Snopeslore
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
CHRISTMAS BOOK ISSUE Snopeslore By Stanley Edgar Hyman "HE HAD never thought of it [the sea] before and he could not have said why he wanted to go to it—what of repudiation of the land,...
...I. O. is a bigamist who talks a half-educated jargon...
...Mink will kill but he will not steal...
...CHRISTMAS BOOK ISSUE Snopeslore By Stanley Edgar Hyman "HE HAD never thought of it [the sea] before and he could not have said why he wanted to go to it—what of repudiation of the land, the earth, where his body or intellect had faulted somehow to the cold undeviation of his will to do—seeking what of that iodinic proffer of space and oblivion of which he had no intention of availing himself, would never avail himself, as if, by deliberately refusing to cut the wires of remembering, to punish that body and intellect which had failed him...
...The Hamlet (1940...
...The heart and power of the trilogy, the whale in this Moby-Dick, is the Snopes family...
...The Snopes who shot Medgar Evers in the back was a man, not an animal, although we need not be proud of the fact...
...It is funny and touching and an absolutely convincing account of the love an idiot might feel for a cow...
...The progenitor is Ab, the sullen and spiteful old barn-burner, who establishes the family in Frenchman's Bend...
...Alas, everything I said about that poor book is true, but since then I have felt that I owe the record some compensating appraisal of Faulkner's more significant work...
...In the first we see the outrage to his humanity that made Mink kill Houston...
...but because Mink neglected to rob him afterward...
...The reissue of the three novels of the Snopes trilogy as a boxed set (Snopes, Random House...
...to the last, an old man raising watermelons for the pleasure of punishing the boys who steal them...
...His son Clarence becomes a Silver Shirt state senator...
...Another son...
...Lump nevertheless plans to help Mink by framing a Negro for the crime and assembling a mob to torture the Negro into confessing...
...I was all right," Mink says, "until it started coming to pieces...
...Mink's overcoming one by one of all the insuperable obstacles between him and a shot through Flem's head, is one of the wonders of our literature...
...William Faulkner's Snopes, and Mink in particular, is a contribution toward understanding these new murdering Snopeses...
...Ab, in the hamlet of Frenchman's Bend late in the last century, to the departure of Flem, whose social rise is the central action of the trilogy, to the wider opportunities of the nearby town of Jefferson...
...In Faulkner's view...
...Then there is Flem...
...The romance between the idiot Ike Snopes and Houston's cow is quite as remarkable...
...As the example of Mink makes clear, Faulkner never forgets that they are men too...
...Flem is so mean that when he cheats a poor farm wife out of $5 he forces her to thank him by giving her a nickel bag of candy for the children...
...The Town covers Flem's rise to respectability as president of a Jefferson bank and...
...Flem's small vicious brother or cousin (all Snopes interrelationships are obscure...
...Flem deserts Mink at the trial, and for 38 years Mink bides his time in jail, waiting to be released, when he can kill Flem...
...The Town (1957...
...To my great regret, that review appeared on the stands the day that Faulkner died...
...Faulkner writes him an idiot aubade, the lover's dawn song...
...Most important, there is Mink, who is compared by everyone in the book to every sort of deadly small animal, but is a man for all that, and a perverse tribute to the indomitable human spirit...
...Lump is horribly shocked at Mink's murder of Houston, not because Mink killed him...
...The last Snopes named in the trilogy, Orestes, sets booby traps...
...Faulkner detests Snopeses, and in some moods he dreads them, and sees them proliferating like cancer cells...
...The first volume...
...Gavin Stevens' love for Flem's wife Eula and then for her daughter Linda is poor stuff, and the book contains a variety of hokum, including one or two spoofs of the Faulknerians...
...Nor is that the limit of Faulkner's audacity...
...I am sorry to say, respectability is intrinsically less interesting than depravity...
...Faulkner's best work attains to greatness by the intensity of its tragicomic vision of man, and in that canon the Snopes trilogy has a place as Faulkner's fullest exploration of natural evil, what Coleridge called (in characterizing Iago) "motiveless malignity...
...Wesley Snopes has the distinction of having been tarred and feathered for the statutory rape of a 14-yearold girl at a revival service...
...and 436 pp., $14.75) furnishes an opportunity...
...Snopes is about the inundation of Snopeses that befell Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner's writing preserve in rural north Mississippi...
...No literate reader...
...in a world where Linda Snopes frequents Twenty-One and the Stork Club, and Flem displays his penchant for blackmail by stealing her membership card in the Communist party...
...Ab is a model of nastiness and the spiritual ancestor of every church-burner in Mississippi...
...Faulkner may have written monstrous prose, but at his best it is transcended by an imagination almost Melvillean in its power and audacity...
