The Snopeses

THE TOV/N (371 pp.)--William Faulkner--Random House ($3.95).

In his first novel in three years William Faulkner displays the vision of a Hieronymus Bosch rendered in the style of Grandma Moses. The demons who emerge from the earth are those old familiars--the Snopeses--and the earth is the red clay of Yoknapatawpha County, Miss. Yet Faulkner is not what he appears to be--a regional novelist; he is a novelist of the nether regions.

In The Hamlet (TIME, April 1, 1940), Faulkner told how Flem Snopes, a repellent specimen of white trash, sidled into Frenchman's Bend. Now, in The Town (the second book in an intended trilogy), Faulkner takes Flem Snopes from his earlier triumphs over the steppingstones of other men's dead selves to higher things in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha's county seat (which closely resembles Oxford, Miss., where Novelist Faulkner has lived for most of his life).

Originally, the county was inhabited by Sartorises, Varners and Comptons. Now it is just about all Snopeses--the twins, Bilbo and Vardaman Snopes, Wallstreet Panic Snopes, Admiral Dewey Snopes, Byron and Virgil Snopes and Montgomery Ward Snopes. (The reader is grateful for an occasional mnemonic rhyme, e.g., one Snopes is called Eck, "the one with the broken neck.") Malignant, hated, despised, physically maladroit, the Snopeses prevail over better men by their rapacity and lack of pride or shame. They are like monkeys on the backs of men, and they move to "the blind glare of the blind money."

New Labyrinths. The plot slithers like a water moccasin through the canebrakes among four narrators and unnumbered previous Faulkner books; it more or less turns around the fact that Eula, daughter of the old. failed squire Varner, has become pregnant--though nobody is sure by whom. Varner marries her off to Flem Snopes, who advances from shortest-order cook to bank vice president, then moves up several more rungs of Jefferson's social ladder when he permits "Major" De Spain to cuckold him with Eula. His motives are Snopesean and Faulknerian: through a kind of sexual osmosis, he hopes that the Snopes family tree will flourish by association with the aristocratic De Spain. The gentle, white-haired local lawyer, Gavin Stevens (left over from Intruder in the Dust, etc.), loves Eula's adolescent daughter Linda; he wants her to get out of Jefferson because the Snopeses have taken over. But Flem hangs on to his prestigious wife and daughter until Eula puts a bullet through her brain and thus releases Linda for better things.

Through all this move the grisly minor characters of Faulkner's theater. The druggist is running a dirty-picture seance. Bad niggers chase good niggers with carving knives, fall together into the same ditch and talk philosophy. Four grotesque little Indians (the offspring of a stray Snopes and an Apache woman) turn up out of nowhere, settle down in a cave and very nearly burn alive a citizen who tries to civilize them.

Faulkner's book continues the involuted garrulity of its predecessors into new labyrinths of confusion. There is all the usual apparent clumsiness and a kind of deliberate illiteracy, e.g., characterizing the Snopeses in general. Faulkner mixes five metaphors in about half a sentence: "[The Snopeses] accreted in from Frenchman's Bend into the vacuum behind the first one's next advancement by that same sort of osmosis by which . . . they had covered Frenchman's Bend, the chain unbroken, every Snopes in Frenchman's Bend moving up one step, leaving the last slot in the bottom open for the next Snopes to appear from nowhere and fill . . ." Thus Faulkner attempts to set a whole town talking at once about itself and in its own tone of voice. He deliberately imitates the total recall of a village wiseacre who insists on telling a captive audience about some intricate scandal involving at least three generations.

Old Laws. William Faulkner has an unabashed sense of caste, honor and history. To him Appomattox was only yesterday, and he feels deeply "our gallant lost irrevocable unreconstructible debacle." This sense gives the tragic dimension to his novels, even when he appears merely to be telling elaborate stories of a little town in the Deep South. If the clowns are there, blowing up bladders in the wings and trading anecdotes with the witches, it is because his theater resembles Macbeth's and Shakespeare's. Another Elizabethan, Thomas ("Bad money drives out good'') Gresham. seems to have suggested a text for Faulkner's moral law: Bad men drive out good.

Faulkner scarcely believes in the good old plantation Sartorises and the old Southern heaven, but he believes in its present hell. He is a Manichaean and a Mississippian, a confused and magnificent novelist whose magnificence comes from his confusion and that of the people he has made his own.

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