When the Dam Breaks

(See Cover)

Not since its brief awakening after the Civil War has Southern literary life been as lively as it is now. Not since that same period has Southern life changed as rapidly as it is now changing. Political and economic news from the South is confused and contradictory; but Southern literary news snaps and crackles with unexpected items--with new writers discovered and old writers coming back, new magazines popping up and every mail bringing to publishers' desks fresh evidence of the South's literary ferment. In England (where T. S. Eliot's Criterion has called The Southern Review, published at Baton Rouge, La., the best American literary magazine), in France (where William Faulkner is compared to Poe), in the U. S. (where Gone With the Wind has sold 1,750,000 copies), the literary rise of the South looks like the biggest thing in U. S. letters.

Central figure in any investigation of Southern literary life is William Faulkner. This short, reticent Southerner, sharp-eyed as a gambler, lives about as close to the heart of the South as it is possible to get--in Oxford, Miss., a county seat of 2,890 people, 62 miles southeast of Memphis. Historically speaking, nothing much has happened to Oxford since the Yankees burned it 75 years ago. It has a courthouse square, which Mississippi-born Artist John McCrady painted in Town Square (see cut). It has its Confederate monument on which a soldier stands stonily at ease. It has its old families and old legends, its tireless political disputes, its pleasant wooden dwellings, nice lawns, and some of the softest Southern accents in the South. It has new pavements and filling stations painted in tropical colors, new bright-fronted chain stores which are outward evidence of recent community change.

For most of his 41 years William Faulkner has observed the life that revolves around Oxford's courthouse square. For twelve years he has packed his observation into a series of bitter, imaginative, extraordinarily powerful but extremely uneven books. For the last nine years he has been successful, regarded by critics as the most talented but least predictable Southern writer, by his fellow townsmen as an enigma, by himself as a social historian, who hopes that by recording the minute changes in Oxford's life he can suggest the changes that are transforming the whole South.

This week he publishes his 15th book. Called The Wild Palms (Random House, $2.50), it is a wild, outraged and outrageous novel, which boils over with outlandish humor and grotesque incident. Part of it is a swift story, funny and slightly maddening. Part of it is involved psychological analysis mixed with melodrama, just plain maddening. In most of his previous books Faulkner has written of a mythical Southern town. In The Wild Palms he has a new hero, but he has not left the South. This time his hero is the Mississippi.

The Book. The story begins in May 1927, when the river, the Old Man, is on a rampage, when levees are broken, the country flooded, the waters flowing the wrong way, and barns, mules, chicken coops and people bobbing around in a drenched and bewildering world. One of the bewildered people is a tall, lean, 25-year-old hillbilly convict who has never seen much water before. Given a boat which he does not know how to manage, he is sent to rescue a woman perched on an old cypress snag and a man clinging to the ridgepole of a cotton house.

But the boat is soon completely out of the convict's control. It races downstream, hits an eddy, drifts back, finally carries the convict, stunned and incredulous, to the tree where the woman perches on the branch like a bird. "It's taken you a while," she says.

She is pregnant -- a quiet, pale girl dressed in a calico wrapper, a sunbonnet and part of an old army uniform. He gets her into the boat, pushes off. From this point on it is the convict against the Mississippi--he trying to get the boat and the woman back to the guards, the Mississippi plunging him through thickets, over cotton fields, up past Vicksburg and down past Baton Rouge, past dead cows, bobbing outhouses; and leaving him the exhausted, hungry, indignant victim of nature on the loose.

When he tries to land at Baton Rouge, soldiers guarding the levee see his convict uniform, open fire. Out in the current again, the boat whirls downstream. Miles from nowhere, on an old Indian mound crowded with snakes, the baby is born. After six days the convict gets so he thinks, "It ain't nothing but another moccasin," when he steps on a snake.

The convict, woman and baby are rescued, get mixed up with Chinese muskrat hunters from the Louisiana swamps, are turned loose, drift to the house of a kind-hearted French-speaking Cajun alligator hunter, somewhere near the Gulf. When the convict sees his first alligator, and understands that it is to be killed, he thinks, "Well, maybe a mule standing in a lot looks big to a man that never walked up to one with a halter before." With that he jumps overboard, catches the alligator around the neck, stabs it. The convict becomes a local hero.

