Father Abraham Read online

  Copyright © 1983 by Jill Faulkner Summers All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in 1983 by the Red Ozier Press, New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Faulkner, William, 1897–1962.

  Father Abraham.

  I. Title.

  PS3511.A86F37 1984 813′.54 83-43204

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79965-4

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  First Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Not a fragment, not quite a finished work, Father Abraham is the brilliant beginning of a novel which William Faulkner tried repeatedly to write, for a period of almost a decade and a half, during the earlier part of his career—the novel about the Snopes family which he finally completed and published as The Hamlet in 1940.

  The twenty-four-page manuscript of Father Abraham here first published is apparently the earliest surviving attempt at this Snopes novel. Probably written late in 1926, by early 1927 it had been abandoned for another novel, Flags in the Dust, which Faulkner went on to complete later that year, and which was published in a much-edited and cut-down version, entitled Sartoris, in 1929.

  But the unfinished Snopes novel continued to plague him. He made further efforts to write it in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, trying different titles (‘Abraham’s Children,’ ‘The Peasants’), making short stories out of episodes he had planned or drafted for the novel (‘Centaur in Brass,’ ‘Wash’), even making large parts of entire novels, like As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!, out of the ideas and materials that had originally belonged to the Snopes book. When he finished writing The Hamlet, one of his longest novels, he still had so much material remaining that he planned at least two more books about the Snopeses, though it was not till late in his career that he finally got around to writing The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). And in 1964, two years after his death, all three volumes of the trilogy were brought out together, as he had wished, with the title Snopes.

  Father Abraham, then, marks the inception of a work that altogether spans nearly the whole of Faulkner’s career as a writer of fiction, a work that includes some of his best writing and which, as it evolved, had profound effects upon much of the rest of it. After Father Abraham, no matter what other novels and stories he turned to, Faulkner’s Snopeses would be a vital part of what he called the ‘lumber room’ of his imagination, and the completion of their saga would be one of his major ambitions—or obligations—as an artist.

  Why, then, did he for so long leave Father Abraham unfinished—at least as a novel? Surely he felt no dissatisfaction with what he had already written—the introduction of Flem Snopes and his tribe, and the magnificent tale of the auction of the wild Texas range ponies which he used in his 1931 short story ‘Spotted Horses,’ and so much of which he carried over directly into The Hamlet, almost a decade later. But changes in his original conception of the Snopeses, and the need to expand the scope as well as the size of their book, obviously caused Faulkner problems which he had great difficulty in resolving.

  One problem may have been the need to outgrow an influence, or at least to achieve a certain amount of distance from it. All three volumes of the trilogy were dedicated by Faulkner to his early friend and mentor Phil Stone, a lawyer and fellow-townsman in Oxford, Mississippi with whom, in the 1920’s, he worked up many of the characters and incidents that eventually went into The Hamlet and The Town. Though the two friends parted ways later on, at the beginning of Faulkner’s career they were very close, and it is clear that Stone’s ideas were still important to Faulkner at the time Father Abraham was begun.

  In a 1957 letter, Stone recalled that the idea for the Snopeses, and their book, had been his, and that he had given it to Faulkner after Mosquitoes (his second novel, published in April 1927) was written but before the writing of Sartoris. ‘The core of the Snopes legend,’ explained Stone, was ‘that the real revolution in the South was not the race situation but the rise of the redneck, who did not have any of the scruples of the old aristocracy, to places of power and wealth.’ And he recalled that ‘Bill once wrote fifteen or twenty pages on the idea of the Snopes trilogy which he entitled ‘Father Abraham’ but I think that has disappeared.’ Stone’s recollection seems accurate, both for the date and for his own attitude, at least, towards the lowly origins of the Snopeses. In a piece he wrote early in 1927, for the local paper, announcing the forthcoming publication of Mosquitoes, he mentioned a Faulkner novel in progress which, he said, ‘is something of a saga of an extensive family connection of typical “poor white trash” and is said by those who have seen that part of the manuscript completed to be the funniest book anybody ever wrote.’

  At the time he wrote Father Abraham, Faulkner’s attitude towards the Snopeses was very near to Stone’s, and he probably shared to some extent Stone’s aristocratic condescension towards ‘rednecks’ and ‘poor white trash.’ But the creator of Will Varner and V. K. Suratt, or even of Eck Snopes, already possessed a much broader, more sympathetic view of human nature and society than did Stone, and in order to go on from Father Abraham to The Hamlet, Faulkner had to go far beyond the friend who had originally contributed so much to the idea of the Snopeses and their book.

  Behind the immediate influence of Phil Stone’s ideas, and the Snopeslore the two men invented in yarnspinning sessions, lay a wealth of experience and reading Faulkner could draw on in creating the Snopeses and their neighbors and their book. In the memoir of Faulkner that his brother John wrote, he recalled an occasion (Faulkner’s biographer, Joseph Blotner, assigns it the date 1922) when William was helping their Uncle John Falkner, Jr. in his campaign for a District Court judgeship.

