No one can write about William Faulkner without committing himself to the weary task of trying to disengage the author and his work from the misconceptions that surround them. It has taken me ten years of wary reading to distinguish the actual writer of The Sound and the Fury from a synthetic Faulkner, compounded of sub-Marxian stereotypes (Negro-hater, nostalgic and pessimistic proto-fascist, etc.); and I am aware that there is yet another pseudo-Faulkner, derived mostly from the potboiling Sanctuary, a more elaborate and chaotic Erskine Caldwell, revealing a world of barnyard sex and violence through a fog of highbrow rhetoric. The grain of regrettable truth in both these views is lost in their misleading emphases; and equally confusing are the less hysterical academic partial glimpses which make Faulkner primarily a historian of Southern culture, or a canny technician whose evocations of terror are secondary to Jamesian experiments with “point of view.” Faulkner, also distorting Faulkner, once told a class of young writers that he never considers form at all! I am moved by the newest collection of Faulkner’s short stories (Collected Stories of William Faulkner, Random House, 900 pp., $4.00) to propose another partial view as a counterweight to the others.

There have been in the last weeks predictions from various quarters that Faulkner, now that his latest novel was chosen by the Book of the Month Club, will shortly win a wider audience. But he has been, though the fact has been astonishingly overlooked, for nearly twenty years the most widely read American writer of whom any respectable critic has been tempted to use the word “great.”

In Dixon Wecter’s recent history of American life during the years of the Great Depression, the name of Faulkner is not even mentioned; yet in the years covered by Mr. Wecter’s book, Faulkner published not only his two greatest novels, but also some sixty stories, nearly twenty of them in the Saturday Evening Post, which is, I suppose, the magazine most likely to be picked up by the common man when he has seen all the movies in town. One must make certain qualifications, of course; neither The Sound and the Fury nor Light in August, his most eminent novels, have had a wide sale. But as a short story writer, he has sold consistently to the mass circulation magazines, apparently pleasing the widest of our reading publics.

It is a strange experience for those of us to whom Faulkner’s name is associated with the critical journals in which his fiction almost never appears, to find his stories, dressed up with the obvious pictures of the weekly family magazine, flanked not by a Kafka or Joyce, but by the dismal hacks whose names I cannot even now (though I have just looked) remember. Sometimes Faulkner writes for Harper’s, but never for anything even as pretentious as the New Yorker. The only “little magazine” which has printed any of the present stories is Sewanee Review, in which first appeared the charming but utterly slick “A Courtship.”

If Faulkner’s stories were the work of his left hand, their appearance in popular magazines would be of little consequence (a man has to live!), but Faulkner is essentially a short story writer. He has no special talent for sustained narrative, though twice he has brought off a tour de force in long fiction. The forty-three stories in the present collection are by no means his total achievement. In it are included most of the stories from two earlier collections now out of print, These Thirteen and Dr. Martino; but the seven stories of Go Down Moses are not included, nor those loosely worked together in The Unvanquished, nor the four magazine tales woven into the text of The Hamlet, nor the Gavin Stevens detective stories (Saturday Evening Post favorites) which were gathered together last year in a pseudo-long narrative called Knight’s Gambit.

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Faulkner as a storyteller is apparently short-breathed by nature, and his years of writing for the stringent space limits of the magazines has confirmed his tendency to write in gasps. What look like novels at first glimpse, The Hamlet or The Unvanquished, for instance, come apart into loosely linked short narratives; Light in August achieves substance by intertwining two separate stories, and Sanctuary, slim enough in finished form, consists of various sub-plots out of the Sartoris-Snopes background, tacked onto the original money-making shocker. Only in Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury has Faulkner worked out genuine full-length narratives by extension rather than patchwork; and even in these two books, he attains novelistic thickness not by inventing a long, complex fable, but by revealing in a series of strict “point of view” accounts of the same experience the amount of narrative material proper to a short story. It is this experiment with “point of view,” a virtue made of a short-breathed necessity, that has concealed somewhat the essentially popular nature of Faulkner’s work, and has suggested to his critics comparisons with Proust or Joyce or James, rather than Dickens, whom he so strikingly resembles. The inventor of Popeye and the creator of Quilp have a great deal in common besides an obsession with the grotesque, and especially they have a demonic richness of invention (typified by their equal skill at evoking names that are already myths before the characters are drawn) and a contempt for the platitudes of everyday experience.

