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FAULKNER, William (1897-1962). A group of 62 letters comprising HIS COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE WITH ELSE JONSSON, containing: 10 Autograph Letters signed ("Bill"), 5 Autograph Letters, 15 Typed Letters signed (one "William Faulkner, most "Bill") and 32 Typed Letters (several with 1- to 4-line autograph postscripts); all to Else Jonsson in Stockholm, Sweden; various places (Paris, Rome, New York; Oxford, Mississippi; Beverly Hills, Cal.; Charlottesville, Va.), various dates from 15 December 1950 to 14 December 1960.
Together 63 pages, small folio and smaller, the typed letters single-spaced, with original envelopes addressed in Faulkner's hand, with original stamps and postmarks. All in extremely fine condition.
FAULKNER'S IMPASSIONED, POIGNANT AND RICHLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LOVE-LETTERS TO ELSE JONSSON, LETTERS "NEARER LITERARY STANDARDS THAN ANYTHING HE WROTE TO ANYBODY EXCEPT HIS OWN MOTHER AND MALCOLM COWLEY"
UNPUBLISHED OTHER THAN IN EXCERPTS, THEY CONSTITUTE "THE NEAREST APPROACH TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY WE HAVE IN FAULKNER'S HAND" (--M. Gresset)
A rich and virtually unexplored trove of Faulkner letters. At the Nobel prize award ceremonies in Stockholm, Faulkner had met Else Jonsson, the young widow of Thorsten Jonsson, who had translated Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner into Swedish. Else, fluent in English, was assigned to serve as a laison with Faulkner and soon, the bereaved widow and the lonely author became lovers. They had several later meetings in Paris, and began a remarkable correspondence that continued until the author's death. Faulkner's letters to Else--some of which are quite lengthy--are surprisingly unaffected and spontaneous, passionate and playful, at times frankly sexual, suffused with wistful melancholy at their forced separation and occasionally, tinged with jealousy and regret. (Unfortunately, we have only one side of their correspondence, since Faulkner destroyed Else's letters upon receipt, to keep their relationship secret.) The letters are especially significant, points out scholar Michel Gresset, because "they are written to an equal in maturity," someone with whom "Faulkner could drop whatever mask he felt it necessary to put on with his other, younger mistresses: he could be confidential, and in a way that involved his very writing...." (Michel Gresset, "A Public Man's Private Voice: Faulkner's Letters to Else Jonsson," in Faulkner: After the Nobel Prize, ed. Gresset, 1987, pp. 61-73.
Fully 38 of the letters to Else Jonsson are entirely unpublished. Of the other 24, only very brief extracts from these long personal letters were furnished by Jonsson to Joseph Blotner and published in his edition of Faulkner's Selected Letters (New York, 1977). In most cases, it is now clear, Else supplied a carefully selected excerpt, usually in reference to his writing. The letters, read in their entirety are considerably more interesting the the excerpts suggest: richly textured with references not just to his writing -- and his increasing desire to be finished with writing forever (to "break the pencil," as he puts it). They offer colorful descriptions of his life, farming and horse-raising in Oxford, his travels, his health problems, the frustrations of new-found celebrity, the burden of his dysfunctional marriage, his strong sense of responsibility for his daughter, Jill, and, in the later letters, his fears for the growing conflict in the south over the Civil Rights movement (Faulkner's 12 June 1955 letter contains one of Faulkner's strongest personal statements on America's looming racial conflicts.) Gresset, who carefully studied Blotner's excerpts, concludes that the 10 letters written by Faulkner to Else from May through November 1951 provide "a perfect 'autobiographical' picture of Faulkner's activity, both physical and intellectual, during these six months..."; while in Faulkner's letter of 13 December 1956, "we read, or hear, as perfect a vignette of the aging Faulkner as we are likely to find anywhere else under his pen...." Gresset contends that, because of their unusual economy and terseness, the letters to Else Jonsson may be compared with two other important series, Faulkner's letters to Cowley and those to his mother, in 1925. "There is a quality of thought--a quality in reflection--which makes these letters as sharp an instrument of self-analysis as he ever forged for himself-besides his fiction"; they constitute, in effect "the nearest approach to autobiography or the self-portrait that we have in Faulkner's hand...."
