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Lot 184
Faulkner, William (1897-1962) American author, best known for his novels about the decadent Old South and the grasping, materialistic new South in the town of Jefferson and the Mississippi county he called Yoknapatawpha. He won the 1949 Nobel prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize for A Fable (1954) and for The Reivers (1962). Some of his major works are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom Absalom! (1936), Go Down Moses (1942),Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Requiem for a Nun (1951).
Typed Letter Signed ("Bill"), one page, 11 x 8½ inches, Oxford (Mississippi), n.d. (c. January 1961). With an eleven-word holograph sentence inserted at the top of the page: "Haydn should be ashamed in having forced you to this shabbiness." To Joan Williams, a former lover, responding to a request (which he feels was forced by her agent, Haydn) for a plug for her soon-to-be-published book, The Morning and the Evening.
"This is not you, this is somebody else combing the bushes for plugs for your book. [the above-mentioned holograph sentence is inserted here] How about this?
QUOTE: this is a compassionate and hopeful first novel, hopeful in the sense that I dont believe Miss Williams will be satisfied until she has done a better one. William Faulkner
I will be here until about Feb 15th, go back to Va then until about April 1st, when the State Dept is sending me to Venezuela, unless by that time the new administration [President John F. Kennedy's] will have created an actual foreign policy, so that they wont need to make these frantic desperate cries for help to amateurs like me who dont want to go, to go to places like Iceland and Japan and Venezuela to try to save what scraps we can. That will be a fortnight, then back to Va. until about July 1st. After that, likely back here…Im glad you are working, believe you will work, make a better one each time as you learn more, and how to tell it.
P.S. I cant say it's honest since no work of fiction is honest since fiction is a synonym for lying, which is why they call it fiction." He signs "Bill," then adds: "re above. I think any one who wants to be a serious and honest artist should get away from the entire east north of the Potomac and east of the mountains, and stay away until he or she is old enough to resist them.
P.S. The more I think of whoever it was cajoling, frightening, pressuring---whatever it was---you into swotting up plugs to sell one of his books, the madder I get. In my time, editors and publishers didn't do things like this to young writers, though maybe things have changed. Commins, Linscott, etc. not only wouldn't, they wouldn't have permitted it. Max Perkins too. Write another one, do one so true and moving that the old established people like Scribner's Knopf, Random House, who dont treat inexperienced writers like this, cannot help but take and publish it.
I love you dammit, the red hair the violet eyes the taste of your mouth the drop of ambrosia that lives in your navel the rich close patch of your delta with the sweet hole in the center of it. I want your book to stand up of itself first, to earn the accolade afterward, to be proud of you as well as lose you."
Joan Williams, a young writer from Memphis, Tennessee, approached Faulkner in August 1949 after reading The Sound and the Fury. He was 52; she was about 20. They began a five-year affair and a long-term friendship. He suggested that they collaborate on a play, "Requiem for a Nun," which he had started as a short story in 1933, as an excuse for them to see each other. He wrote it as a novel and helped Joan adapt it into a workable play script. Miss Williams' short story, "The Morning and the Evening" was published in the Atlantic Magazine in January 1953. Published as her first novel in 1961, it was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the John P. Marquand Award for most distinguished first novel of the year. In April 1961, soon after he wrote this letter, Faulkner spent two weeks in Venezuela as a cultural emissary of the U.S. government for the Sesquicentennial of Venezuelan Independence. His affair with Miss Williams had ended with her marriage in 1954, and Faulkner had other affairs, but as evidenced by this letter, his feelings for her did not end when their relationship did. Miss Williams' novel, The Wintering (1971) is a fictionalized account of her relationship with Faulkner.
Estimated Value $12,000 - 15,000,
Serendipity Books, Berkeley, CA, 1990,
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| Realized $15,600 |
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