BOOKS
FAULKNER AND THE SOUTH TODAY
INTRUDER IN THE DUST.
By
Willi11m F11ulkner. R11ndom House. $3.00.
There are probably very few novelists in America who have
not in some depressed, sterile hour wished for Faulkner's madness. He is
authentically, romantically possessed by his genius; he can lose himself
not only in the act of writing but in the world his imagination has
created and populated. He believes all of it, concretely, amazingly: the
map of Yoknapatawpha County is not a joke. Here is a man who can
take a walk in the morning and point to the spot where Wash Jones
killed Sutpen or visit Compson's Mile for which Jason I swapped Ik–
kemotubbe a race horse. And he is so beautifully our young writer's
image of the artist: he has done it by himself, in solitude, far from
New York, in spite of critics, little magazines, fads, and professors--our
natural genius, isolated, sure of himself, magnificently hallucinated as
we feel the artist ought to be. And what a happy man he must have
been, for what is there except the furious ecstasy of art's triumph over
the artist's life in his extraordinary recent comments on the characters
in
The Sound and the Fury?
He tells us that Candace, the heroine of a
novel published
in
1929, has vanished in Paris with the German oc–
cupation in 1940, that she is still beautiful and does not show her age.
He's mad, of course; we remind ourselves that there is no Candace, nor
a Jason, after the pages of the book are closed, to live on into a sour
middle age and to sneak up the steps with his "big, plain, brazenhaired"
misti<ess from Memphis. Still we cannot help but envy a writer so
splendidly deluded; we feel an irrevocable calling to art ought to give
us indifference to reality, that creative work should heal the misery of
an unhappy love affair, pull us through nervous breakdowns, discount
personal deficiencies, and in that sense most artists strive desperately for
the same fantastic identification with their work and characters, the
wondrous involvement with the imagination which Faulkner's little
map symbolizes with an accuracy and simplicity almost beyond credulity.
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