A poor Mississippi family carries their mother’s coffin forty miles to bury her in town, through flood and fire, in the July heat. The story is told in 59 short sections by 15 different narrators, including, once, the dead woman herself.
Six weeks at the power plant
In June 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham. He was 31, had published four novels that barely sold, and needed a steady wage. That autumn he took a night job at the University of Mississippi power plant in Oxford, where he shovelled coal from the bunker into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it to the boilers for the fireman.
Around midnight the town went to bed, the demand for power fell, and the work stopped. Faulkner turned the wheelbarrow over, used it as a desk on the other side of the wall from the humming dynamo, and wrote by hand until about four in the morning.
The first page of the manuscript is dated 25 October 1929, the day after Black Thursday, when the stock market began to crash. The last page is dated 11 December, a little over six weeks later.
“I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.”William Faulkner, introduction to the 1932 Modern Library edition of Sanctuary
“Without changing a word”?
Faulkner liked to say he wrote the book in about six weeks without changing a word. The papers tell a slightly different story. The typescript wasn’t finished until 12 January 1930, eleven weeks after he began, and he made changes while typing. Several neighbours were renamed: Vernon Tull started out as Turpin, his wife Cora as Anna, Armstid as Starnes.
One change shows how closely he worked. In the manuscript, Addie remembers her father saying that the reason for living was to get ready to die. In the book it became something stranger and sadder:
“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”Addie Bundren, section 40
So it wasn’t effortless. But he did write it fast, and with the shape already in his head. The last line is the same in the manuscript and the finished book.
Fifteen voices, no narrator
There is no one telling this story from above. Each of the 59 sections is headed with the name of whoever is speaking, and you get only what is in their head. Darl, the second son, has 19 sections and sees things he couldn’t possibly see. His brother Jewel, the one who matters most to their mother, speaks only once. Addie herself gets a single section, two-thirds of the way through, after she has died. The rest are family, neighbours, the doctor, the preacher, the farmers who put the Bundrens up on the road and the drugstore clerks they meet in town.
The shortest section is five words long. Vardaman, the youngest, caught a fish on the day his mother died, and in his grief the two have run together:
“My mother is a fish.”Vardaman Bundren, the whole of section 19
Where the title comes from
The title is from Homer. In Book XI of the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the underworld and meets the ghost of Agamemnon, who tells him how his wife Clytemnestra murdered him when he came home from Troy. Faulkner knew the speech by heart and quoted it like this:
“As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades.”
The book was published by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith on 6 October 1930. It is dedicated to Hal Smith, the editor who had taken a chance on The Sound and the Fury the year before.
