The Life of William Faulkner by Carl Rollyson

Author:Carl Rollyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: IDENTIFIER: Rollyson_V2
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2020-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

“An Event in American Literature”

In the Dallas Morning News (September 26), John Chapman observed that “it should not seem particularly strange that Faulkner, having dealt with the displacement of people from war and poverty, should finally come to deal explicitly with the most dispossessed and displaced of all, the Negro.”16 Horace Gregory in the New York Herald Tribune (September 26) called Lucas Beauchamp a new kind of black man in American fiction: “no mere ‘Uncle Tom,’ that Pantaloon of sentimental abolitionist literature, but one of the most convincing Negro characters in American fiction, a rare figure of unmarred dignity, and it is one of the marks of Faulkner’s genius that he can write of the Negro without false pity, without the usual haze of shallow sentiment in which so many ‘men of good will’ scatter patronage, and the sweet, slightly rotted fruits of ‘good intentions.’ ”

Between Edmund Wilson and Eudora Welty stretched the literary and political ground on which Faulkner’s novel was appraised. Wilson complained about “snarled-up,” tract-like prose.17 The critic presumed the novel derived from a response to the civil rights plank at the Democratic National Convention and to an antilynching bill in Congress, unaware that Faulkner had conceived the novel nearly a decade earlier and had been exploring the race issue in his wartime screenplays. When Wilson said that “it is difficult to reduce what is said to definite propositions,” he contradicted his own argument that Faulkner had written a tract. As Harvey Breit observed in the New York Times Book Review (September 26), Stevens’s speeches are “non-paraphrasable because they have not been conceived in political terms nor are they expressed in ready formulas. They are individual notions, expressed with utmost particularisation, and no camp or faction will find them readily usable.”

Eudora Welty read a different novel from Wilson’s. “Intruder is marvelously funny,” she wrote in the Hudson Review (Winter 1949). “The complicated intricate thing is that his stories are not decked out in humor, but the humor is born in them, as much their blood and bones as the passion and poetry.” Welty, a master of comic prose and scene setting, noticed sentences like this one: “Miss Habersham’s round hat on the exact top of her head such as few people had seen in fifty years and probably no one at any time looked up out of a halfway rifled grave.” This old lady is helping sixteen-year-old Chick Mallison to dig up a body as part of the proof that Lucas Beauchamp is innocent. A bullet will prove Lucas’s gun was not involved in the murder. Faulkner attends to the incongruity of the characters, the setting, and the time—the past (the old hat) impinging upon the present, the living upon the dead. A crime has been covered up, literally buried. Ultimately the novel is not simply a murder mystery—that is its casing, Welty noted—or a response to social issues (although those are there). “What goes on here?,” Welty began her review: “Grave digging. ‘Digging and undiggin.’ What’s

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