William Faulkner Manuscripts 2: Father Abraham Holograph Manuscript and Typescripts and The Wishing Tree Ribbon and Carbon Typescripts

by William Faulkner

A sale of fiery wild ponies, which manage to escape their corral after they are sold, introduce Flem Snopes, the man behind the sale, to the town of Frenchman's Bend.

Genres: Fiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later that decade, he wrote Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms. He also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. The former film, adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.
Faulkner's reputation grew following publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, and he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel." He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962, following a fall from his horse the month before. Ralph Ellison called him "the greatest artist the South has produced".

Reviews

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the introduction says, Father Abraham is not quite a fragment, not quite a finished work. This constitutes an early work-in-progress by a young Faulkner which slowly transformed into the great Snopes trilogy. The work in Father Abraham eventually found itself into The Hamlet, a book I aim to ready later this year.

Faulkner's writing has never been so singular and so authentically pure and resonant. There is just something special about each turn of phrase, each metaphor which would never come readily to the standard human mind but somehow Faulkner's vision is so accurate that it just takes us back to the deep South of the US, a place which no longer exists except in spirit and in stories.

The story revolves around a pony auction and is loosely based on an event which Faulkner witnessed.
This is a short read but it is highly recommended for Faulkner fans due to the beautiful prose throughout.
A big thank you once again to Temple University Japan Tokyo Library for lending me a copy.

[Ronald Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This initial take on the Snopes saga, unfinished though it is, is well-worth reading. While nowhere near his peak, there are inklings of the greatness to come in this early work. One can easily get lost in the flow of Faulkner's words.

[Franc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Father Abraham, is basically an unpublished first attempt at the famous "Spotted Horses" story and Snopes saga, sort of an ​ur-​Hamlet. It's described in the Introduction as "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..."

Why read Father Abraham? First it's a ripping good yarn and a wonderful compact version of all that we love about Faulkner. The action of the story takes place over a single April day of the horse auction, and is mostly told in dialogue, in the various idioms the participants from laconic hardscrabble to big talkin’ Texan. In this, of course Faulker was the master without peer, and the result is a wonderful story that you imagine will be told in county's stores, barber shops, and bars down through the years. But Faulkner was also one of the best in describing the natural world, and here he lards the story, punctuating the action with beautiful descriptions of the progressing arc of the day:

He yawned at the red and hill-nicked rim of the sun. About him the world waked fresh beneath the spring dawn, waked happily chill, as though not fully reassured . . .

the sun heaved up like a captive balloon from beyond the ultimate horizon . . .

Above the bowl of the sky hushed itself into mysterious ineffable azures . . .

Evening was completely accomplished. The sparrows are gone, and the final cloud of swallow had swirled into a chimney somewhere and the ultimate celestial edges of the world rolled on into vague and intricate subtleties of softest pearl...

And yet it was not quite night. The west was green tall and without depth, like a pane of glass; through it a substance that was not light seeped in sourceless diffusion, like the sound of an organ.

Secondly, obvious reason is that as a fan of one of his greatest and (perhaps more importantly) readable novels, it is a chance at a glimpse at Faulkner at the very beginning as his career as a novelist and "Sole Proprietor" of Yoknapatawpha (love that my spellchecker has that) County. Snopes family and the so-called "rise of the redneck" theme that dominated much of is writing in the 40s and 50s was in his thinking as early as 1926, while he was also writing his first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust:

''The Snopes sprang untarnished from a long line of shiftless tenant farmers - a race that is of the land and yet rootless, like mistletoe; owing nothing to the soil, giving nothing to it and getting nothing of it in return; using the land as a harlot instead of an imperious yet abundant mistress, passing on to another farm. Cunning and dull and clannish, they move and halt and move and multiply and marry and multiply like rabbits: magnify them and you have political hangers-on and professional officeholders and Prohibition officers; reduce the perspective and you have mold on cheese.''

The title is ironic, but the explanation comes also from Flags in the Dust:

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.

It is also interesting to compare this with the final version of the "Spotted Horses" story that makes its way into The Hamlet. While the story is identical and the dialogue are almost verbatim, there is a big difference in tone. By the time of the The Hamlet, Faulkner has saturated the story with what Cleanth Brooks calls "distancing" elements, language with which he elevates the Snopes story to a mythic level that is absent here beyond the first page and a half. The result is less mythic. more Twain. Also Faulkner end the store before (or hasn't conceived) the successive trial scene that casts Flem in a much darker light than just the Trickster.

Finally, the book itself is beautiful and a joy to read enhanced by lovely complementing woodcuts by John DePol. For this reason I recommend tracking down one of the hardback copies.

[In an intersting footnote, the 26 page manuscript survived for 30 years lost in the archives of the New York Public Library's Arents Collection, which was endowed by cigarette-manufacturing magnate to collect any containing even the most obscure or limited references to tobacco. The manuscript was bought by the library in 1953 because early in the story, there is a sentence that reads: ''He chews tobacco constantly and steadily and slowly, and no one ever saw his eyelids closed.'' That mention alone led to the purchase of the Faulkner short story by the library for $300 in 1953.]

[terrycojones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too short (20 pages?) to be worth 4 stars, it's just a snippet. An early view of Ab Snopes and the roots of the Snopes clan.