Turning to Reality

...Reviewed by PETER SHAW Department of English New York State University at Stonybrook William Faulkner was first fully accepted in this country in the late '30s when a few critics discovered the patterns of a saga in his novels and stories...

...In my opinion," Faulkner once told an interviewer, "ideas and facts have very little to do with truth...

...The major casualty was his own fiction...

...Furthermore, as Baldwin said, Faulkner was evoking not a tradition but a legend...

...It is hard to believe that Faulkner was unaware as he delivered his truisms to the graduating class of Pine Manor Junior College or the Delta Council of Cleveland, Mississippi, that he was mouthing platitudes...

...What he had known to be a legend in his fiction he had now come to believe in as history...

...If Americans failed to accept this personal responsibility, failed the Negro, they would find themselves among "the remaining handful of white people against the massed myriads of all the people on earth who are not white...

...James B. Meriwether's collection contains several public letters by Faulkner denying that he had ever made such a statement, but there is no editorial note telling us whether or not he actually did...

...Whether or not Faulkner made the statement, Baldwin's criticism stands: Faulkner in his public statements was holding up the present to a model of the past that did not apply...

...Faulkner's metaphysics afterward improved, but his art declined...

...The heroic tradition of the Southern Civil War heroes did not and does not apply to the South...

...Unfortunately, as this book makes clear, Faulkner's most serious thought during the '50s amounted to a deeply felt but irrelevant local and national patriotism...

...Certainly he could have made it, not in a relapse into Southern know-nothingism as Baldwin took it, but to dramatize the danger of the racial situation: Things should not be allowed to deteriorate, Faulkner would have been saying, to the point where he would have to repeat the tragic decisions of Lee and others who reluctantly took up arms in the Civil War...

...We are living in a time of impossible revolutions,' Sartre wrote, "and Faulkner uses his extraordinary art to describe our suffocation and a world dying of old age...

...But his public statements of the '50s-comprising the bulk of this collection-show that he in fact did turn to facts and ideas in the last part of his life, and with unhappy results...

...After 200 years in slavery and 90 years of quasi-freedom," Baldwin wrote, "it is hard to think very highly of William Faulkner's advice to 'go slow.' " Baldwin was especially incensed, as were many others, when Faulkner was reported to have announced that, in the event of actual hostilities with the Federal government, he would take up arms to defend Mississippi, "even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes...

...From then on, not only his readers but Faulkner himself concentrated on the tangled legends of Yoknapatawpha county...

...I like his art, but I do not believe in his metaphysics...

...As Irving Howe once put it, Faulkner became our contemporary...

...Echoing Lincoln, Faulkner repeatedly warned that the racial crisis was a test of whether this nation could endure...

...His ideas were simply irrelevant to the situation, whether in his alleged statement or his denials of it in Time, Life, and The Reporter...

...The sequels are inferior to The Hamlet in the degree to which Faulkner better understood the sociological significance of his subject...

...At the same time that he was coming to understand his themes he was writing the last two novels of the Snopes trilogy, The Town and The Mansion, sequels to The Hamlet of the '30s...

...I am every inch as much an enemy of liberty and enlightenment and progress as any voting or drinking dry either in Oxford...

...Faulkner, but what were you saying before about that man who raped a woman with a corn cob...

...It might be argued that there is a mystique surrounding certain public occasions in America that produces these ideas no matter who is talking...

...Flem Snopes as the repiesentative of a rising class is less interesting than his purely malevolent original, and the understanding of "Snopesism" by V. K. Ratliff comes off less well than the narrator's previous amazement...

...Human endurance had been a subject of his fiction...

...Beginning with a letter in 1950 (the year he won the Nobel Prize) to the Memphis Commercial Appeal on the murder of three Negro children by three white men, Faulkner publicly was caught up in the agonies and perplexities of his time...

...This Faulkner was "a lost man," full of despair, and unable to imagine the future...

...James Baldwin thought Faulkner worse than platitudinous...

...In his late works, Faulkner could still sometimes create such moments, but he could no longer let them go...

...His local humor is recalled by a letter to the Oxford Eagle which begins, "I notice that your paper has listed me among the proponents of legal beer...

...now it was as if he had discovered its social and historical implications...

...I for one have never listened to or heard about a graduating speech of the last 15 years that did not include the Global Confrontation and "freedom with responsibility...

...He began lecturing to fraternal organizations and graduating classes on the duties of Americans in a period of crisis...

...There are only occasional echoes of the great Faulkner in his collected public papers...

...The last two parts of the Snopes trilogy demonstrate that ideas can have very little to do with the truth of fiction...

...And in a piece on an ice hockey game for Sports Illustrated, a description of the skaters carries a reminder of something else that he used to do: [they made] "a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.' The great moments in Faulkner's books were those in which the pattern of a life emerged from a moment of time-suspension-Benjy in The Sound and the Fury eternally being driven past the Confederate soldier monument, Lena Grove walking uphill at the beginning of Light in August, or the convict paddling on the great river in "Old Man.' Most characteristically, the suspension came in the middle of some violent motion like that of a hockey game-the collision of pony and wagon in "Spotted Horses,' or the moments of calm enjoyed by the fantastic Bayard Sartoris and Joe Christmas before their violent deaths...

...To win the larger contest, America had to win the smaller one -it had to recover the spirit of the Founding Fathers and learn that freedom involves not only the right, "but the inalienable duty to be free...

...I resent that...

...Yes, of course, Mr...

...At about the same time, though, Sartre was discovering a different and greater Faulkner: an artist of concealment, not clarification, whose meanings lay in inscrutable acts of violence...

...He urged acquiescence in the inevitable on his fellow white Southerners and "restraint," or "flexibility" on Negro leaders...

...In a long autobiographical essay of 1954 called "Mississippi," he explicated as well as any of his critics the significances of his major themes: the Indians, the retreat of the wilderness, the old families, the myth of the South, the old Bear, and the rise of the Snopeses...

...That was written in 1939...

...The context of the racial struggle, Faulkner insisted, was the broad contest between the American idea of freedom and the Communist ideology...

...In his little report on the hockey game, he ends not with a picture of the skaters but with a homily on America's decline as seen in our need always to play the national anthem: "Must we even use a Chamber of Commerce race for Miss Sewage Disposal or a wildcat land-sale, to remind us that liberty gained without honor and sacrifice and held without constant vigilance and undiminished honor and complete willingness to sacrifice again at need, was not worth having to begin with...