ABSTRACT
Three of these writers have given us their measure-a satisfying measure we admit it to be. The fourth and youngest, Faulkner, has already revealed more creative energy than any ofhis contemporaries, but the time has not yet arrived to cast his horoscope. He is still intelligently but violently experimenting. There is much crashing in the underbrush, but he is hewing out a recognizable path. Where it will lead him is the debatable question. His full strength he has put out only in one book, The Sound and the Fury, and its almost incredible difficulty is not an initial recommendation. The ordinary intelligent reader does not relish such apparent contemptuous treatment from an author. But with the difficulties overcome we are inclined to admit that they may have been necessary to the plan, and that a simple approach would have deprived the book ofthe impressivenessit gains from its very complexity. While we admit the virtue ofclarity we are not prepared to insist that a profound treatment of life shall reveal itself at a glance. The others do not strike so deep to the root of things. In Anderson and Hemingway difficulties do not exist, and in Dos Passos they are unnecessary and irritating. [discusses subject matter of each]
In the craft of words they are all competent and interesting. When Arnold Bennett announced Faulkner as 'The coming man' he said that he wrote 'generally like an angel.' We are glad of the 'generally,' for his forcefulness betrays him often into over-emphasis. There is a too
perpetual straining for similitudes, since everything is not of necessity like something else. Fertility in image-creating power is a virtue too rare in modern writing to merit condemnation, and an ultimate pruning of excess will some day permit us to expunge Arnold Bennett's 'generally.' We suspect that he does not always know the meaning of the long words he uses, and there are mannerisms in his constructions that irritate us by their frequency: 'and pretty soon there were gulls looking like they had pink and yellow feathers, slanting and wheeling around-and it was like there was a street in a city.' A mannerism confined to As I Lay Dying may be noted without comment. It is so constantly and confidently employed that it must rest on some obscure artistic reason which is not readily apparent. The ordinary habit in dialogue is to represent the speakers with variations in the phrase announcing them. To every speech in this book is attached the bald statement, 'he said,' or 'he says,' 'I says.'
