LIGHT IN AUGUST
521
conflicts of which the book is made-between life and anti-life, be–
tween the spirit of birth and the murderous abstractions and obses–
sions which drive most of the characters-is in Faulkner himself, in
his attempt to will his painful material into a kind of harmony that
it does not really possess.
But in any event, it is Lena who opens the book, Lena's world,
Lena's patience, that set the ideal behind the book-that world of
the permanent and the natural which Joe Christmas seeks all his life
without knowing that he does, and seeking it, will run full tilt into
the ground. "Light in August" is itself a country saying: Light as
a mare or a cow is light after delivery. And it is this world of Lena
Grove from Doane's Mill-the tiny hamlet which was too small for
any post-office list; yet even Lena, living in the backwoods, had not
seen it until her parents died-with the sound of the wagon wheel
taking her away from it, that remains in the book not merely a world
that Faulkner celebrates but a mythic source of strength.
As
indeed
it is. For it is this intense sense of itself, it is this superb registering
of country sights and sounds as the stillness is broken by the creaking
and lumbering wagon coming up the hill, that is the secret of
Southern writing. In his attachment to the irretrievable, in his ob–
stinate feeling for the earth, the good Southern writer makes so much
writing in America seem as shallow as if it had been composed by
a young instructor in English sitting in his study surrounded by
manuals on the great novels. Albert Camus, talking appreciatively
about Southern novelists, once remarked to a friend of mine that
what he liked about their books was "the dust and the heat." And
to the man from North Mrica, with his memories of that blazing
world described in
Naces,
that world into which Paris can never
enter, Faulkner's sense of local color must be especially moving. But
after all, it is this sense of place that is the great thing about all Amer–
ican writing. It is the "mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones,
elder, mullein and poke-weed" in
Song of Myself;
the landscape
that in
Walden
seems always to be reflected in water; the strong
native sense of the here and now that is the basis of Emerson's aes–
thetic; the edge of the world seen from Hemingway's Michigan
woods; "reading the river" in
Life on the Mississippi
and
Huckle–
berry Finn;
the "snow, the real snow" seen only beyond Chicago that
Scott Fitzgerald described so rapturously in his memories of Mid-
