ABSTRACT
Woke at six and wrote 1,000 words before rising. Two gems of American literature arrived from one of those esoteric Paris publishing houses: one called BubuofMontparnasse, the other Sanctuary by William Faulkner. They are all about sex and syphilis: all grimness and starkness: not a ray of humor or insight: two unclothed authors committing nuisances in a public park. When I expressed myself to Mr. Tarkington about the Faulkner masterpiece, and made inquiry as to who he was and how he got that way, Mr. Tarkington replied:
From your queries about Mr. Falconer, you must be an ignorant not to say loutish person literarily. I heard ofhim 'way last December during which by some odd mischance I stumbled upon a copy, of all things in the world! of Scribner's magazine for that month, and was
quite startled to find that this periodical still runs-in its own way. It has an editor, evidently, and he did a kind of trumpeting for his contents, this Mr. Falconer being what was most trumpeted. According to the noise, Mr. F. is almost officially our Leader and Hero. Subsequent to the trumpeting, Mr. F. himself appeared exuding a short story, which, as I recall it, began something like this:
So you can see he has some pretty original ways and would like to get lots of notice from terribly literary people, and would. Outside of being different with parentheses and things now and then, and some traces of Stephen Crane, our Leader is often satisfactorily confusing in ways that demonstrate greatness.
