Manuscripts Etc.
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The following items are drawn from the William Faulkner Foundation Collection at the University of Virginia's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (http://small.library.virginia.edu/). |
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Below left: Page 1 of the extant 24-page carbon typescript for "Pantaloon in Black" makes two things clear. First, how economical Faulkner was about using paper, even the onion skin paper he used for the carbon copies he made for his own records: the sheet is one that had been partially used before. And second: that the extant typescript is not the first draft of the story, since the earlier lines are from an earlier version of the story's opening at Manny's funeral; that episode apparently was longer in the previous draft. Below center: The rest of the typescript is fairly clean, but on page 5 we see Faulkner still revising the dialect in which the black characters speak. Below right: one of the few longer passages he cancelled is on page 17. "Pantaloon" is a more direct representation of a black man's thoughts than anything Faulkner had written in the past, so it's interesting to see how he had originally written and then decided to cancel an incomplete phrase in the style that critics would call "Faulknerian" and that readers would be unlikely to identify with Rider - "the back-loop of time's retrograde trepanned, junctureless"    On the story's last two pages (below) appears a passage that is not in the published story. As part of the story he's telling his wife, the deputy sheriff says that Birdsong, the white man Rider kills, "deserves about what he gets," since he shoots dice with blacks. There's no way to tell whether it was Faulkner or the editors at Harper's who decided to remove it. (The reason why page 23 looks different is that the Library pasted the frail onion skin paper onto a stiffer sheet, to preserve it.)   Citing this source:
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