  Bill was sitting on the front porch of the boardinghouse late that evening when some men brought in a string of calico ponies wired together with barbed wire. They put them in a lot just across the road from the boardinghouse and the next morning auctioned them off, at prices ranging from about five dollars apiece on up.

  Just like in Bill’s story, the men sold all the horses, put the money in their pockets and left. When the buyers went in to get their purchases, someone left the gate open and those ponies spread like colored confetti over the countryside.

  Bill sat there on the porch of the boardinghouse and saw it all. One of them ran the length of the porch and he had to dive back into the hallway to get out of its path. He and Uncle John told us about it the next day, when they got home.

  To such raw material Faulkner would soon be able to bring the literary skills he needed to make it into the substance of Father Abraham, into his own highly individual blend of realism and comedy—comedy constantly threatening to turn into tragedy and always inclining towards myth. In New Orleans, in 1925, Faulkner came to know Sherwood Anderson, whose Winesburg, Ohio and Horses and Men the younger writer particularly admired, and with whom he invented tall tales of the Al Jackson family, descended from Andrew Jackson and ‘no longer half-horse half-alligator but by now half-man half-sheep and presently half-shark,’ as Faulkner recalled in 1953. Some of the Al Jackson material made its way into Mosquitoes and its influence upon the conception of the Snopeses is obvious. Earlier literary antecedents abounded, in an earlier America, especially in the South. In Constance Rourke’s American Humor she describes such material and what was done with it by other writers:

  Scalawags, gamblers, n’er-do-wells, small rapscallions, or mere corncrackers were drawn into a careless net of stories, against a background of pine-bar
rens, sandy wastes, half-plowed fields, huts with leaky roofs. Their implements were rusty, their houses wall-eyed and spavined. They belonged to a rootless drift that had followed in the wake of huntsmen and scout, and they were not wholly different in kind. Sly instead of strong, they pursued uncharted ways, breaking from traditions, bent on triumph.…[The center of these stories was] Grotesquerie and irreverence and upset … caricature was drawn in a single line or phrase. ‘He drawed in the puckerin’-string ov that legil face of his’n,’ said Sut Lovingood of a sheriff.

  We might recall that Faulkner knew and admired the book from which she quotes that description—George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood Yarns (1867), and the description itself recalls Father Abraham’s I.O. Snopes, with ‘his mean little features clotted in the middle of his face like the plucking gesture of a hand.’

  Obviously Faulkner is writing of the plain people of the rural South, in Father Abraham, consciously within the tradition of Harris, and of A. B. Longstreet and Mark Twain, with their humor of exaggeration, their unsentimental view of human nature, and their celebration of the literary possibilities of the American vernacular. And he enjoys showing the vitality of that oral tradition when his character V. K. Suratt, the sewing machine salesman, ‘with the studied effectiveness of the professional humorist,’ converts the raw material of the experience he has just had into an artfully woven narrative for his audience on the veranda of Will Varner’s country store. Suratt (renamed Ratliff in The Hamlet) was to become one of Faulkner’s favorite characters; though he comes from much the same background, he is the natural antagonist of the cold and silent and humorless Flem Snopes.

  The title of the work is ironic, and it is to Flem that it refers. The explanation appears not in Father Abraham but in Flags in the Dust, where Flem’s arrival in Jefferson is described:

  Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day and without making a ripple in the town’s life, behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country people. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he led his family piece by piece into town.

  Only in later works does Faulkner make Flem’s impotence certain; but even here it is apparent that there is a monstrous irony in the comparison with the Old Testament Abraham, father of many, founder of Judaism. Flem, the worshipper of money, may be leader of a clan, but he is father to no one.

  Father Abraham is perhaps a little unpolished, a little awkward, in places. The opening description of Flem, already in town, in his bank, unjealous of his wife, already both Snopes and symbol of Snopesism, is a little stilted compared to the easy and relaxed narration of the following flashback to his origins in Frenchman’s Bend. The last sentence dangles—it is a temptation to omit it and end the work with that final surrealistic vision of twilight and evening in Frenchman’s Bend, into which Faulkner brings so many tags and images from the poetry he had been writing, and into which he brings the reader with a striking departure from the hard-edged realism and rich vernacular humor of the main body of the story. But its flaws are minor compared with its accomplishment. The young Faulkner—that is, the writer he was until he wrote The Sound and the Fury—did nothing more ambitious, or more successful.

  James B. Meriwether

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  This edition reproduces, with a minimum of editorial alteration, the text of the twenty-four page holograph manuscript in the Arents Collection of the New York Public Library. It is written on legal-sized sheets, numbered 1 through 25, with page 23 missing. The handwriting is not, in general, difficult to read, but there are a few passages where haste or the need to save space made Faulkner’s usually precise if tiny letters almost illegible. In deciphering these I have not hesitated to consult various later manuscript and typescript versions of the work; however, I have resisted the temptation to use them as authority to emend or revise this text, even though a closely-related later version of a passage may smooth out awkwardnesses in grammar or punctuation.

