Haunted Landscapes

COLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER (900 pp.) --Random House ($4.75).

Mississippi Novelist William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Sanctuary) has no time for literary circles. An iron-grey, taciturn man of 52, he much prefers hunting and fishing. Nonetheless, for 20 years, he has been one of the leading enthusiasms of U.S. literary-intellectual pundits. Next month, for the first time, a book by William Faulkner is a Book-of-the-Month-Club alternate selection. A fat collection of 42 Faulkner tales written over the past quarter-century, Collected Stories will let a brand-new layer of U.S. readers judge for themselves what all the critical whooping is about. The stories are also pretty sure to bring a spate of re-estimates by the critics themselves.

As a writer, Faulkner shuttles between two worlds. One of them is easily recognizable because most people spend most of their time in it: the grey one of everyday life. Faulkner describes its persons and places: down & outers in Manhattan's Penn Station, war veterans living on pride, hungry poets mooching from a successful colleague. If this were all that Faulkner could do, he would be buried in an obscure corner of U.S. letters, as a minor realist in the tradition of Dos Passes, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Sartoris v. Snopes. The other Faulkner world is the one he has made his own: mythical Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, a landscape haunted by an unsettled past and an unwanted future. The past survives in the memory of the old South, its code of courage and chivalry, its moral stain of slavery. The future is the creeping new world of Northern commerce and industry; in Faulkner's view, it promises to make life impersonal, mechanized and "depthless."

In his stories, the Sartoris family represents the past--former aristocrats who lose themselves in gentility, alcohol, rhetoric and madness. The Snopes family symbolizes the future; they are coldly, and crudely, on the make. The process of degeneration hits bottom when a third type appears: people who use the Sartoris pretensions to veil the Snopes greed.

Faulkner's instinctive sympathies are with the founders of the Sartoris clan, who tamed the country and fought in the Civil War. But he realizes that their way of life is dead forever, largely because they allowed it to be corrupted by slavery. Some of Faulkner's most viciously satirical passages are directed against the sickly remnants--the gentlemen who drink morning toddies while the floors beneath them are visibly rotting away. At the same time, he desperately hates the hard-souled, faceless Snopeses, whose only purpose in life is to accumulate money. In the present-day South, Faulkner admires only such stiff-back Negroes as Lucas Beauchamp of Intruder in the Dust (TIME, Oct. 4, 1948), who endure humiliation with patience and dignity, and those poor whites who cling to their land, their families and their old morality.

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.

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