Pylon

  William Faulkner

  PYLON

  William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the “u” to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather “The Old Colonel,” a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called The White Rose of Memphis, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the “ink stain” from him.

  Never fond of school, Faulkner left at the end of football season his senior year of high school, and began working at his grandfather’s bank. In 1918, after his plans to marry his sweetheart Estelle Oldham were squashed by their families, he tried to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army but was rejected because he did not meet the height and weight requirements. He went to Canada, where he pretended to be an Englishman and joined the RAF training program there. Although he did not complete his training until after the war ended and never saw combat, he returned to his hometown in uniform, boasting of war wounds. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi, where he began to publish his poetry.

  After spending a short time living in New York, he again returned to Oxford, where he worked at the university post office. His first book, a collection of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published at Faulkner’s own expense in 1924. The writer Sherwood Anderson, whom he met in New Orleans in 1925, encouraged him to try writing fiction, and his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1926. It was followed by Mosquitoes. His next novel, which he titled Flags in the Dust, was rejected by his publisher and twelve others to whom he submitted it. It was eventually published in drastically edited form as Sartoris (the original version was not issued until after his death). Meanwhile, he was writing The Sound and the Fury, which, after being rejected by one publisher, came out in 1929 and received many ecstatic reviews, although it sold poorly. Yet again, a new novel, Sanctuary, was initially rejected by his publisher, this time as “too shocking.” While working on the night shift at a power plant, Faulkner wrote what he was determined would be his masterpiece, As I Lay Dying. He finished it in about seven weeks, and it was published in 1930, again to generally good reviews and mediocre sales.

  In 1929 Faulkner had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, after her divorce from her first husband. They had a premature daughter, Alabama, who died ten days after birth in 1931; a second daughter, Jill, was born in 1933.

  With the eventual publication of his most sensational and violent (as well as, up till then, most successful) novel, Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner was invited to write scripts for MGM and Warner Brothers, where he was responsible for much of the dialogue in the film versions of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and many other films. He continued to write novels and published many stories in the popular magazines. Light in August (1932) was his first attempt to address the racial issues of the South, an effort continued in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). By 1946, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print in the United States (although they remained well-regarded in Europe), and he was seen as a minor, regional writer. But then the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, who had earlier championed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others of their generation, put together the Portable Faulkner, and once again Faulkner’s genius was recognized, this time for good. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as many other awards and accolades, including the National Book Award and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s Legion of Honor.

  In addition to several collections of short fiction, his other novels include Pylon (1935), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962).

  William Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is buried.

  William Faulkner's Works

  The Marble Faun (1924)

  Soldier’s Pay (1926)

  Mosquitoes (1927)

  Sartoris (1929) [Flags in the Dust (1973)]

  The Sound and the Fury (1929)

  As I Lay Dying (1930)

  Sanctuary (1931)

  These 13 (1931)

  Light in August (1932)

  A Green Bough (1933)

  Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934)

  Pylon (1935)

  Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

  The Unvanquished (1938)

  The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939)

  The Hamlet (1940)

  Go Down, Moses (1942)

  Intruder in the Dust (1948)

  Knight’s Gambit (1949)

  Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950)

  Notes on a Horsethief (1951)

  Requiem for a Nun (1954)

  A Fable (1954)

  Big Woods (1955)

  The Town (1957)

  The Mansion (1959)

  The Reivers (1962)

  Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1979, Posthumous)

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 2011

  Copyright 1935 by William Faulkner

  Copyright renewed 1962 by William Faulkner

  Notes copyright © 1985 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Harrison Smith & Robert Hass, Inc., in 1935. Subsequently published in paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1987. This revised text and the notes are reprinted from Novels 1930–1935 by William Faulkner, published by The Library of America in 1985, by permission.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Faulkner, William.

  Pylon / William Faulkner.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3511.A86P9 1987 813′.52 86-40166

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79178-8

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  William Faulkner’s Works

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Publisher’s Note

  Dedication of an Airport

  An Evening in New Valois

  Night in the Vieux Carré

  Tomorrow

  And Tomorrow

  Lovesong of J. A. Prufrock

  The Scavengers

  Editor’s Note

  Also by William Faulkner

  Academic Resources for Educators

  Vintage International

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The copy-text for this edition is Faulkner’s typescript setting copy, which—under the direction of Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner—has been compared with the incomplete holograph manuscript and the corrected galleys. An editors’ note on the corrections by Noel Polk follows the text; the line and page notes have been prepared by Joseph Blotner.

