David M. Poxson I948

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THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF

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Thesis for the Degree of M. A.

MICHIGAN STATE COLLEGE David M. Poxson I948

LIBRARY ’ Michigan State University "

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i '7 r77 '-' 'r THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF WILLIAM FAVLKNER

IN AMERICA

David M. Poxson

A THESIS

Submitted to the Graduate School of Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English 1948 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER Page I Introduction...... 1

11 Early Novels...... 8 In mwmam:aimmo - . ~18 1V Sanctuerz ...... 29 V Theee 13 ...... 58 V1 .Eéflfifiuég August ...... 42 V11 2192.9. My 23. Martino, 3221; Others, mag . 53 V111 Abealam, Abealoml.. e ...... 64_ 1x ‘223_Unvanquiehed ...... 74 IX ‘ggg,flélgugglgg_ ...... 80 XI {222_§§2}g§’ ...... 88 III 'qugggg,‘§gggg ...... 95 XIII ‘zéggl Return: ...... 101

BibliographyOtoooeeeeeeeeeeeeo106 CHAPTER I

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to collect and analyze American criticism of William Faulkner's prose and poetry. It is not concerned with biographical studies of Faulkner, except as they are applicable to critical estimates of Faulkner's work, nor does it treat, directly, his work itself. It is a synthesis of critical Opinion of Faulkner's published works based on material selected from periodicals and books which have been published in the last twenty five years. This critical material has been selected with.two principles in mind: general critical excellence, and availability. Some criticism has been omitted because it simply was not good, some because it duplicated in less trenchant form that which had been said better in other articles, and some because it was difficult to procure. Much of this last group, if files are trustworthy, would have duplicated the comment of that which was available.

William Faulkner's literary reputation is here followed chronologically as it deve10ped around his major workc-from his first novel, Soldier's £21 (1927) to his last volume of short stories, 39. M W, and Others (1942). His privately printed early verse, essays and verse which appeared in the

University of Mississippi student magazine, and newspaper articles written for the New Orleans Picayune apparently have never earned more than a line or two of incidental criticism.

Critics have said little or nothing about Salmagundi, a small book of which 500 OOpies were published in 1932, and of which cepies are more elusive than some of Faulkner's own more

intricate stories.

When pertinent, general criticism involving overlapping

chronology and a particular technical, stylistic, and thematic milieu (including some discussion of not otherwise criticised magazine short-stories) will be interpolated. A final section

will be devoted to essays in such.works as Joseph warren

Beach's American Fiction, 1920-1940, maxwell Geismar's Writers

'52 Crisis, Malcolm Cowley‘s 232 Portable Faulkner, and others which attempt to appraise all, or nearly all, of Faulkner's major work.

Significantly, much murky fog enve10ps Faulkner's reputation.

Many critics overlook him entirely, others ridicule him.exces-

sively, some praise or damn him for the right reasons, some for

the wrong. Nearly all admit his tremendous power as a writer: very few have put their fingers on the source of that power. In their pursuit of Faulkner's meanings, many critics develOp

weird Faulkner themes and motives to fit pro-conceived ideas--

ideas as foreign to Faulkner as Faulkner himself would be to

Siberia.

As late as 1955, Amy Loveman, 1 giving advice to a Texas

student writing a paper on the negro in recent American fiction,

failed to mention Faulkner as a writer interested in negroes--

this at a time when two-thirds of Faulkner's novels and collected

1 Saturday Review 2; Literature, (August 24, 1955), 24. short-stories had been published. In 1942, Maxwell Geismar, on the other hand, makes the negro one of the "twin furies" which dominate Faulkner's work from the beginning. In 1930 the editor Of the American Mercugy, commenting on Faulkner as a contributor, said "His first novel, 2139.. _S_9_u_r_1g and £132 _Fu_r_y, was published last year. His second, Sanctuayy, will be out in the fall."2 313339313 2331 £32 £221 is Faulkner's fourth novel: Sanctuayy is his sixth. Timothy Fuller, in 1956, displayed the rather typical pro-occupation with nothing in

Faulkner but horror when he used strained simile to produce an amusing story of Jack and Jill as Faulkner might tell it.3

Interestingly enough, Fuller cannot reproduce the visceral horror of Sanctuary or 3."). 3939 £93 Emily. {is evidence of his mercenary sensationalism, many critics triumphantly dangle before the reader's eyes Faulkner's claim.that Sanctuary was a mere pot-boiler. Those are but a few examples drawn from the amorphous mass of Opinion based on an equally amorphous mass of hurried reading, preconception, and.misinformation.

As background for a survey of the contemporary critical Opinion of William Faulkner, it is useful to note briefly some general trends in literature, particularly that of the 1930's,

Faulkner's most productive period, as seen by several reputable

2 American Mercgyy, (July, 1960), 584. 3 Saturday Review gg Literature, (December 19, 1966), 10. critics. In the summer of 1937, Bernard DeVoto produced a series Of articles in which he attempted to summarize the qualities essential to modern fiction.4 In it he establishes spatial, temporal, or emotional movement as essentials to modern fiction. If a writer does not convey motion he is not writing fiction, says DeVoto, even though what he says may be important. Description, itself, steps motion. modern fiction transforms descriptive material into the Springs of action, but usually, the modern novelist has to strike a compromise between necessary description and movement. Practically, the novelist may render movement directly by using dialogue, but the minute he begins to recount action, even through a fictional character, action steps. A relatively new method of getting around this difficulty is the Joycean technique of internal dialogue, or

"stream-of-consciousness." DeVoto illustrates the latter method's weakness when he says,"A method waich requires eight hundred pages to render partially the events of less than twenty- four hours in the lives‘of three characters must be used spar- ingly in a novel about twenty people which covers half a century."5

The modern novelist, trying as he does to make his work a vehicle for an idea, must skillfully present information-~which is exposition or description--and yet not stOp essential movement, without which he will not be read. At the same time, preoccupation.with ideas is a dangerous invitation to the writer

4 "English ’37." Saturda Review of Literature, (June 26, 1957 to August 28, I933) "' 5 Saturday Review 2£ Literature, (August 7, 1967), 24. to become prolix. DeVoto implies that Faulkner, in

The £9329- _a_r_l_d_ 213 _F_u_ry has partially solved the inherent problem of the stream-of-consciousness technique. The burden of collecting information is transferred from the page of the novel to the mind of the reader. Of course, warns DeVoto, the strain on the reader's mind may be too great, in which case he will probably pick up 2993 w E13 .3119. before which "intelligence is not only uncomfortable, but downright anguished."6

Although DeVoto's articles are too long to be comprehensively summarized here, they show clearly the components of fiction in Faulkner's time, and their application to Faulkner's work is obvious.

Addison Eibbard, in an excerpt from.§2y32 Tempers‘gg

Literature.7 recognizes, with DeVotO, the modern's interest in ideas, but apparently, unlike DeVoto, he includes static writing in the definition of fiction. He points to a prevailing tendency in fiction to move away from the general toward the particular, to an interest in "mental states" rather than "external actions," and concludes by saying that "unity, coherence, and emphasis is Jettisoned, and in its place is written suggestion, association, and indirection."8 An anonymous article “9 ”Note for the end Of 1939 and the 1930's works out three

6 Saturday_Review‘2£ Literature, (July 24, 1937), 17.

7 Saturday Review gg Literature, (January 21, 1939), l.

8 Ibid. 9 Saturday Review 2; Literature, (December 30, 1959), 8. tendencies in American fiction: the develOpment of social awareness as against self-expression; the increasing consciousness of American history focussed mainly on the Civil

War but found elsewhere; and the depiction of violence, most of which was, in the 'SO's, "more significant for what it suggested than for what it accomplished. "10

In" U’hat Deep South Literature Needs",11 Cleanth Brooks, believing that wide misunderstanding of the South has led to an equally wide misunderstanding of the Southern artist's purpose, says that southern literature needs release from "those twin evils of modern literature: sociologism and romantic escapism.”12 This remark especially fits Faulknerian criticism: he who interprets Faulkner as a sociologist is lost from the beginning. In Brooks's eyes, Faulkner is pro-eminently a tragedian: when Faulkner trips over his broken buskin straps and falls flat on his face, the critics pounce joyfully on the resulting disorder and confusion. Southern writers in general, and Faulkner in particular, thinks Brooks, are also misunder- stood for their ceaseless attempt to evolve new forms adequate to express their tremendous nervous force. In approaching the criticism of iilliam Faulkner, it would be well to use as a touchstone Brooke's words, "To sum up, the Deep South presents a picture of a section producing a vigorous and powerful

10 Ibid. 11 MSaturday leview of Literature, (September 19,1942), 8.

12Ibid. literature--a more able literature one feels than the section deserves. I suggest that what it needs is not better writers but more intelligent readers. . . . , and a group of critics and reviewers more sensitive and more intelligent than it presently has."13

13 Ibid. CHAPTER II

Early Novels

Soldier's Pa , Faulkner's first novel, was published

in 1926. The action, laid in the spring of 1919, is relatively simple. Donald hahon, scarred almost beyond recognition by war wounds, is traveling to his small town home in

Georgia. On the train, he meets ex-sergeant Joe Gilligan, Air

Corps Cadet Lowe, and the young war widow hargaret Powers. Joe and Margaret send naive Cadet Lowe home and sympathetically take charge of Donald. If Donald hahon could feel anything, he would sense the emptiness of his return to his father, a puzzled EpiscOpal Rector, and his flapper fiancee, Cecily,

Joe and Margaret know that disillusion is inevitable. When

Cecily sees Donald's face, she faints, and later runs off to marry another local boy. With some vague principle of preser- vation in mind, Margaret marries Donald, who dies. Action in the story is subordinate to characterization, to the cross-

sectional presentation of small town tensions and artificiality.

Through the whole story wanders one Januarious Jones, a young man whose sole interest is seducing girls, a quest at which he never succeeds. The real central character is not Donald, who

is articulate Just once in a dream before his death, but Joe.

The real heroine is not Cecily, but the strangely quiet Margaret.

That the criticism of this early novel is limited to the

standard reviews is not surprising. Typically, the early

critics Judged Faulkner as a writer of power, even though they

might criticize his technique and choice of subject matter. An anonymous reviewer on the New York Times staff said that the returned soldier theme is "an old story-~as old as the

Greeks--and older--as old as war and its folly,"1 and thus he classifies Faulkner's first book as another lost generation novel. But the reviewer insisted that it is not merely a "tricked-out plea for neglected heroes." 2 anther, Faulkner's development of motives, however submerged and vague, at the expense of plot and character shows a glimmering of genuine tragedy. When the reviewer mentioned the presence of humor, he was evidently thinking of the pathetically earnest but ineffectual Rector and of the grimly slapstick antics of

Januarius Jones. It is significant, that this stock-in-tradc reviewer does notice its presence: "Discordantly," he says,

"as in life, it sounds the cap and bells in distressful comics."3 subsequent critics have called Faulkner everything from a per- verted naturalist to a romantic mystic. In this review, the critic limits himself to the statement that Faulkner ”evokes with fine selection, avoiding the dreary piling-up of details of naturalism--the high.moments of life and the strong resurgent memories of his casuals, giving the transition that has brought them to their present status of disillusion. Brutalised for violence, they have been left without parts to play. . . .

The workaday world is now alien.'4 The importance of this ""I""' New York Times Book Review, (April 11, 1926), 8. 21bid. 31bid. ‘Itid. lO

perceptive and favorable review is in its recognition of

Faulkner's tragic and comic potentials. Thomas Boyd, writing in the Saturday Review pg Literature? treats Soldier's 321 as an out-and-out returned soldier story

spoiled by uncontrolled technique and fantastic imagination.

It is as if, he says, Faulkner were trying to create a very

special world of his own: a cabalistic world in which peeple

lack the common attributes of humanity. This, of course, is

precisely that Faulkner later did. Boyd attributes the es-

sentially impressionistic technique, which, he says, is capable

of brilliantly rendering individual scenes and pointless 222’

_§equiturs, directly to James Joyce. He has considerable fun

with Faulkner's neglect of descriptive elements, pointing out

that Donald Manon is described only by the scar on his face,

and that ﬁargaret Powers is simply the "black woman." L.S. horris, who even more uncritically accepts Soldier's Egy,as a

last generation novel, agrees with boyd in his estimate of

Faulkner's impressionism. hoyd says that the Faulkner char-

acters are "a group of vague, abnormally behaving characters

who waver uncertainly and fantastically through the story."6 Morris echoes Boyd with the statement that "the poignancy of

situations is weakened by literary echoes, which lead him into

straining for effect and misplaced brilliance."7 He adds, in

5 Saturday Review 2; Literature, (April 24, 1926), 756. 6 Ibido 7* New Republic. (June 23, 1926), 148. 11 an off-hand manner, that "straining for effect" seems a deliberate cultivation of cleverness on Faulkner's part.

Every two or three years during the thirties, one or another irate critic attempted to bury Faulkner in a flurry of shocked invective. Camille thole, writing in the Catholic ﬂorid in 1955, is such a one. In her essay8 she labels

Faulkner "King of the degenerate sensationalists," berates him soundly, and winds up by saying his work is "charlatanism of the cheapest kind."9 Perhaps her Catholic affiliation explains this castigation. By 1935, of course, more than half of Faulkner's work had been published, but hiss thole did not slight his relatively innocuous first novel. It was published, she says, solely on the uncritical recommendation of Sherwood

Anderson, and even this first-born showed unmistakeable signs of its parent's degenercy. The latter was already develOping what she calls, in a borrowed phrasee'a.chhritable eye for excrementlflo Why can't Faulkner, asks Miss McCole, exercise his “deep understanding" of his land to show us the South as it is-os land of moonlight and roses? She also emphasizes one other thing: Faulkner's tremendous power in using language. Here, in the comment of four critics, are many of the major elements of the subsequent stream of Faulkner criticism.

8 ”Nightmare Literature of William Faulkner," Catholic World, (August, 1935), 576. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. Quoted from Kenneth Burke. 12

In the eyes of the critics he was to become a tragedian, a comedian, a perverse sensationalist, a brilliant technician, a degenerate money-grubber--all of those will Faulkner be, and more.

William Faulkner's second novel, Mosquitoes, published in

1927, is by general agreement his worst. It scarcely merits a resume, let alone criticism. In method, it perhaps parallels

Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow. Faulkner assembles in it a heterogeneous group of New Orleans artists, writers, socialites, adolescents, and a lugubrieus pair of sweethearts from the wrong side of the tracks, and puts them all on a yacht for a weekend cruise. The only person of principle aboard is a sculptor. Patricia, the young girl, is as sexless as a knife;

Jenny, from the edge of the slums, is completely, stupidly, and virtuously mammalian. In the words of one critic, Faulkner

”lets them buzz and sting at each other for several days, perform strange antics, and chatter endlessly."11 This same critic regrets that a good idea was spoiled by Joycean inter- ludes and "purple lyricism." he also predicts that Faulkner will contribute to "urbanity in fiction,'12 which only shows the danger of critical prognostication. Another critic13 admits that he has not read Soldier's Pa , calls Faulkner's irrelevant passages in Mosquitoes "a bad habit," rather

ll Izzew Republic, (July 20, 1927), 256.

Ibid. 13 Saturday Review 25 Literature. (June 25, 1927), 933. 13 vaguely says that the theme is "the wastage of life in futility, the futile beauty of youth, the Oppression of adult triviality . . . "14 The reviewers apparently did not mind that Faulkner inserted himself into Mosquitoes by name as a dark little man always asking questions. At least, they do not mention what seems quite s breach of modern fictional convention. In general, the criticism of Mosquitoes is not significant. Both Soldier's‘ggy_and Mosquitoes may be regarded, in retrospect, as the work of s young, intense novelist search- ing for something worthwhile to write about.

The central preoccupation of the major Faulkner appears for the first time in Sartoris, published in 1929, for it is s tale of the Sartoris family--0f ten closely identified with Faulkner's owno-acted out in the vicinity of Jefferson, lississippi. The hypothetical Jefferson is clearly the actual

Oxford, Mississippi, near which Faulkner has always lived.

Charscteristically, Sartoris is nearly without plot. Ybung

Bayard Sartoris returns to the family mansion near Jefferson from Royal Air Force duty in France directly after the war.

Unlike Donald Hahon, young Bayard's wound is spiritual, for he had watched his twin brother John, whom he loved, leap from his flaming plane high above the earth. Seemingly courting death, young Bayard tears around the countryside in a high- povered car. 01d Bayard, his grandfather, dies of a heart sttsck during a spectacular smash. Young Bayard, without s vord, runs off to stay with friends in the pine hills. Just

14 Ibid. 14 before they learn what has happened, he leaves for New York.

He succeeds in killing himself there, testing a crasily designed airplane. Narcissa Benbow, whom he had married, is left expecting a child.

If this is the main plot, it is interspersed with several others: the story of Horace and Narcissa Benbow, a running narrative of plantation life, the love affair of Horace and lele--all separate stories, none quite standing by itself. Actually, in both its main plot and in its tantalizing glimpses of innumerable and undeveIOped characters and events, Sartoris suggests a dozen stories. Nearly all of Faulkner's subsequent protagonists and themes appear in one way or another in

Sartoris. Although the critics in 1929 could not know it,

Sartoris represented the beginning of Faulkner's Mississippi legend.