  Some changes were necessary, however, in preparing a reading text from a manuscript that was never intended by its author to go to the printer. In preparing typescript printer’s copy from a manuscript Faulkner always made certain changes which I have adopted here: making new paragraphs by indention instead of by extra spacing, expanding various abbreviations, adding necessary punctuation to new material inserted in the margins, converting arabic numerals to words. A few slips of the pen have been corrected, a few quotation marks have been added, and a few proper and place names have been made consistent—e.g., Frenchman’s bend and Frenchman’s Bend. However, I have left unaltered such consistent, if idiosyncratic, Faulkner practices as the omitted apostrophes from one-syllable contractions like dont and cant, the omitted periods after Mr and Mrs; and I have left unmodernized certain habitual spellings, like rythm and whipporwill, which lead to no confusion and have adequate historical justification. In trying to steer a middle course between a more literal transcription of the manuscript, which would have pleased scholars, and a more modernized, regularized, and corrected version, which might have made smoother going for the general reader, I have had to make compromises; but I hope the final result is a text appropriate both to this particular work and to the audience for which it was written.

  J. B. M.

  He is a living example of the astonishing byblows of man’s utopian dreams actually functioning; in this case the dream is Democracy. He will become legendary in time, but he has always been symbolic. Legendary as Roland and as symbolic of a form of behavior; as symbolic of an age and a region as his predecessor, a portly man with a white imperial and a shoestring tie and a two gallon hat, was; as symbolic and as typical of a frame of mind as Buddha is today. With this difference: Buddha contemplates an abstraction and derives a secret amusement of it; while he behind the new plate glass window of his recently remodelled bank, dwells with neither lust nor alarm on the plump yet still disturbing image of his silkclad wife passing the time of day with Colonel Winword in front of the postoffice.

  Thus he comes into the picture, thus he goes out of it, ruminant and unwinking and timeless. As Buddha, through a blending of successive avatars, was in the beginning Complete and will be Complete when thought has long since progressed logically into a frigid region without sight nor sound where amid sunless space the I become a sightless eye contemplates itself in timeless unsurprise, so with him. What boots it that for many years his corporeal illusion was not so smugly flourishing, that for many years he was too busy to sit down and, when he did, looked not out upon the world through plate glass? Buddha had his priests to invent a cult for him while he stirred not a finger; while he must be god cult priest and ritual simultaneously; Buddha drew followers by mouthsounds, he bought them with the very blood in his veins. This, behind its plate glass, its quiet unwinking eyes, its mouth like one of those patent tobacco pouches you open and close by ripping a metal ring along the seam, this is the man. It boots not that for thirty years the town itself saw him not four times a year, that for the next fifteen years the bank knew him only on the customer’s side of the savings’ window; this was, is and will be, the man. The Lord said once to Moses: “I am that I am” and Moses argued with the good God; but when he spoke to one of his chosen, that one replied immediately: “Here am I, Uncle Flem.” He chews tobacco constantly and steadily and slowly, and no one ever saw his eyelids closed. He blinks them of course, like everybody else, but no one ever saw him do it. This is the man.

  The story first finds him where the light of day found him. Twenty miles southeast of Jefferson, in the hill cradled cane and cypress jungles of Yocona river lies the settlement of Frenchman’s Bend. To the urban southerner anyone who speaks the language with a foreign flavor or whose appearance or occupation is strange, is a dutchman. His rural brother though, being either more catholic or more of a precisian, calls the outlander a frenchman. The original settler of Frenchman’s Bend could easily have been Louisiana French, however, but this is not known. He is
gone, with his family and his splendor. His broad acres are parcelled out in small shiftless farms which the jungle is taking again, and all that remains of him is the riverbed which he straightened out to keep his land from overflowing in the spring and the skeleton of a huge colonial house which neighbors have been pulling down piecemeal for fifty years and burning it a plank at a time for firewood, amid its grove of oaks.

  But the Frenchman himself is forgotten, and his pride is now but a legend upon the land he had wrested from the earth and tamed and made fruitful: a monument to himself against the time when sleep should come upon his eyelids and depart not from them again; a legend which no longer has anything to do with the man even. The man is gone, his dream and his pride are dust with the lost dust of his anonymous bones, and in its place but the stubborn legend of the gold he buried when Grant swept through the land on his way to Chickamauga.

  The inhabitants of Frenchman’s Bend are of Scottish and Irish and English blood. There are Turpins here, and Haleys and Whittingtons, and McCallums and Murrays and Leonards and Littlejohns; and other family names which only the good God himself could have invented—sound peasant names from the midlands and the Scottish and Welsh marches, which have passed from mouth to mouth after the generations had forgotten how to read and spell—Starnes and Snopes and Quick—ridiculous names until you remember that the soil had bred them long ago and the soil has nourished them down the untarnished ages until their owners have come to accept them at the true value of a name: a sound by which a man may be singled from a crowd. Let the city fools alter and corrupt and prune and graft their appellations to fit euphony or fashion if they will. They till the soil in the cleared bottom land and grow cotton on it, and till the soil along the edge of the hills and raise corn on it, and in the second growth pine clad hills they make whiskey out of the corn and sell what they do not drink. County officers do not annoy them save at election time, and they support their own churches and schools, and sow the land and reap it and kill each other occasionally and commit adultery and fear God and hate republicans and niggers.