Ghost Stories

DR. MARTIXO & OTHER STORIES--William Faulkner--Smith & Haas ($2.50). Successful authors rarely make the mistake of writing too much. Ernest Hemingway, whom unfriendly critics call a careerist, has yet to write an obvious potboiler. F. Scott Fitzgerald has schooled his readers to make a distinction between his sacred and profane work (TIME. April 16). After Sanctuary, the macabre literary sensation of 1931, William Faulkner's first editions became collectors' items. But last week, with the publication of his Dr. Martino & Other Stories, it began to look as though Author Faulkner's market might soon reach saturation point. Of these 14 short stories a bare half-dozen were up to standard; the rest were as undistinguished as run-of-the-mill magazine fiction. Faulkner seldom writes about ordinary human beings. When he does he is careful to hide them in a mist of sinister innuendo. His forte is pathology; his most effective stories depend on madness gradually unveiled. In a novel he has space enough for his tortuous unraveling, but many of these short stories fail to convince simply because the reader has not had sufficient time to become bemused. The four best stories stand out from the rest like so many painted thumbnails: Three daredevil neurotics with a condemned airplane, no licenses, tour country towns putting on a crazily dangerous show for a living. A Southern officer and his Negro servant, on their way home from the Civil War, stop for the night at the wrong Tennessee mountain cabin.

A very young British naval officer is rescued from a gutter by a U. S. airman, taken on a night bombing flight. Next day he reciprocates by showing the airman what his tiny torpedo-boat can do.

An old judge dies and, finding heaven uncongenial, comes back to earth in time to go with his body to the grave.

The Author. Mississippi-born (in Ripley, 1897) and bred, William Faulkner still lives there (at Oxford), with his wife, two stepchildren. Though the Sound and the Fury (1929) made him one of the coming young men, he is a lion whom Manhattan hostesses have fret to capture. He fills big pages with his tiny script, likes, to write to the accompaniment of jazz records. He indulges in solitary golf, shaves irregularly and appears easy-going but, says he: "Ah write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.''

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