The Lost Faulkner Sentence Peter LaSalle (bio) 1. Here are . . . here . . . 2. Let me try again: Here are . . . here are some . . . (Still not there.) 3. Here are some things about the lost Faulkner sentence. 4. (That’s better—and now it is started, as it inevitably always does start.) 5. And I suppose how it really started for me was that I wasn’t even sure why it was lost, or how it could be so, true, lost like that. A kid of ten or eleven, I knew nothing of Faulkner at that age, I had never read anything by Faulkner. But there was the paperback in our house in Connecticut, frightening me a bit, needless to add. 6. Yes, the lost Faulkner sentence, and what I think you actually could call the first time, which involved that paperback. My sister had bought it for one of her classes, when she went away to what back then was the “exclusive” women’s college run by nuns from the supposedly ritzy Order of the Sacred Heart in a rolling-hilled Boston suburb. (The Kennedy girls were all educated by the Order of the Sacred Heart, originally French, and characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels went to Sacred Heart schools, why, even characters in Henry James novels attended them.) It was a used copy that she might have gotten from another girl or found for herself in a second-hand bookstore in Harvard Square. I knew there had been some sadness in my sister’s life around that time, something that happened to her while away at school that nobody in the big, sprawling house where we had all grown up really wanted to talk about, my other sisters never saying anything concerning it and I, as an only son, seemingly cut out of the message of it and certainly not about to ask my parents. In truth, my father, the dignified judge, seemed about as removed from it as I was, and to go up to him in the evening when he sat in the maroon easy chair in the living room under yellow lamplight, lost in the late edition of the newspaper or yet another long biography of Jefferson or Franklin Roosevelt, his two lifelong heroes, wouldn’t yield an answer, anyway. And it was Faulkner, and it was a used copy of The Sound and the Fury, a British edition, I now realize, worn [End Page 45] and with the very bright orange along the spine that used to be the trademark of all Penguin paperbacks, the front cover itself just gray and black and white, offering a skewed, rather abstract drawing of several outlined floating faces that could have been done by a child, or, more appropriately for this book, by an idiot; the price of the book was given in shillings and pence on the cover. Probably it got left in the tall bookcase when my sister was back home from college during summer vacation (my beautiful sister, quiet, the second oldest in our large family, with the cascading mahogany hair, the high cheekbones, the lovely gray eyes, and she did later act in New York theater, then had a brief Hollywood film career), and in the bookcase at the end of the upstairs hallway it was there with some other books that any of us might have had for school or college classes. I think I simply pulled it out of the bookcase once when looking for something else, found it by chance and examined it, stared at the orange spine, with the little logo of the penguin in an oval lower down, and especially the front-cover artwork that showed the outlines of the several untethered faces—that artwork sort of mesmerized me, I couldn’t figure it out. I thought about the book a lot after that. I often thought of it being there in the bookcase when I was waiting for sleep to come and lying in bed in my blue bedroom at the other end of the hallway, the looming upright clock beside the bookcase hollowly tick-tocking away, maybe some spilled moonlight coming through the long, twelve-paned hallway window (outside...