710
PARTISAN REVIEW
mated by themes of the widest urgency? Is Temple Drake so much a
County
girl
gone wrong as she is a member of an all-American family
claiming descent from Daisy Miller? And isn't her story a highly char–
acteristic American story of how a life of casual moral anarchy can
open suddenly into a career of crime? Is
The Unvanquished
("a trivial
sketch of adolescent adventure") a proof of Faulkner's inability to im–
agine the Southern past seriously? Does it not suggest that he knew
better than to
try
and produced instead a book that is fine on its own
terms?
Reading Mr. Howe's quick dismissal of
The Unvanquished,
I sus–
pect not his taste but his assumptions. I suspect him of
apriorism
but I
cannot prove it. Nor can I confirm my suspicion that he praises "The
Bear" extravagantly because it is the capstone of the Yoknapatawpha
arch. That narrative seems to me intermittently good, at worst too
sententious. I prefer "Old Man." Mr. Howe admires this story too but
cannot securely place it in the saga. I suspect- but again without be–
ing able to offer confirmation-that this is why he does not admire it
enough.
His
apriorism,
as I conceive it, consists in his adopting too narrowly
a historical view of Faulkner's origins and achievement. We must cer–
tainly agree that his native situation was in many essential ways decisive
in the formation of his talent. He owes to it his need to set things right,
his sense of purpose. He owes to it his conviction that
life can be other
than it is.
This conviction is indispensable to any writer who finds him–
self as much at odds with his times as Faulkner does. Other American
writers, although hating industrial civilization as much, are left to
appeal to memories of pioneering days or of a childhood in the woods.
But childhood is finally an inadequate source of values; and pioneering
was the forerunner of industry. On the other hand, the Southern past
lives on mainly in pious recollection and books of history. The discon–
tinuity with the present is complete; the tragedy nearly perfect. For the
Southerner, therefore, the feeling that life can
be
other is exacerbated
at the same time that it is assuaged.
'to
the extent that the feeling is
not, for Faulkner, nourished by the Southern past, it is nourished by the
spectacle of present Negro life and character. In the Negro he has the
same inestimable advantage that the classic Russian novelists had in
the serf and that American writers of other backgrounds are seriously
in want of. The worker? The farmer? The
paisanos
or other immigrant
communities? Alas, these prove to be continuous with the rest of our
population or, like the
paisanos,
too special. They cannot be depended
upon to maintain their separate identity and tragic status. That the
