The Snopeses at an end
The Mansion.
by William Faulkner.
Random House. 436 pp. $4.75.
As Faulkner tells us in a prefatory note to The Mansion, the book is the “final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925.” In this new book we presumably see the last of the famous Snopes tribe, whose earlier activities were chronicled in The Hamlet and The Town and whose name has become synonymous with mean-minded, small-time commercialism, provincial conniving in and out of politics, and general skullduggery. There is no other such sustained trilogy dealing with small-town life in America; it is, of course, a major achievement and constitutes a large portion of Faulkner’s general portrait of his mythic but very real Yoknapatawpha County and its town of Jefferson.
Like much of Faulkner’s work, the Snopes trilogy is uneven. The Hamlet, published in 1940, remains the strongest and richest of the three novels (although “novels” is not quite the word for them). Reading The Town (1957) one was uncomfortably aware of the author borrowing events, characters, and tricks of language from his own earlier books without quite being able to give them a new vitality. On some pages one feels the same way about The Mansion, but this book is a better one than its predecessor and makes a fitting conclusion to what scholars will doubtless be calling the Snopes cycle.
They are certainly a picturesque group. Flem, who progresses from grocery clerk to bank president, is the sexually impotent Menelaus of the clan. He is murdered at the end of the new book by Mink Snopes, who waits thirty-eight years in prison to track down his hated relative and shoot him. This he finally accomplishes in a vivid scene in the one room Flem ever uses of the spacious mansion he has pretentiously remodeled in the antebellum style. The Helen of the story is Eula Varner, whose lush femaleness and beauty drive quixotic sentimentalists like Gavin Stevens, the local lawyer, to despair and on whose sexual infidelities Flem trades himself into wealth and respectability, dispossessing her aristocratic lover Manfred De Spain not only from the bank presidency but from his mansion too. But she had committed suicide in The Town, and the main woman character in the new book is her daughter Linda. Then there are I. O. Snopes, Watkins Products Snopes, the carpenter, Virgil Snopes, of the prodigious sexual performances, Senator Clarence Snopes, Montgomery Ward Snopes, the purveyor of lewd photographs, and several others who constitute what thoughtful people like Stevens and his friend V. K. Ratliff sardonically refer to as “the Snopes condition or dilemma.”
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This condition set in when the Snopeses, descendants of carpetbaggers who came south after the Civil War, began about the turn of the century to displace the earlier settlers, like the Varners, from their positions of local power and prestige. This they gradually accomplished by trickery, suborning, and sheer persistence. And by the time Faulkner comes to the end of his chronicle he has produced not only a series of colorful and humorous stories but also something of a historical and sociological commentary. There is documentary value, for example, in the account in The Mansion of the rise of Clarence Snopes, a small-time Huey Long, Vardaman, or Bilbo, from local constable to state senator. He began by brandishing the racist slogans of the Ku Klux Klan, made himself newly popular by doing an about-face and attacking the Klan in the guise of a humanitarian reformer, and later, as expediency dictated, joined the fascist Silver Shirts. Faulkner appears to think that the Southern demagogue can never be beaten by liberal idealism or political action. This is shown not only by the bafflement Stevens and Ratliff feel when confronted with the political aspect of the Snopes “dilemma” but by the fact that the defeat of Clarence Snopes is brought about in a purely farcical manner.
That the Snopes chronicle is a significant social commentary is all the more remarkable because the three books of the trilogy are really collections of related fables rather than novels, and they tend to make scant use of the novelist’s ways of giving his narratives a detailed social content. There is sometimes very little psychological content either, and as usually happens in Faulkner some of the leading characters in The Mansion are not really portrayed or presented. Instead they are alluded to or described remotely in words that become a mere repeated formula, as in the case of Flem Snopes. Or they are used as a temporary point of view or narrator but not accounted for otherwise, as in the case of Chick Mallison. On the other hand, there are several characters whom readers will remember from earlier stories who achieve a new reality and interest in The Mansion, like Gavin Stevens, Ratliff, Linda Snopes, and Mink.
