Free Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon

of exultation, as though I had downed a Hun machine.”
    By 1925, during a productive half-year in New Orleans that will have him metamorphosing from poet to novelist, Faulkner keenly begins to feel himself a writer. (Indeed, he sometimes Writes as determinedly as Elinore Stewart: “Sky all full of fat white clouds like little girls dressed up and going to a party.”) Along with verse and fiction, he’s turning out newspaper sketches that are almost literally potboilers: “They want some short things,” he explains to his mother, “about 200 words with a kick at the end. I can knock off one of them while I’m waiting for my teakettle to boil.” The longer ones, he believes, are fit for a scrapbook, and his work is provoking fan letters from “strange females” who’ve seen the author’s picture in
The Times-Picayune
. A new bumptiousness infuses his correspondence; he pronounces his novel-in-progress “very good” and boasts of having put down “7000 words in one day this week.” By the summer of ‘25 he can tell his mother that writing letters has become a busman’s holiday.
    Actually, it was the three years between his days in New York and his time in New Orleans that really dimmed the luster of letter writing. Back home during that period, Faulkner supported himself as the University of Mississippi’s postmaster, playing cards and writing on the job and sometimes throwing away letters before they could be delivered. “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life,” he declared after being fired, “but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”
    THE MODERN TRAVELER’S iPhone will begin pulling e-mail down from the sky the moment his plane has landed in Ulan Bator,whereas little more than half a century ago, while studying and traveling abroad, the young V.S. Naipaul could write to his family back in Trinidad and say, almost believably: “I have been in Paris for a week and have only just come across a post office.” Before Xerox and the SEND ALL button, dispatching the same news to multiple recipients also required considerable labor from a novelist on the make; as Naipaul explains to Kamla, his sister studying in India: “Writing two copies of a letter is pretty tiring. To write home and then to write to you about the same thing is a heavy task.”
    Like the letters Faulkner sent home from New Orleans, the ones Naipaul mails from Oxford show him quickly gaining traction as a writer and fast coming into a sense of his own superiority, though he seems to have been inclined to that almost from birth. As the family prince, its great hope for distinction, “Vido” reports on his social navigation through the university—his attendance at bottle parties, his need for dance lessons—as well as his decidedly unimpressed view of the competition: “There are asses in droves here,” he writes just months after arriving. He has every reason to believe that he “can beat them at their own language.”
    The hauteur of this fellow, still a teenager, who likes being called “sir” and believes Jane Austen’s books to be “mere gossip,” makes him scorn fellow passengers on a train as well as the offspring of an uncle who resides in England (“The children nauseate me”). He finds it difficult to be polite, and can’t even beg his family’s pardon for the bad typing in one of his letters without adding: “I have no time nor the desire to correct.” As his sister’s birthday approaches, he tells her: “I shan’t send a card, but I offer my best wishes.”
    All the salient personal features of the Nobel Prize winner are on display fifty years before he takes the stage in Stockholm. Misogyny is everywhere in the letters. Patricia Ann Hale, the wife he will make miserable for decades, occasions a premarital assessment, written for his family, that seems in spots more like literary