ABSTRACT
Mr. Faulkner's reputation has suffered lately from the exaggerated claims his admirers made for him on the strength ofthe rather obvious technical experiments in his early novels, Soldiers' Pay and The Sound and the Fury. He isn't anotherJoyce, any more than he is another Stein, that bogey of the Sunday reviewer. Indeed in his historical novels he is rapidly matriculating into the Book Society. Horsemen riding at night, the clank of holsters, niggers shrieking in the dark, Southern gentlewomen and the scent of wistaria, family Honour and family Doom: his historical novels are full of quite charming, traditional, bogus romance: a little of Stevenson, of Meredith, of Shiel, even a little of Amanda M'Kittrick Ros in such passagesas this:
I ..• who even at nineteen must have known that living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veilbefore what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust ifwe had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash. Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either: not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant,wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prison arteries and veins and prisoning in its tum that spark, that dream .••
and so on to the sentence end ten lines later. Let the devil's advocate have his way for awhile, explain how
Mr. Faulkner's new novel belongs to the worst, the Sartoris, side ofhis achievement: the deep South and the picturesque Civil War costumes,
the doom-ridden hero, 'this Faustus, this Beelzebub', riding in from nowhere with a couple of pistols, buying land from the Indians, hiring a French architect, working naked on the house with his niggers, marrying the most respectable girl in the town, overtaken by his Fate, his son murdering his daughter's betrothed to save her from incest and the taint of black blood, all culminating years later, in 1910, in a huge conflagration and the last survivor's death in the flames. That advocate will point out that the method ofthe novel, the story related by various people years later, the events falling into their order in the mind only on the last pages, has been far more skilfully managed by Mr. Ford who knows how to give intrinsic value and character to the narrators -all Mr. Faulkner's narrators speak the same bastard poetic prose. And as for this prose the advocate will remark how often it falls into blank verse rhythms, how fond the author is ofresounding abstractions so that sometimes we are reminded of Mr. McDonald's cloudy oratory: '... turned upon his contemporary scene offolly and outrage and injustice the dead and consistent impassivity ofa cold and inflexible disapproval.' (In the first paragraph of the novel-a devil's advocate is always a bit ofa pedant-there are forty-one adjectives in twenty-seven lines qualifying only fifteen nouns.) And the advocate will wind up his speech with the claim that Mr. Faulkner has not created a single character of recognizable humanity and that the intellectual content of his novel is almost nil. Strip away the fake poetry, and you have the plot ofa 'blood', while Mr. Faulkner disguisesthe complete absenceof a theme with pseudo-tragic talk of doom and fate and the furies.