That chapter closes when engineers blow up the levee to save New Orleans, and the convict, the woman and the baby have to move on again. Six weeks from the time he had been washed away, the convict gets back to the place where his journey began. "Yonder's your boat, and here's the woman," he tells the deputy sheriff. "But I never did find that bastard on the cotton house." The deputy and the warden repeating "Them convicts," slap another ten years on his sentence for trying to escape.

Moral. Had Faulkner been content to let The Wild Palms rest with the convict's story, the book might have become a classic of involuntary adventure. It is a pulsing, racing story, a kind of hysterical Huckleberry Finn, its humor at once grotesque and shrewd, its moral at once grim and humane. The convict, with his thoughtless courage, his exasperation at the titanic forces unleashed against him, is Faulkner's most original and attractive character. And the whole book is conceived in the grand manner. Faulkner makes you feel the terrible fragility of man's levees, boats, prisons, other civilized trappings; he suggests that man's life is a little like the bewildered spin of the convict in the current, attended by a woman and child, never sure of where he is going.

When Faulkner finished the convict's story, however, he felt that it was incomplete. He therefore wrote another novel and inserted the chapters between chapters of the convict's tale. This second novel tells of a young New Orleans doctor who runs off with another man's wife. When she becomes pregnant he performs an abortion, as a result of which she dies and he is jailed for life.

This story reverses that of the convict--the doctor, too, is trying to erect barriers against nature--and the sick, squalid, miserable sequence of events he goes through contrasts with the nightmarish but still exhilarating adventures of the convict. It does not come off: the doctor and his mistress are not credible characters, the prose is turgid and confusing. But not even careless writing can weaken the cumulative effect of Faulkner's imaginative fertility, the boldness and originality of his themes.

Background. William Faulkner's great-grandfather entered northern Mississippi, so the legend has it, at the age of ten. Colonel William Falkner (the name is spelled both ways) ran away from his home at Middleton, Tenn., walked several hundred miles to Ripley, near Oxford, to stay with an uncle. He found the uncle in jail, charged with murder. He sat down on the courthouse steps and "swore he would some day build a railroad along the route he had walked."

He did. He grew up to own a plantation, fight under Longstreet in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, raid with Forrest, build railroads with a fellow Confederate veteran, Colonel Thurmond, after Appomattox. He fought duels, wrote a popular thriller, The White Rose of Memphis, which had sold 160,000 copies before it went out of print 30 years ago, made the grand tour of Europe, always went armed. He also quarreled with peace-loving Partner Thurmond, ran against him for the legislature. On election day 1889, after a savage campaign, Colonel Falkner walked out unarmed after hearing he had won, met Colonel Thurmond, who shot him down on the main street of the town they both helped to build.

Drifter. The family wealth died with him. William Faulkner's grandfather moved the family to Oxford, where William, the eldest of four sons, grew up in indolence, his romantic contributions to the local literary magazine, The Double Dealer, for the amount of liquor he drank.

When Miss Prall, who had recently married Sherwood Anderson, came to New Orleans, Faulkner visited her, became Anderson's close friend. He turned to novels, under Anderson's influence, wrote Soldiers' Pay. Mrs. Anderson volunteered to get Sherwood to read the book, to recommend it to Publisher Horace Liveright if he liked it. Next day she brought it back, saying. "Sherwood says if he isn't required to read this, he'll try to get Liveright to publish it." Liveright accepted it, gave Faulkner advances of $200 apiece on the next two. He dashed off Mosquitoes, was halfway through his third novel, Sartoris, when something happened. He was writing about his own country when suddenly "I discovered that writing was a mighty fine thing," he says; it enabled you "to make men stand on their hind legs and cast a shadow." Sartoris was rejected.