...His fat son Saint Elmo is an insatiable maw, and his twins Bilbo and Vardaman seem aptly named...
...But in saving moods he is able to laugh at them, and to make us laugh at them...
...It is easy enough to deride the wretched grammar and syntax, the tortured tropes, the affected and often incorrect use of words...
...Mink goes with an axe in the night to chop it out and hide it elsewhere...
...But just as The Town is redeemed by the Snopes Indians, so The Mansion is saved by Mink Snopes, and its first and last sections come alive with Mink's demonic vitality...
...He is so greedy that when he is made superintendent of the power plant he steals the brass safety valves off the boilers...
...When Mink returns to the tree, he is captured...
...takes the story from the appearance of the first Snopes...
...Around these mighty antagonists are lesser Snopeses...
...Mink's heroic ability, like that of Odysseus, is to endure patiently until his moment comes...
...He is illiterate, but the will is so fierce in his small frail body that when he must read a name to get to Flem, he reads it...
...As Ike watches the dawn rise...
...1 could have handled that dog...
...Launcelot, called Lump, is a chivalrous storekeeper who violates Negro women customers behind the counter as part of a nickel purchase, and sells peeks at Ike and the cow...
...We see Ike and the cow eat feed from the basket together, then Ike gathers flowers, clumsily stripping off the petals of some, and makes her a crude garland that disintegrates into fodder as he puts it on her head...
...The Hamlet's sequel...
...The Town is saved by a fresh infusion of pure Snopesism in the last few pages: the arrival in Jefferson of four savage and frightening little Snopes children, born to a Jicarilla Apache squaw, and their fantastic depradations, including the eating of a $500 Pekinese (Flcm pays for it), and a good try at burning at the stake a young Snopes who had been training them as a hunting pack...
...His son Byron absconds with money from the Jefferson bank and flees to Mexico, where he fathers the Snopes Indians...
...Two sections of The Hamlet are among the boldest and most brilliant things Faulkner ever wrote...
...When schoolteaching palls, he goes into the trade of getting his mules killed on the railroad tracks...
...to success in Hollywood...
...I did so in these pages (July 9, 1962) in a review of The Reivers...
...At the end, ominous new Snopeses are glimpsed at Flem's funeral...
...Jefferson believes that when Flem bought a black felt hat on being made vice president of the bank, he did not throw away the cloth cap he had worn for 17 years, but sold it to a Negro boy for a dime...
...Snopeses are Mississippi poor whites—tenant farmers and sharecroppers, crackers and rednecks—who have the vitality no longer possessed by the gentry of Sartorises and de Spains that he so much admires...
...Doris, is the joker who tried to train the Indians...
...is much inferior imaginatively...
...One can see the difference most clearly by comparing the stampede of I. O. Snopes' mules in the second book with the stampede of Flem's Snopeslike spotted horses in the first, which it imitates...
...Mink ambushes Houston with an old shotgun and shoots him in the belly, then drags the corpse a great distance and hides it high in a hollow tree...
...His only comment on his act is a marvel of macabre and terrifying humor...
...He then steals the cow and runs off with her...
...we watch Houston's arrogance drive Mink step by step into the corner of murder...
...The Mansion (1959), shows Faulkner even further from his sources of strength...
...In a fantastic scene, the starved and maddened man fights off Houston's wounded, starved and maddened dog and gets the body, but it has decomposed and one arm remains in the tree...
...and thus eventually getting them back between the pages of books, where we can laugh at them again...
...Flem has been sexually impotent all his life, having perfectly sublimated all other passions into his one pure lust...
...Like a Homeric hero...
...His other son Virgil does sexual exhibitions for small wagers...
...The final volume...
...But the son of a bitch started coming to pieces on me...
...deliberately tracking horse manure on Major de Spain's fancy rug...
...One is the killing of Jack Houston by Mink Snopes...
...I suppose, could fail to recognize that sentence as the unique and curious language of William Faulkner...
...Mink drives his wife and daughters away, and during the days that he is disposing of the body Mink lives on cold stale coffee and raw meal out of the barrel, and finally on sweetened water and the grains of meal in his stubble of beard...
...They are a matchless gallery of portraits...
...Ike falls in love with the cow, and bravely saves her from a grass fire, in a grotesque scene that ends with the terrified cow defecating on Ike...
...The last son, Montgomery Ward, progresses from running a YMCA canteen in France during the first World War as a front for a brothel, to running a photography studio in Jefferson as a front for a pornographic peepshow...
...From the first look we get at him...
...Much of it is absurd, and some of it is disastrous...
...When buzzards reveal the location of the corpse...
...The last section of the book...
...He has learned that "a man can bear anything by simply and calmly refusing to accept it, be reconciled to it...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
