring. His skin had a dead, dark pallor. His nose was faintly aquiline, and he had no chin at all. His face just went away, like the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire and forgotten. Across his vest ran a platinum chain like a spider web. “Look here,” the other man said. “My name is Horace Benbow. I’m a lawyer in Kinston. I used to live in Jefferson yonder; I’m on my way there now. Anybody in this county can tell you I am harmless. If it’s whiskey, I dont care how much you all make or sell or buy. I just stopped here for a drink of water. All I want to do is get to town, to Jefferson.”
Popeye’s eyes looked like rubber knobs, like they’d give to the touch and then recover with the whorled smudge of the thumb on them.
“I want to reach Jefferson before dark,” Benbow said. “You cant keep me here like this.”
Without removing the cigarette Popeye spat past it into the spring.
“You cant stop me like this,” Benbow said. “Suppose I break and run.”
Popeye put his eyes on Benbow, like rubber. “Do you want to run?”
“No,” Benbow said.
Popeye removed his eyes. “Well, dont, then.”
Benbow heard the bird again, trying to recall the local name for it. On the invisible highroad another car passed, died away. Between them and the sound of it the sun was almost gone. From his trousers pocket Popeye took a dollar watch and looked at it and put it back in his pocket, loose like a coin.
Where the path from the spring joined the sandy byroad a tree had been recently felled, blocking the road. They climbed over the tree and went on, the highroad now behind them. In the sand were two shallow parallel depressions, but no mark of hoof. Where the branch from the spring seeped across it Benbow saw the prints of automobile tires. Ahead of him Popeye walked, his tight suit and stiff hat all angles, like a modernistic lampstand.