Letter 1, Paris [15 Dec. 1950]: "Else, it seems impossible to leave, going back across the ocean without seeing you again. I don't know how I can do it. But I don't know anything else I can do. I love you, I think about you all the time. I tell you, something happened to me that evening at Mme. Bonnien's. When I walked in and saw you standing there. I love you, Else. All the pride and glory of being a Nobel prize bloke is nothing against one afternoon - your eyes, the color of your hair, your mouth, your sweet tongue, your soft sweet white girl-woman flesh that I touched. I love you, Else. I wish the love could be a pride and a happiness to you...."Letter 6 [6 Jan. 1951, recalling the Nobel awards ceremony and their meeting]: "Of course I am spoiled; who wouldn't be? I reached Stockholm that noon hating and dreading the whole thing I faced, then 8 hours later I walked into that room and you were looking at me, and as soon as I looked into your eyes, after the first impact on my heart or whatever, I wasn't even surprised because I had known you forever. I didn't even recognize, associate your name, until about the middle of dinner. I wasn't thinking about your name. It didn't matter. I knew that we were fated, doomed if you like...."
Letter 9 [21 January 1951]: "Howard Hawks, a moving picture director in Hollywood, telephoned me yesterday to help him with a picture script. Which means I may go to Hollywood this or next week, for about 2 months. So don't send letters to me here at Oxford....Yes yes yes we must be together together together one one one no day no night no time nothing but this together together together. Bill." Letter 13 [Oxford, 15 March 1951, planning a meeting in Paris]: "...I will engage a room for you...I am so notorious now that I probably could not hide my presence, and your name will suffer in connection with mine...." Letter 18 [23 May 1951]: "...Jill is busy graduating from high school here, house now in a whirl of garden parties, eating fetes, etc. I talked to her by telephone from NY, she said 'Will you talk to my graduating class?' I said of course, assumed informal talk, got home and found I was committed to make the Commencement address (public)...I could accept your replacing me that quick with a better lover, which would not be hard perhaps, no matter how hard I tried. But damned if I would forgive you for replacing me with whom I consider a second rate writer to Faulkner...Ms. going pretty well. I[t] will be a good book. I have one more to do, the big one (sic Verdun) and then I have the feeling that I shall be through, can break the pencil and cast it all away, that I have spent 30 years anguishing and sweating over, never to trouble me again." Letter 19 [4 June 1951]: "...The mss. is about finished. I'll be glad; I am tired of ink and paper; except for our 12 days, I have been at it steadily since New Year's...Here, I have no private papers unless I lock them up or hide them....So I destroy them...An impossible situation, I grant. But I made the decision once years ago that I owed a responsibility to a female child [Jill], which must be discharged... --that is, to hold a household together, give her security. I would have cleared out long ago, otherwise...." Letter 21 [19 June 1951]: "...I finished the mss. yesterday. I am really tired of writing, the agony and sweat of it. I'll probably never quit though, until I die. But now I feel like nothing would be as peaceful as to break the pencil, throw it away, admit I don't know why, the answers either...." Letter 22 [22 June 1951]: "...This is a fact. I am 53 years old, enough years older than you to be your father. In a certain number more of them, there won't be anything of me except the heart which wants to please you and the mind which can invent and think of, and the tongue to say to you, the things to please you which the heart wants. There won't be anything else: my flesh will be old, distasteful to you...That's what I was trying to tell you in Verdun, and I was so clumsy at it: that when that moment comes, you are not to grieve. Let me do the grieving. I know you will never forget what we had, but don't grieve over it. It was not our fault. You will still be young, a girl, pretty: I will not hold you with remembering, even if I could. I will like to know that you are still making butterflies. You don't need to tell me that the only rival I have is Time...."