Apparently, Sartoris is the least read of all the Faulkner novels: certainly it is the most difficult to obtain. It has earned some fairly good critical appraisal in spite of the scanty criticism usually apportioned to his early novels. The anonymous reviewer of the New York‘gimgg}5 tried to pigeon- hole it as an ordinary novel of southern life revolving around the struggle between the values of the old south and those of northern industrialism. The cultural struggle, says the critic, is not clearly stated: it must be inferred, "but one cannot be too certain, for Mr. Faulkner appears as little interested

15 New York Times Book Review.(narch 5, 1929), 8. 15 in the working out of a theme as in the consistent creation of character." Thus he frankly admits his bewilderment, as others have since. The presence of too many characters, he says, prohibits clear delineation of any. Young Bayard, old

Bayard, and old Bayard's Aunt Jenny are the best. Camille

HcCole--she who labels Faulkner a degenerate sensationalist-- admits that in Aunt Jenny Faulkner achieves "magnificent characterization. "15 Aunt Jenny, of course, is pure stark young moonlight and roses, a romanticism in treatment later characteristic of Faulkner's attitude toward the Sartorises. The‘giggg critic is decidedly put out by Faulkner's technique. He blames the flash-back device and the presence of meaningless (though often brilliant) anecdotes for the novel's

"uneven texture. "17 Here we have reflected directly in work-a- day criticism the necessity for movement in fiction, for the author to submerge his exposition under what DeVoto in his

English {91 says is essential action. In all his work, and in one form or another, Faulkner consistently flashes back to supply genealogy: it is his favorite device. When the critic says, ”His principal interest . . . lies in quantitative variety, in assembling within a single book the widest possible range of characters, situations, moods, effect, and styles . . .,"18 he is right. And again, the critic cannot be blamed if, at this

------“- 16 Catholic World, (August, 1955), 576. 17 New York Times Book Review, (March 6, 1929), 8. 18 Ibid. 16

early stage of Faulkner's development, he does not see that

Sartoris marks the beginning of the Faulknerian legend of

the South.

Twelve years later, Warren Beck,19 looking backward over

Faulkner's eleven novels, three volumes of collected short

stories, and one book of poetry is quick to recognize the im-

portance of Sartoris to the legend. "The real and complete Faulkner first stands out in his third novel, . . ." he says.

It is here, he continues, that Faulkner first shows that he

has a sense of man's fate together with a real awareness of

the South's tragic history and present dilemmas, and it is here that Faulkner sits in bitter judgment on the South's

decadence while he retains a deep sympathy for the Old South's

values. While some have attributed Faulkner's obvious nervous

tension to his experience as a combat airman, Beck thinks it

results from the conflict between his sympathy for the South

.and the values of its regional life and his clearcsighted

Judgment that the South has failed to retain and develop them.

And he notes perspicaciously that the lost generation motif died early in competition with "the southern legend." He

quotes Horace Benbow, inJSartoris, as saying, "within ten years

individual ex-soldiers will 'reali:e that the A.E.F. didn't invent disillusion."'2o

In the same Y car, Van Wyck Brooks wrote an article

19 Antioch Review, (March, 1941), 82. 20 Ibid. The quotation was taken from Beck's review. 17

"Fashions in Defeatism."21 In it he put Faulkner at the tOp of the defeatist heap, his chief argument being that Faulkner, like other southern writers, hates the South; ergo, he hates provincialism. Thus he deliberately destroys his grass roots.

Brooks' is a specious analysis. Ls tarren Beck, referring to Sartoris, says, ”Faulkner is a mississippian who has tran- scended provincialism without losing artistic devotion to a locale; he is a Southerner who has become disinterested without losing interest. He wonder he is melancholy; his is the excruciation of a hamlet, forced to chide his own mother on the grounds of his realistic discernment of fact and the demands of his indomitable idealism."22

21 Saturday Review 25 Literature, (March 22, 1941), 23.

22 ’ Antioch Review, (March, 1941), 82. ELEPTZLR III

The Sound and the Fury: ‘£§.£ Lay Dying

Although.The Sound and the EEEZ.W35 written before

Sartoris, it did not appear in print until six months after

the latter was published. The chronological treatment here, then, is a little arbitrary. Actually, Sartoris and The; §_ou_9_d

229. £92 £551 probably represent two closely related and very nearly simultaneous phases in Faulkner's creative deve10pment.

If the former novel publicly announced the future theme of Faulkner's major work, the latter elaborated it in a genuine

522’. 93 m. Plotless as a novel can be, telling, again, not one story, but many, tortured in its complexity, The §_9_u9_d_ gag

‘Ehgﬂgggz defies any sort of compact summarization.

Structurally, it is divided into four parts, titled ”April 7, 1928," “June 2, 1910," "April 6, 1928," and "April 8, 1928."’ All contribute to the history of the Compsons, a

Jefferson family much like the Sartorises. The first section of the action is seen through the mindo-or rather, the simple apprehension--of Benjy, a thirty-three year old idiot. The second is seen through the consciousness of Quentin Compson, who is a freshman at Harvard, and who is about to drown htmsclf because his beloved sister Caddy, with whom he thinks he has committed a sort of platonic incest, has Just married to find a father for her unborn child. In the third section, the stream-of-consciousness turns into the conventional first person narrative and dramatic asides of Jason Compson, IV, who is without doubt the meanest, most despicable character in all of 19

Faulkner; meaner, even, than Flem Snopos, usually regarded as Faulkner's all-time fictional high in that respect. The fourth section is told in the third person with strict objectivity by Faulkner himself. It centers on the Compson's negro servants and their relations with the now completely degenerate Compson family.

On finishing 33:? Sound and. the 2251' the reader knows much of the Compson history and much about the life of Jefferson,

Mississippi, but he is also aware of many loose ends of plot.

He sees, even if he does not understand, the somehow frustrated love between members of the family,--the tension produced between Benjy, Caddy, Quentin, Jason IV, the hypochondriac mother, and the drunken father. Above all, he sees the family's decay as a naked, accomplished fact, feeling pe haps that somewhere in the fog of Faulkner's caperimental technique lies a symbol represerting the whole South.

The problem of eXperimental technique in.2hg'§ggnd'gnd‘thg

§2£y_is recognized but not thoroughly analyzed by another anonymous New York Times reviewer} He asks, somewhat plaintively, whether or not Faulkner really has a style, saying that it seems to be weirdly original with Joycean overtones. Thg_§gund_

229.2E2HEEEI’ he says, has "four styles welded into one."2

Apparently he refers to Benjy's idiot stream-of—consciousness,

Quentin's sephisticated stream-of—consciousness, Jason's first person monologue, and Faulkner's objective third person narrative. He doesn't show how Faulkner does the welding. He

1New Yerk Times Book Review, (November 10, 1929), 28. 21bid. 20 mentions the large number of characters involved, and he points to the Russians as a possible source. Basil Daven-

port3 treats the progression from Benjy's idiocy to the hard

factual narrative of the fourth section as something new in

stream-of—consciousness technique; it represents he says,

”a steady movement toward externality and away from emotion."4

Davenport, however, is more aware of the symbolic theme of 313 M and 5.2.9. 2.11.11 than he is of its technique. Nobody in

the book, he says, can really feel the significance of tragic events. The obvious symbol for this "mortal stupor" is Benjy.

The rest of the characters apparently suffer, but their suffering, with the possible exception of :uentin's, is little more

than a refined petulance. The tragedy of 3333 m £291 the. ‘22:: is the tragedy of perennial frustration, says Davenport,

and he parodies,

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, 5 There's this little street and this little house.

The tragedy of the book lies not in the process of family

decay, but in the end result, symbolized by Benjy's oblivious-

ness to human pain and grief. To this critic, at least,

William Faulkner is on his way to a distinguished place in

exalted company. It is interesting to suggest that Faulkner, by using Benjy,

has perhaps overcome the problem of bulkiness which Bernard

‘ Ibid. 5 Ibid. 21

DeVoto says is inherent in the stream-of—consciousness

technique. For Benjy makes no time distinctions. hvents

of thirty years ago are as vivid to him as those of today.

Thus, while Faulkner can pick and choose historical events as

he will, he retains the advantages of the Joycean technique.

His method does not lead to crystal clarity, but then, neither

does Joyce's.

Benjy is essentially a boy, and Faulkner frequently uses

a boy as narrator. That Evening gun, from 2E2§2.l§ is told by

young Quentin Compson. WELL; 332 m} a story of a n'er-

do-well seducer who is shot, is told by an extremely naive seven-

year old. Egglgnﬁillzy is a tale of a likeable old dope-

addict told by a fourteen-year old. And there are others. hone

of these boys is the incoherent monster that benjy is, but

presumably, boys do not have minds capable of reflection.

Thus Faulkner, using a boy, is able to present a flow of simple

apprehension revealing itself as either stream-of-consciousness

or external dialogue, and he does not have to analyze emotions

and events because his narrator has not the analytical faculty.

‘ Thus Faulkner can present both sOphisticated and naive reactions

to events at once. Benjy may simply represent an intense ap-

plication of this device. Critics have often pointed to this

two-level presentation, most of them feeling, however, that

each level tends to destroy the other.

6 American Mercury, (July, 1955), 264. '7 Ibid., (October, 1955). 156. 22

2113 M 293 the M has often been exhibited as a prime example. of Faulkner's complex technique. Remarks by critics especially interested in technique might be pertinent here. If what Addison Hibbard says in 1938 is true, that ”unity, coherence, and emphasis is jettisoned, and in its place is written suggestion, association, and indirection"8 then Faudk- nor in 1929 is an outstanding leader in this trend. L.A.G. Strong9 justifies the novelist's non-sequential technique in the name of experiments in language and form. By the latter, he means the artistic concept of the material rather than his ability in structure. Basically, he is asking the reader to revise his notions of what prose is. Herbert Muller, in s good article on impressionism, says that Faulkner is one of those who have adapted to literature "the technique of the impressionistic painters, especially as it was supplemented by Cesannc.'1o Insofar as it achieves its purpose, impressionism is primitive in its subordination of intellect to emotion.

By the same token, it poetizes fiction, and although, as DsVoto says, the emotion itself may be fascinating, it is Faulkner's, not the reader's. Thus fiction, in the strict sense, is destroyed. As guest editor of an Old South issue of the Saturday Review g£.Litsraturs.11 David Cohn wrote an introductory essay

9 1 Ibid., (August, 1935), 433. 0 1 American Scholar, (July, 1938), 355. 1 Saturday Review 25 Literature. (September 19, 1942), 3. in which he made it very clear that the southern experimental

novel will inevitably be complicated by the complexity of the

South itself. He attributes the seemingly insoluble problems

of the South to race relationships, above which neither white

nor black, including the writers themselves, ean rise; to the

relics of chivalry; and to the phenomenon of white—trash ris-

ing to power, a group which loves only dollars, and hates

equally the old school southerners and negroes. Essentially,

these are the elements which form the society Faulkner gives us. add the social dilemmas of the South to those of eXperi- mental fiction and quite a complex combination results. J.G.

Bruninilz takes a less tolerant stand. his thesis is that the

South is full of pregressive, socially minded thinkers who are

descendants of the old aristocracy, and that this group of modern but not depraved Sartorises and Compsons are making a genuine effort to-solve their problems. The writer, thinks

Brunini, should write sociological novels about these.

Faulkner does: his progressive descendant of Civil War plantation owners is Jason Compson, the most despicable character of his whole roster.

Camille LacColel:5 dodges any real issues when she says of

2.3 m £119. the F_u_r_'l, "Faulkner here makes a generous display, not only of his disgusting lack of taste, but also of a lack of artistic ability, when he employs many of the methods of

12 Commonweal, (April 24, 1938), 711. 13 Catholic World, (August, 1935), 576. 24

that literary impostor, Janos Joy e. The be est criticism

of Faulkner, then, treats him as an emer5in5 tre5e diam with

a puzzling style which is perhaps justified by the material

he treats, perhaps not. The most uncritical and unsympathetic

remarks are typified by those just quoted from Camille wcCole.

It ought to be remeLberei, however, that Miss :eCole probably

:rote from a Catholic viewpoint.

Cf £53.}. £231 Dying, Faulkner sa i:1 that it Was written on a wheelbarrow in a po.vcrr ouse, where he was working: On those

nights, betveen 12 and 4, I wrote $3.5.EEX Dying in six weeks,

without changing a word. 1 ser t it to S.ith ani wrote him that

by it I would stand or fall."15 If this claim is all it ap-

pears to be, hen indeed Faulkner is a writer's writer. Puba

lished in 1950, the novel tells the ste ry of the ooor- hite

Eundren family's forty mile wagon trip through the hississippi

bu ckwoods to Jefferson in order to bury Addie Bundren--Anse's

wife and mother of the feuily--whose uneznbalznzd body, in a

honzo-ma de coffin, lies in the “noon-bed. The trip takes nine

days, durin5 which Addie's coffin is ducked in a flooded river,

Anse loses his team of mules and has to buy another, Cash breaks his leg, which the farily sets with corent, and Darl

sets a burn on fire. Other vicissitudes are met and sloaly

overcome. Addie's first-born, Cash, an eXpert carpenter, had built the coffin in front of Addie as she lay dying, thinking

14 Ibid. 15 Sanctuagy, Introduction, (Modern Library: 1932), vii. in the pride of his workmanship that that was the least he could do for her. Althou5h.id’ie dies early in the book, the tragedy, if it is tra5edy, is hers: here the futility and frustration, not engendered by a decaying order of society, but rather inherent in mankind, and intensified by a pinching poverty which has always been and always will be. The rest of the fahily, Anse, Cash, burl, Jewel, Vardaman, and Dewey Dell, merely emphasize this central theme. host members of the farily have an ulterior motive for going to Jefferson. hnse wants a new set of teeth, Dewey Dell Wants an abortion,

Vardaman Wants to see the electric train in the store window.

At least one of them, hurl, is mentally unbalanced. he has poetic visions of literal events. The Bundrens are related to the Sartorises and the Compsons only by geography.

Again, this book makes a study of motives and causes at the erpense of plot and character. It is told from fifteen different points of View; each chapter bears the name of a character. Sometimes a chapter is only half a line, sometimes a page, sometimes a dozen pa5es. The narrative method employed in each Varies from external first person dialogue to internal dia105ue to pure stream-of-consciousness. In Earl's case, the latter method is tempered by his insanity. host critics think that Faulkner's technique in.£§‘£ EEK Dying is far too brilliant for his subject matter. a New York Times reviewer,16 for instance, admits the great Lmaginative power manifested in this book but thinks Faulkner annoys his reader's emotional

16 New York Times Book Review, (October 19, 1930), 6. 26 faculty by such constant attention to the doltish Bundren family. For this reason, he says that some absolute critical sense in readers must relegate £3 1 £91 213.115 to a "high place in an inferior category" and that the Bundren family is "more amenable to the method Ring Lardner has used on his bail players."17 The critic calls Faulkner's technique extremely subtle but compares it unfavorably with what Joyce has done and what Dostoevsky might do. Faulkner has, he feels, learned a great deal about nothing; that is, his characters' minds. Or to put it another way, Molly Bloom has character, the Bundrens have not. Jewe1--conceived in sin by Addie and the ministero-comes closest to having it, and, the critic points out, is portrayed objectively. The 2iggg_man thinks that Faulkner is a good technician spoiled by his subject matter. He goes too far, however, when he says there is no distinction between Dari, Cash, and Vardamsn. Each of these lives by a different principle, and, though hone are truly vhols characters, the difference is apparent in each. Yards- nsn is guided by childish perceptions, Cash is dominated by what Veblen called the instinct of workmanship, snd Darl is consumed by an insane poetic vision. Before reading Absalom, Absalom 1, Clifton Fadiman had a considerable regard for Faulkner. He is glad to see, in‘gg.§

EEIHQIEEK' an original mind unhampered by the usual platitudes: he is sorry to see this mind preoccupied with s set of "romantic obscssions."18 Insanity, he says, 1. such a limited

Ibid. 18 Nation, (November 5, 1950), 500. 27 field for an artist. Although Fadiman admits the presence of tragedy in Addie and her family, he rather thinks £5.2“221 ingg_is a well written piece of melodrama. Actually, he says, this book is a "psychological Jig-saw puzzle," less obscure than £333 3929.9 and the. m, the object and fascination of which is the horrible way in which "the phosphorescent rottenness of the family gradually reveals itself to the reader."19

Horror based on rottenness has been recognized in Faulkner by critics of his earlier works, but Fadiman is the first to put his finger on it squarely. Even though he is acutely aware of Faulkner's deficiencies, he admires the Faulkner of A: _I_ Lay 21.1215 because he does not explain himself too con- veniently. Unlike other young novelists, he "cannot be . . . ticketed; that is one reason why he deserves attentive con- sideration."20

Winifred Hutchings,21 commenting on the rise of the southern family-life novel, says merely in passing that ££.l 531 M "is a strong and tragic novel about a mountain woman." However, she lumps Faulkner and Caldwell together as "lurid” novelists painting the "darker side of life,"22 and at the same time she strongly suggests that Faulkner is actively fighting for the recognition of regionalism as a literary

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 22Libragy Journal, (July, 1935), 556.

