ABSTRACT
There was once a man in the West of Ireland who was the butt ofhis village. Baited and tormented beyond patience, he sprang up one night in a rage and cried out: 'Oh, Heavens! If I were only Almighty God for five minutes! .. .' Mr. Faulkner seems to begin his novels in much the same spirit of misanthropy. It is rather extraordinary that so many modern authors, with the power to recreate the world to their heart's desire, should have wished to do it in a like spirit ofmisanthropy. Not that there is any lack ofjoy of life in Faulkner. But it is a masochistic joy. Pylon, his new novel, is the story of a bizarre group of aeroplane racers-in the words of the publishers' 'talkie-ese'-'slaves of speed,
reckless and indomitable people £lying from pylon to pylon behind roaring motors on fragile projectors of cloth and steel.' [summarizes story]
Mr. Faulkner is obviously very much excited by the lives of these strange circus foIk-excited, indeed, beyond coherence, so that he can only present them as if they were not human beings at all; as if he felt that petrol and not blood ran in their veins, and they were the halfdoped robots of a brutal half-doped world. Yet if it is not a pleasant world he has created it is exciting, disturbing, Dantesque, with all the compulsion and terror of a great talent driven to frenzy. In fact, so much so, that his language, always inclined to be rhetorical, becomes here at times so elusive that many who will begin his novel with interest will finish it more asa duty thanasa pleasure. So, when Laverne enters the editor's office, he thinks of himself as looking at 'a canvas conceived in and executed out ofthat fine innocence ofsleep and open bowels ofcrowning the rich, foul, unchaste earth with rosy cloud where lurk and sport oblivious and incongruous cherubim.' Or the reporter, in his drink, feels his destination and purpose 'like a stamped and forgotten letter in a coat which he had failed to bring.' His eyes, while he is still drunk, are 'like two dead electric bulbs set in his skull.' And so on. Faulkner is one of the finest American writers of today, but he has not yet learned, and may never learn, that brutality is not strength, nor facetiousness wit, and that, if America holds nothing sacred, art still does.
