Books: When the Dam Breaks

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Obvious weakness of Faulkner's portrait of Jefferson is that it is one-sided, sensationalized, so grim it sometimes approaches burlesque. Obvious strength is its density, its interweaving of generations that dramatize the past as a living force in the present. Still unfinished, his Jefferson cycle is to be wound up in a three-volume novel, telling how the low-born Swopes family, blackmailers, plotters, money-grabbers, gradually take over Jefferson from the old inhabitants, the aristocrats and their ghosts.

Southerner. The Sound and the Fury was published in the fall of 1929, sold badly but excited critics. Sanctuary became a bestseller. Movie contracts and stories for the Saturday Evening Post followed; Faulkner bought a big, 90-year-old, cedar-shaded house at the edge of Oxford, a Waco cabin plane, financed an aviator brother in a barnstorming venture. He still flies occasionally, but sold his plane after his brother was killed in a crash in 1935. In Oxford he lives quietly, writes, rides, hunts or drives his tan Ford to his 35-acre place in the hills. His daughter Jill, five-and-a-half, wakes him about seven, and after reading her the funnies in the Memphis Commercial Appeal at breakfast, he works until about eleven.

On the first of his five Hollywood visits, Faulkner asked and got permission to work at home. When the studio telephoned his Santa Monica home, it found he was working at home in Oxford, Miss. In Hollywood, he has a reputation for silence and eccentricity; in Manhattan literary circles, he is considered antisocial. People who meet him in Memphis find him unbending a little. By the time he drives through Holly Springs on his way to Oxford he is comparatively fluent. When he enters the driveway, honks the horn and picks up Jill, who runs out to meet him, he is animated and at ease. Sitting in his study he talks eloquently, intently in sentences that sound old-fashioned and literary, about hunting, horses, Sherwood Anderson, Colonel Falkner, Don Quixote, flying, the ways of the Negroes in winter, cotton, tenant farming, his daughter Jill, the changing South. A landlord, a conservative Democrat, he says he finds it too difficult to run his own place (he has five tenants) to theorize about tenant farming, politics or economics.

In France, William Faulkner is regarded as a teller of horror stories. U. S. critics find his horrors often overdrawn, his prose frequently muddled, undisciplined, but value him for his narrative drive, his mastery of hillbilly and Negro dialect. What he will write when his Jefferson novels are finished he will not say. But readers of The Wild Palms, noting the fantastic humor of the book, may conclude that Faulkner is changing as rapidly as the South, may some day be known as the grim humorist of her transformation, as he is now known as the grim chronicler of her decay.

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