Letter 23 [2 July 1951]: "I am rewriting some of the play [Requiem for a Nun], which will be put in rehearsal this summer..." Letter 36 [2 March 1952]: "...I stay busy, working on my big book [The Fable], also farming, getting ready for the year, sowing grazing land for pasture, vaccinating calves..." Letter 38 [19 April 1952]: "...I will not be too involved in Paris. I decline to be a delegate to anything; the words 'delegate' and 'freedom' in the same sentence are, to me, not only incongruous but terrifying too. I will not accept any commitment. I will pay my own way...That is, I will be a free agent in Paris...." Letter 43 [9 August 1952]: "...probably the great trouble is unhappiness here, have lost heart for everything, farming and all, have not worked in a years now, stupid existence seeing what remains of life going to support parasites who do not even have the grace to be sycophants. Am tired, I suppose...." Letter 47 [New York, 25 February 1953]: "...I reached the point where I could no longer work in Oxford, too unhappy...Am seeing another doctor this week. Because something is wrong with me; as you saw last spring, my nature has changed...." Letter 51 New York [19 Oct. 1953]: "...I am just finishing a book, which, if my judgment has not failed completely with age, may be the best of my life and maybe of my time...." Letter 56 [19 Feb. 1955]: "...I had thought that perhaps with A FABLE, I would find myself empty of anything more to say, do. But I was wrong, another collected, partly rewritten and partly new book this fall, and I have another one in mind I shall get at in time...." Letter 57, Oxford, 12 June [1955]: "...I will have a book out in the fall; I will send it. It is a nice book, hunting stories...[The Big Woods]...We have much tragic trouble in Mississippi now about Negroes. The Supreme Court has said there shall be no segregation, difference in schools, voting, etc. between the two races, and there are many people in Mississippi who will go to any length, even violence, to prevent that, I am afraid. I am doing what I can. I can see the possible time when I shall have to leave my native state, something as the jew had to flee from Germany during Hitler. I hope that won't happen, of course. But at times I think that nothing but a disaster, a military defeat even perhaps, will wake America up and enable us to save ourselves, or what is left. This is a depressing letter, I know. But human beings are terrible. One must believe well in man to endure him, wait out his folly and savagery and inhumanity...." Letter 58, 20 Oct.[1955]: "...I am well, still working, there is a new book which I will send you. I will go back to Mississippi soon and get to work again; I know I won't live long enough to write all I need to write about my imaginary county and country, so I must not waste what time I have left...." Letter 59, Oxford, 13 Dec. [1958]: "...what is probably the last flare, burning, of my talent has been going on these last three or four years...In that time I have done A FABLE and the second Snopes volume, called THE TOWN, to be published this coming May, when I will send you your copy, and am now working on the third volume, which will finish it, and maybe then my talent will have burnt our and I can break the pencil and throw away the paper and rest...."
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Together 63 pages, small folio and smaller, the typed letters single-spaced, with original envelopes addressed in Faulkner's hand, with original stamps and postmarks. All in extremely fine condition.
FAULKNER'S IMPASSIONED, POIGNANT AND RICHLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LOVE-LETTERS TO ELSE JONSSON, LETTERS "NEARER LITERARY STANDARDS THAN ANYTHING HE WROTE TO ANYBODY EXCEPT HIS OWN MOTHER AND MALCOLM COWLEY"
UNPUBLISHED OTHER THAN IN EXCERPTS, THEY CONSTITUTE "THE NEAREST APPROACH TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY WE HAVE IN FAULKNER'S HAND" (--M. Gresset)
A rich and virtually unexplored trove of Faulkner letters. At the Nobel prize award ceremonies in Stockholm, Faulkner had met Else Jonsson, the young widow of Thorsten Jonsson, who had translated Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner into Swedish. Else, fluent in English, was assigned to serve as a laison with Faulkner and soon, the bereaved widow and the lonely author became lovers. They had several later meetings in Paris, and began a remarkable correspondence that continued until the author's death. Faulkner's letters to Else--some of which are quite lengthy--are surprisingly unaffected and spontaneous, passionate and playful, at times frankly sexual, suffused with wistful melancholy at their forced separation and occasionally, tinged with jealousy and regret. (Unfortunately, we have only one side of their correspondence, since Faulkner destroyed Else's letters upon receipt, to keep their relationship secret.) The letters are especially significant, points out scholar Michel Gresset, because "they are written to an equal in maturity," someone with whom "Faulkner could drop whatever mask he felt it necessary to put on with his other, younger mistresses: he could be confidential, and in a way that involved his very writing...." (Michel Gresset, "A Public Man's Private Voice: Faulkner's Letters to Else Jonsson," in Faulkner: After the Nobel Prize, ed. Gresset, 1987, pp. 61-73.
