Afternoon of a Cow Original Typed Manuscript Drafts.

FAULKNER, William.

$15,000.00

Item Number: 139485

Three original typed drafts of William Faulkner’s parodical short story “Afternoon of a Cow.  By Ernest V. Trueblood.” Two complete copies, each 17 leaves; bound with brass clasps in green folders with the third copy lacking the first leaf; with 49 strikethroughs in Faulkner’s hand throughout most excising a single word. When Faulkner returned to Oxford at the end of World War I, he was writing poetry, much of it under the influence of the French Symbolists.  In the summer of 1919, he borrowed Mallarmé’s title, “L’Après-midi d’un Faune,” for a 40-line poem of frustrated love. The poem appeared in The New Republicon 16 August was a revised version appeared in The Mississippian at Ole Miss in the fall.  Early the next year he was to publish in Oxford a poem inviting comparison with François Villon, “Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues.” As Joseph Blotner says diplomatically, “Such poetry unsurprisingly provoked various responses.”  Parodies began to appear in The Mississippian.  One was “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdue,” signed by “Lordgreyson.” The poem described the heifer Betsey, lost and wandering far from home. “It was an amusing tour de force, which Faulkner may have had in mind seventeen years later, ‘one afternoon,’ he recalled, ‘when I felt rotten with a terrible hangover.’  He was then working unhappily at Twentieth Century-Fox” (Blotner). “The story generates interest because it uses Faulkner himself as a character, much in the manner of a post-modernist writer such as Paul Auster. The story reports on a frightened cow that has fallen into a ditch during a fire. The character Faulkner, along with Oliver, a black butler, and Ernest V. Trueblood, the first-person narrator of the tale, rush to rescue the cow, but they are at first unsuccessful. In its fear and distress, the cow empties its bladder and bowels upon Faulkner, shattering the dignity of the scene. The story ends with Faulkner stripping in the door of the stable and washing. Latter, wrapped in a horse blanket, he and his friends drink to the cow” (Fargnoli & Golay). Faulkner was very fond of this story and thought it particularly funny. On 25 June 1937, he read the story to his guests after dinner in Los Angeles, telling them it was the work of a talented boy named Ernest V. Trueblood. The only person who seemed to appreciate the story was his house guest and French translator, Maurice Coindreau. The Frenchman was in Los Angeles to discuss his translation of The Sound and the Fury, which became one of the most influential and celebrated literary translations of the century. Faulkner gave Coindreau a carbon typescript of the translation as a souvenir. In 1939, Faulkner was to appropriate elements of the story for the mock chivalric romantic treatment of Ike Snopes’s love for Jack Houston’s cow in The Hamlet. During the war, Faulkner approved Coindreau’s translation of the story, published in the June/July number of Fontaine in Algiers. It first appeared in English in Furiosoin 1947 and was anthologized by Dwight Macdonald in a collection of parodies in 1950. In very good condition.