Ibid. 28

principle. Criticism of this kind very nearly'makes Faulkner

a sociological novelist, which he certainly is not. Basil Davenport says that the strain of insanity in

Faulkner, particularly in is _I_ 591 223.135.: "actually brightens

the black despair of the whole, like lightning at night."23

Lightning is terrifying comfort in a thunderstorm; Davenport

doesn't elaborate, but falls back on comments about Faulkner's

technique which generally, he says, "entirely justifies itself." Unlike Fadiman and the anonymous gimg§,critic, he main-

tains that Faulkner has a flair for character, citing the

revelation of forces dominating the lives of the Bundrens as evidence. Apparently, Davenport is thinking of character in

terms of motive. Even the most illiterate of these Bundreus

often have thoughts running through their heads in good, solid

literary sentences. Although this method is clearly a compromise, Mr. Davenport feels that it succeeds partially in its attempt to render ”incommunicable thoughts." In contrast with

Fadiman and the 23233 reviewer, who say that Faulkner's material is inadequate for his method, this one says more accurately that Faulkner's method is inadequate for his startling imagination. However that may be, perhaps the burning desire to express the incommunicable may explain much of the later first class obfuscation which got its start in 2313 M and £112

331;; and to a lesser degree, in is. it. 221, gm. Perhaps the obfumcation is merely part of a sensational bid for fame. If the critics wished to find sensation, they found it in Sanctuagz.

Saturday Review gg Literature, (November 22, 1930), 362. CHAPTER IV

The lurid story of Temple Drake's experiences is. known well enough. Temple, a college student, slips off an_exs cursion train to keep a date with Gowan Stevens. Gowan, looking for liquor, takes her up into the hills, and they both end up, after Gowan smashes his car, at the Old Frenchman place, from which Lee Goodwin sells moonshine. Pepeye, a notorious gangster, with eyes like ”two knobs of soft black rubber"1 brings to this backwoods hideaout Horace Benbow, native of Jefferson, Oxford graduate, and lawyer. Also there are Tommy, Lee's shambling henchman, Ruby Lamarr, ex-prostitute and Lee's wife, an old, blind man, and a miscellaneous assort. ment of Lee's customers and truck drivers. Gowan and Temple are forced to spend the night, but Gowan succeeds in getting away the next day. Temple, after fluttering around wildly, hides in a corn crib. There POpeye, who is sexually impotent, rapes her with a corncob, first shooting Tommy, Temple's self- sppointed protector. Pepeye then takes Temple to a Memphis brothel, where she is a violent prisoner. She becomes directly instrumental in the murder of Red, Papeye's business associate and amorous rival. In spite of Horace Benbow's efforts to save him, Lee Goodwin is convicted of Tommy's death by Temple's false testimony and lynched. Papeye is legally executed for a murder he did not commit. Temple is last seen, devoid of

-‘COCQCD... l Sanctuary, (Modern Library), 2. 30 all feeling, in EurOpe with her father.

The bare framework of Sanctuagy cannot possibly reproduce its sustained sensational horror, which.made Faulkner famous.

Many critics dismiss Sanctuary on the grounds of Faulkner's own statement about it: "I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might just as well make some of it myself. I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks . . .."2 There is no particular reason to doubt this statement. Other critics, feeling that Sanctuagz has real value in spite of its being a pot-boiler, might do well to emphasize Faulkner's further statement about it, in which he says, ”. . . I had to pay for the privilege of rewriting it, trying to make out of it something which would not shame The wmmmmaammmmh ~ - . '3 John Chamberlain calls his review of Sanctuagy "Dostoyefsky's

Shadow in the Deep South."‘ He insists, however, that it is only a shadow which Faulkner casts, for he says that Faulkner is not, like Dostoevsky, interested in ideas, that with the exception of Horace Benbow (who is a symbol of good) no key values are symbolized. He attributes this lacko-for to him it .---£------,

Sanctuagy, Introduction, (Modern Library), vi.

égggg.. vii-viii. 4 New York Times Book Review, (February 15, 1931), 9. 31

is definitely a lacko-to Faulkner's choice of subject matter.

If Faulkner's representation of the South is a true one, then

the South has eliminated positive values, and there is no room.for moral ideas. Chamberlain interests himself more in

the book's narrative technique, saying in general terms that

Faulkner uses highly suggestive words, but that he leaves the mechanics of the horror effect to the reader's inference. He also says that Sanctuagy shows better characterization than do the earlier novels. It is difficult, though, to see who in

§anctua§l is characterized: Faulkner's peeple in it are cari- catures--products of a principle or driving force--rather than' peeple. Chamberlain admires Sanctuary most for its ability to suggest a multitude of unnameable horrors behind the obvious horrors, which,it might be added, are certainly horrible enough.

He doesn't explain exactly how Faulkner does it. He suggests that Faulkner has an unremitting vision of evil, that Sanctuagylg form may grow out of this_vision, that it is a "story of human evil working out its strange and inevitable destiny without respect of persons."5 Temple Drake, says Chamberlain, was ruined "through no fault of her own"--an ill considered statement. Other critics have more accurately seen Temple as the temptress: a vicious temptress because she doesn't know what she is doing. It is the cause of the unawareness, the viciousness, they think, which.Faulkner is attempting to reach. Thus the door Opens to

5 Ibido 52 admit moral ideas, and perhaps Faulkner is more like Dos- toevsky than Chamberlain thinks.

Probably John Chamberlain wrote the New York Timgg review of £EWE.EEI.QE$25 in which he said Faulkner sacrificed his story for his technique, and in which he recommended that

Faulkner "externalize."6 The internal evidence for the identity of reviewers is very strong although positive evidence is not available. If he did, then he has come a crepper when he says, "His power to tell a story has greatly increased since is”;

921.212251 and he has encompassed his increase by externalizing. It is good to see that he hes listened to criticism, . . . "7

He couldn't know in 1931, what Faulkner would say in his 1932 introductiono-that the first draft of Sanctuary had been written and forgotten before 53 _I_ 5:21 W was produced. But the critics have never been Faulkner's teachers.

Unlike John Chamberlain, Evan Shipman maintains that

Faulkner's portrayal of peeple with positive values in contrast with those who have none at all is his "greatest achievement."8 Lee Goodwin and Ruby, he says, are at least hard-- they face life realistically in sharp contrast to all the others. The bootlegger and his wife symbolize real purpose: the rdst of the characters, especially the good Benbow, symbolize soft futility. The contrast is heightened, Shipman

6 The internal evidence for the identity of reviewers is very strong although positive evidence is not available. 7 New York Times Book Review, (February 15, 1931), 9. 8 New Republic, (March 4, 1931), 78. continues, because Faulkner does not insist on it. He

simply lets it appear. Furthermore, he says, gradual appear-

ance of images is basic in Faulkner's technique. Therefore,

he is not a conventional realist. In this drama of violence,

"a strong bias is risked and justified," thus intimating

Faulkner's predilection for the impressionist technique.

Faulkner, to Even Shipman, sees Temple Drake as the eter-

nally unaware person, the person whose life is perennially

lived in viciously flat planes. Simply because she has no

values, no understanding, Temple is unaware of the danger in

her flirtatious teasing, and the danger of actual violence which exists all around her in fear-repressed peeple. For

once, he says, in Sanctuagy, this person has a chance to "play" the "comedy to the end . . . in this novel nothing is

evaded by anyone."9 The revelation of violence thus engendered is almost too horrible to contemplate. But through it

all move, in relative serenity, the "hard" characterso-the bootlegger who is destroyed, the woman who had been a pro-

stitute for the good, sound reason that she needed money, are

symbols of Faulknerian virtue. This, Shipman says, is the real story in Sanctuary, the story which is completed in the

"first half” of the book. Shipman does not mark accurately the dividing line. After the "first half," the style of

Sanctuary becomes to him a "milk and water imitation of what

. . . had been distinguished and heightened language."10

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 34

It is pleasing to note Shipman‘s recognition of humor in

the episode Of Uncle bud and the three madame. One wonders

about his perspicuity, though, when he says Uncle Bud is a

"descendant of Dickens's Fat boy. n1]. Lne wonders, indeed!

H. S. Canbylg agrees with hvan Shipman in determining

Sanctuary's theme as the hard versus the soft. he differs

in including as "hard" all the evil peeplea-"even the worst characters have some code." Temple and Gowan are seen as

truly valueless. More interesting is his discussion of Temple

as a symbol of female depravity. Canby deve10ps this theory

early in Faulkner's career. It later becomes a fundamental

tenet of maxwell Geismar's criticism. The former intimates, without elaborating, that Temple had not the slightest notion

that escaping from her ruin was as simple as walking out the back door and down the road. no, she cannot leave the scene of the rape she fears. by her automatic reaction to her sur- roundings, she herself instigated the act, which it will be remembered, was performed pervertedly. Her depravity "even in her climaxes of terror keeps her hovering like a soiled moth near the danger. "13 This interpretation may not be accurate, but certainly it is more penetrating and suggestive than that of John Chamberlain, who says that Temple's rape was completely divorced from her own action. Perhaps it is also suggestive to say, parenthetically, that Faulkner often uses sensuous,

11 Ibid. 12 SaturdayReview‘gg Literature, (March 21, 1931), 673. 13 Ibid. 35 female imagery to describe his southland. If Faulkner's supreme symbol is woman, and woman is depraved, then there is no hope for anyone.

Canby approaches that point of view when he says that even the virtuous characters bring ruin. Horace Eenbow, who at least has a vision of ideal goodness, tries altruistically to see Justice done Lee Goodwin, but succeeds, hrough the agency of Narcissa, his sister, and Temple Drake, only in assuring

Lee's death. But Canby is not this specific. ne says simply that Faulkner gives us a "community which seems incapable of virtue"1‘ and he does it in such a one-sided emotional way, with, however, the accuracy of the Dutch Masters and the sharpness of vaudevillian caricature, that the peeple in Sanctuary are "false to everything but accident and the ex-

15 acerbated sensibilities of the author." he also comments at length on the appearance of sadism as the dominating note of modern fiction. This is too bad, he says, for it becomes an obsession and an inevitable dead end. Faulkner in this reapect is like Poe, he continues, and the luridity of Poe is new interesting only to the professional psych0105ist. Although

Faulkner has many qualifications of true greatness, his sadism is his fatal flaw.

In 1934, H. S. Canby wrote an introduction to L. S. Kubie's psychoanalytic treatment of Sanctuary.16 It speaks briefly of

14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Saturday Review 2; Literature, (October 20, 1954), 217. 56

the history of neuroses in literature, pointing out that the

classic writer's interest rested with the victim of the neuro-

sis, and that the modern is fascinated by the neurosis itself.

Canby then, after suggesting that the "new realism" of the moderns (Faulkner included) presents neuroses without judging

or understanding them, justifies a psychoanalyst’s appearance

on the stage of the Saturday Review of Literature on the

grounds that the readar must understand psychological facts

to Judge whether or not a writer is truly imaginative or just

showing off. It sounds very plausible. Kubie's article

sounds plausible, too, but, as Canby admits, it is not lit-

erary criticism. It will not be discussed here. Most critics

seeking symbolic meanings overlook a rather important fact:

in the last chapter of Sanctuagy, we learn that Pepeye is what he is because he inherited syphilis from his father. Hereditary

syphilis may not obviate symbolism: it may make it easier to understand.

Clifton Fadiman, at this point still sympathetic toward

Faulkner, agrees with Chamberlain that, in Sanctuary, Faulkner shows a desirable trend toward externalizing-~Fadiman says "exteriorizing"--his style. To Fadiman, it is not character which Faulkner brings out of subjective bondage, but the romantic obsession with horror of Faulkner himself. As he says, "his damned and distorted cosmos is a cosmos. It is not a private belly ache, n17 and by this token, Faulkner is.a genuine

1'7 Nation, (April 5, 1951), 422. creator. His prose, Fadiman goes on, is not only powerful and good, it is too good. The horror of Sanctuary would be Gothic if it were not so intense: "--but instead of the flesh, it makes the mind and viscera creep."18 This very intensity builds up a resistance in the reader which prevents the full effect of horror from reaching hrs.

Temple Drake and Pepeye make up one story, says Fadiman, and Horace Benbow another. Both are related, .nc both are different. Eight years later, this same critic bitterly de- nounces Faulkner for putting two novels in one bindirs under the name The Wild Palms. here, he does not seen to rind.

Red's funeral scene and the episode of Uncle Bud and the three madame is not funny to Fadiman. Rather, they are passages of

"pointless bravura”19 not worthy to be included n this novel which, in its revelation of pure horror, is better, to him, than Elle Sound 53.32 32333 M and is. 5 £21 Dying, , and which was written by one who is "among the most interesting young novelists new writing in America."20

annou-oco 18 Ibido 19 Ibid. 20 Ibido CIL". PTER V

These 13

The chronology of Faulkner's short stories is always

puzzling. Anthony Buttitta, in a biographical essay1 says

that Faulkner's study, in 1953, had a box of novel manuscript

on the floor and a file of over a hundred short stories, many

of which had been rejected before he became famous. Publi-

cation date is not indicative of composition date. 233M,

for instance, originally appeared in Harper's Magazine for

July, 1950. It appears again in slightly different form.in

‘23. Martino, 229 Others, the 1934 collection, and it appears

yet again in yet different form as an integral part of'ghg

Hamlet (1940). There are other parallels.

These is is the collection published in 1931. Victory,

5.2.1. m, 53.}; £113 229. Pilots, and Crevasse are all stories of the var. Victggl 1. probably the best of these. It is a

story of a young Scot who goes to war, murders his sergeant-

major, gets decorated by a mistake, becomes an officer and s

gentleman, and ends, ten years later, by selling matches on the

London streets, still with his waxed moustaches. The other three

range through.various incidents and various degrees of war-time

disillusion. The next six, .1322 Leaves, A Justice, 5 32.9.2 £3:

Emily, 2223 Evening gag, M, and 931 September, all add to

the history of the Jefferson area and its inhabitants. ‘Awﬁggg

_f_o_r_ Emil , widely anthologized, is a well known 3393 Q3 £93932

1 Saturday Review 2; Literature, (May 21, 1938), 6. 39

12222 Evening §2§ is probably the best Faulkner. The last three, histral, Divorce‘ig Na les, and Carcassone are phan- tasies laid in Italy, where Faulkner is decidedly a fish out of water.

The New York‘gimgg? reviewer, again anonymous, presents These 13 as a good introduction for those not yet initiated into Faulkner, saying that his stories are novels in miniature.

Later critics will realize that often the novels seem collections of short stories. The 2&222.m3n0 who identifies

Faulkner's short story technique with that of his novels, says that technique is Faulkner's major preoccupation. Reading

These 13, one sees, he says, that Faulkner is, through his multitude of devices, "creating realism"3 based on pecple rather than on a predetermined concept of people. Then he compares Faulkner to a sculptor, chipping away at his block of marble until the major features of the real image in his mind emerges. With Faulkner, it is the chipping process that is important. ‘gggt'Evening‘ggg is regarded by this critic as the best story for its two-level treatment of terror in children: their instinctive fear of superstition and their naive unawareness of adult terrors. He also defends Faulkner against the charge of morbidity on the grounds that the artist may choose whatever material he likes.

Edvard Cushing4 agrees with the Times critic that technique,

ZNBW 2933 112133 M RevieW, (September 2‘7, 1931), 7.

323$, Saturday Review g£_Literature, (October 17, 1931), 8. 40 or method, preempts other considerations. He remarks pene- tratingly and accurately that, except where plot is interesting in itself»; M £95 @9111, Divorce in Naples--, Faulkner does not even try to achieve the naturalist's or realist's two or three-dimensional character portrait, but that he desires to project characters "in the round."5 Apparently, it was this desire to render experience "in the round" that was behind the merry-go-round point of view in £3 1 291 211335.

Cushing uses the term experiment to mean form rather than syntax, and, without explaining, points to the relatively straight-forward war stories as examples. He further spoils hid sound criticism with the off-hand remark that ”this ex- perimentation in form may not be apparent in the novels, but it certainly is in These 115."6 Can he have read 223.2 ‘M _a__n_d_ .t_h_e_ m, or As A; 1:21 21.1.9.5! or even Sartoris? Faulkner will not be great, says Cushing, until he steps playing with technique.

Robert Cantwellv admits the experimental element in 23222

‘;§. He evidently is thinking of the syntactical kind, for he names the three stories of Italy as examples. Incidentally, it might not be unsafe to guess that these three represent a very early Faulkner. Cantwell emphasizes That Evening‘Sgn and‘ggz September as not only the best but as illustrating

m...... 5 Ibid. 6 Ubﬂi:

New gepublic, (October 21, 1931), 271. 41

most clearly a fundamental principle in all of Faulkner's

best work.a That principle is the omnipresence of a nervous

fear, and, more important, the nmpelling force behind the fear

which gives it movement. As always in Faulkner, Cantwell says,

the cause of the fear or ”nervous strain" is ”in some past

condition, outside the story, not clearly stated. Sometimes

the nervousness, the tension‘ig the story, as innghg§.Evenigg

‘§gg.“8 Ostensibly the story, says Cantwell, is a straight

narrative of a negro woman mortally afraid of her husband's

razor. And this is the way in which the reader accepts it,

until it dawns on hime-this especially if he has read the

novels-othat the real fear, the unnameable in the background,

is some inexplicable thing in the tradition of the white family. The negro woman's physical fear is merely a hang-nail through

which.the fatal virus enters the tale.

In 251 September, Cantwell sees the keynote of all the‘

southern stories, including the novels. It is the story of a lynching, in which the lynchers are opposed ineffectually by

an insignificant barber. The critic says that Faulkner always

‘establishes a society of unequal forces, of ”purposeful violence” on one hand, and "half-hearted protest"9 on the other. He

questibns the realism of this picture, but he admits that it

is executed brilliantly. Would it perhaps make a better story, he asks, if the author made the Opposing forces more equal?

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 42

The war stories Cantwell dismisses as disappointing.

