Faulkner, William

A Fable. New York: Random House, 1954

8vo. Publisher's red cloth, top stained light blue; some light fading. Original dust-jacket; minor wear to extremities. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.             

Peterson A37.2b

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A presentation copy of the first edition inscribed to his mother on the front endpaper: "To Mother, with love / Billy." Signed on the title page almost two months before the August 2 publication date: "William Faulkner / Oxford, Miss. / 10 June 1954."

It was Faulkner’s mother, Maud Butler Falkner (1871-1960), who first nurtured his talents with a firm belief in his genius when he was barely out of diapers. A driven but likely unhappy wife to a man who became increasingly less successful professionally with each year of their marriage, she formed a bond with the eldest of her four sons that all recognized as the dominant relationship among them. Though Maud Falkner introduced all her sons to art and literature, William was her clear favorite. And though she insisted that all her boys write to her once a week when they were out of Oxford, William wrote more than twice, often while out of town, and visited her daily when in his hometown. She continued to support him emotionally throughout her life, as he helped to support her financially.     

Faulkner was closer to Maud, whom he resembled both physically and intellectually, than to his father (Murry Cuthbert Falkner, 1870-1932), a failed businessman cheated by J.W.T. Falkner (“The Young Colonel”) and marginalized by his wife to whose artistic leanings he remained unsympathetic. Faulkner dedicated his first work, The Marble Faun, to his mother, and while he lived in or visited Oxford he paid her daily visits; in her absence he wrote her hundreds of letters and during some periods they corresponded nearly every other day. He composed many of his works on a t able she had given him, seated in a chair that had been hers as well. “As to Bill’s treatment of his own people, his family,” his brother John later wrote in a memoir, “he was best of all to Mother. He gave her whatever she would let him but she was very independent and her brag was that she supported herself with her painting” (My Brother Bill, p. 217). After her husband’s death she refused bank deposits and bill payments her oldest son made on her behalf with varying degrees of success. 

More important to William’s creative development, of course, was the reading Maud prescribed. As John described Maud, “Mother was always an avid reader. She taught us to read. She showed us that words put together the right way could make a story worth the time it took to read it,” noting that she “kept us supplied with books matched to our age and comprehension. She was a selective reader too… Her reading was all for pleasure and her literary taste was much like a man’s,” and included Joseph Conrad, who would become one of Faulkner's favorites as well. Other writers she prized include Wister, Shaw, and Butler. (John Falkner, 236)

John further wrote, “Mother was proud of Bill’s writings, just as she was of mine when I started. She always kept copies of our books on a special table in the front room to show them off. Then she began missing them, even the ones in foreign languages. Someone even took one of Bill’s in Japanese. That’s when Mother stopped keeping them where visitors could lay their hands on them. After that she moved my and Bill’s books to a closet in her bedroom and kept them locked up” (ibid 171).