A Way Out of the Swamp?

INTRUDER IN THE DUST (247 pp.)--William Faulkner--Random House ($3).

Yocknapatawpha County, bound by the Tallahatchie and Yocknapatawpha Rivers in northern Mississippi, is one of the most remarkable landscapes created by the American imagination. Notably similar to

Lafayette County, where William Faulkner lives, it has become, in the novels of this most powerful of present-day American novelists, a symbolic place suggesting the diseased condition of the South and the entire modern world. In fiercely Gothic melodramas Faulkner has spun out his cobwebby legend of the South. Intruder in the Dust is the latest installment of that legend.

Creatures of Decay. Faulkner's view of the South has no trace of magnolia-and-old-plantation romanticism; it is tough and realistic, even if sometimes debatable. From novel to novel, weaving backward and forward in patterns of time as intricate as his twining sentences, Faulkner has developed his picture of a society devastated by war--a society that was both honorable and doomed by an inherent guilt. In his view the South was right in insisting on its sovereignty but cursed by the shame of slavery. It had to fight and was doomed to lose.

In the ruins of the war, Faulkner shows the mean-spirited and hard-driving Snopeses, poor whites who absorbed the cheap commercialism of the carpetbaggers, rising to economic and social power by defeating the Sartoris clan, impotent aristocrats talking about the code of chivalry but unable to bring it to life. Faulkner is especially adept at portraying the creatures of the decayed South: Gowan Stevens, a gentleman of the old school, who learned to drink in a Virginia college but not to overcome his cowardice; Flem Snopes, who would not hesitate to stamp on every living creature to satisfy his greed; and the famous Popeye, a ghastly symbol of machine-age amorality, with the "vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." Against this background, the violent elements in Faulkner's novels--rape, castration, lynching, bestiality--are symbols of moral confusion and social decay.

In the scheme of Faulkner's work, Intruder in the Dust is a key novel, his one book that offers a sign of hope that the South may yet extricate itself from the swamps of hatred and violence. Though not so structurally daring as The Sound and the Fury, nor so eloquent as Light in August, nor so sensational as Sanctuary, Faulkner's latest book is a better told and more firmly bound story than any of these..

The Self-Possessed. Two main characters dominate the novel. One is Charles Mallison, a 16-year-old boy who, in the scheme of the book, represents innocence and freshness, the potentiality of Southern white manhood unspoiled by ancient hatreds. Counterposed to Charles is Lucas Beauchamp, an old Negro farmer with some white blood in his veins, who lives in solitary dignity on a patch of land bequeathed by a white ancestor. Lucas Beauchamp is one of the most magnificent and majestic characters in all American fiction. "Solitary, kinless and intractable, apparently not only without friends even in his own race but proud of it," he suggests the reserve and strength of a people inured to suffering and unshakable in its self-possession.

The novel opens with the sudden news that Lucas Beauchamp has shot Vinson Gowrie, a backwoodsman. A lynching is expected momentarily. For Charles, this news stirs an emotional crisis. He remembers how, during a childhood hunting expedition, he had fallen into an icy pond and had found shelter in Lucas' cabin. Next to the massive black man, he had felt small and uncertain. To assert his budding sense of superiority, he offered the Negro some coins as payment for a meal, but with a magnificent gesture Lucas had shamed him.

Now, when it seems that the Negro is doomed, Charles is troubled by confused feelings: he hopes Lucas may be saved while subconsciously enjoying the thought that he may burn in gasoline. When Charles, with his Uncle Gavin, visits Lucas in jail, the unperturbed prisoner refuses to tell his story to Gavin, since as a

Negro he trusts no adult whites. But he does consent to offer Charles the tip that Vinson Gowrie was not killed by a bullet from his gun--as an examination of the buried body will show.

The boy is now faced with a sickening problem: dare he dig up a white man's still fresh grave in order to save an irritatingly proud Negro? His Uncle Gavin, though friendly to Lucas, does not believe he is innocent. Certainly no white adult in the whole county believes it, and none would dare risk the ire of the Gowrie clan by disturbing the grave. But Charles, acting on his uncontaminated instinct, goes to the grave at night, taking with him a Negro boy and a 70-year-old white woman. They set off a train of events which prove that Lucas is innocent.

"Now What?" The novel ends with a rousingly comic scene in which Lucas gravely lumbers up to Uncle Gavin's office to pay for his legal services. When Gavin as gravely tells him that the fee will be two dollars, Lucas extracts from an ancient purse a dollar bill, some silver, and 50 pennies. He then stands waiting. "Now what?" asks the lawyer. "My receipt," says Lucas.

Never before has Faulkner been so explicit in presenting a solution to Southern problems. "I only say that the injustice is ours, the South's. We must expiate it and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help . . ."

Whatever its worth as social analysis, as a novel, Intruder in the Dust is surely one of the best written by a 20th Century American. It is composed in Faulkner's usual polyphonic rhetoric: long sentences, spiraling over pages and interspersed with complex parentheses, matted coils of language that suggest the quality of disturbed reverie. In the hands of almost any other writer, this sort of swampy, tangled eloquence would be unbearable, but occasion, ally Faulkner's rhetoric is driven by the whip of this tremendous and urgent passion. Sample (an apostrophe to the Negro):

". . . You just didn't see them--a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered homes, not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear: just waiting, biding since theirs was an armament which the white mati could not match nor--if he but knew it--even cope with: patience . . . this land was a desert and a witness . . . of the deliberate turning as with one back of the whole dark people on which the very economy of the land itself was founded, not in heat or anger nor even regret but in one irremediable invincible inflexible repudiation, upon not a racial outrage but a human shame."

Intruder in the Dust makes the reader work, it is not easy reading. But the reward is worth the trouble. It can be read as a detective story, a humorous idyl (a kind of second cousin to Huckleberry Finn), an outraged, descriptive exhortation to Southern society, a parable of modern life. It is also a triumphant work of art.

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