Salmagundi and Miss Zilphia Gant (1932)

Summary

Harry Hansen. “The First Reader.” Greensboro Daily News, May 15, 1932, Section II, p. 4.

William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway appear together in Salmagundi, a thin book of early writings just prepared by Paul Romaine and published by Casanova Press, of Milwaukee, Wis. True, the Hemingway is but four lines long, but it gets him on the title page. The articles and poems, with one exception, appeared in the Double Dealer, of New Orleans, and are being reissued with “the amusing permission” of Faulkner.

Upon reading these early writings of William Faulkner we find impressionistic sketches, irrelevant comment on American criticism, an autobiographical fragment discussing the influence of Swinburne on himself as a lad of 16 and a group of poems, including “L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune,” said to be Faulkner's first published work. It appeared in the New Republic, August 6, 1919.

In 1925 we discover Faulkner writing:– “Is there nowhere among us a Keats embryo, some one who will turn his lute to the beauty of the world? Life is not different from what it was when Shelley drove like a swallow southward from the unbearable English winter; living may be different, but not life. Time changes us, but time's self does not change. Here is the same air, the same sunlight in which Shelley dreamed of golden men and women immortal in a silver world and in which young John Keats wrote ‘Endymion’ trying to gain enough silver to marry Fannie Brawne and set up an apothecary's shop.