Taking a Flyer with Faulkner
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Taking a Flyer with Faulkner By Stanley Edgar Hyman To start with a platitude, American success is often hollow. Here is William Faulkner, accepted by all the world, at least...
...Lucius narrates the story to his grandson in 1961...
...Then there are other works that are no more than pretentious nonsense— Requiem for a Nun, A Fable—and still others that are carefree hacking—the Post stories published as Knight's Gambit, the movie script published as Intruder in the Dust...
...If you got any business still hanging," Butch says to Boon, with a leer toward Everbe, "better get it unhung before I get back or something might get tore.' Asked why she takes out her gold tooth to eat, Minnie, the whorehouse servant, says: "I aint going to have it all messed up with no spit-mixed something to eat...
...He has received the Nobel Prize and every other critical accolade, his books sell in the millions, and at 65 he stands at the pinnacle of success...
...The Reivers is written in Faulkner's habitual prose...
...There is a valid and moving nostalgia, almost obsessive, for the wilderness of Mississippi, full of bear and deer, before our century's civilization destroyed it...
...Eyes are "like two bluebird feathers moulted onto a small lump of coal,' teeth are "like small richly alabaster matched and evenly serrated headstones," events stop one cold "like basilisk," someone vanishes "like a mouse into a lump of still-soft ambergris...
...for example, Ned's magic for making the reluctant horse run and win turns out to be feeding it a sardine...
...Some of the book's speech carries the same conviction, and brings the characters momentarily to life...
...As a boy's initiation with the help of Boon, the book is a redoing of "The Bear" as farce...
...the crippling burden of history on personal relations...
...The Reivers tells of the initiation into adult life of 11-year-old Lucius Priest in 1905...
...When Faulkner wants to say that Miss Reba's whorehouse was quiet because the girls were still afraid of the absent pimp, he writes: "But decorously: no uproar either musical or simply convivial...
...the loss of conviction by the best, while the worst continue full of passionate intensity...
...The statement is absurd, and malign...
...the difficulties of attaining manhood in our world of overgrown boys...
...In such novels as Sartor is, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August, and in such stories as "The Bear," Faulkner has produced masterpieces on some of the major themes of the American experience: the blood guilt on the land, Indian blood and Negro blood...
...Balancing these two vile critters are the book's two noble heroes: the sheriff, little old Mr Poleymus, a brave and just man...
...If you can go bare-handed against a knife defending her," Boon says to Lucius, "why the hell cant I marry her...
...The book's ultimate absurdity, perhaps even too much for a juvenile audience to stomach, is its subplot, The Magdalen's Redemption...
...regal, prince and martinet in the dignity of solvent and workless age...
...With them are little interpolated essays: on the afterlife of old soldiers...
...Perhaps her conversion is being saved for the next novel...
...The long awful sentences are too long to quote, but a short example or two should suffice...
...Actually, they are just the book's two noble white heroes...
...Sometimes, when a character uses strong hard verbs like "tomcat" and "ramshack," or when Faulkner uses an effective figure of speech ("He ate like you put meat into a grinder") one comes temporarily to believe that he really could write decent English prose if he chose...
...A few things in The Reivers transcend its absurdity and juvenility, and remind us of Faulkner's earlier accomplishments...
...A single scene in the book, an encounter with a pirate who digs the road by his place into bog in order to charge for pulling out automobiles, is the colorful comedy of Faulkner at his best...
...It is listed facing the title page as Faulkner's 25th book, and the list is far from complete...
...He says grace "briefly, courteously but with dignity, without abasement or cringing: one man of decency and intelligence to another...
...At one point, when Lucius fears for Uncle Parsham, because if Butch is frustrated in his pursuit of Everbe he will take it out on Uncle Parsham, who stands watching "white people behaving as white people bragged that only Negroes behaved," the book suddenly comes out of Roverland and shows us the real South in which Faulkner fives...
...Mr Binford's ghost still reigned, still adumbrated his callipygian grottoes.' Arguing that frightened horses are not graceful, Faulkner explains: "Fright demands fluidity and grace and bizarreness and the capacity to enchant and enthrall and even appall and aghast, like an impala or a giraffe...
...The pastoral glorification of Negro wisdom and nobility in The Reivers may be equally absurd, but at least its absurdity is benign...
...The car-and-racehorse plot is melodrama of the most preposterous sort...
...True, Miss Reba is not redeemed, but she is not the ignorant blowsy madam of Sanctuary, rather, a young woman "with a kind hard handsome face" and heart of gold, who is compelled by circumstance "to make a living in this hard and doomed and selfdestroying way...
