For several weeks now, William Faulkner has been living in town and going to work daily in the office of Saxe Commins, his editor at Random House. Mr. Commins permitted us to stop by one day last week and watch the great man in travail, and we did, and he was. We found the two men working about four feet apart in a small, warm, smoke-filled room on the third floor. The room had green walls, a maroon carpet, and a single window. Commins was sitting at a desk with his back to the window, studying galley proofs. Faulkner was sitting in a straight-backed chair at right angles to the desk, facing a wall of bookshelves; his eyes were on a level with “The Standard Medical Guide” and “The Teaching of Speech.” He was hunched over a typewriter on a stand and was a study in gray, brown, and blue: neatly parted gray hair, brown-rimmed glasses, a shirt with blue stripes, a blue tie, gray suspenders, gray tweed trousers, and brown shoes. Having shaken hands with Commins and Faulkner, we retreated to a corner of the office and watched the sole owner and proprietor of Yoknapatowpha County bring forth prose. He typed very, very slowly, mostly with the middle finger of his right hand, but with an occasional assist from the index finger of his left.
A tall, serious-looking girl entered the office and, without a word, crossed to the bookshelves by Faulkner’s head. She pulled out a book, rifled the pages, put it back, and pulled out another. Faulkner went on typing without looking up. Commins said to the girl, “On your left, if you’re looking for Aristotle.” She thanked him, plucked a book from the shelves, and told Commins that she might be back later. “Any time,” he said, and the girl walked out. The telephone on Commins’ desk rang, and he answered it with a hearty, “Hello! Arthur! How’s the play going? Still a hit?” Faulkner went on typing. Commins talked for a few minutes, put down the telephone, and returned to his proofs. Faulkner coughed, and Commins glanced anxiously at him. “Got a cold, Bill?” he asked. Faulkner shook his head, his middle finger poised above the space bar. “Think you ought to take some medicine?” Commins asked. Down went the space bar. “Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure,” Faulkner said. He lifted the sheet of paper in the typewriter and read over what he had written, then got up and stretched. “Work hurts mah back,” he said. “Ah think Ah’m goin’ to invent somethin’ like an ironin’ board, so Ah can lie flat on mah back while Ah type.” He pressed both hands against his spine. “Fell off a hoss last spring,” he told us. “Back’s been hurtin’ ever since. Ah got a very fine filly and Ah was trainin’ her to trot. Ah was ridin’ her mama. Had the filly on mah left side, the lead in mah left hand, when the filly crossed me. Ah didn’t want to let go and Ah didn’t have time to change hands, so Ah had to take the fall.”
Commins fished in his wallet and brought out a snapshot, which he handed to us. “Bill jumping,” he said. “Jumpin’ mah daughter’s mare,” said Faulkner. “That mare’s twenty years old. Mah daughter was in California with me in 1944, when Ah was workin’ for Warner’s; she was ’bout ten then. Every day on mah way to the studio to work, Ah’d drop her off at the ridin’ stables. One day, she came to the studio all dusty and said, ‘Pappy, Ah bought me a hoss.’ Turned out it was a mare with distemper. Ah had to pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars for her and seventy dollars to a vet to cure the distemper and a hundred and fifty dollars for a trailer and then Ah had to pay a man three hundred and fifty dollars to pull the trailer back home to Oxford and before we got that mare into the barn she cost me twelve hundred and eighty-five dollars. Mah daughter loves that mare.” He lit a cigarette and sat down at the typewriter. “Ah have a feelin’ of doom hangin’ over me today,” he said. He typed a line, then another. The words came as if he were typing each letter of them for the first time. When he had finished a page, he added it to a pile of other pages, then went over the lot with a red pencil, marking certain paragraphs with “X”s. “Damn it!” he said softly. “Ah wish mah doom would lift or come on. Ah got work to do.” Commins raised his eyebrows. “Somethin’ is happenin’,” Faulkner said. “Ah can feel it.” Commins asked him if he got such feelings often. “Not very often, but when Ah feel it, somethin’ happens,” Faulkner said. “You don’t look worried,” Commins said. “Suppose it’s something awful?” “Ah can bear anythin’,” Faulkner said, and went back to typing. After another half hour, he got up and said he had a date for lunch. He put on a trench coat and green felt hat, and we took advantage of the opportunity to ask him why he chose to work at Random House instead of in more private quarters. “The work is gettin’ itself done here,” he said, heading for the stairs. “Ah don’t want to disturb it.” The work, he went on, is a novel that he has been writing on and off for the past ten years. He has five hundred thousand words done and he figures that if he doesn’t get it finished now, he never will. At the street door, he waved goodbye to us and set off alone up Madison Avenue—a small man in a green hat, waiting for his doom to lift. ♦