Like Dickens, Faulkner is primarily, despite his intellectual obiter dicta, a sentimental writer; not a writer with the occasional vice of sentimentality, but one whose basic mode of experience is sentimental, in an age when the serious “alienated” writer emblazons anti-sentimentality on his coat of arms. In a writer whose very method is self-indulgence, that sentimentality becomes sometimes downright embarrassing, as in the stories of World War II in the present collection, “Tall Men,” “Two Soldiers,” etc., in which the soupiest clichés of self-sacrifice and endurance are shamelessly worked; he is not above the crassest “happy endings,” stagemanaging creakily the fulfillments that we had hoped for against all logic and probability. Even in so good a story as “Uncle Willy” the subtlety of tone and the ingenuity of development serve the conventional soft tale of the town lush opposed to the embattled forces of spinsterhood in a struggle for the old man’s life and a boy’s soul. Since Romanticism, the reservoir of the sentimental has been nostalgia, and in popular American literature this reservoir has been preeminently the nostalgia for boyhood and for our only homegrown Middle Ages, the ante-bellum South. The South conquered the popular imagination at the moment of its defeat, and the number of synthetic latterday supporters of the Confederacy is exceeded among us only by the synthetic rooters for Notre Dame. When the bloody corn cobs are brushed aside, we can see there is a large area of popular commitment which Faulkner shares with the author of Gone With the Wind.

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Faulkner is a Rousseauist at a time when scarcely a serious writer has not found a way to mock the Noble Savage. Recently, in a general recantation of his earlier bitterness, he has been telling us that all men are good, that is, better than their circumstances would lead us to expect. And the best men in Faulkner are small boys, peasants, Indians, and Negroes. The American extension of Rousseauism through James Fenimore Cooper leads directly to William Faulkner. The great unpopular novels of the 20th century are urban, cosmopolite, but his writing has been non-urban, even anti-urban, as has the popular sub-literature produced largely for city-dwellers from fashionable suburbs. Faulkner is, without doubt, the last serious writer in the United States to attempt Noble Savage Indian stories (“The Courtship,” “Lo!”), as well as tales of hunting, fishing, horsemanship, and aviation—stunt and combat flying, to be sure—where the matter-of-fact machine is triumphed over, as the plod and pull of the horse is romantically sublimated in jumping. What other novelist of first rank can write so directly to the average American?

The subject matter par excellence of the modern novel, the alienation of the artist, and the hero par excellence, a Dedalus wandering the city in the vain hope of embracing his father, the citizen, are alien to Faulkner. He has only one story and one early novel in which the artist is protagonist; and this, too, is fortunate for Faulkner. The occasional “intellectual” whom he uses for a mouthpiece, Ratliffe, the sewing machine salesman, or Gavin Stevens, is an intellectual who can mingle unnoticed with the boys on the front porch, wearing the Phi Beta Kappa key which no one recognizes. This is Faulkner’s sentimentalized image of himself, not even the writer but the peddler or the lawyer, accepted and admired by the whole people, for whom he adjusts his grammar and to whom he reveals the truth of their plight, not as a prophet but as a detective—the poor man’s intellectual.

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The detective story is the inevitable crown of Faulkner’s work; in it (the six stories in Knight’s Gambit and Intruder in the Dust) many strains of writing find fulfillment, not least his concern with the “switcheroo” and the surprise ending. Such devices are generally regarded these days as old-fashioned and factitious, but Faulkner has always shared with the mass public a sneaking fondness for them. “A Rose for Emily,” in some ways the best of his short stories, is marred by the last-minute use of such machinery, and many of his other pieces good or bad (“Hair,” “A Courtship”) employ that disreputable device, presumed to have died with O. Henry. In the sub-literature of the detective novel the “switcheroo” has not only survived, but has become its very point; and it is therefore inevitable that Faulkner turn more and more to that form, as, indeed, Dickens was doing at the end of his career.