...Thus a horse avoids the bit "as if the bit were a pork rind and he a Mohammedan (or a fish spine and he a Mississippi candidate for constable whose Baptist opposition had accused him of seeking the Catholic vote, or one of Mrs Roosevelt's autographed letters and a secretary of the Citizens Council, or Senator Goldwater's cigar butt and the youngest pledge to the A.D.A...
...How about that, Fiedler...
...Lucius and Uncle Parsham go fishing together, then in a final rite of kinship, they go innocently to bed together...
...Touched by Lucius' fighting Otis in defense of her reputation, the whore Everbe promises Lucius that she will give up prostitution, and does...
...If we use "writer" to refer to imaginative power, moral earnestness, and ability to create an effective imitation of life in Aristotle's sense, Faulkner is a great writer...
...Thus the title, an archaic word meaning "robbers...
...Here is William Faulkner, accepted by all the world, at least since the death of Hemingway, as our greatest writer...
...We can be grateful for that...
...He plans and directs the entire horse intrigue, his understanding of human psychology rivals that of Sigmund Freud, and his powers of ratiocination rival those of Sherlock Holmes...
...The other is a deputy sheriff named Butch Lovemaiden (yes, Lovemaiden), "with a red face and a badge and a holstered pistol," stinking of sweat and whisky, who uses the power of his badge to topple Everbe from her new pedestal of virtue...
...Worst of all are the spots where comic essay and simile combine...
...He can and does, and on the book's last page they have a baby, named, of course, Lucius Priest Hogganbeck...
...on the vulnerability of virtue...
...In 1956 he told an interviewer on the subject of segregation that, forced to a choice, he would "fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes...
...Ned pretends to be Uncle Remus, but like Lucas Beauchamp of Intruder in the Dust he is preternaturally dignified, brilliant, and wise...
...as a paean to the virtue and wisdom of elderly Negroes, it is a more inspirational Intruder in the Dust...
...Yet I do not think that he has published anything first-rate since Go Down, Moses in 1942, when he was a relatively obscure avant-garde novelist...
...He eventually gets his comeuppance too, and has his badge ripped off by the sheriff...
...as a vision of golden hearts and redemption by love at Miss Reba's, it is Sanctuary turned into musical comedy...
...Looming above them are two noble Negro heroes: Ned, and a saintly old figure called "Uncle Parsham" Hood...
...At the end Ned's motive for the whole operation turns out to have been to save another Negro family retainer and kinsman of the Priests, Bobo Beauchamp, who was being blackmailed (or whitemailed) by a "white blackguard...
...There is a real sense of the hard and painful initiation from the child's world into the adult's, with its loss of one kind of innocence at least...
...on the hierarchy of animals from the rat down...
...It is the hardly-meant-toconvince plot of a boy's book, and there are two melodramatic villains to fit it...
...The figures of speech aghast like an impala indeed...
...and Lucius' grandfather, Boss, a figure of Olympian wisdom and understanding...
...Faulkner has always occupied an anomalous position in our literature...
...She demonstrates her new domesticity by washing Lucius' clothes, then takes a job helping Sheriff Poleymus care for his invalid wife...
...on the mule as a gentleman...
...He, the simple strong man Boon Hogganbeck, and Lucius' grandfather's Negro coachman (and kinsman), Ned McCaslin, steal the grandfather's 1904 Winton Flyer and drive it from Jefferson to Memphis...
...As for Uncle Parsham, he is "the patrician, the aristocrat of us all and judge of us all...
...Lucius recognizes that Uncle Parsham is just like Boss, even to the same gold toothpick...
...on the comedy of party politics in 1961...
...In Memphis, they make Miss Reba's whorehouse their headquarters, and after Ned trades (or appears to trade) the car for a horse, they spend their time in a complicated series of private horse races until Lucius' grandfather appears to straighten things out...
...One is Otis, the wicked nephew of Everbe the Virtuous Prostitute, who tells Lucius the facts of life, says bad words to his elders, pulls a knife in a fight with Lucius, and is eventually exposed as a rotter and a coward and properly punished...
...If we use "writer" to mean prose stylist, Faulkner is one of the worst writers who ever lived, worse even than that other ornament of American letters, Theodore Dreiser...
...Now we have The Reivers (Random House, 305 pp., $4.95), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection...
...Yet even in those works, the reader is maddened by impenetrable thickets of time-switching, broken-backed sentences that squirm along for pages, figures of speech from some high school magazine, and horrid little editorials on topics of the day...
...Unfortunately, The Reivers is a boy's book, and not even a superior specimen of that genre...
Vol. 45 • July 1962 • No. 14
