The Essential Faulkner Read Online Free PDF Page A

and every anecdote is based on character). You remember Quentin Compson not in his despairing moments, but riding with his father behind the dogs as they quarter a sedge-grown hillside after quail; and not listening to his father’s story, but still knowing every word of it because, as he thought to himself, “You had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and livingbeside it, with it, as children will and do; so that what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word by word, the resonant strings of remembering.”
    Faulkner’s novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed. And they have what is rare in the novels of our time, a warmth of family affection, brother for brother and sister, the father for his children—a love so warm and proud that it tries to shut out the rest of the world. Compared with that affection, married love is presented as something calculating, and illicit love as a consuming fire. And because the blood relationship is central in his novels, Faulkner finds it hard to create sympathetic characters between the ages of twenty and forty. He is better with children, Negro and white, and incomparably good with older people who preserve the standards that have come down to them “out of the old time, the old days.”
    In the group of novels beginning with
The Wild Palms
(1939), which attracted so little attention at the time of publication that they seemed to go unread, there is a quality not exactly new to Faulkner—it had appeared already in passages of
Sartoris
and
Sanctuary
—but now much stronger and no longer overshadowed by violence and horror. It is a sort of homely and sober-sided frontier humor that is seldom achieved in contemporary writing (except sometimes by Erskine Caldwell, also a Southerner). The horse-trading episodes in
The Hamlet
, and especially the long story of the spotted ponies from Texas, might have been inspired by the Davy Crockett almanacs. “Old Man,” the story of the convict who surmounted the greatest of the Mississippi floods, might almost be a continuation of
Huckleberry Finn
. It is as if some older friend of Huck’s had taken the raft and drifted on from Aunt Sally Phelps’s farm into wilder adventures, described in a wilder style, among Chinese and Cajuns and bayous crawling with alligators. In a curious way, Faulkner combinestwo of the principal traditions in American letters: the tradition of psychological horror, often close to symbolism, that begins with Charles Brockden Brown, our first professional novelist, and extends through Poe, Melville, Henry James (in his later stories), Stephen Crane, and Hemingway; and the other tradition of frontier humor and realism, beginning with Augustus Longstreet’s
Georgia Scenes
and having Mark Twain as its best example.
    But the American author he most resembles is Hawthorne, for all their polar differences. They stand to each other as July to December, as heat to cold, as swamp to mountain, as the luxuriant to the meager but perfect, as planter to Puritan; and yet Hawthorne had much the same attitude toward New England that Faulkner has to the South, together with a strong sense of regional particularity. The Civil War made Hawthorne feel that “the North and the South were two distinct nations in opinions and habits, and had better not try to live under the same institutions.” In the spring of 1861 he wrote to his Bowdoin classmate Horatio Bridge, “We were never one people and never really had a country.” “New England,” he said a little later, “is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.” But it was more than a lump of earth for him; it was a lump of history and a permanent state of consciousness. Like Faulkner in the South, he applied himself to creating its moral fables and elaborating its legends, which existed, as it were, in his solitary heart. Pacing the