A SENSE OF FAULKNER
93
More on animals: Once, at the home of Ruth Ford (a fellow-Mis–
sissippian and an old friend), Faulkner, on entering, found two totally
strange animals in the room (they were cavies; I believe of the rodent
family). I wasn't too keen on handling them, but Faulkner involved me
in his impromptu experiments, very quiet ones that he conducted
almost from the moment we sat down. He peered down their throats,
examined their toes, kept one behind his back in order to find out how
the other reacted to the disappearance. He carried these experiments
forward on a secondary plane as it were, so that none of us were disturbed
in our talk. He knew considerably more about cavies than I did, or than
his hostess did for that matter, when we left.
Faulkner has an astonishing loyalty toward his own generation of
writers. During the time that Hemingway's
Across the River
was making
its appearance in installments, we were in a taxi with a young and well–
known writer who, not being used to Faulkner's restful silences, launched
an attack
OIl
the Hemingway installment he had just read, finding in
it not a solitary virtue. Faulkner interrupted him. "Young man," he
said rather sharply, "I haven't read thi s new one. And though it may
not be the best thing Hemingway ever wrote, I know it will be carefully
done, and that it will have quality." It was an effective silencer.2
His loyalty toward his own generation isn't a blind or sentimental
belief. He has his reasons. He believes the present is a machine age
which, though it has not destroyed the writers, is destroying their ma–
terial. That material
is
being dehumanized. What appears in contempo–
rary
fiction are types, categories, struggling not against the verities of
the heart, which are honor and duty and pride and cowardice (they
cannot struggle against these since they don't know what these are
and are kept from knowing them) ; they struggle against the categories
they are forced into by a well-intentioned society that wants to make
room for everybody. He believes that his own people in time, Heming–
way, Wolfe, Dos Passos, were free of this fate, as were Anderson, Dreiser
and Willa Cather ("the real ones before us," he says).
Now, this criticism of an age, and this solidarity with the one just
preceding it, doesn't mean that Faulkner is some sort of a cranky man
ranting against his time. Not at all. He is extremely alert to our time,
to the political situation (and though the political ideas in
Intruder
2. Katherine Anne Porter told
an
analogous story. She was on a drive with
Sherwood Anderson. A young writer was there too, and his object of attack
was Dreiser. Anderson had the car stopped. "Get out, young man," he said.
When they got started up again, minus the writer, Anderson said to Miss Porter:
"We know what's wrong with Dreiser, only that arrogant young bastard can't
tell us."
