The Essential Faulkner Read Online Free Page B

Hawthorne—“the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination.”
    Moreover, he has a brooding love for the land where he was born and reared and where, unlike other writers of his generation, he has chosen to spend his life. It is “… this land, this South, for which God has done so much, with woods for game and streams for fish and deeprich soil for seed and lush springs to sprout it and long summers to mature it and serene falls to harvest it and short mild winters for men and animals.” So far as Faulkner’s country includes the Delta, it is also (in the words of old Ike McCaslin)
     … this land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jimcrow cars to Chicago and live in millionaires’ mansions on Lake Shore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together.
    Here are the two sides of Faulkner’s feeling for the South: on the one side, an admiring and possessive love; on the other, a compulsive fear lest what he loves should be destroyed by the ignorance of its native serfs and the greed of traders and absentee landlords.
    No other American writer takes such delight in the weather. He speaks in various novels of “the hot still pine-winey silence of the August afternoon”; of “the moonless September dust, the trees along the road not rising soaring as trees should but squatting like huge fowl”; of “the tranquil sunset of October mazy with windless wood-smoke”; of the “slow drizzle of November rain just above the ice point”; of “those windless Mississippi December days which are a sort of Indian summer’s Indian summer”; of January and February when there is “no movement anywhere save the low constant smoke … and no sound save the chopping of axes and the lonely whistle of the daily trains.” Spring in Faulkner’s country is a hurried season, “all coming at once, pell mell and disordered, fruit and bloom and leaf, pied meadow and blossoming wood and the long fields shearing dark out of winter’s slumber,to the shearing plow.” Summer is dust-choked and blazing, and it lasts far into what should be autumn. “That’s the one trouble with this country,” he says in
As I Lay Dying
. “Everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”
    And Faulkner loves these people created in the image of the land. After a second reading of his novels, you continue to be impressed by his villains, Popeye and Jason and Flem Snopes; but this time you find more space in your memory for other figures standing a little in the background yet presented by the author with quiet affection: old ladies like Miss Jenny Du Pre, with their sharp-tongued benevolence; shrewd but affable traders like Ratliff, the sewing-machine agent, and Will Varner, with his cotton gin and general store; long-suffering farm wives like Mrs. Henry Armstid (whether her name is Lula or Martha); and backwoods patriarchs like Pappy MacCullum, with his six middle-aged but unmarried sons named after the generals of Lee’s army. You remember the big plantation houses that collapse in flames as if a whole civilization were dying, but you also remember men in patched and faded but quite clean overalls sitting on the gallery—here in the North we should call it the porch—of a crossroads store that is covered with posters advertising soft drinks and patent medicines; and you remember the stories they tell while chewing tobacco until the suption is out of it (everything in their world is reduced to anecdote,