Sanctuary by William Faulkner

Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury in 1929, followed by As I Lay Dying in 1930, his third and fourth published novels. Those, and his two previously published novels: Soldier’s Pay (1925) and Sartoris (1927), had not sold well. But newly married, in 1929 to a woman who came with two children from an earlier marriage, and having recently bought a house, Faulkner needed more money than he was earning from his meager royalties, the occasional short story and odd jobs.

According to an introduction he wrote for the 1932 re-print of Sanctuary by Modern Library (first published in 1931), Faulkner wrote both As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary during the overnight hours at his job at the power house of the University of Mississippi. His shift was from 6 PM to 6 AM, ferrying coal in a wheelbarrow to the furnace where a second man shoveled it in. Folks didn’t need much heat after they went to bed around 11 PM, so while the other man dozed, Faulkner wrote from late night to early morning when the furnace needed to get fired up again. He wrote Sanctuary first, with the clear intention of making money. He writes, “I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine” (p. 323). (I read a Vintage paperback edition from 1993 that includes Faulkner’s introduction among the notes at the back). But the novel, quickly written, scandalized the publisher. Faulkner says his publisher’s response was, “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail” (p. 323). So Faulkner gave up on being a popular writer, wrote, As I Lay Dying, and got that published. Then, surprisingly, the galleys for Sanctuary showed up from the publisher after all. Faulkner says he had forgotten about it. Re-reading it, Faulkner thought it was awful. “So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book. It had been already set up once, so I had to pay for the privilege of rewriting it, trying to make out of it something which would not shame The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much and I made a fair job and I hope you will buy it and tell your friends and I hope they will buy it too” (p. 324).

Sanctuary is not shameful writing, but it is not in the same league as Faulkner’s two modernist masterpieces written before and immediately after. And the story is pretty horrific. It is a potboiler, as Faulkner described it, or pulp fiction: a sordid tale of murder, rape of an underage girl, and other criminal behavior involving a group of hangers-on to a bootlegger. Tracking the story, in a noir-ish style, is a mediocre lawyer who tries to save the life of the wrongly accused bootlegger.

The writing is fine but not brilliant. Everything is told in third-person narration. The only modernist touch is that occasionally the story will double back on itself to reveal a little more information to the reader by re-telling a scene from the perspective of a different character. But basically the story moves chronologically forward over a few weeks in May and June of 1929, with an epilogue that takes place briefly in August and that fall.

The story begins with the man who will become our noir-ish lawyer, Horace Benbow, stopping at the rundown home of the bootlegger, Lee Goodwin, that he shares with a woman he treats like a wife but isn’t married to, Ruby, and an odd collection of other men, two in particular catching our attention: Popeye: dark, silent, dangerous; and Tommy, younger and simple.

Next, Horace visits his sister in her home outside the town of Jefferson, the seat of Yoknapatawpha County where much of Faulkner’s fiction takes place. Horace’s sister is a widow. She lives with her deceased husband’s wheel-chair bound great aunt named Miss Jenny. During Horace’s visit a young man, Gowan Stevens is there, courting Horace’s sister. And we learn that Horace is himself married to a woman named Belle who has a teenage daughter from her previous husband named Little Belle. Horace dotes on the daughter but is contemplating leaving his wife.

Next the scene shifts to the University where we meet seventeen year-old Temple Drake. There’s a Friday night dance. Gowan Stevens is there, too, getting drunk. On Saturday, Gowan picks up Temple in his car intending to drive them to a baseball game. On the way, Gowan decides he needs more liquor and stops at the same bootlegger’s house that Horace had visited in the opening scene. Driving recklessly down a dirt path, Gowan runs his car into a fallen tree.

Then comes a deeply disturbing, extended episode of drunk Gowan and vulnerable Temple at the bootlegger’s house. The woman, Ruby, warns Temple to get a car and get away, but Gowan is too drunk to help her and Temple is stuck. The men threaten her. Ruby defends her. Temple is forced to spend the night. Gowan, sobering up the next morning, realizes that his inexcusable behavior will forever ruin his reputation so he abandons Temple rather than risk being seen with her again. He walks off. We learn later that during the night Popeye rapes Temple and kills Tommy with a pistol shot as Tommy tries to protect her. Popeye takes Temple away in his car and they drive to Memphis. When the police arrive, they arrest Goodwin, the bootlegger, for the murder of Tommy and put him in jail in Jefferson.

There’s more horror to come, although the dread eases somewhat. Popeye sets up Temple in a room at a whorehouse in Memphis where she’s cared for by the owner, Rita, and a black maid named Minnie, but prevented from leaving. Popeye arranges for other men to have sex with Temple while he watches. We learn later that Popeye is impotent due to a congenital defect. He accomplished the original rape using a corn cob. Horace visits Lee Goodwin in jail and tries to mount a legal defense but Goodwin refuses to participate for fear of reprisal from Popeye. Horace pays for Goodwin’s woman, Ruby, and their baby to stay at a hotel neighboring the jail house. Horace eventually discovers that Gowan and Temple were at Goodwin’s house the night of the murder and he tracks down Temple to recruit as a possible witness, first at the University and then at the whorehouse in Memphis through a contact Horace has with a man he knew in college, Clarence Snopes. Temple attempts an escape by relying on one of the men she met through Popeye, but her attempt leads to the man’s murder. Goodwin is nearly acquitted for Tommy’s murder based on lack of evidence, but on the final day of court Temple shows up and gives false testimony pinning her rape and Tommy’s murder on Goodwin. Goodwin is lynched soon after.

There’s a bit of an epilogue after that. Horace Benbow returns to his wife and step-daughter, feeling newly protective of her. Popeye leaves Memphis to visit his mother in Florida and on the way ends up being arrested in Alabama for a murder he didn’t commit. He declines a lawyer and is hung. The final paragraphs find Temple and her father listening to a music concert in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. If there’s any sanctuary in the novel there it is, but frankly nothing in its pages feels very peaceful or safe.

It is rather strange to read a novel by a high literary author who acknowledges it was written for money not art and the gonzo underworld crime story isn’t really my cup of gin. Still, the novel has its worth. The wide collection of characters, well-drawn and motivated are fascinating. The convoluted plot is admirably constructed. I wouldn’t credit the novel as being a sober examination of the psychology of evil or anything as high-falutin’ as that. It really is a shabby little shocker (as the critic Joseph Kerman once called Puccini’s opera Tosca) meant to illicit sympathetic thrills in excitable readers, but not this one. If it weren’t by Faulkner I would say the gleam wasn’t worth the grime, but it is by Faulkner, so there’s that.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature. To see what else is on my reading list click here.