Fiction
Intruder in the Dust is, it seems, Mr. Faulkner's seventeenth book and his first novel to be published since 1941. What a perverse and exasperating writer—what an impossible writer—he is ! The talent is there, of course—a sombre and individual cast of imagination, a lurid pictorial intensity, an intoxicated verbal copiousness. And his brooding obsession with the social history of the South, with the frustrations and violences that thicken the blood and water the soil of the Faulkner country in Mississippi, and that seem to make him sweat with nostalgia for the patriarchal verities of slavery, plainly springs from genuinely felt experience. Unhappily, Mr. Faulkner's demonic imaginative preoccupations are one thing and his no less demonic novelist's performance is another. Between them his crassly tortuous style of construction and his chaotic churning of words play the devil with the effect he aims at. Where, after all, has his passion for the unutterably dark led him ?
Shorn for the most part of the obscure and ill-fitting epithets and the flamboyant imagery he affected in earlier books, the sentences in Intruder in the Dust are invincibly dreary in texture but are still yards long. Here is a sample, or a bit of one, taken at random:— "Though of course there was really no reason to expect his uncle to be in the office this late on Saturday afternoon but once on the stairs he could at least throw that away, happening to be wearing rubber soles today though even then the wooden stairs creaked and rumbled unless you trod the inside edge close to the wall: thinking how he had never really appreciated rubber soles before, how nothing could match them for giving you time to make up your mind what you really wanted to do and then he could see the office door closed now although it was still too early for his uncle to have had the lights on but besides the door itself had that look which only locked doors have so even hard soles wouldn't have mattered. unlocking the door with his key then locking it with the thumb- latch behind him and crossed to the heavy swivel roller chair which had been his grandfather's before his uncle's and sat down behind the littered table which his uncle used in place of the roll-top desk of his grandfather's old time and across which the country's legal business had passed longer than he could remember,"
and so on, like the drip of a broken tap, for another two enervating pages.
The story is of the threatened lynching for a murder he has not committed of the elderly Lucas Beauchamp, a negro with a white grandfather, a familiar character in the Faulkner oeuvre, and of the adventures and loyalties set in train by the sixteen-year-old boy who proves his innocence. Besides the narrative tension for which Mr. Faulkner pays so high a price he has moments of impassioned perception and, in a clumsy fashion, of both sly comedy and unsentimental pathos. But it requires no inconsiderable effort to read the book to the end.
By contrast Mr. Robert Graves's disciplined plainness of style is refreshing indeed. Seven Days in New Crete, which begins as a satirical and somewhat Butlerian excursion into Utopia, then acquires a flavour of Through the Looking-Glass, and finishes up as a comic fantasy, in prose and verse, of a promiscuous and engaging kind, is dryly enteirtaining reading. The history of the emergence of the New Cretan system from a series of " anthropological enclaves," designed to supply " the necessary data as to when and why the freight train of civilisation leapt the rails," shows nice learning and ingenuity ; the adventures, metaphysical and amorous, of Edward Venn-Thomas, a poet of our own day magically pitchforked into New Cretan society near his former home in the south of France, exhibit an equally nice candour of sense and sensibility ; and the pages of pure fancy on which Mr. Graves rides away with protessional poetic competence are admirably done. A light-weight and rather arbitrary essay in fiction, but agreeable enough in its kind. The two Italian novels arc both intelligent pieces of work, the one rather acrid in flavour, the other—A Tale of Poor Lovers—just a little too facile. The latter presents a fragmentary and formless accumulation of slices of life in a mean little street in Florence round about the year 1925. Garbage, prowling cats, petty crooks, pros- titutes, Fascist thugs, a Communist village blacksmith, gas-lit fairs, inconstant lovers and a maniacal bedridden old harridan, lend diversity to the crowded scene. Signor Pratolini has an eye for dramatic detail, sometimes for over-dramatic detail, but otherwise seems to possess too little feeling for the shape and structure of a novel. Not so with Signor Flaiano, who develops his psychological theme with patiently calculated and impressive logic. Mariam is set in Abyssinia at the close of Mussolini's victorious campaign. The story, told in the first person, is of an officer who, his nerves frayed by the country, accidentally wounds the native girl he has possessed, then kills her and buries her body, and is afterwards visited by fantasies and hallucinations of guilt. Signor Flaiano's is a subtle mind, which turns in on itself with lively and stimulating curiosity. The novel I have enjoyed most, however, is Miss Emma Smith's The Far Cry, issued by a new firm of publishers. Immature in thought though it is, somewhat derivative in style—its brand of sensibility too often echoes Miss Elizabeth Bowen—not very sub- stantial as story telling, this novel about a fourteen-year-old girl snatched away from school in England by a poor pathetic fish of a parent and translated to India has nevertheless a freshness, astringency and poetic awareness that Miss Smith has turned to very
Previous page
