Gambit Declined
Knight’s Gambit.
by William Faulkner.
Random House. 246 pp. $2.75.
The five stories and one novelette making up this volume, despite the technical brilliance of their telling, are all extremely slight. The one exception, though only in comparison with the rest of the volume, is “Tomorrow,” which, like the great and fantastic As I Lay Dying, has to do with the dogged and obscure part of the population of Yoknapatawpha County living up in its stony hills. The “point” of this little tale, moreover, is the same one Faulkner makes in his great hillbilly anabasis: “‘The lowly and invincible of the earth—to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’ “In As I Lay Dying, however, nobody says this—it doesn’t have to be said. In Knight’s Gambit, this sentiment, as well as many others, is put into the mouth of Gavin Stevens, county attorney and Southern ideologue, who is the moral center and dramatic pivot of all these stories.
Faulkner’s narrative method owes a great deal to Conrad, I believe, and Gavin Stevens, though not a narrative “I,” is a sort of Conradian narrator. In this, however, Faulkner has fallen behind rather than gone beyond Conrad’s example. For the character of Stevens, used most ambitiously in his recent Intruder in the Dust, has allowed Faulkner to indulge in a long bout of opinion-mongering. In his best works he gives us a vision which is something other and more real than opinion. But with the advent of Stevens he has taken to airing his views directly, about the South in particular and about modern civilization in general. His work has sundered for this. Intruder in the Dust fails because on the one hand there is the story, and on the other Faulkner’s “solution” to the Negro problem, as expressed by the obnoxiously avuncular Stevens, there being no necessary connection between the two. The author plainly believes that Stevens’ opinions follow from and illuminate the story. But the story can serve as justification for any sort of opinion—for the self-righteous Northern cant Faulkner abominates, as well as for his own reactionary ideology.
_____________
Stevens, the Philo Vance of these “detective” stories, is a curious and rather preposterous creation. With all the awe of the autodidact, Faulkner never fails to remind us of Stevens’ Harvard Phi Beta Kappa key and of his PhD from Heidelberg. And then there is “that ritual of the Translation . . .—the rendering of the Old Testament back into the classic Greek into which it had been translated from its lost Hebrew infancy—which Uncle Gavin had been engaged on for twenty years now. . . .” This quixotic unworldliness on the part of the unambitious and unselfseeking Stevens, Faulkner chooses to celebrate in decidedly worldly stories (potboilers, that is to say) two of which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and the rest of which very plainly had that Parnassian summit as their spiritual goal. Stevens, moreover, an aristocratic Southern republican and the very antithesis of the debased modern demagogues that figure in Faulkner’s pages, is described, with egregious demagogy, as “a loose-jointed man with a mop of untidy iron-gray hair, who could discuss Einstein with college professors and who spent whole afternoons among the squatting men against the walls of country stores, talking to them in their idiom. He called these his vacations.”
Knight’s Gambit, the novelette that gives this volume its name, is a melodramatic and sentimental piece of trumpery incongruously tricked out in Faulkner’s elaborate late style. In a strange way it travesties, or revises (as if Faulkner, softened by years, were repenting his earlier unrelieved tragic harshness) elements of the story of Candace Compson (“Caddy”) in The Sound and the Fury. Like Caddy, the heroine of this story is a victim of the rotting of the Southern landed aristocratic tradition, though unlike Caddy there is nothing at all doomed and demoniacal about her. Her father “farmed his heritage and, with a constant tumbler of thin whiskey-and-water at his elbow and an aged setter bitch dozing at his feet, sat through the long summer afternoons in a homemade chair on the front gallery, reading in Latin the Roman poets. . . .” But then she is made to marry a rich man “whom nobody in that part of Mississippi had ever heard of before,” and the “once-simple country house is transmogrified into something a little smaller than a Before-the-War Hollywood set.” With the death of her husband, Mrs. Harriss, the heroine, like Caddy, wanders about in Europe an exile from Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County. Unlike Caddy she comes back and, after melodramatic complications, marries her old beau Gavin Stevens, the story ending on a very genial and patriotic note indeed for William Faulkner.
These stories, then, are no great addition to that most ambitious imaginative effort in modern American literature, the saga of Yoknapatawpha County. It is to be hoped that with the marriage of Stevens we have seen the last of him. The Faulkner that we value as the most powerful living American writer is not the Southern Review ideologue, but the poet of such a work, for instance, as The Bear, that infinitely sad and moving elegy on the death of a pastoral America.
_____________
