Books: Haunted Landscapes

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North & South. This view of the South as an area trapped between Sartoris impotence and Snopes viciousness explains Faulkner's harshness and fury. He is a man possessed and tortured by his vision: too honest to deny it, too sensitive to tolerate it. The horrors of his books—the rapes and castrations, the incestuous romances and idiot flirtations with cows-fall into place, not as exhibits of sensationalism, but instead as images of the social and moral disease that he is constantly probing.

If taken as realistic reporting of Southern life, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga makes little sense. It is based on his lifelong devotion to the Mississippi scene, but it is no mere copy of that scene. Rather it is a grotesque, symbolic version, in which the dimensions of reality are wildly distorted to make them more vivid. Sometimes, his writing seems almost like a prolonged hallucination—a hallucination crowded with extraordinary characters and violent actions. Moreover, for any Northerner to believe that Faulkner's world is limited to the South would be complacent provincialism. When Faulkner describes his Yoknapatawpha County, he is writing not only about the South but also the North, not only about the North but all of modern life.

Often enough, in his furious haste to get things down on paper and his weakness for pyrotechnics, Faulkner trips over his own inventiveness. His tales of violence then become preposterous and cheap; his livid rhetoric creates a verbal log jam, with prepositions flying wild, clauses drifting crazily and parentheses multiplying like rabbits. But when he is really in command of his story (about half the time), Faulkner makes his rhetoric work for him, even when it is full of echoes of Ciceronian oratory and of overripe Elizabethan poetry.

And he can be direct and simple. When he wants to describe Flem Snopes's eyes, he calls them "two gobs of cup grease on a hunk of raw dough."

He is particularly gifted at recording Negro speech: "I cant hang around.white man's kitchen . . . But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I cant stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I aint got no house."

Arson & Anguish. In the Collected Stones, Faulkner's blazing skill and lazy improvisations, his rich humor and corny folksiness, his deep sense of tragedy and tasteless gothic excesses are all brought together. About half a dozen stories are as good bits of fiction as have ever been written in the U.S.: Barn Burning, a poignant sketch of a boy's anguished love for his arsonist-father; A Rose for Emily, that hair-raising classic of a lady's decline to necrophilia; Wash, a magnificent portrait of a poor white who, after years of loyalty, rebels against his landlord; Dry September, a lynching story to end all lynching stories; A Courtship, a richly comic tall tale about the love rivalry of a white man and an Indian in early igth Century America; and Death Drag, a harrowing story about three hungry, neurotic stunt flyers.

The final impression left by Faulkner's work is that he is a writer of incomparable talents who has used and misused those talents superbly and recklessly. But his book has the excitement that comes from never knowing when, amidst pages of failure, there will come a masterpiece.