99 Fables

Introduction

introduction WHEN WILLIAM MARCH died in 1954, the longest unpublished manuscript among his papers was this collection of fables. It 'was first assembled "about 1938," when William Edward March Campbell had just retired as vice-president of the Waterman Steamship Corporation, 'which in eighteen years he had helped to build from a small Mobile line to one of the world's largest. He was forty-five, and he had seen much of life when as William March he settled down in a Manhattan apartment "to write as I please." Behind him were his boyhood days in Mobile, Pensacola , and the small sawmill towns of Alabama and Florida. His attendance at Valparaiso University and the University of Alabama had been all too brief. When the United States entered World War I, he immediately joined the Marines, participated in all the bitter fighting of his 5th Regiment, 43rd Company-Mont Blanc, Soissons, Verdun, Belleau Wood-and received almost every award for personal bravery, including a Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross, and Croix de guerre. "As a result of wounds I received in action," he wrote in 1932, "I shall never be entirely well again so long as I live"-wounds to the body and to the psyche as well. Behind him also were the years with Waterman when he was helping to organize the Mobile home office, traveling over the East and Midwest to "solicit freight," and putting three times the money he took out as salary back into the company. Then there were the years in Europe: the depressive atmosphere in Hamburg as he watched Hitler's rise to power (so well depicted in "Personal Letter") and the more pleasant though uneasy days in London from 1935 to 1937 (reflected in "Sweet, Who Was the Armorer's Maid" and "A Short History of England"). Almost all of these experiences had already found some expression in the novels and short stories of these busy years. On trains, in hotels and apartments in little towns and big cities, William March had always found time to read and to write. From the days of his schoolboy interest in composing verse and fiction he had come to know creative writing as a pleasure as well as a sort of necessary therapy. For a decade now he had published [ xiv ] with considerable success. His first important story, "The Holly Wreath," had appeared in the October Forum of 1929, and using his World War I letter-diary (sent from France to his sister Margaret), he had re-created his war experiences in the powerful novel, Company K (1933). The growing to manhood of a boy in south Alabama is the theme of Come in at the Door (1934); and while he was working in Germany and England he recalled the environment of Lockhart, Alabama, where, after finishing the only school in town at fourteen, he began to work in the sawmill. This village he had renamed Hodgetown in the novel The Tallons (I 936)-the dramatic story of two brothers, a farmer and a mill worker, both in love with the same girl. In addition to these novels, his short stories had appeared in leading magazines and in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best A merican Short Stories, and The Little Wife and Other Stories had been collected in 1935. Now he had a second volume of short stories ready, Some Like Them Short. During the 1930's he had also been writing fables. His pithy style, his unending invention of situation, and his concern with the kinks of human behavior all predicted the fabulist. In 1930 he had approached Little, Brown and Company-which was later to issue Some Like Them Short (1939) and his most ambitious novel, The Looking-Glass (1943)-about the idea of a group of fables, "but they rejected it pleasantly but quite firmly." [ xv ] The fables venture would not be downed so neatly, however, for the inter-chapter sections of Come in at the Door entitled "The Whisperer," which so disturbed the American and British reviewers, were in reality the thoughts of a sort of a cosmic moralist who views the story and the writer of the story from ironic parallels of parable. Later, in the final chapter of The LookingGlass , when the popular novelist Minnie McMinn is asked why she never married Professor St. Joseph, she replies by reading a fable, "The End of the Farmer...