BOOKS
William Faulkner
By W. W. ROBSON
WILLIAM FAULKNER'S early reputation, among the avant-garde in America, France and England, was based on his having applied ad- vanced modernities of technique, accompanied by a richly significant symbolism, to such outré subjects as idiots, poor-whites and moral defec- tives, in the glamorous-sinister setting of the `decadent' South. Passages such as that in Light in August describing the nymphomaniac New England spinster were quoted as typical :
She would be wild then, in the close, breathing halfdark without walls, with her wild hair, each strand of which would seem to come alive like octopus tentacles, and her wild hands and her breathing : 'Negro! Negro! Negro!'
If, then, one dissented from the large claims made for Faulkner it was not because of moral horror at such passages, or others showing a still starker defiance of polite proprieties, but on ar- tistic grounds : the famous technique was so ob- viously a means of obscuring, from Faulkner himself as well as from his readers, just what he was trying to do; while the symbolism seemed nothing more than a wordy insistence on a mean- ing which his art had patently failed to com- municate.
But the fact is that (as Faulkner's later work makes abundantly clear) his real merits, which the fashionable cult ignored, are not those of sophisticated art. It is the old-fashioned country- man or small-townsman, shrewd but soft-hearted, whose point of view and vernacular the novelist plainly finds the most congenial. His naiveté is pervasive; and it is not always an advantage to him. It appears, indeed, in that very effort to subtilise his themes by an obvious and mechani- cal elaboration of treatment—those incessant attempts at an inward rendering of the move- ment of consciousness, which, having little im- mediacy, have little justification. The naïveté appears in the whole conduct of the allegory— culminating in the equation of Christ with the Unknown Soldierin his recent novel A Fable. It appears (most damagingly to the pretensions which there accompany it) in philosophic-poetic rhapsodies intermediate between Amanda Ros and the Transcendentalist ladies in Martin Chuzzlewit. The more 'philosophical' rhapsodies come from the lawyer Gavin Stevens, an educated spokesman (Harvard and Heidelberg) who clearly stands very close to the author; and the measure of his profundity is given in this utterance, which is certainly unpretentious : . Yes, they [women] don't need minds at all, except for conversation, social intercourse. And I have known some who had charm and tact without minds even then. Because when they deal with men, with human beings [sic], all they need is the instinct, the intuition before it be- came battered and dulled, the infinite capacity for devotion untroubled and unconfused by cold moralities and colder facts.
This throws some light on Faulkner's general presentation of Wafnan. True, Gavin Stevens is
supposed to be a dramatic figure (You don't know very much about women, do you?' his femme fatale Mrs. Eula Snopes, the 'supreme primal uterus' of The Hamlett tells him in The Town*). But the show of dramatisation continually lapses.
The main point is, however, that Faulkner's naiveté is closely related to his true strength as a writer. When he is at his best the novelist he often resembles is not Joyce or Sartre, but Mark Twain, and in one of his finest things, the long short story called 'The Bear' (in the Go Down, Moses volume), the relation to Huckleberry Finn is obvious and important. There is in this story a genuine perception of a moral and 'cultural' complexity, the transmission of which is closely bound up (as in Huckleberry Finn) with the re- capturing of boyhood's vision. The comparison admittedly brings out just how clumsy, literary and self-conscious, even in 'The Bear,' is Faulkner's use of Nature for symbolic purposes, when we remember how it plays its part in the marvellous and truly 'natural' unfolding of Mark Twain's masterpiece. Similarly, Faulkner's general handling of the problem that forced itself, in a different historical context, on Huck Finn, the supreme' ethical problem confronting a Southern boy—I mean, of course, the Negro— shows itself in this comparison superficial and tending to romantic simplifications. These may be unpleasant, as in some of his earlier work, or pleasant, as in Intruder in the Dust, where the boy's splendid uncle joins forces with a splendid old lady (a benevolent eccentric of, perhaps, Dickensian origin) to effect the rescue of a splendid old Negro. But in either case there is a contrast, destructive of the claim that Faulkner is a great novelist, with the best parts of Huckle- berry Finn.
It remains true that much of what is good in Faulkner reminds us of Mark Twain. In The Town there is something of that old-fashioned ripe humour in the presentation and utterances of one of the three persona' who tell the story : V. K. Ratcliff, the sewing-machine salesman and part-owner of a local restaurant. And we are reminded of the bitter Mark Twain of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (though without his ferocity) in the episode of the showing-up, to the discredit of the communal ethos, of Grover Cleve- land Wimbush, the night marshal.'
If Faulkner is inferior to Mark Twain, this is not just because of his lesser talent. Altered cul- tural conditions must also account for it. Thus, while Faulkner, like Mark Twain, admires the Southern Gentleman and holds him up as a posi- tive standard (You're a gentleman,' Eula tells Gavin in The Town, 'and I never knew one be- * THE TOWN. By William Faulkner. (Chatto and Windus, 16s.)
t Reissued in the Uniform Edition. (Chatto and Windus, 12s. 6d.) fore), this idealisation is related in the older novelist to a whole moral order, in which the romanticising of the Old South is by no means paramount; Faulkner's Southern Gentleman, without any such relation, appears merely as a quaint survival : his romanticism has no effective critical context. But it is not Faulkner's fault that that order has gone; indeed, his best work has derived much of its force from the implicit recognition of this.
The Town, the latest Faulkner novel, is more readable than The Hamlet, to which it is a sequel —the earlier book abounds much more in those rhetorical efforts to impose significance from out- side : hardly one idea, one touch, is left to speak for itself ('the bright blatant wild daisies of flamboyant summer's spendthrift beginning' fairly represents the poetical parts). The main explicit theme of both books (if we ignore the portentous ruminations about Sex) is the advent and expan- sion, through 'osmosis,' of the Snopes clan. And the description of this process is quite interesting and sometimes amusing. But I cannot believe that anyone who has read those parts once will want to read them again : since what effectiveness Flem Snopes (the head of the clan) has depends on his being a grotesque, done from without; the result is thdt when we are given the diagnosis and are told of the connection in him between his 'frontier' mentality and his secret craving for re- spectability, we have a sense of being merely told. It is true that we are promised a succeeding volume to complete the story, but it is hard to see how any later development could make any difference. And in this local lack of realisation we have the great weakness of the whole book. For its inspiration so plainly comes not from a specific desire to dramatise the ostensible social theme suggested by the Snopes family, but front a general—far too general—aspiration, all the more intoxicating for being unfocused, to write a Saga, 'create characters,' diffuse local colour, and so gesture grandly and vaguely towards the evocation of a teeming American world. Gavin Stevens, gazing down from a ridge at Yok- napatawpha County 'in the dying last of day,' expresses in an outburst of Faulkner's great- novelist prose this ambition to 'preside unan- guished and immune' over its 'passions and hopes and disasters.'
If we are puzzled, then, by Mr. Edmund Wilson's pronouncement that the inventor of Yoknapatawpha County is 'a great novelist,' and puzzled by the customary American overrating of the Faulkners, Hemingways and Scott Fitz- geralds, we should reflect that even among distinguished critics the awareness of a need is apt to be confused with a conviction of its ful- filment. And, after all, this confusion is not peculiar to American criticism; we have only to consider the original acclamation of Andre, Malraux (of La Condition Huntaine), or of Dylan Thomas.
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