  Dedication of an Airport

  For a full minute Jiggs stood before the window in a l
ight spatter of last night’s confetti lying against the windowbase like spent dirty foam, lightpoised on the balls of his grease-stained tennis shoes, looking at the boots. Slantshimmered by the intervening plate they sat upon their wooden pedestal in unblemished and inviolate implication of horse and spur, of the posed countrylife photographs in the magazine advertisements, beside the easelwise cardboard placard with which the town had bloomed overnight as it had with the purple-and-gold tissue bunting and the trodden confetti and broken serpentine—the same lettering, the same photographs of the trim vicious fragile aeroplanes and the pilots leaning upon them in gargantuan irrelation as if the aeroplanes were a species of esoteric and fatal animals not trained or tamed but just for the instant inert, above the neat brief legend of name and accomplishment or perhaps just hope.

  He entered the store, his rubber soles falling in quick hissing thuds on pavement and iron sill and then upon the tile floor of that museum of glass cases lighted suave and sourceless by an unearthly daycolored substance in which the hats and ties and shirts, the beltbuckles and cufflinks and handkerchiefs, the pipes shaped like golfclubs and the drinking tools shaped like boots and barnyard fowls and the minute impedimenta for wear on ties and vestchains shaped like bits and spurs, resembled biologic specimens put into the inviolate preservative before they had ever been breathed into. “Boots?” the clerk said. “The pair in the window?”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “How much?” But the clerk did not even move. He leaned back on the counter, looking down at the hard tough shortchinned face, blueshaven, with a long threadlike and recently-stanched razorcut on it and in which the hot brown eyes seemed to snap and glare like a boy’s approaching for the first time the aerial wheels and stars and serpents of a nighttime carnival; at the filthy raked swaggering peaked cap, the short thick musclebound body like the photographs of the one who two years before was lightmiddle-weight champion of the army or Marine Corps or navy; the cheap breeches overcut to begin with and now skintight like both they and their wearer had been recently and hopelessly rained on and enclosing a pair of short stocky thick fast legs like a polo pony’s, which descended into the tops of a pair of boots footless now and secured by two rivetted straps beneath the insteps of the tennis shoes.

  “They are twenty-two and a half,” the clerk said.

  “All right. I’ll take them. How late do you keep open at night?”

  “Until six.”

  “Hell. I’ll be out at the airport then. I wont get back to town until seven. How about getting them then?” Another clerk came up: the manager, the floorwalker.

  “You mean you dont want them now?” the first said.

  “No,” Jiggs said. “How about getting them at seven?”

  “What is it?” the second clerk said.

  “Says he wants a pair of boots. Says he cant get back from the airport before seven oclock.”

  The second looked at Jiggs. “You a flyer?”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Listen. Leave a guy here. I’ll be back by seven. I’ll need them tonight.”

  The second also looked down at Jiggs’ feet. “Why not take them now?”

  Jiggs didn’t answer at all. He just said, “So I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “Unless you can get back before six,” the second said.

  “O.K.,” Jiggs said. “All right, mister. How much do you want down?” Now they both looked at him: at the face, the hot eyes: the appearance entire articulate and complete, badge regalia and passport, of an oblivious and incorrigible insolvency. “To keep them for me. That pair in the window.”

  The second looked at the first. “Do you know his size?”

  “That’s all right about that,” Jiggs said. “How much?”

  The second looked at Jiggs. “You pay ten dollars and we will hold them for you until tomorrow.”

  “Ten dollars? Jesus, mister. You mean ten percent. I could pay ten percent. down and buy an airplane.”

  “You want to pay ten percent. down?”

  “Yair. Ten percent. Call for them this afternoon if I can get back from the airport in time.”

  “That will be two and a quarter,” the second said. When Jiggs put his hand into his pocket they could follow it, fingernail and knuckle, the entire length of the pocket like watching the ostrich in the movie cartoon swallow the alarm clock. It emerged a fist and opened upon a wadded dollar bill and coins of all sizes. He put the bill into the first clerk’s hand and began to count the coins onto the bill.

  “There’s fifty,” he said. “Seventy-five. And fifteen’s ninety, and twenty-five is.……” His voice stopped; he became motionless, with the twenty-five cent piece in his left hand and a half dollar and four nickels on his right palm. The clerks watched him put the quarter back into his right hand and take up the four nickels. “Let’s see,” he said. “We had ninety, and twenty will be——”

  “Two dollars and ten cents,” the second said. “Take back two nickels and give him the quarter.”

  “Two and a dime,” Jiggs said. “How about taking that down?”

  “You were the one who suggested ten percent.”

  “I cant help that. How about two and a dime?”

  “Take it,” the second said. The first took the money and went away. Again the second watched Jiggs’ hand move downward along his leg, and then he could even see the two coins at the end of the pocket, through the soiled cloth.

