ABSTRACT
There are two Faulkners-c-at.least to me there are two: the one who stayed down South and the one who went to war in France and mixed with foreigners and aviators; that is, the Faulkner of the Sartoris saga (and the countless other savagely and tenderly chronicled documents of the South) and the Faulkner who wrote 'Turn About', for instance,and 'All the Dead Pilots' and Pylon with no perceptible cooling of that hot devotion to man's courage although the speech, the history, the conflict were no longer his strict heritage. I believe these two separate Faulkners (separated more by a native shynessofthe foreigner than any variance in ideology or technique) possess between them the strength and the vulnerability which belong only to the greatest artists: the incalculable emotional wealth, the racy comic sense, the fury to reproduce exactly not the recognizable picture but the unmistakable experience, the thirst for articulation as well as the curiosity and the vocabulary-that rarity-to quench it. The weaknesses there are, the errors, the occasionally strained effects, are accomplished by the same fearless, gifted hand.