By the summer of 1929, Faulkner was back in Oxford, and his financial situation was getting desperate. He had written a brilliant, bitter, difficult book, The Sound and the Fury, which Publisher Harrison Smith assured him would not sell. He had married Mrs. Estelle Oldham Franklin, an Oxford girl who had two children by a previous marriage. To make money he wrote a horror story, Sanctuary. It was rejected, too. He got a job shoveling coal at the Oxford power plant for $100 a month, working from 6 p. m. to 6 a. m. From midnight until 4 a. m. he wrote, using an upturned wheelbarrow for a desk. On it he wrote As I Lay Dying, rewrote Sanctuary, laid out his series of connected novels dealing with the mythical, haunted, decadent Southern town of Jefferson.

Ghost Town. Jefferson is saturated with the memory of old feuds and old sins. In eight of his books Faulkner has traced its history through the stories of its once-great families whose descendants still hold on, whose legends still remain. Violent, formless, the books are packed with scenes of murder, suicide, insanity, horror, give as unsparing a picture of social decay as any U. S. novelist has drawn.

Southern decay in Faulkner's novels is no more romantic than decayed teeth. In the broadest terms, his picture of Jefferson's social history is this: Jefferson's men & women of the Civil War generation were strongwilled, ambitious, quixotic, ruined not so much by the War as by their own feudal code; their sons tended to linger long over the achievements of their ancestors as wealth and position slipped away; members of the third generation turned savagely on their parents when they found that the traditions they inherited did not square with the bitter actualities of life. So his books are full of melodrama: the last descendants of old families lie awake in crumbling houses; pompous parents like Mr. Compson deliver half-drunken lectures to their children; elderly spinsters of gentle birth talk hysterical nonsense to impressionable youngsters; young girls creep through the wisteria vines to meet lovers their parents will not accept; young men split their minds trying to make sense of the hodgepodge of Southern traditions, gossip, inaccurate history and pompous moralizing that is given them for their guidance.

Obvious weakness of Faulkner's portrait of Jefferson is that it is one-sided, sensationalized, so grim it sometimes approaches burlesque. Obvious strength is its density, its interweaving of generations that dramatize the past as a living force in the present. Still unfinished, his Jefferson cycle is to be wound up in a three-volume novel, telling how the low-born Swopes family, blackmailers, plotters, money-grabbers, gradually take over Jefferson from the old inhabitants, the aristocrats and their ghosts.

Southerner. The Sound and the Fury was published in the fall of 1929, sold badly but excited critics. Sanctuary became a bestseller. Movie contracts and stories for the Saturday Evening Post followed; Faulkner bought a big, 90-year-old, cedar-shaded house at the edge of Oxford, a Waco cabin plane, financed an aviator brother in a barnstorming venture. He still flies occasionally, but sold his plane after his brother was killed in a crash in 1935. In Oxford he lives quietly, writes, rides, hunts or drives his tan Ford to his 35-acre place in the hills. His daughter Jill, five-and-a-half, wakes him about seven, and after reading her the funnies in the Memphis Commercial Appeal at breakfast, he works until about eleven.

On the first of his five Hollywood visits, Faulkner asked and got permission to work at home. When the studio telephoned his Santa Monica home, it found he was working at home in Oxford, Miss. In Hollywood, he has a reputation for silence and eccentricity; in Manhattan literary circles, he is considered antisocial. People who meet him in Memphis find him unbending a little. By the time he drives through Holly Springs on his way to Oxford he is comparatively fluent. When he enters the driveway, honks the horn and picks up Jill, who runs out to meet him, he is animated and at ease. Sitting in his study he talks eloquently, intently in sentences that sound old-fashioned and literary, about hunting, horses, Sherwood Anderson, Colonel Falkner, Don Quixote, flying, the ways of the Negroes in winter, cotton, tenant farming, his daughter Jill, the changing South. A landlord, a conservative Democrat, he says he finds it too difficult to run his own place (he has five tenants) to theorize about tenant farming, politics or economics.

In France, William Faulkner is regarded as a teller of horror stories. U. S. critics find his horrors often overdrawn, his prose frequently muddled, undisciplined, but value him for his narrative drive, his mastery of hillbilly and Negro dialect. What he will write when his Jefferson novels are finished he will not say. But readers of The Wild Palms, noting the fantastic humor of the book, may conclude that Faulkner is changing as rapidly as the South, may some day be known as the grim humorist of her transformation, as he is now known as the grim chronicler of her decay.

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