FAULKNER AND CONTEMPORARIES
109
the world. But he does not carry off this theme. For one thing, lacking
almost entirely an intellectual culture, he has no way of enriching his
theme, of making it sound necessary or convincing-and the reactionary
impulse is lost without culture. Besides, his own gifts are more suited to
destroy the legend than to perpetuate it. His vision is too violent to sus–
tain the genteel dreams of an agrarian aristocracy. He does not hesitate
to call the land accursed; the blood stain of slavery is still deep on it.
This limits the Romantic possibilities of the Southern past. Its present,
even for Faulkner, is immediately in the world. He admits all the weak–
nesses of the South, its susceptibility to coke and chrome, nor does he
pretend that the legend has in any way made it proof against the
cheapness of modern life. This honesty, though admirable, is fatal to
the legend. It is, like Quentin Compson's outcry, "I don't hate it! I don't
hate it! I don't hate it!" an admission from which it is impossible to
recover.
In the stories of this collection, the legend is only scantily devel–
oped, and while the simpler style has a better opportunity to speak for
itself, something is lost without the desperate struggle between his two
themes and his gigantic effort of will does not appear. But in a few of
the stories he attains so high an art, one can hardly imagine the level
his art might have reached, had it not been forced to wear itself down
in the hopeless inner struggle of most of the novels. By far the greatest
story in the collection-it is also one of the greatest in our language–
is "Red Leaves," which deals with the death of the Chickasaw chief
Issetibbeha. Faulkner's deepest feeling for life is here engaged, and never
dissipated, and following one another, with a compression unique for
him, appear all the themes of doom and submission, which usually have
a questionable ring within the context of his "South." But there is no false
legend here. In the prehistory of his Indian narratives, his episodes have
an extraordinary self-sufficiency, and his subjects an undiminished power,
born without the trauma of the Civil War. His imagination, for once,
is set free, it works out its own drama, without the need to plead or
prove a superimposed case, and cover with impenetrable rhetoric the
traces of a false argument. It is not too much to say that this story, like
all his best writing, succeeds precisely because it is something Faulkner
has written not about the South, but
over
it, over its dead body, in a
moment of complete triumph. In these brief victories over the South
he wins his greatness.
Most of the books and artieles that have come out of the intel–
lectuals' recent interest in popular culture have been so bad that one
