560
PARTISAN REVIEW
posts. Then the sunset gun went from the old citadel, deliberate and
profound, as if a single muffled drumstick had been dropped once
against the inverted bowl of hollow and resonant air, the sound fading
slowly and deliberately until at last, with no suture to mark its close,
it was lost in the murmur of bunting with which the flags, bright
blooms of glory myriad across the embattled continent, sank, windless
again, down.
or to give each moment of time or experience its final own fatal judg–
ment or epithet. The only criticism we make is the old one: that all
Mr. Faulkner's moments have the same intensity.
The whole conception is poetic. We shall read of "day dream's
idle unexpectation." Or
One more day I would have missed him which should have told me,
warned me that what faced us was doom, not destiny, since only destiny
is clumsy, inefficient, procrastinative, while doom never is.
But behind the rhetorician and the dizzy dialectician who is meta–
physically wonderstruck at the way one idea, or even one word, turns
into its opposite, there is another Faulkner. This is the sardonic, the
'jedgmatic,' the garrulous folk writer, as incurably repetitive and
parenthetical as the folk. He drawls out his portraits of the soldiers,
his life story of the
bl~phemous
English groom; he drawls out the
night talk in the trenches, the professional talk of the aerodrome; the
nasty talk of the assassins or the burial squad and what they will do
for one, or preferably, two bottles of brandy. The native Faulkner is
the old pungent Faulkner and, in trying to pick his way through this
consciousness and that, the reader is grateful for this survival. For
what one notices is that there is no equivalent to Pop-Eye in this book.
The precise, brutal, bleeding savage pity we recall in
Soldiers
Pay
is
missing-except
in
the murder or execution of the French Commander
in the end-and this from a theme which would seem to demand all
Mr. Faulkner's capacity for horror. Instead, evil is generalized by words
like "anguish" and so on. The war is an atmosphere, a dark if peopled
eloquence; an atmosphere that pervades like the smell of refuse and
rules by some implicit yet mysterious moral and physical force of its
own. There is no doubt that Mr. Faulkner's supreme gift is the crea–
tion of atmospheres of one kind or another; but we are now dealing
with a writer who has moved from destructive despair, in his own work,
to conscious affirmation: to that extent his world becomes more
recognizable than the earlier one of idiots, sadists and derelicts, be–
cause it is more comprehensive and humane; but it is recognizable
solely on the sympathetic, engaging and immensely ingenious level of