The Mansion is loosely constructed around the story of Mink Snopes and his long planned revenge. In The Hamlet one reads how he killed Jack Houston in an argument over a cow and vowed revenge on Flem when Flem failed to come to his defense during the trial. All this is amplified in the new book, and we are told how, with the help of Montgomery Ward Snopes, Flem tricks Mink into an attempted escape from jail in order to lengthen his term. In the long sections devoted to Mink, Faulkner is at his best. They are so fine that we do not worry about the fact that in the portraits of the tall convict in Old Man and of Joe Christmas in Light in August he had told basically the same story of fortitude, masculine isolation, endurance, and “outrage” at the cruelty and irrationality of nature and society. Nor do we worry much about the note of sentimentality (Mink’s physical resemblance to a child) that creeps in here and there.
Ratliff’s eloquent flow of salty, semiliterate talk and his sardonic humor are a delight as always, and he makes the perfect Sancho Panza to Stevens’ Don Quixote. Stevens himself is more alive and attractive here than he was, for example, in Intruder in the Dust, where he was not much more than a mouthpiece for Dixiecrat ideas on the race question. We learn anew in The Mansion of his charming if more than slightly neurotic impulse to be gallant to adolescent girls (lending them books of poetry and buying them ice cream sodas) and about his doomed love first for Eula Varner and then for Linda, although readers of The Town will find some of this unduly repetitious. There is much low-keyed but pungent talk between Stevens and Ratliff, the two moral consciences of Jefferson, and we even see them in New York in a sketchy but hilarious scene.
It is Linda who brings them to New York. Partly under the tutelage of Stevens she has acquired political views, although they are very different from his. The time is 1936 and she is about to marry the Jewish sculptor she has been living with for several years. They have become Communists and are off to the Spanish Civil War, in which Linda’s husband is killed and she is made permanently deaf. The deafness is one of the barriers that isolates her from the world after she returns to a lonely celibate life in the mansion owned by the man the town agrees to call her father. Faulkner has never been notable for his women characters, succumbing like so many romancers from Cooper to Hemingway to a folklore about women rather than relying on his own observation of what they are really like. But one of the strong points of The Town was the portrait of Eula Varner; in The Hamlet she was not much more than a ribald joke enjoyed by the menfolks, but in The Town she came to life—a crossroads fabulous Helen whom Faulkner finally showed to be human and even something of a tragic heroine. He has done well, in the novelistic way, with Linda too, and there is much substance as well as pathos in her long, sad story. The moral strands of the book come together when it is shown at the end how Linda in effect collaborated with Mink in the series of events that lead up to the murder of Flem. The ultimate destructiveness of Snopesism is made clear by the fact that Flem himself collaborates or at least acquiesces in his own death.
This is as close to explicit moral comment as Faulkner comes. And those conservative critics who used to maintain that in Faulkner’s works there is a system of moral and religious values based on a polarity between the virtues of the old-line aristocrats like the Sartorises and the De Spains and the vices of the Snopeses will be disconcerted anew by the words of Gavin Stevens and Ratliff as they drive through the countryside to give Mink Snopes some money after he has committed the murder:
‘So maybe there’s even a moral in it somewhere, if you jest knowed where to look.’
‘There aren’t any morals,’ Stevens said. ‘People just do the best they can.’
‘The pore sons of bitches,’ Ratliff said.
‘The poor sons of bitches,’ Stevens said. ‘Drive on. Pick it up.’
This has its full quota of bathos, and in general there is a good deal of emotionalism and sometimes of sentimentality in The Mansion. Faulkner returns briefly to characters who have had little or nothing to do with the Snopes saga but about whom one read in books like The Sound and the Fury. Jason Compson, his brother Benjy, young Bayard Sartoris, and others unexpectedly appear, like forgotten ghosts, as if the author were reluctant to have done with them.
The pervasive feeling of elegy and sentiment in The Mansion has its positive side and finally assists Faulkner in asserting the serious meaning he obviously means to assert. Perhaps, as Gavin Stevens says, there are no “morals” in the world, but there are moral values which we sense intuitively or emotionally and to which we cling even though we can’t account for them intellectually. The values asserted in The Mansion are the same ones that the author has always asserted when he is writing at his best: love, endurance, tolerance, humor. He has shown a weakness of late years for proclaiming portentous moral abstractions, as in his much-quoted Nobel prize speech. The Faulkner of the Nobel prize speech was the valedictory-rhetorical Faulkner. The author of The Mansion is more than a bit valedictory, but in a poetic mood.
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