One would think, he says, that Faulkner's peculiar ability to create tension would be particularly apprOpriate here. Again, it might be safe to guess that the war stories are Faulkner's very early work. Insisting that the Jefferson stories are by far the best, Cantwell says that they are vehicles for Faulk- ner's awareness of a disintegrated southern society, destroying itself by an excessive individualism symbolized in family disunity. Thus, Faulkner finds himself involved in a real social problem: particularly real to him, for he is a product of the society he describes. He does not suggest a remedy. He cannot, for he has never been a detached observer. CHAPTER VI

Light in August

Light. in August, published in 1932, is a novel which tells

several related stories in one, a method by now recognized as

typical of Faulkner. It begins with Lena Grove, whose laborious

search on foot for Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child,

takes her to Jefferson, Mississippi. There she does not find Lucas, although he is in the vicinity, but Byron Bunch, a con.

scientious mill worker who inarticulately falls in love with

her.

The mill in Jefferson.is used to introduce, through Byron

Bunch, the story of a.minister living in disgrace and without

a congregation, and that of Joe Christmas, a.mysterious coal

heaver and bootlegger, who, it is later learned, is shaded with

a touch of negro blood. The latter story is told in a long flash back in which the reader learns of Joe's birth, of his

gradual realization, as a child in an orphanage, that he is

part negro, of his formative years as the adapted son of a

self-righteous, persecuting farmer. These years culminate in

murder and flight, and Joe takes up his careening course of

evil which, after a love affair with the middle-aged hiss

Burden, ending in her murder terminates in his own violent death. He is shot and mutilated in Hightower's house, where he has sought refuge, by Percy Grimm, a young incipient

Fascist. Although it is considerably shorter, Hightcwer's story is told in the same way. To the minister, reality exists only 44

in the past. his mind literally teams with grand exploits of

his Civil War ancestors. He does not look back: he is the

past, and although he is pathetically aware of his incongruous

position, he can not resolve his dilemma. Thrown out by a congregation outraged at the substitution of romantic chivalry for Calvinist theology, his wife a suicide, hightower settles

down to live with his disgrace and his past, which.he will not

disavow, in a Jefferson side street bungalow. The stories of

Joe Christmas and Eightower are inextricably woven together.

Lena Grove, calmly aware that the necessitous facts of life

and death.must be met, moves through both stories serenely

untouched by the foreboding aura of bloody violence all around her. {Lighgkig August closes, melodramatic in its happiness,

with the assurance that Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, and the newly

born baby will live a life of happiness tagether.

J. Donald Adams says that this novel of “white trash,

plain folk of a better strain, whites of a higher order,

Negroes"1 is draped on the frame provided by Joe Christmas's

story, and that Hightcwer, symbolizing good, is inserted as

an object against which evil may batter. Christmas he sees as

pure symbol of inherent evil. He says the drama of evil versus

good is here related with "an intensity and rush of force“ stemming from vivid use of the "fresh-minted phrase."2

’That is accurate enough, but recognition of Faulkner's ability

chuuoﬁ--- 1 New Yerk Times Book Review, (October 9, 1952), 6. 2 Ibido to render Violence is nothing new. Faulkner, says Adams, evidently produced his work up t°.§$§§£qi2 August out of a blinding personal disillusion. now, he says, Faulkner is a better novelist because he is better balanced. Faulkner continues to shock hi audience for the sheer fun of it,

Adams.continues, but he has benefited by leaching his power.

To illustrate this new equilibrium, Adams devotes the heart of his article to a "new" aspect in Faulkner's work.

Enter, he says, for the first time as a major theme, justice and compassion: "he ~erzits some of his people, if not his chief protagonist, to act sometimes out of motives which are human in their decency; indeed, he permits the neverend Ligh- tewer to live his life by them."3 Justice and compassion are not necessarily identical. It is true that Lena Grove re- ceives a sort of justice. It is equally true that higatower and Byron Bunch are compassionate men, but Adams has made a questionable statement-sec questionable, indeed, that one wonders whether or not he has read Faulkner attentively. Who, to ideas, is the "chief protagonist" of Ligggﬂig iggggt? If the story is centered on Joe Christmas, is he not the central character? And if Ldams sees Christmas as a symbol of evil, what then? It is easy to name a half dozen truly compassionate characters in Faulkner's work who are integral to his scheme of things. Eany of these strive for Justice and some occasionally achieve it: Joe

Gilligan in Soldier's‘ggz, the hill boys in_§artoris, Aunt

Jenny in Sartoris and others, Peabody, the doctor, partic-

.. .W”-.. 3 Ibid. 46 ularly in Sertcris. and __z_:_ 3'.- ELI-[128' Addie bundren, horses

Benbow in Sartoris and Sanctuc , the harbor in‘ggz September, even quentin in 21;: Sound £151. £122 £1311. All of those appeared before Light éE'LQﬁUSt she published. In the letter novel

Faulkner may show Justice and compassion, but not for the first time. Furthermore, "decent" is hardly the term for hightower. he is human enough, but he lives in a vision of chivalry. If

Civil tar ohiVulry is decent, then it must be remembered that Kightowcr's here would be a Civil Ker Colonel like John Sur- toris who, directly after the war, shot a good many or his neighbors through the head in order to let in the light of justice.

is in his criticism of Scnctusr , Evan Shipmun, revi sing

Light ig'suﬁust, notes that Faulkner, unlike most moderns who struggle for honesty through realism, risks a strong bias. he does not hesitste to irnmutise his realistic material for the sake of the dress itself. "ixcepticnal and perverse impulses"4 still drive his characters on in their queer and often violent lives. Faulkner, he says, writes books which clearly stand spurt from others, which embody a prose truly poetic when it is good, truly boring when it is bad. shipmsn comments on other critics' comparison of Faulkner to the grout Aussiun novelists,5 but he rather thinks that comparison not accurate.

That which, he says, in the Russians is a holy fervency becomes

..00. 0‘--- 4 'Ncs Republic,(0ctober 26, 1932), 500. 5 John Chamberlain on Sanctuugz, 3.3. 47

only in Faulkner" e ssv: :e weariness with the pup;)ets he means to destroy-"6 __£E§.in tst,Au Shi.pmsn continues. embodies Faulkner's

stsndsrd "faults" and "virtues.” The pronounced lack of

ﬂty er gendered ty highly different subjects often seems like

deliberate obfuscation, and the high-flown rhetoric becomes a

piidli:13t in3 w;en appliei ts ordinary events. The omnio

rcsence of violence, he says, is less sniobsession with Faulk- ner t: an s peculinr convc ntion: it is "as formal a matter an

en Elizub€*hsn tragedy of blood."7 However, he continues, in

passages which might rennire all sorts of elaborate prose,

Faulkner does not become high-flown, and thus achieves a much

better effect. else, he says that Faulkner "has a rare feel.

ing for the poetry of rural speech"3 with which he accurately depicts geo,rsphiccl and social nuances.

Shipnan wiiires most the short group of chapters exposing

the weird love affair between Joe Christmas, the mulatto. and

4133 Burden, the abolitionist spinster. Both, he says, are

warped and inhibited outcasts, and thus both doomed to tragedy.

But the important thing to note about Shipmsn's criticism here

is his recognition or the love affair as an independent short

story. In the short story, he says, the sensation of s specious

.rate, dolibc‘stuly forced on the resder, disappears. And he

tnsphssises this stutencnt when he continues with "I find in all

--_--a—--u-- 6 New Republic, (October 26, 1932), 300.

Ibid. run- Ibido his work the importance of the fragment, this srtificislity

of t? e whole." "9 This is important for it marks no bo3innin3

of an attitude which regards Fatlkner cs roither a novelist

nor short story writer, but as one somewhere in between the two.

Dorothy an Loren, 10 in discussing Fa ulkner's method, regrets that he sorely tells us " .tut s cazractz- does a. without

ever 8:31n3 shut he feels. "11 This statement, cospszed with

her opinion that 13;. Sound 353253-1155; is Feullmor's test,

app cmrs incomprehensitle. actually, it is tie Joycesn tech-

nigue to .hioh she objects: she wishes Faulkner oould describe

motion objectively. Lppliei to Joe “‘ nristmss, her criticism

is par tiell y right. Fa lkncr often does confine himself to

Joe's actions, but there are nsny occasions n which.se are

literally ir siie Joe's mix1d. xiss Van Loren would not agree,

however. Sfie ru es outs comparison with the Aussies novelists

on tress 3rounds, ssyin3 that a Dostoevsky is interested in "reticcinction," while Faulkner presents activity which occurs

[only 1 n in t. e vise rs. «13 Faulkner scold to really orest,3- she

says, if he could ca pture feelin3. Perhaps she is overlooking

the possibilities of the impressionistic technigue, more espe-

cdslly Faulkner's; a te-Ln quo at 13 to su33ost such depth.of

feeling; that no writer och capture it all. Ilor criticism calls

‘to mind Cleanth brooks's canonition: we need more intelligent

readers.

0...... -0 9Ibid. 301. 1 1.Rstion, (October 26, 1932), 402. llbido Ilzlbido 49

To Frederick lnonpson,15 Liiht‘ég,ﬁgﬁust. servos by its unrelieved development of evil, as a catharsis for evil itself. Faulkner, he implies, is in too dennl" earnest to be branded as a more sensationalist. Lvil brooding evil in "practically every characto- in a small, is slated co 1munity"14 is the central theme of Li‘ht in Lgnu st, he s ays. It is n theme which su‘oordimtes that of Christmas's inner conflict, the cor stunt strU33le to free hirself from the taint of negro blood which impcls his evil acts. lvil trcc:din3 cvil, ho"evcr, leaves a nunbcr of charactozs in Li‘nt in “Enust unexolat mi: Lena,

ﬁi3LtoncI, Bunch--nono of hose fit the theory. Even Percy

Grimm, who shot J so, was born with viciousness already in him.

Thompson, unlike most, praises rather than d_rns PsuL“ner'a dazzling rhetoric, his “t111cket” of nerds, for, he 82 ,5, "he has the supreme genius of being able to invest even humble peeple and little things with a s éden, stran3e immediate- noss; they suﬁdonly stand out in nal:ed objectivity . . ."15

Critics almost unanimously agree that Faulkner has this curious poser. but they are decidedly in disagreement in nttril uting it to its prayer cause.

atom E. S. Canby says that Light‘ég.ﬁufust is "everything that life is and can to except the imagination of great minds highly touched which does not enter this book,”16 he is singing

O.-- 0-.... 13 Connonweal. (November 50, 1952), 159. 14 Ibido 15 Ibido Saturday Review g£_Litoratngg, (October 8, 1952), 155. 50

high praise. Tampering this praise. he finds to Faulkner's

detriment s strong romantic tendency to over exploit phantasy. Faulkner's romanticimm, he says, is far too unrestrained, a

result perhaps of his effort to establish s new style. and, he

speciously suggests, perhaps emanating in part from his ex-

perience with "the fundamentalist pulpit in his youth."17 Here then, to Canby, is the full-blown tradition of re-

mantie despair, for life as Faulkner records it is s constant

struggle with the rear growing out of acceptance or rejection by life itself: the theme or £553 in Amet is "the oppo-

sition of those whom life accepts and those whom it rejects.”18

This is a trifle vague, but Canby does not elaborate. He is

also vague when he says the characters in this book are 'impressiwe, in that different inner world which always lies ' shout and beyond Faulkner's Mississippi . . .' and lets it go

st that. But when he says that the inhabitants of Faulkner's

world either rise above the terror to "poetic symbolism."19 or drop under it into crime, he 1. close to the truth. Lens

Grows. however. is not perceptibly terrified. nor is Byron }

_ Bunch in his stolidity, nor is Hightower afraid-not really. Be is Just puzzled and resigned.

Apparently, Canby dismisses the genesis of ”that different

inner world” of "Faulkner's mississippi' as resulting only

O...----m 17 Ibid. 18 . Ibid. 15 Ibido from over stretched romance. Still, he has said that this book in "everything that 11:. is."20 It is odd that Canby does not look further for a source of the terror nearly always present in Faulkner's work. Lvidently he feels that

Faulkner has gotten rid of his sadism, or at least romanticised it. as Canby said he should in his review of Sanctuary, for he ends the review of Eight 1.3 £18222 with the words "the country lives again, becomes possible for human welfare in Lens and her ohild,'21 who. it will be remembered, comes to a happy end.

It must also be remembered that Lens Grove represents no fundamental motivating force in the novel, and that simple, innocent people are not always symbols. . It is obvious that Faulkner, except in his first two novels,

‘gzlgg, and a few short stories, is trying to render some sort of picture of the South. It is equally obvious that he wants to do this in his own way. Curiously enough, the View we do ‘get through Faulkner's work is in striking accord with that

.found in the work of W. J. Cash, a reputable intellectual historian. ‘Cash published an article, "The Mind of the South," in 192922~by 1941 it had grown into a bookzaocin which he said that the recipe for the southern mind was one part romance, one part individualism, and one part God..that the belief in

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 American Mercury, (October, 1929), 185. 23“ 2'29. Mind 2; £133 South, (KnOpfx 1941). 52

these three was anything but figurative. He says that the mind of the South is still determined by the soil. rather than by the mills. It is characterized by a "magnificent incapacity for the real. a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic . . .

whatever pleases him (the Southerner), he counts as real.

Whatever does not please him, he holds as non-existent.'24 If these remarks were clothed in the language of William Faulk- ner. and the conflicts implicit in Cash's analysis were‘rcpre.

sented by the peeple of Jefferson, Mississippi, a Sartorie, or an 53 3 221 213.95! or a Eight in August might be reproduced.

The process might eliminate much labored search for symbols.

and the reader might discover that he was deep in an old-

fsshioned story after all.

.W 24 American harem, (October; 1929), 185. CHAPTER VII

Green Bogghg‘gg. Martino, and Others, Ellen

Green Bough

In his early years, Faulkner read poetry voraciously.

Occasionally he published a poem of his own. It is not surprising that, after he had become known as a writer, he should publish the Green Bough, a collection of forty-five poems which appeared in 1933. Very few peeple have read the Green

Bough: neither the poems nor their criticism are significant to the main stream of Faulkner's work. Both will be treated briefly. Although it would be necessary to quote a dozen poems to show adequately a cross section of Green Bough, perhaps one will suffice here:

Man comes, man goes, and leaves behind The bleaching bones that have his lust; The palfrey of his loves and hates ls stabled at the last in dust.

He cozened it and it did bear Him to wishing's utmost rim; But now, when wishing's gained, helfinds It was the steed that cozened him.

Reading this kind of poem, William Rose Benet2 asks where, in this poor imitator of Housman, do we find the vivid person- ality seen so clearly in the novels and short stories? He leaves the question unanswered. Benet compliments Faulkner on

1 Quoted from New Republic, (May 3, 1953), 358, but it also appears in Green oug . 2 Saturday Review 2; Literature, (April 29, 1935), 565. 54 his "excellent prose,"but he wonders why his poetry is so med- iocre. Faulkner, he says, seems a good student of the moderne but their poor imitator. 9323 m. to Bcnét, is a collection of the standard poetic expressions liberally sprinkled with

Swinburn and the pre-Raphaelites. Likewise, the Nation's anonymous reviewer says that Faulkner's poetry is a mixture of "A. E. Housman, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, T. 8. Eliot, and other poets of very different talents."3 He disagrees with Benet, however, when he says that Faulkner has deveIOped a style "fairly his own:"‘ a style which, in its literary for- mality, is distinctly different from that in the prose works. Faulkner may be identified as a.modern, continues this critic, because "he has the modern's ability to analyze the feelings, the modern's certainty of disillusionment."5 Both critics point out Faulknerts tendency to sing sweet songs in his poetry rather than to writhe in agony; neither is ecstatic in his praise. Of the two criticisms, Benét's is the most penetrating.

If the reader really wants to find poetry in Faulkner, let him turn to the more grandiloquent passages in the novels.

23, Martino, and Others

The chronological difficulty again prevails in a discussion of 2;. Martino, and Others. For this reason, criticism which

-O----¢-b-- 3 Nation, (May 17, 1953), 565. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 55 treats Faulkner's technique as a process of dev010pment may in-

Validate itself. Frequently Faulkner's short stories overlap to form a vague sequence, but this volume contains fourteen which are distinct entities. Some of them are mentioned here. 23, Martino is a story about a sick doctor's magic spell over a young girl. £95 222.2 relates :1 day in the life of a rich, violent hunter and his spiritually crushed wife against a backdrop of southern scenery and poor whites. Beyond attempts to portray a nebulous, disillusioned world of life after death.

3.35 is a phantasy of personal and perhaps self-induced horror. In W 2133, an unlicensed aviator is driven nearly crazy by the consummate stinginess of his Jewish wing-walker who, when the loss of forty dollars is involved, Jumps from the air- borne plane through a barn roof into a haystack, lands ges. ticulating, and dashes up to shake his fist under his employer's nose. th £91139. is a murder story in which the interest is centered on horror; Eng-k2 is a standard murder mystery, with the interest centered on the surprise denouement. In 3112

About, a war time bomber pilot and a boyish torpedoeboatman give each other rides. Each is impressively surprised at what the other is doing. EH presents a girl-”almost another

I1‘emple Drake-owho rather successfully vents a vaguely motivated murderous impulse. ﬂash is the story of Colonel Sutpen's murder; a story later included as an integral part of Absalom, Absalom!

In Mountain Victogz, an admirable Confederate officer, return. ing home after the war, is ambushed and killed by the family with whom he has spent the night. 56

William Rose Benet, dubious about‘ggggg‘ggugh, adapts

quite a different tone when he says that Faulkner, in the

short story, "is doing some or the most powerful and original

work that American can claim in our time."6 In Opposition to

those critics who regard 23, martino, and Others as slick fiction, Benet maintains that Faulkner derives the form of

these stories organically: that they are part of himself,

particularly as they show a sardonic sense of humor. This may be true although it does not adequately explain Eggkg, or

ESEEEHQEEEF He says that Elly and Mountain Victory are the

best stories in the collection, and he points out the curious

circumstance that the men on whom each story hinges are sus-

pected of having some negro blood. Although sonét ioplios that Faulkner's best work has miscegenation as a central theme, he does not elaborate this

fact's significance. And, like J. Donald Adams in his criticism °f.£$§EEMlE_Au523tt Benet recognizes the presence of compassion ' in Faulkner's scheme of things: Mountain Victory, for instance, "is not that exclusive parade of various types of ignobility

to which a good deal of Faulkner's former work has accustomed us.'7

Louis Kronenberger takes quite another view of Faulkner's

excellence, saying that his method, which promised so much in

is; £21 21.1.55! is now "in a state of collapse,"8 that his -.-.3---.. Saturday Review of Literature, (April 21, 1934), 645.

.ggyg. 8 New York Times Book Review, (April 22, 1954), 950. 57

theatrics obscure even the simplest communication, that he

is pompous, and that he is nothing but a ”hurried virtuoso

with a bag of tricks."9 Furthermore, he says, the tricks are

not even now. It is one thing, he says, to excuse overwriting

in a young novelist; quite another to excuse it in a writer

with some pretensions to fame. Although to Kronenberger

Faulkner's over-wrought method is his great blight, he feels

that it is typical, and thus worthy of discussion. Faulkner,

he says, never operates directly on the reader's emotions. Rather, he overwhelms the nerves and senses, and he does it by

a sort of incantation which when successful creates a tremendous

impact, but which when it fails, is merely puerile. Incantation

has elsewhere been called the method of impressionism, and,

althoughugg, Martino, 322.922223 does not fully illustrate Faulkner's impressionism, it might be well to balance Kronen- berger's objection with the excellent remark L.A.G. Strong makes about Joyce's technique in creating a ”real" Dublin day,

"More than photographic description is needed for such a re-

construction. Magic is necessary, and magic proceeds by incantation."10

Significantly, Kronenberger picks as best E§§_§Qggd which,

he says, is a straight story about Fear. The bizarre, the remarkable, he continues, has only a limited interest, and

Faulkner, like Poe, will linger in memory only as an example

of virtuosity.

9 Ibid. 10 American Mercury, (August, 1935), 456. Phillip Rice,11 discussing technique, thinks that Faulkner reaches his supreme achievement in the short stories. The novels are interesting, he says, because they tell good stories, because they sensationally startle peeple, because the language is "dazzling," and because they are experimental. Faulk- ner's pre-occupation with experiment--hice compares htm to

Virginia Woolf-ospoils his work when set alongside the experimental novels of Thomas Kann or James Joyce. The latter have something to say in addition to their new way of saying it. If,

Rice says, the novels wash Faulkner out of the main stream of literary tradition, the short stories suck him back in. Reve- lation, rather than deveIOpment, of character and event, continues this critic, is Faulkner's main structural device, in which the trick of execution depends on withheld meaning. The ”Jolt of realization'12 at the end is essential. This device obviously adapts itself to the short story. If it is used in the novel, Rice says, the reader either loses interest while he waits for the meaning to became clear, or he succumbs to the buffetings of too many jolts. This critic accurately adds that Faulkner is a dismal failure when he makes a direct approach to ideas; witness the completely uncalled for soliloquy at the end 0f.2222.£§2220 and the phantasmagoria masquerading as a philosophic doctrine of death in Beyond. Only Philip Rice genuinely admires‘gg. Martino, §£g_0thers. Critics generally

11 Nation, (April 25, 1954), 479. 12"“““' Ibid. 59

Judge it as the worst volume of Faulkner's collected short stories.

Ellen

In‘gylgg, published in 1935, Faulkner deserts his Jeffer- son, for a group of Junketing aviators who have come to the

Mardi Gras air show in New Orleans. The story has a plot which however, is submerged, for neither Roger Shummnn, the race pilot, nor Jack, the parachute Jumper, nor Laverne--Roger's wife who sleeps with either man indiscriminately--nor Jiggs, the mechanic, nor Laverne's little boy, fathered either by

Roger or Jack, is the central character. The action of‘gylgg reveals itself through a six-foot ninety pound, drunken newspaper reporter who supplies enough aberration to make the book s Faulkner novel. Roger, in an outmoded plane, gets into the first race prise money-~two hundred and ninety dollarso-by dint of expert though hessrdous flying. Because hotel rooms are not available, the reporter, who is covering the races, and who has confusedly fallen in love with Laverne, takes the troupe home with him.

All drink from a gallon jug of absinthe, but especially the reporter and Jiggs. Jiggs, still drunk the next day, neglects to service the engine. It fails in flight, and Roger, in swinging clear or the course, smashes up. Although he is un- hurt, Roger is without a plane. Aware that Laverne is again pregnant--this time by the Jumper-one feels that he must get a chance at the big prize money. Using fantastic means, the reporter helps Roger get a notoriously dangerous plane. Roger 6O

flies it next day, and, when he crashes into the bay, is

killed. Jack and Laverne, using the reporter's borrowed money, take the little hey to Roger's father in Ohio and leave for

parts unknown. The reporter, drunk again, ends by writing a

purple tribute to the dead Roger.

Malcolm.Cowley says that this simple story, distorted as it is ”retracted“ through.drunken eyes, is a "voodoo dance of

the passions,“15 partly because of the reporter, but more be-

cause of the style in which it is told. The style he says, is

highly poetic. If‘gylgg is read aloud, he says, this becomes

apparent. Cleverly illustrating his point, he rearranges a

prose description:

Above the shuffle and murmur of feet in the lobby and above the clash and clatter of crockery in the restaurant the amplified voice still spoke, profound and effortless . . . saying, "I have not changed a word or a punctuation.mark, but

have merely divided part of a sentence into separate lines at places where the voice instinctively breaks.'1‘ ‘gzlgg is full

of such passages, he says; the incessant quality of the poetry

becomes as pervasive a force as the off-stage drum in Emperor

‘ggggg. He also points to other devices, dramatic rather than fictional, which enhance the effect. People in the book, he says, are identified by their "cue" characteristics, and, in

addition to the throbbing poetry, the back-stage area is full

of professional sound effects. It is an ingenious analysis.

-“C O---.-. 13New Re ublic, (April 10, 1935), 254. l‘Ibid. 61

Equally ingenious, but less sound, his explanation of

Faulkner's departure from Jefferson rings a hollow note. ,

Ellen's symbolism, he says, would not be comprehensible--as if Faulkner ever worried about that-.in the rural Jefferson area; so he moved to New Orleans. Symbolically, he says, sex and danger equal speed and machines, respectively. The hero,

Shumann, is killed by the latter, plus the efforts of the reporter who, as a "literary weakling,"15 is outside the realm of both sex and the machine. Thus, says Cowley, we have a “legend of contemporary life.” It fits, but it is a little too neat. Then too, Cowley is fond of ”legends" in Faulkner. He finds them, much more reasonably, in his later criticism.

Ben Ray Redman takes the firm stand that Faulkner, in‘gzlgg, is a ”mannered, tricky, extremely clever, and talented sensationalist."16 What to Cowley is poetry is to Redman.merely pretension. Faulkner, says Redman, delights in filling up empty space with the illusion of complexity. The oblique approach, the elliptical method, the disarranged time are Faulkner's conscious devices to make the reader feel he is getting something for his money. Consequently, he continues,

.gzlgg,does not present life, and the aberrant picture which is presented lacks validity. Conceivably, Redman admits, Faulkner is trying to be symbolical. If the characters symbolize anything at all, then Faulkner errs seriously in making them ”focal

--- C- 0--.».- 15 Ibid. 16 Saturday Review 25 Literature, (March 30, 1935), 577. 62 points of a factual narrative otherwise designed to carry a conviction of reality.”17 Redman also castigates Faulkner for his improbable situations; say, the way in which the reporter raised money, or, for that matter, the way in which the whole story occurs. It is a common charge.

When William Troy, toward the end of his review, says that gylgg_is, thus far, Faulkner's best novel, he has rendered high praise for the wrong reasons. He sees, in lon a strong novel of the post war lost generation, with the cadaverous reporter a cartoon of the "typical hero of the post war generation of poets and novelists,"18 and the pilots equal to Hemingway's toreadores. It is true that Faulkner labors under a sense of loss, or perhaps deficiency, but the lost generation motif, never strong with him, died an early death. But Mr. Troy finds

the best symbol of all when he says the pilots and planes are literally "indistinguishable from the theme of flight into the

life of action . . ."19 Ruin, however, he says, cannot be

excaped, and Faulkner bends all his efforts to show this. The feeling of doom is congenial to Faulkner, but it is not rooted in anything so transitory as the World War: it is rooted in the soil.

m, to Harold Strausszo opens new vistas. Before ﬁll-.25,

17 Ibido 16 Nation, (April 3, 1935), 393. 19 Ibid. 20 M York Times Book Review, (March 24, 1935), 2. 63

he says, Faulkner's style had steadily degenerated from the bizarre representation of the violent and sexually abnormal to

the bestial-dmitigated by compassion, however, in Light‘ig Augusto-to the weary virtuosity of 23, Martino, and Others.

The difficulty lay, he continues, in Faulkner's absence of a

tangible subject matter, and in his fear of becoming common-

place. Now, says Strauss, we have all of Faulkner's old

power with a "daylight” theme. The reporter in‘gylgn becomes, by his protective action, "the central link in the steel chain

of cause and effect,"21 for he gave Jiggs the liquor which was eventually responsible for Shumsnn's death. In the fineness with.which.this theme is wrought, Strauss says, is the "day—

light theme.” Furthermore, Faulkner's consummate skill is

apparent with the reader's awareness that, though the chain

of events is plainly in sight, suspense is progressively heightened. It is true that the chain is in‘gzlgg. However,

it would be equally easy, using this theory, to make of the book an allegory of the drunkard's progress-ofrom one drink

of absinthe to death in only three days!

21 Ibid. CHAPTER VIII

Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalmnl,nwhich appeared in 1936, reaches the high point for all time in that peculiar style-.many critics call it deliberate obfuscation--30 distinctly Faulkner's own. Yet, in spite of its obscurity, running through it is a stronger, more complete narrative than in any of the other Faulkner novels.

About 1810, Thomas Sutpen, a poor white hill boy new to the ways of Virginia tidewater society, is shocked to the very core of his being when told, by a plantation house slave, to go around to the back door when he comes to the big house. There and then he resolves some day to own land and a big house himself. Later, as the trusted manager and son-in-law of a wealthy white

Haitian sugar planter, he thinks he is near his goal, until he discoveres that his wife, and consequently his son Charles Bon, is part negro. Sutpen leaves Haiti, taking with him twenty half-wild negroes.

He appears in Jefferson riding before a wagon loaded with his negroes and a manacled French architect. Acquiring a hundred square miles of land (”Sutpen's Hundred") from the Indians, he sets about converting the wilderness into a cotton plantation, forcing the architect to build a mansion of hand hewn timbers and home fired bricks. In Jefferson he is known, but not audibly, as "the demon.” Several years later, the plantation is thriving;

Thomas Sutpen has a white wife, a daughter, Judith, a son, Henry, and a social status equal to that Of the already established

Compson family. 65

The children grow up, and Henry Sutpen goes to the Uni- versity of Mississippi to study law. There he meets and becomes attached to Charles Bon. Henry, not knowing that he is

Charles's half-brother, takes the latter home with him for the holidays. Charles becomes engaged to Judith. Thomas Sutpen priVately tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother, and

Henry, blindly loyal to his friend, instantly gives his father the lie, throws up his patrimony, and rides out with Charles to Join the Confederate army, for the Civil War is Just break- ing out. Henry and Charles fight four years together. Just before the war ends, Sutpen, now a Colonel, tells Henry further that Charles is part negro. Charles rides, with Henry beside him, back to Sutpen's Hundred to claim Judith as his bride. Henry, aware that incest and miscegenation are about to be con- summated, shoots Charles dead at the gateway and flees to Texas.

Thomas Sutpen, on his return, unsuccessfully attempts to rebuild his ruined plantation. Finally, he starts a cross- roads store. Dasperate for a male heir, he offers marriage to

Ellen Coldfield, the sister of his now dead wife, if she will first bear him a son. She recoils in horror. Still desperate, he fathers a child on Milly, poor white granddaughter of Wash

Jones. 0n learning that he has begotten a girl, Sutpen pro- vokes Wash into killing him.

Judith, Ellen Coldfield, and Clytemnestra, who is Thomas

Sutpen's half negro daughter, remain at Sutpen's Hundred. They bring there Etienne, son of Charles Bon and his New Orleans octoroon.mistress, and treat him with a mild cruelty. Knowing he is part negro, he labors under a sense of wrong. As a young 66 man, he marries the most negroid woman he can find and has an idiot son, Jim. itienne and Judith die of smallpox. when, in 1909, Clytemnestra burns the house destroying herself and

Henry Sutpen, who has secretly returned, the Sutpen family attains its hellish apotheosis. Only the idiot "Jim Bond" is left.

Obviously, this plot contains enough.materia1 for a dozen novels. But the amazing aspect of this complicated story is Faulkner's refusal to tell it. nuentin Compson, who drowned himself in June, 1910, saw Sutpen's Hundred burn. working backward from this fact, he and his Harvard roommate Shreve imaginatively reconstruct the action of Absalom, Absalom! from scraps of evidence. Small wonder that critics scream in desperation at Faulkner's indirection. In that classic example of critical exasperation, "Faulkner, Extra-Special,

Double-Distilled,'1 Clifton Fadiman throws up his hands in defeat. Faulkner, he says, deliberately employs a set of devices to obscure his narrative. ﬁe says of one of them:

This cheerful little fable is filtered through the medium of a style peculiar to Hr. Faulkner. It seems peculiar to me, too. First, we have the hon-Step or Life Sentence. The first two and a half pages of Absalom, Absalom! con- sist of seven sentences, corposcd of IE3, 155, 9 (something wrong here), 146, 66, 93, and 135 words respectively. Average: 104. To penetrate hr. Faulkner's sentences is like hacking your way through a Jungle. The path closes up at once behind you, and in no time at all you find yourself entangled in a luxuriant mass of modifiers, qualifi-

1 A Subtreasurygof .Qmerican Humor (New'York; 1941), 545. ‘The review appears ed orIEIna Tin y The New Yorker. 67

cations, relative clauses, parenthetical phrases, interjected matter, recapitulations, and other indications of a Great Style. All of Mr. Faulkner's shuddery inventions pale in horrendousness before the mere notion of parsing him.2 .

Fadiman continues in this vein, finding in the place of meaning, a clever artificiality of words. Absalom, Absalom! he thinks, is a contrived melodrama of lunatics in which a specious illusion of tragedy is precariously supported by cr3pe paper pillars of rhetoric.

Clifton Fadiman is not alone in his conviction that this book is a clever sham though few critics have expressed themselves as devastatingly. Harold Strauss says that, in Absalom, Absalom! ”Hr. Faulkner is ambushed in words,“5 that this tour gauggggg,fails. He thinks that Faulkner has fallen back on style to hide the banality of his theme. In commenting on

‘gzlgg, this same critic said that Faulkner had excised his fear of banality, that he treated his theme by "daylight."‘ In

Absalom, Absalom! Strauss says, Faulkner has reverted to his old fear of the commonplace which has nearly always been the cause of his rhetorical complexity. He finds this a significant index to Faulkner's work, for he says, ”It represents an entirely new departure into complexity for Faulkner. He has been complex before, but never uncommunicative."5 Granting the

-C”.-“‘.. 2 Ibid., 647-8. 3“ New‘York Times Book Review, (November 1, 1936), 7. d ' ' "'m""“"“ . Ibide' (March 2" 1935). 2. 5 Ibid., (November 1, 1936), 7. 68 pointless obscurity, says Strauss, Absalom, Absalom! is still notable for its superb "hypersensitive examination of the flow of mental images during moments of violent physical action,"6 and for its passages of beautiful, if irrelevant, blaz: verse. Malcolm Cowley has always approved of Faulkner. While he recognizes the obscurity in Absalom, Absalom! he excuses it on grounds that Faulkner is incurably romantic.7 Hevolting subject matter, he says, does not make a realist; nothing is less perspicacious than the common Judgment of Faulkner as a torrid realist. Introspective romantics, says Cowley, write about themselves as sounding boards for life, and their books inevitably reveal a symbolic meaning running through the veneer of a literal subject. Faulkner’s self, he thinks, is ruled by a demon, the "ghost of the haunted castle, "8 which is the South with its tragic history. The saga of the Sutpen family, Cow- ley continues, is the literal subject of Absalom, Absalmn! and the family mansion is the symbol-ealmost the literal representation-oof the "haunted castle."

