708
PARTISAN REVIEW
novelists. It is in the second half that Mr. Howe is probably most satis–
fying. He makes Faulkner's novels extraordinarily vivid in all their
particulars. His knowledge of the characters is acute. When there is
some problem of coherence or
i~tention,
as there so often is in Faulkner,
he is good at pleading the author's cause and saying what can be said.
The reasoning is always clear. The phrasing is rapid and precise. He
may work hard at his job but he has the gift of saying hard things
easily, as when he remarks of
As I
Lay Dying
that it is a "wry celebra–
tion of mankind" or of Joe Christmas that "the condition of his hu–
manity is that he remain vulnerable."
These phrases came back to me, as I believed, at random; but I
now see that they are going to serve a purpose. What Mr. Howe says of
that novel and that character are irresistibly applicable to Faulkner's
entire work. It is all a wry celebration of mankind and the condition
of its humanity, or its art, is that it remain vulnerable. And I could
wish that Mr. Howe in his theoretical account of the novelist's origim
and concerns, had made more allowance for his larger preoccupations
and less allowance for his preoccupation with Southern history. Admit–
tedly, the former is all too easy to do. Some French critics of Faulkner
have done it to excess, as French critics are inclined to do, grasping at
his conception of
l'homme
in defiance of the complexity and variety of
the novels. But American critics face another temptation which is more
or less peculiar to ourselves and probably springs from some exaggerated
homing impulse in us. Faulkner having made his great decision to live
and work in his native Mississippi, we are tempted to keep him there
in spirit as well as body.
It
is not given to us to do as he did-even if we
wished to, many of us could find no real native ground but only a col–
lection of childhood residences-and so we admire his decision to excess.
Mr. Cowley represented this impulse with a singular warmth and modes–
ty; besides, he was interpreting Faulkner according to his own needs as
an editor. Mr. Cowley was making an anthology; Mr. Howe is character–
izing an
oeuvre.
This is a different matter. It ought to be said, however,
that Mr. Howe gives a highly rational expression to the prevailing nos–
talgia. And Faulkner's relation to the South does not engage him to the
exclusion of all other issues. It simply commands more of his attention
than it does of mine. He is constantly aware of other possibilities, as
when he says of
The Sound and the Fury
that "to confine the meaning
of [the] story to a segment of Southern life is sheer provincialism."
Such observations represent a high degree of consciousness rather than
merely a form of honorable amends. But why do they need to be so
frequent?
i :
!,