  “Where do you get this bus to the airport?” Jiggs said. The other told him. Now the first returned, with the cryptic scribbled duplicate of the sale; and now they both looked into the hot interrogation of the eyes.

  “They will be ready for you when you call,” the second said.

  “Yair; sure,” Jiggs said. “But get them out of the window.”

  “You want to examine them?”

  “No. I just want to see them come out of that window.” So again outside the window, his rubber soles resting upon that light confettispatter more forlorn than spattered paint since it had neither inherent weight nor cohesiveness to hold it anywhere, which even during the time that Jiggs was in the store had decreased, thinned, vanishing particle by particle into nothing like foam does, he stood until the hand came into the window and drew the boots out. Then he went on, walking fast with his short bouncing curiously stiffkneed gait. When he turned into Grandlieu Street he could see a clock, though he was already hurrying or rather walking at his fast stiff hard gait like a mechanical toy that has but one speed and though the clock’s face was still in the shadow of the opposite streetside and what sunlight there was was still high, diffused, suspended in soft refraction by the heavy damp bayou-and-swamp-suspired air. There was confetti here too, and broken serpentine, in neat narrow swept windrows against wallangles and lightly vulcanised along the gutter-rims by the flushing fireplugs of the past dawn, while, up-caught and pinned by the cryptic significant shields to doorfront and lamppost, the purple-and-gold bunting looped unbroken as a trolley wire above his head as he walked, turning at last at right angles to cross the street itself and meet that one on the opposite side making its angle too, to join over the center of the street as though to form an aerial and bottomless regalcolored cattlechute suspended at first floor level above the earth, and suspending beneath itself in turn, the outwardfacing cheeseclothlettered interdiction which Jiggs, passing, slowed looking back to read: Grandlieu Street CLOSED To Traffic 8:00 P.M.–Midnight

  Now he could see the bus at the curb, where they had told him it would be, with its cloth banner fastened by the four corners across its broad stern to ripple and flap in motion, and the wooden sandwich board at the curb too: Bluehound to Feinman Airport. 75¢ The driver stood beside the open door; he too watched Jiggs’ knuckles travel the length of the pocket. “Airport?” Jiggs said.

  “Yes,” the driver said. “You got a ticket?”

  “I got seventy-five cents. Wont that do?”

  “A ticket into the airport. Or a workman’s pass. The passenger busses dont begin to run
until noon.” Jiggs looked at the driver with that hot pleasant interrogation, holding his breeches by one hand while he drew the other out of the pocket. “Are you working out there?” the driver said.

  “Oh,” Jiggs said. “Sure. I’m Roger Shumann’s mechanic. You want to see my license?”

  “That’ll be all right,” the driver said. “Get aboard.” In the driver’s seat there lay folded a paper: one of the colored ones, the pink or the green editions of the diurnal dogwatches, with a thick heavy typesplattered front page filled with ejaculations and pictures. Jiggs paused, stooped, turning.

  “Have a look at your paper, cap,” he said. But the driver did not answer. Jiggs took up the paper and sat in the next seat and took from his shirt pocket a crumpled cigarette pack and upended and shook into his other palm from it two cigarette stubs and put the longer one back into the crumpled paper and into his shirt again and lit the shorter one, pursing it away from his face and slanting his head aside to keep the matchflame from his nose. Three more men entered the bus, two of them in overalls and the third in a kind of porter’s cap made of or covered by purple-and-gold cloth in alternate stripes, and then the driver came and sat sideways in his seat.

  “You got a ship in the race today, have you?” he said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “In the three-seventy-five cubic inch.”

  “How does it look to you? Do you think you will have a chance?”

  “We might if they would let us fly it in the two hundred cubic inch,” Jiggs said. He took three quick draws from the cigarette stub like darting a stick at a snake and snapped it through the stillopen door as though it were the snake, or maybe a spider, and opened the paper. “Ship’s obsolete. It was fast two years ago, but that’s two years ago. We’d be O.K. now if they had just quit building racers when they finished the one we got. There aint another pilot out there except Shumann that could have even qualified it.”

  “Shumann’s good, is he?”

  “They’re all good,” Jiggs said, looking at the paper. It spread its pale green surface: heavy, blacksplotched, staccato: Airport Dedication Special; in the exact middle the photograph of a plump, bland, innocently sensual Levantine face beneath a raked fedora hat; the upper part of a thick body buttoned tight and soft into a peaked lightcolored double-breasted suit with a carnation in the lapel: the photograph inletted like a medallion into a drawing full of scrolled wings and propeller symbols which enclosed a shieldshaped pen-and-ink reproduction of something apparently cast in metal and obviously in existence somewhere and lettered in gothic relief: