Books: Haunted Landscapes

COLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER (900 pp.) —Random House ($4.75).

Mississippi Novelist William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Sanctuary) has no time for literary circles. An iron-grey, taciturn man of 52, he much prefers hunting and fishing. Nonetheless, for 20 years, he has been one of the leading enthusiasms of U.S. literary-intellectual pundits. Next month, for the first time, a book by William Faulkner is a Book-of-the-Month-Club alternate selection. A fat collection of 42 Faulkner tales written over the past quarter-century, Collected Stories will let a brand-new layer of U.S. readers judge for themselves what all the critical whooping is about. The stories are also pretty sure to bring a spate of re-estimates by the critics themselves.

As a writer, Faulkner shuttles between two worlds. One of them is easily recognizable because most people spend most of their time in it: the grey one of everyday life. Faulkner describes its persons and places: down & outers in Manhattan's Penn Station, war veterans living on pride, hungry poets mooching from a successful colleague. If this were all that Faulkner could do, he would be buried in an obscure corner of U.S. letters, as a minor realist in the tradition of Dos Passes, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Sartoris v. Snopes. The other Faulkner world is the one he has made his own: mythical Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, a landscape haunted by an unsettled past and an unwanted future. The past survives in the memory of the old South, its code of courage and chivalry, its moral stain of slavery. The future is the creeping new world of Northern commerce and industry; in Faulkner's view, it promises to make life impersonal, mechanized and "depthless."

In his stories, the Sartoris family represents the past—former aristocrats who lose themselves in gentility, alcohol, rhetoric and madness. The Snopes family symbolizes the future; they are coldly, and crudely, on the make. The process of degeneration hits bottom when a third type appears: people who use the Sartoris pretensions to veil the Snopes greed.

Faulkner's instinctive sympathies are with the founders of the Sartoris clan, who tamed the country and fought in the Civil War. But he realizes that their way of life is dead forever, largely because they allowed it to be corrupted by slavery. Some of Faulkner's most viciously satirical passages are directed against the sickly remnants—the gentlemen who drink morning toddies while the floors beneath them are visibly rotting away. At the same time, he desperately hates the hard-souled, faceless Snopeses, whose only purpose in life is to accumulate money. In the present-day South, Faulkner admires only such stiff-back Negroes as Lucas Beauchamp of Intruder in the Dust (TIME, Oct. 4, 1948), who endure humiliation with patience and dignity, and those poor whites who cling to their land, their families and their old morality.