BOO KS
in the Baptist church, an unshakeably respectable "solitary widower,"
and owner and master of "the old de Spain house which he had re–
mod~led
into an ante-bellum Southern mansion." It is a great American
story of success, and a typical one. Inside of forty years, Flem, son of
an outlawed, bushwhacking tenant farmer from the back hills–
"Scratch?" says Gavin Stevens, "Scratch was euphemism indeed for
where he started from"-has transformed himself into a rich and re–
sponsible citizen in a respectable old community, a defender of "civic
jealousy and pride," a pillar of society.
But the rise of Flem Snopes, which Irving Howe has called "an
inverted and sinister picaresque adventure," is only one of several
stories which make up the novel's elaborate organization. Another
and more continuous narrative concerns Eula, Flem's wife, and her
affair with Manfred de Spain, saber-scarred veteran of the Spanish–
American War, romantic, rakehell, former mayor of Jefferson, and
after the death of Colonel Sartoris president of the bank. It is revealed
in this book that Flem Snopes is impotent, and Eula, as we recall from
The Hamlet,
is a kind of bucolic Venus and Briinnhilde, a glimpse
of whom is enough to send most men into nympholepsy. The affair
of Eula and de Spain goes on for eighteen years within " a kind of
outrageous morality of adultery ... based on an unimpugnable fidelity" ;
they come together in a "simple unadulterated uninhibited immortal
lust," one of those characteristically fateful and annihilating grand pas–
sions through which Faulkner has frequently expressed his sense of the
limits of feeling, of emotions whose splendor of commitment and self–
lessness is inevitably accompanied by barrenness and isolation: de Spain
is driven out of town and Eula shoots herself. Flem knows about the
affair all along and effortlessly contrives to make it serve his mono–
maniacal ambition-the adultery of Eula and de Spain is in fact the
wave on which Flem rides into respectable society. Faulkner's sense
of the social immorality that allows Flem's schemes to succeed is par–
ticularly acute, and out of it emerges the extremely critical judgment
on Jefferson life which the novel pronounces.
The only way Flem can hurt Eula is through her daughter Linda,
who is ignorant of her mother's adultery and of the fact that Flem
is not her father. It is her innocence (inexplicably, she loves Flem)
that
is
to be protected at all costs from the truth and from the scandal
and violence that a public exposure would create. For
this
reason
Eula and de Spain are from the very beginning enlisted in Flem's
intrigues, which would destroy them in any case. Eula in tum engages
Gavin Stevens in the defense of her daughter and herself, and
in