Fully 38 of the letters to Else Jonsson are entirely unpublished. Of the other 24, only very brief extracts from these long personal letters were furnished by Jonsson to Joseph Blotner and published in his edition of Faulkner's Selected Letters (New York, 1977). In most cases, it is now clear, Else supplied a carefully selected excerpt, usually in reference to his writing. The letters, read in their entirety are considerably more interesting the the excerpts suggest: richly textured with references not just to his writing -- and his increasing desire to be finished with writing forever (to "break the pencil," as he puts it). They offer colorful descriptions of his life, farming and horse-raising in Oxford, his travels, his health problems, the frustrations of new-found celebrity, the burden of his dysfunctional marriage, his strong sense of responsibility for his daughter, Jill, and, in the later letters, his fears for the growing conflict in the south over the Civil Rights movement (Faulkner's 12 June 1955 letter contains one of Faulkner's strongest personal statements on America's looming racial conflicts.) Gresset, who carefully studied Blotner's excerpts, concludes that the 10 letters written by Faulkner to Else from May through November 1951 provide "a perfect 'autobiographical' picture of Faulkner's activity, both physical and intellectual, during these six months..."; while in Faulkner's letter of 13 December 1956, "we read, or hear, as perfect a vignette of the aging Faulkner as we are likely to find anywhere else under his pen...." Gresset contends that, because of their unusual economy and terseness, the letters to Else Jonsson may be compared with two other important series, Faulkner's letters to Cowley and those to his mother, in 1925. "There is a quality of thought--a quality in reflection--which makes these letters as sharp an instrument of self-analysis as he ever forged for himself-besides his fiction"; they constitute, in effect "the nearest approach to autobiography or the self-portrait that we have in Faulkner's hand...."
Letter 1, Paris [15 Dec. 1950]: "Else, it seems impossible to leave, going back across the ocean without seeing you again. I don't know how I can do it. But I don't know anything else I can do. I love you, I think about you all the time. I tell you, something happened to me that evening at Mme. Bonnien's. When I walked in and saw you standing there. I love you, Else. All the pride and glory of being a Nobel prize bloke is nothing against one afternoon - your eyes, the color of your hair, your mouth, your sweet tongue, your soft sweet white girl-woman flesh that I touched. I love you, Else. I wish the love could be a pride and a happiness to you...."Letter 6 [6 Jan. 1951, recalling the Nobel awards ceremony and their meeting]: "Of course I am spoiled; who wouldn't be? I reached Stockholm that noon hating and dreading the whole thing I faced, then 8 hours later I walked into that room and you were looking at me, and as soon as I looked into your eyes, after the first impact on my heart or whatever, I wasn't even surprised because I had known you forever. I didn't even recognize, associate your name, until about the middle of dinner. I wasn't thinking about your name. It didn't matter. I knew that we were fated, doomed if you like...."