Faulkner "can and does write realistically when his demon consents. He can and does give us the exact tone of the Lissis- sippi voices, the feel of a Mississippi landscape, the look of an old plantation house rotting among sedge-grown fields,"9

6 Ibid. b New Republic, (November 4, 1936), 22. r . Ibid. 9 Ibid. 69

Cowley says. But he thinks that faulkner's obsession with the ghost of the Southo-his demon-«is so compelling that all detail not contributing to demonology's essential effect of horror is simply omitted. Thus he continues, Absalom, Absalom! is not s clear book; rather it is in the tradition of the ”satanic" poets and the ”black” novelists-«Byron and Baudelaire, Monk

Lewis, Hoffman, and Poe. Cowley says that the 'ghost' which almost mechanically

Operates the Sutpen curse was originally conjured by Thomas's relationships with negroes. Thus, the whole Sutpen saga becomes s romantic allegory of the rottenness, rooted in slavery, which is the South. Faulkner, he maintains, neither reasons nor argues his point: "He is giving us perceptions rather than ideal, and their value is not statistical, but emotional. To the critic their importance lies in the fact that they explain

0. great deal not only about Absalom, Absalom! but also about Faulkner's earlier novels. His violence here and elsewhere is not a means of arousing pointless horror: it is the expression of a whole society which the author sincerely loves and hates and which he perceives to be in a state of cats-trephic decay.'1° Nevertheless Faulkner fails in Absalom, Absalom! . for ”in the process of evoking an emotion in himself, [he] has ignored the equally important task of evoking it in the.reader.'11

Although somewhat more esoteric in Judgment than lalcolm

Cowley, William Troy's interpretation of Absalom, Absalomi reinforces Gowley's criticism. Calling his review the 'Poetry

.O--.”--. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 70 of Doom,"12 he centers his criticism on the theory that Faulk- nor is more nearly an intensely subjective poet than a novelist. Faulkner's method, he continues, is similar to that of

Henry James or Marcel Proust except that the latter, even in their most subjective moments, always maintain some "normal social angle on the facts.“13 Faulkner, Troy thinks, presents unremitting personal vision with no reference to Objectivity: his form is organic, following no known conventions of prose.

That, he says,is clearly the method of poetry. In consequence of this poetic method, says William Troy, the reader can not expect logical structure in Absalom, Absalom!, for the book is built on a foundation of horror arising from its author's ravaging emotion. Thus, too, the multiple point of view in Absalom, Absalom! is not Justified; the narrative voice is always Faulkner's own-u'the aggravating ventriloquiMI of method does not disguise the fact that everything in it is the product of the same unrelieved and unrelieving vision of existence.'1‘ By "vision of existence," Troy means Cowley's 'ghost.' Troy, however, does not attribute the ghost's presence to slavery: he merely says that it represents the 'irra- tional"16 element in the cosmos. The consummate skill with which Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom! has presented his intu-

capo-om-.. 12 Nation, (October 31, 1936), 524. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibido 15 Ibid. 71 itive vision.makes this book "not only the best he has given us but one of the most formidable of our generation. . . It possesses the awful impressiveness that comes from exhausting any attitude or vision, however wrong and one-sided, of its- last measure of intensity."16

The literary impressionists, says Mary Colum, 17 create a more nearly real illusion of immediacy than the realists. If Faulkner, as a supreme impressionist,creates this illusion in Absalom, Absalom! she continues, he also rides his hobby. horse blind. 'He is too dazzled by wondrously involved sounds,” and he has a ”narrative manner in which there is no action and hardly any dialogue . . .,' says nary Colum. 18 The demonic, she says, does not create Faulkner's style: the ex- aggeration inherent in his style creates the demonic from that which is merely unique. Thus, she bases Faulkner's tragedy on the artificiality of his method. Nevertheless, she feels that the tragedy of Faulkner's vision is no less real and terrifying. “Faulkner's novels are very disturbing,“ she says, ”because they give us the sense that human beings will never be satisfied with anything that society can give them, that . . . there is no possibility of any social change making very much difference in human existence."19

0.....”.. 16 Ibid. 17 18Forum , (January, 1937 ) , 35 . Ibid. 19 2.1.. 72

Bernard De Voto says that Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! repeats the material of his earlier novels in a style designed

to hide the repetition. This book is strikingly similar to ‘Eighg‘ig.August, he points out: both.Etienne Bon and Joe Christ- mas are treated cruelly, both run amok seeking revenge and

forgiveness, both defy the universe. And, he continues, in both books, “the same gigantic injustices are bludgeoned on

the same immeasurable stubbornness and stupidity in the same

inexplicable succession.“o The themes, too, are identical; both express Isome undimensional identity of fear and lust”

leading to an ”ecstasy of abasement, fulfillment, and eXpia- tion.'21

The characters in Absalom, Absalom I, De Voto says, are

fundamentally human. To illustrate Faulkner's deliberate eb-

fuscation he asks, thy can't they act by a conceivable human

standard? Why, for instance, does Sutpen pointlessly with»

hold vital information from his son? Why, when he tells Henry

about Charles Ben, does he withhold half the story? The an-

swer to De Voto is obvious; Faulkner contrives Sutpen's actions

to motivate plot, which depends for effect on obscurity. Thus,

Faulkner is not demonic so much as he is possessed by the char- latan's spirit. Horror in Faulkner's work is not significant to De Vote.

It arises, he says, when Faulkner probes the prtmitive mind of

20 21.325.93.921 £91331 25 Literature, (October :51, 1936), 3. Ibid. 73 man, but he shrugs it off as an experiment in titillating

the senses. Faulkner can only probe, he says, with his hocus-

pocus witchcraft, which is a poor substitute for reason, or even legitimate mysticism. Thus, if the reader peers through

the apparent symbolism of Absalom, Absalom! , he sees nothing. This is too bad, he thinks, because ”the talent for sensuous fiction shown in Sartoris and the rich comic intelligence grudgingly displayed from time to time, especially in Sanctu- ary, have been allowed to atrophy from disuse and have been covered by a deep tide of sensibility.'22

Qua-uncou 22 Ibid. CHAPTER IX

The Unvanguished

From the fly-leaf of‘ghg Unvanquished (1938), the reader

learns that six of its seven chapters originally were published

as magazine short stories. Although it is more esoteric than the others, the seventh also could have been published separate-

ly. It is difficult to think of‘zgg Unvanquished as a novel.

Yet, regular in its chronology, with little symbolism and much

fast-moving action, it more nearly attains conventional novel form than any of Faulkner's other works. It has the strength

and weakness which characterize all hybrid species.

.252 Unvanquished tells of the Sartorio family during the

Civil War and early reconstruction. Its principal characters

are John Sartoris, Rosa Millard, mother of his dead wife; Bayard Sartoris, his son (Old Bayard of the novel,Sartoris)3

Drusilla Hawk, Bayard's cousin and later his stepmother; Ringo,

Bayard's negro comrade; Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy mcCaslin;

and Ab Snapes, a horse trader. The chapters, or stories, are titled 'Ambuscade,” "Retreat,” "Raid," "Riposte in Tertio,‘ Vendée," “Skirmish at Sartoris,” and 'An Odor of Verbena."

When the action begins, Bayard and Ringo are twelve years old. John Sartoris, a guerilla Colonel, is out with his troop.

Vicksburg has Just fallen. Bayard and Ringo learn.what the war means when the Yankees begin to stream.past. One platoon,

looking for John Sartoris, burns the family mansion and rides

off with a chest of silver. Rosa Millard goes to the Yankee

camp to claim.it. Exasperated by too much silver and too many 75 negroes, the Yankee General gives Rosa an order for ten times what she asked. Back at Sartoris Rosa, her conscience subdued by necessity, forges the order many times to steal Yankee horses. Eventually Rosa is killed by a competitor. Bayard and

Ringo catch Ab Snopes, indirectly involved in the killing, and beat him.unmercifully, and they track down and kill Grumby, Rosa Millard's mumderer. Returning home, the boys find John Sartoris has arrived ahead of them. With him is Drusilla, who has ridden at his side for a year as a private soldier. The war is over, and John Sartoris starts building a railroad to recoup his fortunes.

The ladies of the neighborhood force a marriage between John Sartoris and Drusilla, refusing to believe they have not sinned. .hhen Bayard is twenty-three and a third year law student,

John Sartoris allows himself to be shot in a duel with a polite ical Opponent. Drusilla, who once had made love to Bayard, gives him a pair of duelling pistols which he refuses to use.

He conforms to the code by letting his father's killer shoot at him.once, but he will not fight. The book closes on this note of mild resignation.

Bernard De Voto calls The Uhvanquished a collection of top-flight magazine stories. None, he says, approaches

That.Evening gun} in quality, and 'none edges into the diabo- lism of 23;. Martino, and only the last of them. 53 29.9.5 93:

Verbena, employs the super-saturated lachrymatory gas under

1 In ThOBC 2.20 76 high pressure that is hr. Faulkner's most irritating medium."2

De Voto regrets that the stories in‘ghg,vnvanquished are nothing more than good adventure. Faulkner, he says, mysterious- ly attributes several family curses to the Civil War, and now, when he writes directly of the war for the first time, he does not inform the reader further. The insane actions of modern

Sartorises and Compsons, he thinks, can not stem from the pre- eminently normal peeple of The Uhvanquished. De Voto evidently has forgotten that at least two curses (Sutpen and Compson) began years before the War, and the stigma on the Sartorises hinted at in "An Odor of Verbena” results not from the war but from too much personal killing. On the night before he is shot, John Sartoris says, "I am tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity or evil. Tomorrow, when I go to town and meet

Ben Redmond, I shall be unarmed.'3

The author's clarity in this book results both from pre- scriptive magazine editors and Faulkner's tendency always to write clearly of the Sartorises, DeVoto thinks. The "widest interest"‘ of these stories is in their explanation of the mystifying events and peOple in Absalom, Absaloml.(1936) and £EEEE.$§ August, (1932) he says, adding, ”The same policy is followed withlghg Saturday Review puzzles: if you can't work the Double Crostic by yourself, you can always get the answer

-Q-..---P~. 2 3Saturday Review‘gg Literature, (February 19, 1938), 5.

The Unvanquished, (New York, 1938), 266. 4 Saturday Review 2£_Literature, (February 19, 1938), 5. 77 next week."5 DeVoto implies, however, that The Uhvanquished

approaches that "sensuous fiction shown in Sartoris"6 which, be said in his review of Absalom, Absaloml., had ”been allowed

to atrOphy from disuse and (had) been covered by a deep tide of sensibility.”7

Harold Strauss treats‘ghg Unvanguished as a novel important because it adds necessary details hitherto lacking to the Faulko

nerian legend of Jefferson, Mississippi. In it he sees Faulk~ ner's dream.of the Old South: the southern families are not yet suffering from psychological aberrations, and the "Shapes

and Burdens move unrebelliously in their appointed orbit."8

It is surprising that Strauss, as familiar with Faulkner as he is, makes this uncritical statement. Again it must be remembered that the Sutpen and Compson curses, with their atten- dant aberration, were Operating during the Civil War. Can

Strauss have forgotten that John Sartoris shot the Burden men when they attempted to elect a negro as Town Marshall?

Or that Ab SnOpes was terribly beaten for his treachery to

the Sartorises? It is true, however, that The unvanquished is conspicuously free of psychological aberration.

Demands of magazine editors do not adequately explain Faulk- ner's new clarity, Strauss continues. Rather, he has "consciously developed two keys: a major key for the dream (of the Old South),

and a minor key for the crumbling of the dream against the sharp edges of reality."9 ‘22: Unvanquished. in the major key,

”0-6-0-“- Ibid. 8Saturday Review 2£_Literature, (October 31, 1936), 3.

'ibid. 8how Yerk Times Book Review, (February 20, 193B), 6. r——--—-———-————- Ibki. 78 omits the rhetorical devices characteristic of the symbolical minor key, he says. John Sartoris‘s death and Bayard's refusal to avenge it are the only symbolical events in the book, he asserts. The former represents the ”disintegration that is to set in," and the latter puts Bayard "no longer close to the dream."10 Kay Boyle‘s review of 222 Unvanquished sounds like a High. tower dream of the past in Eight i3 Luﬁvst. It is a study of Bayard's developing maturity, she says, and effusively comments, "This process of development, subtly, heedfully, skillfully accomplished through the seemingly inscrutable metamorphosis of speech makes the book a record not only of an individual's, but a nation's, possibly a civilization's progression from violence to a passive and still undefinable bewilderment.”11

Faulkner's ability to invest anything with an intense glamour, she continues, compares favorably with that of Poe. ”If writing remain one of the Arts . . .,' she says, ".., .then it can quite simply be said of Faulkner that he is the rare, the curious, the almost ludicrously authentic thing."12 It is hard to accept this effusion as criticism. Earle Birney, like halcolm Cowley, postulates a theory of "two William Faulkner's.”13 One, he says, is an "epic mystic":

10 Ibid. 11 is}! Republic, (March 9, 1938), 1:56. 12 Ibid. 13 Canadian Forum, (June, 1938), 84. 79

the other an "expert short story writer."14 The epochal

theme in Faulkner's works, he continues, is circuitously developed; one must read all of Faulkner to apprehend it even

vaguely. Actually, he says, the epic is never developed, for

Faulkner, with his rhetorical bombast, writes all around it. .222 Unvanggished fails, he thinks, because its superb short

story technique inadequately expresses the southern epic, without which Faulkner is lost. hr. Birney says that this book

also betrays Faulkner's ignorance of sociological truth; he looks at slaves "through the dulled and provincial eyes of a slave-holder."15 Thus, this critic demands that Faulkner either write lucidly of his epic, or write realistic sociology, neither of which he has ever done. CHAPTER 1:

The Wild Palms

Published in 1939, The 3.52.9. M, like M, departs from Jefferson. The action is laid in New Orleans, the flooded

Mississippi Valley, Chicago, Wisconsin, Utah, and San Antonio. Actually, it is two stories: "Wild Palms" and 'Old Man," with alternate chapters devoted to each. The first occurs in 1937, the second in 1927. In ”Wild Palms," an impoverished young

interne, Harry Wilbourne, and a married woman, Charlotte Ritten- neycr, fall in love. With twelve hundred dollars Harry has found, and.with the husband's consent, they leave New Orleans for Chicago. In Chicago, Charlotte earns a little money by making and selling figurines, and Harry writes pulp stories.

Afraid that growing domesticity will impair their love, they move to a cottage in the Wisconsin woods where they stay until

the food (their last bit of wealth) runs out. Back in Chicago and still afraid of cloying domesticity,

Harry gets a Job as company doctor for a Utah mine. At the mane, which is Operating in receivership, they live with the nine foreman and his wife-oall four sleeping in one room for warmth. Before the foreman and his wife leave, Harry successfully pcrforms an abortioncn the wife. Harry and Charlotte

stay on through the winter. From the mine, they go to San

Antonio, where Charlotte discovers she is pregnant. She insists that Harry operate on her. Against his will, he does,

and inflicts a mortal wound. They go to a New Orleans beach cottage. Desperate at the last moment, Harry summons a doctor, 81 and Charlotte is taken to a hospital to die. (Faulkner cpcns I'Wild Palms" with this scene.) Harry is sentenced to fifty years in the penitentiary. He refuses to take the cyanide

Charlotte's husband brings him, preferring grief to oblivion. In ”Old Man," a nameless convict, serving as an emergency worker in the 1927 Mississippi flood, is given a boat and told to rescue a woman in a tree and a man on a cotton house. He picks up the woman, who is pregnant, and they are swept away on the flood. The convict, desiring only to deliver the woman and return to prison, is driven steadily downstream. he does not know, nor would he have cared, that the warden has dropped him.from the roster as dead. For seven weeks he undergoes a series of harrowing adventures. When the woman has her baby on an island crawling with snakes, the convict cuts the umbilical corn with a tin can cover and ties it with a shoelace. He is rescued and turned loose. He is shot at twice-~once by soldiers with a machine gun while he tries to surrender. With a Creole he hunts alligators. As the flood subsides, he begins to work up stream, getting odd jobs as he goes.. Although he once gets into trouble with his temporary employer's wife, he never touches the woman with whom he has lived in the closest proximity. As he eventually surrenders to the sheriff who returns him.to the prison, he says, 'Yondcr's your boat, and here's the woman. But I never did find that bastard on the cottcnhouse.“ He is given an extra ten years for trying to escape. "Old Man” closes with the convict, serenely secure on his prison-farm, dis- gustedly uttering, 'Women--«- 1'2

1The Wild Palms, (New York: 1939), 278. 21bit, 339. 82

The dual narrative of The Egg £21.93 has occasioned much critical controversy. Some critics say that the two stories are completely unrelated; others that the alternating themes of flight and refuge attain a contrapuntal effect. Clifton

Fadiman says the latter interpretation has all the critical weight of a publisher's advertisement. Judicious guessing, he says, will reveal parallels between "Wild Palms" and ”Old Man,“ but that ”does not alter the fact that solving a puzzle and reading a novel are separate mental activities. The theme of “Wild Palms" is flight: . . . the theme of "Old Han" is refuge (opposite of flight-cheat pattern, eh?)'3 To him, the two stories are merely "an endless sandwich!‘ Fadiman.criti- class this book with considerably more virulence than he did

Sanetuagz, which, he said, "is really two novels."5 Charlotte, he says, is a "Dostoevskian nymphomaniac” and Harry a ”naive doctor”: the actions of neither have the slightest relation to human nature. Both want freedom for their love, he continues, and are punished for it. The convict, he says, does not want freedom, and he is punished, too. Inevitable punishment of human aspiration to whatever end is not only typical in Faulkner's novels, Fadiman asserts, but superficially contrived. 0f "Wild Palms,” he says, "the love equals suffering formula . . . is simply an inversion of the

3 The New Yorker, (January 21, 1939), 60. ‘Ibm. 5Nation,.(April 15, 1931), 422. Also, Chapter IV of . 83.37. 3'1. 83 traditional love equals bliss equation, and no less absurd."6

And of both stories, he says, "there is something feeble about a creative imagination that, before it can deal with human beings, must call to its aid a flood, two abortions, various extremes of physical suffering, near-madness, a woman in labor, quantities of blood . . . , and human degeneracy‘gg libitum.” or the two, "Wild Palms" is the best story, Fadiman thinks, for at least the reader knows Faulkner's purpose. In "Old Man," on the other hand, should the reader laugh or shudder? he asks. The truth is, Fadiman says with a plaintive, martyred air, The M M is a melodrama in which Faulkner tries "to see how much misery he can.make his readers stand."8 Opposing Fadiman's critical position, Peter Monroe Jack says that The Egg 221.133 is "two long short stories, the characters of which have nothing whatever to do with each other, but the emotions of which are counterbalanced and intensified by each.other.'9 The embtions, he says, grow out of the themes ”waste of life" in "Wild Palms" and indomitable though un- reasoning courage in "Old Man.” The former is a common story made remarkable when interlined, as it were, with the latter. Jack's most trenohant criticism, however, is that dealing with.ths typically Faulknerian extravagance of style in 'Old nan." Faulkner's ability to retard time during action, thinks

6 The New Yorker, (January 21, 1939), 60.

Ibid., 61. r Ibid. 9— 33.3.! York Times Book Review, (January 22, 1939), 2. 84

Jack, is the principal device with which.he attains his nerve-

shearing effect. To illustrate, he quotes a paragraph from "Old Man,” part of which is:

The bow began to swing back upstream. It turned readily, it outpaced the aghast and outraged instant in which he realised it was swinging far too easily, it had swung on over the arc and lay broadside to the current and began again that vicious spinning while he sat, his teeth bared in his bloody streaming face while his spent arms flailed the impotent paddle at the water, that innocent-appearing medium which at one time had held him.in iron-like and shifting convolutions like an anaconda yet which now seemed to offer no more resistance to the thruia of his urge and need than so much air, like air; . . .