The final likeness of Dickens and Faulkner has been almost obliterated by opposite distortions; we are inclined to believe, if we accept the stereotypes, that the grotesque in Dickens is almost exclusively comic, while the same element in Faulkner is invariably horrible. But Dickens has won increasing recognition as a sober exploiter of irrational evil, and attempts have been made to establish Faulkner as a humorist. There are various kinds of humor in Faulkner, the most common “pure” form being the bargaining story, with the climax of the trickster tricked. But precisely as in Dickens, there is no clear line between the horrible and the funny; it is all what we would call in our newest vocabulary “the absurd.” The cast of most of Faulkner’s humorous stories is drawn from the Snopeses, the perpetrators of his most revolting horrors. One of the best stories in the present collection, “Barn Burning,” is a tale of unrelieved horror told through the eyes of a boy watching his father, the aboriginal Ab Snopes; and from the seed of that story is developed a large part of The Hamlet, which begins in terror and passes through the affair of the idiot and the cow to an ambivalent climax of horse-trading and treasure-hunting, by turns simply funny and absolutely horrible; and the final generation of Snopeses appears in the midst of Popeye’s impotent ravages in Sanctuary, as two purely burlesque cornballs, mistaking a brothel for a hotel. The art of the grotesque, whether comical or horrible, has always a popular appeal, impelling each character toward becoming his own archetype, and thus making possible the playing out of moral conflicts as melodrama or farce.

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There are, of course, obstacles between Faulkner and complete popular acceptance. His monstrously involved “point of view” is a lion in the path, but it poses a problem in only three or four of his eighteen books, and is not troublesome at all in the short stories. Then, there is his prose style, whose sheer pretentious ineptitude often puts off all readers, popular or highbrow; but the pseudo-poetry of the author of bad verse is rather an attraction really for the common reader with his dim sense of rhetoric as desirable. If it were only easier to skip in Faulkner! It is necessary in simple self-defense; but his connecting links are so often lost within the double-parentheses of precisely the most unreadable passages, that one skips only at the price of confusion.

In general, the subject matter of Faulkner is congenial to popular taste, but he suffers in two respects, by an omission and an emphasis. His concern with sex at its most lurid, his monotonously nymphomaniac women, his lovers of beasts, his rapists and dreamers of incest, put off the ordinary reader, who tends to prefer his pornography pure. The average reader is no prude about sex, he merely insists that it be kept in its place, that is, in trash and not in literature, demanding a distinction much like that between the harlot and the honest woman he marries.

More important, I think, is Faulkner’s avoidance of young love, his almost hysterical campaign against the myth of the pure young girl, which joins him to most post-Flaubertian serious novelists, but cuts him off from the providers of popular entertainment. The purest passionate relations in Faulkner are between men in love with the same woman, who is usually quite unworthy of either; the tenderest feeling he evokes (barring the almost sickly-sweet idyll of Ike and the cow) are between brother and sister, or a boy and an old man, whether a white hophead, an Indian hunter, or a proud Negro. Even in Knight’s Gambit, the most syrupy of Faulkner’s works, he cannot quite bring himself to redeem the ingénue for love, but saves the final clinch for a middle-aged pair, to whom a nineteen-year-old boy says at the curtain, “Bless you my children!”

But American literature, popular and serious, has a counter-tradition to the boy-girlmarriage routine, a pair of juvenile, subsexual myths of love, perhaps even more deeply rooted in our land: unconsummated brother-sister incest (from the very first American novel through Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville to a recent successful movie, Miss Tatlock’s Millions), and the platonic passion of white boy and colored man, the dream of a love stronger than our strongest guilt (most splendidly expressed in Huckleberry Finn) that reaches a climax in Go Down Moses and Intruder in the Dust.

That Faulkner is an uneven writer everyone knows; but the good and bad in his work cannot be equated with the popular and highbrow elements. The two distinctions cut through his achievement on different planes; he is neither a natural storyteller confusing his talent with forays into the “literary,” nor a great artist prostituting his talents for a living. His successes and failures are alike rooted in each level; and, indeed, he is often a “bad” writer, both by purely slick standards and in light of the higher criticism.

Why he is such a super-eminently good “bad” writer, surmounting excesses of maudlin feeling and absurd indulgences in overripe rhetoric alike, is a mystery. We can only cite the astonishing richness of invention and specification, the ability to realize characters and tensions with a power to coerce our credence that has nothing to do with a resemblance to “real” life or the technical standards we had fondly supposed would be demanded of any first-rate fiction in our time. It is only the just and delightful final turn of the screw that so baffling a writer has pleased over twenty-five years two audiences, each unaware of the fact, much less the grounds, of the other’s appreciation.

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