Letter 9 [21 January 1951]: "Howard Hawks, a moving picture director in Hollywood, telephoned me yesterday to help him with a picture script. Which means I may go to Hollywood this or next week, for about 2 months. So don't send letters to me here at Oxford....Yes yes yes we must be together together together one one one no day no night no time nothing but this together together together. Bill." Letter 13 [Oxford, 15 March 1951, planning a meeting in Paris]: "...I will engage a room for you...I am so notorious now that I probably could not hide my presence, and your name will suffer in connection with mine...." Letter 18 [23 May 1951]: "...Jill is busy graduating from high school here, house now in a whirl of garden parties, eating fetes, etc. I talked to her by telephone from NY, she said 'Will you talk to my graduating class?' I said of course, assumed informal talk, got home and found I was committed to make the Commencement address (public)...I could accept your replacing me that quick with a better lover, which would not be hard perhaps, no matter how hard I tried. But damned if I would forgive you for replacing me with whom I consider a second rate writer to Faulkner...Ms. going pretty well. I[t] will be a good book. I have one more to do, the big one (sic Verdun) and then I have the feeling that I shall be through, can break the pencil and cast it all away, that I have spent 30 years anguishing and sweating over, never to trouble me again." Letter 19 [4 June 1951]: "...The mss. is about finished. I'll be glad; I am tired of ink and paper; except for our 12 days, I have been at it steadily since New Year's...Here, I have no private papers unless I lock them up or hide them....So I destroy them...An impossible situation, I grant. But I made the decision once years ago that I owed a responsibility to a female child [Jill], which must be discharged... --that is, to hold a household together, give her security. I would have cleared out long ago, otherwise...." Letter 21 [19 June 1951]: "...I finished the mss. yesterday. I am really tired of writing, the agony and sweat of it. I'll probably never quit though, until I die. But now I feel like nothing would be as peaceful as to break the pencil, throw it away, admit I don't know why, the answers either...." Letter 22 [22 June 1951]: "...This is a fact. I am 53 years old, enough years older than you to be your father. In a certain number more of them, there won't be anything of me except the heart which wants to please you and the mind which can invent and think of, and the tongue to say to you, the things to please you which the heart wants. There won't be anything else: my flesh will be old, distasteful to you...That's what I was trying to tell you in Verdun, and I was so clumsy at it: that when that moment comes, you are not to grieve. Let me do the grieving. I know you will never forget what we had, but don't grieve over it. It was not our fault. You will still be young, a girl, pretty: I will not hold you with remembering, even if I could. I will like to know that you are still making butterflies. You don't need to tell me that the only rival I have is Time...."
Letter 23 [2 July 1951]: "I am rewriting some of the play [Requiem for a Nun], which will be put in rehearsal this summer..." Letter 36 [2 March 1952]: "...I stay busy, working on my big book [The Fable], also farming, getting ready for the year, sowing grazing land for pasture, vaccinating calves..." Letter 38 [19 April 1952]: "...I will not be too involved in Paris. I decline to be a delegate to anything; the words 'delegate' and 'freedom' in the same sentence are, to me, not only incongruous but terrifying too. I will not accept any commitment. I will pay my own way...That is, I will be a free agent in Paris...." Letter 43 [9 August 1952]: "...probably the great trouble is unhappiness here, have lost heart for everything, farming and all, have not worked in a years now, stupid existence seeing what remains of life going to support parasites who do not even have the grace to be sycophants. Am tired, I suppose...." Letter 47 [New York, 25 February 1953]: "...I reached the point where I could no longer work in Oxford, too unhappy...Am seeing another doctor this week. Because something is wrong with me; as you saw last spring, my nature has changed...." Letter 51 New York [19 Oct. 1953]: "...I am just finishing a book, which, if my judgment has not failed completely with age, may be the best of my life and maybe of my time...." Letter 56 [19 Feb. 1955]: "...I had thought that perhaps with A FABLE, I would find myself empty of anything more to say, do. But I was wrong, another collected, partly rewritten and partly new book this fall, and I have another one in mind I shall get at in time...." Letter 57, Oxford, 12 June [1955]: "...I will have a book out in the fall; I will send it. It is a nice book, hunting stories...[The Big Woods]...We have much tragic trouble in Mississippi now about Negroes. The Supreme Court has said there shall be no segregation, difference in schools, voting, etc. between the two races, and there are many people in Mississippi who will go to any length, even violence, to prevent that, I am afraid. I am doing what I can. I can see the possible time when I shall have to leave my native state, something as the jew had to flee from Germany during Hitler. I hope that won't happen, of course. But at times I think that nothing but a disaster, a military defeat even perhaps, will wake America up and enable us to save ourselves, or what is left. This is a depressing letter, I know. But human beings are terrible. One must believe well in man to endure him, wait out his folly and savagery and inhumanity...." Letter 58, 20 Oct.[1955]: "...I am well, still working, there is a new book which I will send you. I will go back to Mississippi soon and get to work again; I know I won't live long enough to write all I need to write about my imaginary county and country, so I must not waste what time I have left...." Letter 59, Oxford, 13 Dec. [1958]: "...what is probably the last flare, burning, of my talent has been going on these last three or four years...In that time I have done A FABLE and the second Snopes volume, called THE TOWN, to be published this coming May, when I will send you your copy, and am now working on the third volume, which will finish it, and maybe then my talent will have burnt our and I can break the pencil and throw away the paper and rest...."
(62)