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    Faulkner and Money
    Faulkner and Money
    Faulkner and Money
    Ebook436 pages6 hours

    Faulkner and Money

    By Jay Watson

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    Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Gloria J. Burgess, David A. Davis, Sarah E. Gardner, Richard Godden, Ryan Heryford, Robert Jackson, Gavin Jones, Mary A. Knighton, Peter Lurie, John T. Matthews, Myka Tucker-Abramson, Michael Wainwright, Jay Watson, and Michael Zeitlin

    The matter of money touches a writer's life at every point—in the need to make ends meet; in dealings with agents, editors, publishers, and bookstores; and in the choice of subject matter and the minutiae of imagined worlds. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha was no exception. The people and communities he wrote about stayed deeply entangled in personal, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as did the author himself. Faulkner's economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century. The Faulkner met within these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason.

    Faulkner and Money brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel Laureate and new questions about his art. Essays in this collection address economies of debt and gift giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Press of Mississippi
    Release dateJun 27, 2019
    ISBN9781496822536
    Faulkner and Money

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      Book preview

      Faulkner and Money - Jay Watson

      Bookless Mississippi

      SARAH E. GARDNER

      Midway through Ambuscade, the opening story of William Faulkner’s collection The Unvanquished (1938), Bayard Sartoris, the story’s twelve-year-old narrator, lists the books held in his father’s library. At least Granny called the room a library; it had one bookcase in it.¹ Bayard’s brief survey of the shelves’ contents reveals an odd assortment of texts, including a Coke upon Littleton, a Josephus, a Koran, a volume of Mississippi Reports dated 1848, a Jeremy Taylor, a Napoleon’s Maxims, a thousand and ninety-eight page treatise on astrology, a History of Werewolf Men in England, Ireland and Scotland and Including Wales by the Reverend Ptolemy Thorndyke, M.A. (Edinburgh), F.R.S.S., a complete Walter Scott, a complete Fenimore Cooper, a paper-bound Dumas complete, too, save for the volume which Father lost from his pocket at Manassas (retreating, he said).² Colonel Sartoris, it seems, owned the expected, the improbable, and the impossible. Still, what most likely surprised Faulkner’s Depression-era readers was not the idiosyncratic composition of Sartoris’s library—Werewolf Men in England?—but that Sartoris owned a library at all. Nothing that informed book-conscious readers of the day, those who kept up with the news of the publishing world, suggested that Mississippians even read, let alone owned a library.

      Perhaps encouraging that incredulity, Faulkner intimated that Colonel Sartoris’s library was a relic of the past. Readers learn in Flags in the Dust that Bayard had inherited his father’s library. Now approaching seventy, Old Bayard retires to his library, a room, this time described by an omniscient narrator rather than by Bayard himself, lined with book-cases containing rows of heavy legal tomes bound in dun calf and emanating an atmosphere of dusty and undisturbed meditation, and a miscellany of fiction of the historical-romantic school.³ By now, readers learn, the missing volume of Dumas had been replaced. But it does not appear as if Bayard read it or any other of his father’s old books. The steady progression of the volumes now constituted Bayard Sartoris’ entire reading, the narrator clarifies, and one volume lay always on the night-table beside his bed.⁴ Bayard’s library grew through the acquisition of professional reading material. At the dawn of a new era, when the modern commercial press experienced the kind of tremendous growth that made Faulkner’s literary career possible, Old Bayard did not seem to acquire the kind of books that would interest a general reader.

      Old Bayard’s office stands in marked contrast with that of Dr. Peabody, his contemporary and confidante. Here, too, Faulkner does not give readers an enumeration of titles—it was not that kind of library—but merely says a word or two about genre. Peabody’s reading material, we learn, consisted of a stack of lurid paper-covered nickel novels. This was Dr Peabody’s library, the narrator continued, and on this sofa he passed his office hours, reading them over and over. Other books there were none.⁵ These three libraries and three passages, each less detailed than its predecessor, tell us something about how Faulkner imagined books’ varied purposes. Some were owned and displayed. Others were consulted. Others still, of an utterly different sort, were indistinguishable and read for pleasure. The categories, Faulkner implies, were mutually exclusive. Perhaps more to the point, middlebrow fiction, which was coming into its own in the second quarter of the twentieth century, was wholly missing.

      For Faulkner, this absence mattered. And it mattered because it was personal. As Jay Watson and Jaime Harker note in the introduction to their edited collection Faulkner and Print Culture, Faulkner was ever on the lookout for new ways of making books and getting them into the hands of consumers.⁶ His hopes were unrealized more often than not. Jay Satterfield has noted that Random House, for example, developed a strategy to promote Faulkner to readers throughout the 1930s, though with each successive book, a little less attention was given to Faulkner, whose sales were disappointing.⁷ Random House hyped Faulkner’s artistry and his literary importance throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but the firm acknowledged that Faulkner’s books would probably represent a loss. Not until Faulkner published Intruder in the Dust in 1948 did he become a break-even author for Random House.⁸

      Faulkner’s concern with his own financial success was particular; the problem of developing a reading public was much larger than he probably imagined. This chapter contextualizes Faulkner’s concern for books by examining the ways in which academics along with industry insiders—publishers, critics, and booksellers—understood depressed rates of book buying and borrowing in the US South. These were no idle concerns. During the 1930s, the South accounted for a little more than 7 percent of the nation’s book purchases. High rates of poverty and illiteracy accounted for much of the problem, but not all. Those with a vested interest in fostering book consciousness in the South devised creative schemes to promote reading in the region. Yet their efforts proved largely unsuccessful, in large measure because those concerned solely with the bottom line were content to write the South off. The implications, as we shall see, were considerable.

      One example will suffice. In early 1935, Elsie W. Stokes of Stokes and Stockell Bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote to the editors of Publishers’ Weekly, complaining of the book industry’s neglect of the southern market. It has long been one of our notions that the reason the South does not buy books is because the publishers do no advertising in the South. Automobiles, breakfast goods, cigarettes, etc., are sold as well in the South in proportion as elsewhere, but since no book advertising to speak of goes on here, she concluded, we blamed that fact for the small amount that is spent for books in this section. How else to explain, she intimated, Simon and Schuster’s claim that it had sold exactly $8.08 worth of books in Mississippi since its founding eleven years

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