This is half of the paragraph.telling the reader ”The bow began to swing back upstream." Obviously, it retards time and, Jack says, because "Old Man” is one long reel of violent action,

the frequent use of this device is particularly apprOpriate.

Its weakness, he continues, lies in its dependence on words alone, and yet, the action “is credible only as he tells it.'11

Jack has penetrated the central fact of Faulkner's style; he has explained the purpose of the bombast--01ifton Fadiman's "Non-stop sentence'ocso characteristic of Faulkner's novels

of violence.

Alfred Kazin prefaces his review of The Wild Palmslz with

a neat little essay on the general nature of Faulkner's work.

The gist of it is that Faulkner writes not prose but poetry in

.Q---’----- 10 The Wild Palms, (New York: 1939), 145. ll New‘York Times Book Review, (January 22, 1939), 2. 12 New‘York Herald Tribune Books, (January 22, 1939), 2. 85

his effort to 61p10r8 the ulthmate depths of human despair.

Perhaps this is true: Faulkner has been called a post by other critics.13 Kasin's direct criticism of _T_h_9_ 1.219. m, however,

embodies so many glaring inaccuracies (of reading, not Judge

ment) that it is useless. For example, he says that the convict

was on a chain-gang, that he found the boat, that ”at the point

of death.from cold and hunger (he) suddenly encounters a woman on the river, and out of pity and desperation . . . takes her into the boat with him.u‘ Also, he moves the Utah mining snap into Colorado. Actually, the convict was not on a chain- ) gang but a prisonofarm. He was given the boat so that he might rescue the woman, which he did. Kazin.makes other errors

serious enough.to negate the value of his criticisms

Malcolm Cowley thinks that the two narratives forming‘ghg M £21m: are separate. .The protagonist of each, he says, ends in prison, but that is their sole link. Cowley says that "Wild Palms" and ”Old Man" represent, respectively, those

people who ”fight and die to create their own precarious world'16

and those others who ”will perform deeds of . . . heroism to

escape from the need for moral effort."16 The story of Charlotte

“M‘-“-. p 13 halcolm Cowley on lon, and The Wild Palms, Chapters VII and x, and Wil am.Troy on Absalom, KEsalmm! , I‘Chapter VIII, 3010 New York Herald Tribune Books, (January 22, 1939), 2. 15

New Re ublic (January 25 ‘ 1939) I 349. 16- ' Ibid s 86

and Harry, he says, is much too intense, and that of the

convict, which could have risen to great heights of intensity, slights the potential of its narrative material. Thus, though side by side, ”Wild Palms” and “Old man" do not produce the

effect of counterpoint. In this review, Cowley retains his admiration for Faulk- ner's style, saying "the style is clearer than in‘gzlgghor

Absalom, absalom i. There are only a few paragraphs of the high-

flown gibberish . . . that Faulkner writes when he is trying

to explain a complicated emotion.'17 Following his bent,

Cowley arranges the phrases in part_of an emotional passage

of ”Wild Palms” into what he calls free verse. Faulkner writes

the passage thus:

. . . so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will C6380 to bee

And Cowley's verse:

30 when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.19

"What would he (Faulkner) do, I wonder, with a five act tragedy in blank verse?" muses Cowley. This remark becomes significant criticism when the reader realizes that each story in The Wild

“0... O. C- 17 Ibid. 18 The Wild Palms, (New York: 1939), 324. The text is in ”Ethics e ‘Eg! Re ublic, (January 25, 1939), 349. 87

Palms is divided into five chapters. CIUaPTER XI

The Hamlet

‘223 Hmnlet (1940) is Faulkner’s last published novel.

Although a strong narrative runs through it, it often appears to be, like The Unvanquished, a collection of related short stories. Many of its chapters-o'Spotted Horses," ”The Hound,” and others-- have been printed in.magasines. In a letter to Ialoolm Cowley, Faulkner said,"’1 wrote them because Spotted Horses had created a character I fell in love with: the

itinerant sewing-machine agent named Suraff. Later a man of that name turned up at home, so I changed my man to Ratliff

. . . Meanwhile my book had created Snopes and his clan, who

produced stories in their Saga which are to fall in later volumes: . . . This over about ten years, until one day I decided I had better start on the first volume or I'd never get any of it down.”1 Whether'ghg'ﬁamlet is a novel or a collection of stories is unimportant: it does narrate. In this tale of the ShOpes family's rise to power, Faulkner, as usual, indulges in many side excursions which, in terms of plot, are irrelevant. host amazing of these is the section lyrically describing the love of idiot Ike Snapes (Faulkner

‘23; to have an idiot) for a cow. It is Justifiable only as an example of Faulknerian extravaganza. However, if the reader

thinks of'TQQDHamlet as a geographical representation rather

than as a plotted novel, he will see that the irrelevancies

l The Portable Faulkner, (New Yerk: 1946), 366. 89 are integral to Faulkner's purpose.

The story cpens about 1890 with Ab Snapes's arrival in Frenchman's Bond, a tiny village eight miles from Jefferson.

From Will and Jody Varner-othe village economic lords-ans rents a farm. Using the threat of arson Ab's son Flam gets

a Job as clerk in Will Varner's store. Flem steadily usurps

the Varners' power until the store in effect is his. As Flem rises in power, his relatives appear in Frenchman's

Bend: Eck Snopes becomes the blacksmith, 1.0. SnOpes becomes

the school teacher, Flem's cousin becomes the store clerk. When Eula Varner becomes pregnant by a local boy who deserts her, Will Varner marries her to Flem. Flem, realising the goods are slightly damaged, demands and gets the last remain-

ing bit of Varner property as part of the bargain. With this property, he succeeds in defrauding V.K. Ratliff, the shrewd

sewing machine salesman, and the most likeable man in the

county. Having outsmarted everyone and acquired all the value able property in Frenchman's Bend, FlemLmoves into Jefferson. The reader finishes‘ghg Hamlet with the feeling that the rest of the Snopes clan will soon follow. Calmly spiteful, cheating on principle, the shapes men are characterized by their pro- digious desire to squeeze nickels out of farmers.

Clifton Fadiman satirically labels 233 Hamlet "sound, Grade B Faulkner,' Faulkner, he says, is up to his old tricks, in- cessantly parading murder, lying, stealing, wife-beating, sexual abnormality, and idiocy before the confused reader. The action, he says, is motiveless. Faulkner contrives unusual situations

to prove Plan the meanest man in the world, he asserts, adding 90

”cos preposition I for one would be willing to accept without all this argument."2 Repeating his comment on The iii-9.. £2223!

Fadiman wonders when the reader of‘ghg_lhmlet should laugh, when shudder. And finally, he wonders what Faulkner'waats to do with his mixture of 'niggling cruelties and this general store gossip.'3 Perhaps Mr. Fadiman should consult Cleanth

Brooks who, it will be remembered, asked for more intelligent readers. Hilton Rugoff thinks that Faulkner's work, of which The.

Hamlet is typical, paints a picture of the South which is certainly convincing, even though it may not be true. We watch, he says, ”as through the windows of a bathysphere, distorted creatures moving through a weird twilit world, per- forming before our eyes, casually, grotesquely, shamelessly, the most astonishing acts." These "distorted creatures," he continues, are products of the decayed Southern tradition. But the peculiar force cf'ggg Hamlet,he adds, lies in its author's power to impress on the reader his identity with the snakes in the Faulknerian pit. Rugoff pays high tribute to Faulkner's mastery of fictional effect when he says that the Shapes tribe "seep into the hamlet until they stretch across the surface of its life like a film of scum.'5 This book is not, however,

-- C . use“.-. 2 The New Yorker, (April 6, 1940), 73.

Ibid. 4 New York Herald Tribune Books, (March 31, 1940), d. 6 Ibid. 91

a study of pure evil symbolized by the Snopeses, he continues,

for its excessive grotesqueness engenders a weird humor which mitigates the evil. That Faulkner is still preoccupied with the abnormal is shown by the section devoted to the Shapes idiot, Rugoff says; a section in which ”with a seeming insight

that must cue something to sheer imagination, he reproduces the world as the imbecile must see ito-a rudimentary universe

known only through the blows it deals his five senses, and, in

this instance, dominated by the animal/he warships."6 Although the idict's love scene is an extreme example of

Faulkner's lofty style, other sections of‘ghg Hamlet aspire to the same heightso-achieve what Rugoff calls ”clotted” language.

This special Faulknerian language renders sensual impression

ideally, he says, but when Faulkner 'wallows in.wordqf7 when he exploits them for themselves, ”meaning is lost in endless

sentences that unwind themselves like gorged snakes."8 Stephen Vincent BenSt effectively answers Fadiman's question, What is Faulkner trying to do with his 'niggling cruelties and

this country store gossip?"9 For he says, “Reading the Hamlet

is like listening to the gossip of a country store, with its

cruelty, its extravagance, its tall stories, and its deadly

cement on human nature-abut a gossip translated, heightened,

-O------6 Ibid. h Ibid. 8 G"" Ibid. The New‘Yorker, (April 6, 1940), 73. 92

and made into art."10 Benet comments on Faulkner's style in

the usual manner. Using approximately the same terms as Rugoff, he points to the stylistic virtues and faults of‘ghg

Hamlet. He implies that Faulkner's deliberate artistic interest

in form and language excludes all else. Thus, Flem Shepes and his crew are not social symbols: they are merely the vari-

colored homespun with which.Faulkner weaves his tapestries. He says, ' . . . all this material, the violence and the lasi. nose, the nightmare and the trepic warmth of the deep South,

is brought together and orchestrated by a masterly hand.

Peasant humor and peasant horrorn-both are there. And first,

last, and always, Mr. Faulkner is a writer."11

It is unfortunate, says nalcclm.00wley in his review of Thg_§gmlg§ that Faulkner's work treatihg the struggle between

Old-school Sartorises and modern, grasping Shepeses is obscured by his style. The reader feels, he continues, the superficiality

of the splashy, brilliant prose: it raises the theme of struggle ~to a higher pitch than the characters involved in it deserve.

The arson, rape, incest, murder, and sexual perversion, he says, are beyond the capabilities of Faulkner's two-dtmensional

characters. We are made giddy by a dose of literary laughing gas. As he says, "one admires the author while feeling that most of his books are Gothic ruins impressive only by moonlight.'12

10 nSaturday Review‘gg'Literature, (April 6, 1940), 7.

Ibid. 12 New Re ublic, (April 15, 1940), 510. 93

Faulkner, says Cowley, does not write a tragedy of the

Sartoris caste, but a specious allegory which borrows a false dignity from bad poetry.

In‘ggg Hamlet, Cowley continues, Faulkner for the first time bathes the theme of struggle in the light of day: ”The scene is a community so humble and remote that it is outside the plantation system: it might exist almost anywhere in the

American backwoods, from Florida to Oregon.”13 Thus, to Malcolm

Cowley, Faulkner, inwghg Hamlet, is much closer to a clear expression of his haunting dream of the South. By that token, he has gained considerable stature as an artist.

Cowley points out, however, that Faulkner retains some of his old faults. Ike Shepes's love for the cow, he thinks, was included to deliberately shock the reader, and it is obvious to him.that the book is not structurally unified. But he finds a quality new to Faulkner in‘gggbﬂamlet: it is that of friend- liness. I'Pity he has shown in the past,'he says, but never before the amused liking that he extends to almost all the peeple of Frenchman's Bend. He likes their back-country humor, he likes the clean look of their patched and faded shirts, he likes the lies they tell when swapping horses. In a curious way, he even likes the invading tribe of Snopeses; at least he likes to write about them.'1‘ Thus Cowley sees indications in ‘22:,Ham1et that the promise which Faulkner's work has always

13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 94 made but never fulfilled is slowly beginning to materialize.

He hepes that the “further wolumes"15 mentioned in Faulkner's

letter will substantiate his judgment.

Viewing‘ghg Hamlet with refreshing common sense, Burton

Rascoe takes Faulkner's critics severely to task. "Hr. Faulk-

ner," he says, "is an extremely talented man, with a fine sense

of values, which is sometimes confused by his inordinate comic sense." Invariably, he says, the New York reviewers misin.

terpret Faulkner's Jokes. Perhaps, he continues, Faulkner

ought to tell his critics, "that what they are liable to take

as profound criticism of the socio-economic situation in the

South and as a document of the utmost social significance is

only a Joke which every southern reader will understand."16

'ghg_Hamlet, continues Rascoe, is full of superb tall tales in

the strict oral tradition of the South, and it grieves his sensibilities to see them so grossly misinterpreted by stony- faced New‘Yorkers. Applied to‘ghg Hamlet, this comment is refreshing criticism, indeed, but it must be remembered that it

hardly explains 2113. W .939. the, FED Eight _i_._g A r'ust, M

Evening‘ggg, and a dozen other Faulkner tales of horror.

n---.---- 15 A Snapes trilogy, which has not yet been produced. 16 . American Hero , (June, 1940), 245. CPL". PTh‘R XII

GO‘DOWQL,MOSBS Faulkner's dedication of‘gg Down, Hoses (1942), his last published book,1 announces his theme:

To Mammy

Caroline Barr Mississippi [1840-1940]

Who was born in slavery and.who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love

For at the root of these seven related stories lies Faulkner's deep-seated respect for the force of Southern negro-white relations.

Was is a hilarious story about Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy

McCaslin. It tells how, chasing a runaway half-caste, Uncle Buck climbed into bed with Miss Sephonsiba by mistake, and how, had he not been the poker player he was, he would have been married the next day. Underneath this very funny story runs the McCaslin brother's fundamental disbelief in slavery.

The Fire and the Hearth relates the smoldering pride and sense of integrity which Lucas Beauchamp, a negro in the male line of white HcCaslin descent, has nursed through his sixty- seven years. He has lived his life on HcCaslih land owned by the Edmonds family-swhite, descended from the McCaslins through the female line. It isealong story, involving nearly every-

1 The brief genealogy of the Compson family appended to The Portable Faulkner (1946) had not hitherto been published. thing from miscogenation to buried treasure, and it is told

in.a series of time shifts covering fifty years. .Egntalogg 3.3 M describes the actions of a huge negro who, inarticulately broken hearted at the death of his wife, enters a crap

game and kills a white man for cheating. Be is lynched. 2.1.12 213 Peoole serves as a preface to 252%' In it,

Isaac EcCaslin learns to hunt, killing his first deer at major

de Spain’s camp. Young Ike also learns, through the half

Indian, half negro Sam Fathers, something of the primitive spirits of the land embodied in wild animals. In‘ghgwgggg, he learns even more. Interest is centered on Old Ben, an in-

vincible bear, and the men and dogs who for years try to kill him. Tritten in five sections, 2 all but the fourth treat

directly of hunting. In the latter, Isaac learns, in a com-

plicated way, that the curse of the South is the old one of

slavor~. In 2:;33 Autumn, Isaac HcCaslin, eighty years old,

on his last hunt with a party of younger men, one of whom is

sexually entangled.with a negro woman living near the camp.

In this miscegenation, old Isaac sees the continuation of the primal, fatal curse. ELEM! W, the short title piece,

relates how the business men of Jefferson, out.of a vague sense

of duty to an old white family, bring home the body of an exe-

cuted negro murderer.

In reviewing the theme of racial conflict in 29 £03, W,

Horace Gregory thinks that the black characters often emerge

with more dignity than the white, for the negroes possess the

2 140 pages long. "01d Han," in The Wild Palms, is only 154. 9?

twin virtues, humility and pride. Yet it is the clashing or

these virtues that produces he violence, the personal struggle,

he says, end he points to as 23329.2(}. 33 Hearth as an example.

