BOOKS
4SS
mismatched book-ends, and Snopes was half in and half out of the now–
open cellar door on the coping of which the scuttle of ashes still
sat.
Passages like this remind us of one of Faulkner's essential sources
of strength: the legacy of Mark Twain. Like Twain, Faulkner has
learned to assimilate the folk culture of a part of the country to the lit–
erary tradition. He has been able to do so partly because of the nature
of that culture, because it possessed in its actual life the complication
of social and moral assumptions that a true folk culture always has and
that makes it so accessible to traditional literary modes. But he could
not have done it in the way he has without the precedent of Twain;
it is difficult to conceive of Faulkner at his characteristic best without
being reminded that Twain stands in the immediate background.
The other three stories, though not so memorable as "Mule in the
Yard," are sustained with impressive intelligence and humor. In the last
of them, for example, the extraordinary vignette with which the novel
ends, Byron Snopes, who has embezzled a couple of thousand dollars
from the bank and fled to Texas, ships four of his children by "a Jicarilla
Apache squaw" to Flem. "They looked like snakes. Or maybe that's too
strong too. Anyway, they didn't look like children; if there was one
thing in the world they didn't look like it was children.''' Like Faulk–
ner's idiots, these children are natural objects forced to inhabit a civilized
world; the laws of their being are irrelevant to the conventions by which
man lives, even such conventions as the Snopeses find it necessary to ob–
serve. Since their Snopesian inheritance has been enriched with Apache
blood, they exist by a kind of essential destructiveness, a natural, inarticu–
late, unblinking aggressive appetite: they eat and they destroy. A five–
hundred-dollar pedigreed Pekinese disappears inside of them; they al–
most perform an
auto da
fe,
Apache style, with their cousin Clarence
Snopes as victim;
if
they feel they are being imposed on "a switch knife
with a six-inch blade" appears out of thin air. Flem packs them off to
Frenchman's Bend, but since they destroy everything and everyone in
sight there too, Flem, defender of civilization, is forced to ship them back
to Texas and liberate himself and the town of the last of the ineducable
Snopeses: he has run the others out or they have gotten rid of them–
selves. As they are about to be deported, Ratliff says: "Would either of
you gentlemen like to go down with me.and watch what they call the
end of a erea, if that's what they call what I'm trying to say? The last
and final end of Snopes out-and-out unvarnished behavior in Jefferson,
if
that's what I'm trying to say."