Cf The Old Peogle, Gregory says, "In this story, as well as in

isolated passages of prose scattered throughout the present

volume, hr. Faulkner's gifts invite comparison with those of

Herman lelville in Pierre and Hathaniel has horne in Kossss

m 31.932 IZ-cnse."3 Faulkner, he says, is a {gifted master of "imaginative fiction." 222“§233.13 a less sensitive story than

EQEHQEQ Peogle, savs Gregory, but it adds weight to Isaac

HcCaslin's vision of reality: the vision of primitive gods of the wild soil who, superior to any force, will eventually destroy the white man for his ignorance of them. Isaac's vision, ex-

pounded in the complex, genealogical fourth section of‘ghg Bear, leads Gregory to remark, " hat he has to say lies far beyond

the all-tee-hunan conflict between negroes and whites in Miss-

issippi or the more telling of unearthed crises-nuississippi

and its people represent, so I suspect, Er. Faulkne"s glimpses

of whatever Captain Lhab pursued in the ?h1te “hale. The

search has many pitfalls and desolate swamps in the mississippi

landscape, and one cannot say that Er. Faulkner has driven

through ) {or navigated) all of then with equal skill or brilliance."4 Faulkner, Gregory thinks, has quite definitely matured as a writer.

5 New York Herald Tribune Books, (may 17, 1942), 2. 4 Ibid. 98

Hilton Huger? essentially agrees with Horace Gregory's

criticism ex ept that he feels the racial conflict is one of

cles;os rather than iniividuals. Furthermore, he says that

Faulkner eXpertly dremetizes the negro-white mixture Without penetrating to the roots of the "negro problem." By implio

cation, he doxsnﬁs that Purlkncr he a sociological novelist. In the title piece (ﬁg‘gggg, Ioees), "There is a suggestion,"

he says, "that the master-slave relationship was somehow en-

nobling, but the story carries conviction. There is something

rancidly nostalgic in the wry Kr. Faulkner keeps turning back

to a period in the South wtich hes elsewhere in America become only another part of the pest."5. The ancient horror of con- flicting primitive emotions cxoressed by Faulkner's bizarre style, he continues, is mitigated by a humor which is a "warped dosecndent . . . of frontier tall-tales."6

Supporting Gregory, Auger? agrees, for the same reasons,

that The Beer is the most sirnificant u). of these stories, and he likewise alludes to z“obi" Pick. Kc penetrates deeper than

or" however, when he observes that the sentences in The

Bear attempt to ”include everything, just as it occurred, and

as uninteruptedly as thought itself.”7 Malcolm Cowley, in

The Portable Faulkner, reinforces Eugoff's Judgment when he says of The Bear, ' . . o Faulkner carries to an extreme his effort

5 How York Herald Tribune Books, (may 17, 1942), 2. 6 Ibid.

Ibid. 99

toward getting the whole aorld into one sentence. . . there

is a sentence in the fourth Je.t of The Bear that ocengies

six pages of the present volume (235-501),8 0": u-th a we page

parerthcs is in t?:e ni‘ lie. Containing several purngr up? a,

each of Wtich begins with a small letter, and a quantity of

quoted matter, it r one to more than sixteen hnnlrcd words; . . ."9 DJ r's perverse des.1re to be de- Wugofé says this shows Fuulrn (I)

lioer moly 033 euro: Cealey does not juﬁge. xtch criticism of Go town, Roses reiterates the old, and new standard, ch= gee of obscurity, sensetionulism, and pointless hoxror. sze inr°en10t s PGViONL r suboest that the spirit

of World for 11 will L: ist the reader to understand Fa ulkner's hunters.

mlorn a;:t}10 3, xalcelm Cowley says, have frequently treated their readers to collections of short stories grinted as novels. fig 132;, $0393, however, rev: PS es t} a principle by "masquerading as a coilcction of short stories."10 Still, he continues it is not Quite a novel, ”tit a type of hybrid becoming in- creasingly characteristic of ts author. lost of the stories in Go Down, ieses v were published in magazines, and were written by magazine standards. “hen F alkner collected them into one

VOIUﬁG, Cowleyr says he revised them to meet his ovzn atanda:~ds.

Thus he retains "the curious ieiom which Faulkner sometimes

--~00--u--n 8 Pp. 261- 267 in the ﬁt ndom House edition. The Portable Faulhter, (Jew York: 1946), 226.

cw aggublic, (June 29, 1942), 900. 100

tM msgnificcntly, but which he writes at other times with no consineration for the reader.”11

Cowley's review of 93 Seen, Hoses marks a distinct change in his critical Opinion. "There is no othca smerican writer," he says, "who has been so consistently‘misreoresented by his critics, including rysclf. Tilliam Faulkner is not a pure romantic in the Poe tradition, as I asserted some years a50312 on the contrary, some of his recent work seems closer to Mark

Twain, Vith overtones of Turgcnev."13 Faulkner, he says, for the last fifteen years hrs been giving us, bit by bit, the intimate history of his South. Faulkner's legend of “YOkna- patuwphc County" has not been invented piecemeal: it is a living stream under w‘ich Faulkner submerges himself, coming

3 at intervals to tell us that he has seen. Thus, says

Cowley, one cannot juﬂge his books in the Jefferson cycle (his reslly significant work) by themselves. They must be read always as parts of the legend. Even his "second-best" work makes "the legend as a whole more impressive.”14 This is the soundect Judgment of Faulkner yet made. Faulkner is, says

ﬁslcolm Cowley, "after ﬁcmingwsy and perhaps Doe Passes, the nest considerable novelist of this generation.'15

11 Ibid. 12 Cowley's criticism of Absalom, nbsalaml, Chapter VI of this essay, 3.1. 13 14§2§.Republic. (June 2d, 1942), 900. Ibid. 15" ”' Ibid. CHAPTER XIII

Final Returns

Looking back over the Faulkner criticism, one sees innumerable shades of interpretive Opinionglit becomes difficult to render general critical statements About Faulkner's work as a whole from specific criticisms of his individual books. It is not impossible, however, to enumerate the fundamental critical approaches to him as they have appeared in this essay. To many critics, Faulkner stands guilty of indir. action and lack of purpose. To a few, ho is-a social critic spoiled by his incomprehensibility. To others, he is the apostle of hatred. Some critics think thatgFaulknerfs grand- iloqucnce is deliberate obfuscation; othersafhat it is an experimental language. Faulkner is a literary psychologist probing the prima1,depths of the subconscious, declare some.

Yet others say he is exploiting horror for money. All agree that, as a southern regionalist, he has a vision of the past which sharply contrasts with his knowledge or} the present.

In the late 1930's and early '40's, a re; critics attempted to summarise the body of Faulkner's work. Thus, Joseph Warren Beach said, "Faulkner 1. like Poe, by natural disposition,an artist in.mystery and horror; but he is likewise, by dispcbition and training, an artist in familiar truth and fact. 0% all

Southern writers, Faulkner is the one who has been least re- strained by regard for convention or for the sensibilities of his own people. And mainly for that reason, he is the one who has done the most of all Southern writersfto‘bring the South 102

to life imaginatively. For that very reason-oand in spite of

a sort of reckless irresponsibility there is in himp-he may

have done something to prepare the Southern mind to meet the

dark and.intricate problems of its inheriting."1 Thus, too, Alfred Kazin recorded what he thought was Faulkner's pulsebeat when he said, “By identifying all life with the South, by giVing himself so completely to it, Faulkner

showed why he could see all things in it, and at the same time

draw no clear design from it. His absorption was too complete;

it was almost a form of abnegation. Accepting the South, hating it, memorialising it, losing himself in it, Faulkner was forced into a series of improvisations; and his need for pyrotechnics

and a swollen Elizabethanism of rhetoric, his delight in diffi-

culty and random inventiveness, became the expression of his need to impose some external intensity, an almost synthetic unity, upon his novels.'2

Conrad Aiken said that Faulkner sacrifices everything, including verisimilitude, in the interests of form: "What we really see is an extraordinary power for form functioning relatively 3.3 33332, and existing only to sustain itself.'3 Maxwell Geismar attributed Faulkner's force to his Fascistic hate of negroes and women: "For it is in the larger tradition of re- versionary, neo-pagan, and neurotic discontent (from which

Fascism stems) that much of Faulkner's writing must be placed--

1 American Fiction, 1920-1940, (New York: 1941), 143. 2 .95 Native Grounds, (New‘Yorkg 1942), 459. 3 Atlantic, (November, 1939), 650. 103

the anti-civilizational revolt which.has caught so many modern mystics, the revolt rising out of modern social evils, nourg

ished by ignorance of their true nature, and which.succumbs to malice as their solution."4 To Geismar, negroes and women are whipping-boys for Faulkner's "neurotic discontent.” These

and other criticisms partially explain Faulkner (Geismar is farthest afield), but all miss the fundamental element of his

art.

Were it not for Malcolm Cowley, that element might still be hidden, for he has gathered up more Faulknerian loose ends than any other critic. In his review of 93 M, 39333.5 he

asserted that Faulkner's books must not be Judged individually, but by the light of the 'Yoknapatawpha County" legend, and he realized he had found the touchstone. Cowley explains the

nature and importance of the Faulkner legend in the introduction

to his 1946 edition of‘ggg Portable Faulkner. Of this edition,

Robert Penn Warren said, “Malcolm.Cowley's editing of‘ghg Portable Faulkner is remarkable on two counts. First, the selection from Faulkner's work is made not merely to give a cross section or

a group of good examples, but to demonstrate one 5} the principles of integration of the work. Second, the introductory essay is one of the few things ever written on Faulkner that

is not nag-ridden by prejudice or preconception and which really sheds some light on the subject."6 Cowley's introduction is

CC.-- CC... ‘Writers‘ig Crisis, (Boston, 1942), 182. 5Chapter X11, 3.}... 6New Republic, (August 12, 1946), pp. 176-234. 104

nearly identical with his ”William Faulkner Revisited” which

appeared in 1945.7 Written as a critical essay rather than

an introduction, the latter is perhaps better. The vast majority of Faulkner's critics, Cowley charges,

have "fallen into amazing misconceptions."8 Thus, he says of Kazin's belief in Faulkner’s lack of a systematic concept of

the South, "The conception is there, if Mr. Kazin had looked for it."9 Cowley explains the genesis of the concept (the ”kanapatatha County” legend) in terms of the young Faulkner, wounded exinlot ill at ease in the post-war world, brooding

over his beloved but troubled South until his thoughts assumed a pattern. ”This pattern," he says, ”which the critics almost

always overlook, was based on what he saw at Oxford or remembered

from his childhood; . . . on all the familiar sourcesodbut the

whole of it was elaborated, transformed, given convulsive life by his emotions; until, by the simple intensity of feeling, . the figures in it became a little more than human, became heroic or diabolical, became symbols of the old South, of Re: construction, of commerce and machinery destroying the standards of the past. There in Oxford Faulkner performed a labor of

imagination that has not been equalled in our time."10 Cowley admits the deficiencies~~particu1arly those of ---.;-..-. Saturday Review‘gg Literature, (April 14, 1945), 13. 92232. 9 Eggg. 10 Ibid. 105 style-oso often pointed out by critics. Faulkner's trouble, he says, is that his feelings run away with.him, Often, for example, his satire of Southern oratorical bombast becomes the vernacular of all his characters-oincluding the Yankees.

To those who object to Faulkner's structural defects, to his disunity, Cowley says that "Faulkner is not primarily a novelist: that is, his plots do not occur to him in.book- length units . . . '11 If one would see Faulkner at his best, he continues, turn to his long short stories or episodes dealing with "Yoknapatawpha County": £93. .1633; in 32 £213,

(£22229 or the account of the spotted horses in‘ghg Hmmlet. Viewed in the light of the legend, then, Faulkner's faults are merely defects of his virtues. If Cowley's criticism does not answer all questions about Faulkner, it certainly answers more than any other has done. Malcolm Cowley has built a highway into Faulkner's kingdom which the serious reader cannot but follow. It leads straight past the old byways into the heart of "Yoknapatatha County,” a secretive region, hither- to difficult to penetrate, but friendlier to strangers now. If it took nineteen years a-building,12 then one can only say high- time for the traffic to start flowing over it. No critic has laid down so sound a foundation on which a new literary reputation of William.Faulkner may be raised.

occooom. 11 Ibid. 12 Soldier's Pa appeared in 1926: Cowley's "William FaﬁIEﬁer Rev sited" in 1945. BIBLI OGRA PIiY

Books by William Faulkner

Soldier's 231, New York, Boni and Liveright, 1926. mosquitoes, New York, Boni and Liveright, 1927.

Sartoris, New York, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1929. 222 $29.92 Ed. in: 2‘21! New York, Smith and Bass, 19% . A_s_ _I_ 1:331 21.1.25! New York, Smith and Haas, 1930.

The Sound and9 theF As I La D i , New York, The Modern ”mrary, s text was used n preparing this essay.

Sanctua , New York, Smith and Haas, 1931. A Sanctuaq, New York, The Modern Library, 1932. This text was use preparing this essay.

These 13, New York, Smith and Haas, 1931. w in Au ust, New York, Smith and Haas, 1932.

_A_ 23.9.22. M, New York, Smith and Haas, 1933. 2;. Martino, and Others, New York, Smith and Haas, 1934. 311.213, New York, Smith and Haas, 1935.

Absalom, Absalom 1, New York, Random House, 1936.

29.9. UnVanquished, New York, Random House, 1938. 1133 M 3215210 New York, Random House, 1939. The Hamlet, New York, Random House, 1940. 92 Down, Moses, New York, Random House, 1942.

Magazine stories by William Faulkner used in preparing this essay "Centaur in Brass," American Mercggz, Feb. 1932, v.25, 200. "Go Down, Moses," Colliers, Jan. 25, 1941, v. 107, 19. 107

"Golden Land," American Mercury, May, 1935, v. 35, 1. "Gold is Not Always," Atlantic, Nov., 1940, v. 166, 563. "Hair," American Mercugy, May, 1931, v. 23, 3. "Honor," American Mercury, July, 1930, v. 20, 268.

"Hound," Harper's Magazine, July, 1930, v. 163. "Lion,”garper's Magazine, Dec., 1935, v. 172, 67.

"Pennsylvania Station," American mercury, Feb., 1934, v.31, 166. "That Will be Fine," American Ecrcu ,July, 1935, v.35, 264.

"Uncle Willy," American Merour , Oct., 1935, v.36, 156.

III

Books: Background and criticism

Beach, Joseph Wm., American Fiction, 1920-1940, New York, McMillan, 1941.

Boynton, Percy H., America in Contem orar Fiction, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1940.

Cash, W.J., The Mind of the South, New York, Knopf, 1941.

Cowley, Malcolm, ed., The Portable Faulkner, New York, The Viking Press, 1946.

Geismar, Maxwell, Writers in Crisis, Boston, Houghton Mifflin

Kasin, Alfred, On Native Grounds, New Yerk, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942.

White, B. B., and White, K.S., eds. A Subtreasu of American Humor, New Yerk, Coward-NoCann, 1910, 515.

Periodicals

Atlantic en, Conrad, "William Faulkner, the Novel as Form," Nov. 1939, v. 164, 650.

Hawkins, E. l., ”Stream of Consciousness Novel,” Sept.,

1926. '0 138’ 3560 108

American Merou dascoe, Burton, "Faulkner's New York critics," June, 1940,

'g 50' 245. '

Strong, L.A. 6., ”James Joyce and the New Fiction," August,

lgds. V. W. 4'5).

American Scholar luller, HerBert, "Impressionism in Fiction: Prism versus hirror," July, 1938, v. 7, 355.

Canadian Forum Birney,*Ear1e, "Two Tilliam Faulkners," June, 1958, v.18,84.

Catholic ‘orld , ZcCOIe,'CamIlle, "The Nightmare Literature of hilliam Faulkner,“ August, 1935, v. 141, 576.

Commonweal BrUBlnI, John, ”healism from the South," April 24, 1936, V. 23, 711.

Tiompson, Frederic, "American Decadence," Nov. 30, 1932, v. 17, 139. lorum Co olum, story 131., "Absalom, Absalom f' (review), Jam, 1937, v. 97, 35.

Library Journal HutcEIngs, tinifred L., "Trends in hodern Fiction," July, -1935, v. 60, 556.

Nation ""==:-—--"Shorter Notices," May 17,1933, v. 136, 565.

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Troy, William, "The Poetry of Doom," Oct. 31, 1936, v.143, 521.

Troy, Killiam, "And Tomorrow," April 3, 1935, v. 140, 393.

Van Doren, Lorothy, ”More Light Needed," Oct. 26, 1932, v. 135, 402.

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Cantwell, Robert, "Faulkner s Tr irteen Stories," Oct. 21, 1931, v. 68, 271. Cowley, Malcolm, ”Haunted Castle," Oct. 31, 1928, v. 56, 300. Cowley, Malcolm, ”Voodoo Dance," April 10, 1935, v. 82, 254. Cowley, Malcolm, "Poe in Mississippi," Nov. 4, 1936, v. 89, 22. Cowley, Naicolm, "Sanctuary-o", Jan. 25, 1939, v. 97, 349. Cowley, Malcolm, ”Faulkner by Daylight," April 15, 1940, v. 102, 510.

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1936. v I Strauss, Harold, "Mr. Faulkner's Family of Poor Whites," April 7, 1940, 2.

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Brooks, Van Wyck, ”Fashions in Defeatism," March 22, 1941, V. 23. 30 Buttitta, Anthony, "William Faulkner, that Nritin' Man of Oxford,” May 21, 1938, V. 18, 6. Canby, Henry 8., "The School of Cruelty," March 21, 1931, v. 7, 673. 111

Canby, Henry 8., "The Grain of Life," Oct. 8, 1932, v.9, 153.

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