Books: Nigger in a Woodpile

LIGHT IN AUGUST—William Faulkner— Smith & Haas ($2.50).

Those who from experience expect each Faulkner tale to be more gruesomely Gothic than the last will be disappointed in Light in August. Not nearly so horrible as Sanctuary (TIME, Feb. 16, 1931).

It would still make hair-raising cinema of the Dr. Calgari model. Like the late great Joseph Conrad’s method of spinning a yarn. Faulkner’s is roundabout, circular: sometimes the suspense is awful, sometimes merely interminable. Like Conrad, Faulkner makes his people coherent to an unlikely and omnireminiscent degree. Unlike Conrad, Faulkner depends on madmen for his best effects. From the vasty deep of nightmares and bogeymen he can summon up ghosts that haunt nurseries and still frighten some grownups. With fewer bogeymen than usual, a happy issue out of some of its afflictions. Light in August continues the Faulkner tradition by a murder, a lynching and a good deal of morbid fornication.

Heroine is a poor-white girl who has got herself in trouble, comes to Jefferson (Faulkner’s town, as Zenith is Sinclair Lewis’) searching for Lucas Burch, the father of her imminent baby. People are kind to her, especially hardworking. God-fearing Byron Bunch, who compromises himself considerably by looking after her.

Her lover is in Jefferson all right, but under a different name and in jail. Miss Burden, an eccentric spinster who has lived for years under the shadow of the town’s disapproval, has been murdered.

Suspicion points to Burch and his ‘legger boss, Joe Christmas, who have been living in a cabin on her place. Here Faulkner drops the gravid mother, goes back & back to Joe Christmas’ beginnings. Because he was a bastard with Negro blood in him. little Joe had a hard time from the start. His mad grandfather made it worse by hounding him religiously, lost the trail when Joe grew old enough to commit murder. Down a long Beale Street wandered Joe alone, passing as a white when he wanted to. but hating white and black alike. When they got him for the Burden killing his grandfather caught up with him again, went home happy when he had seen Joe’s bullet-torn body. Philanderer Burch. who had hoped for the reward, missed out. but God-fearing Byron Bunch got his.

The Author. Unlike his chief rival. Ernest Hemingway, short, wiry, triangular-faced William Faulkner came late to popularity: not until The Sound and the Fury (his fifth book) was he on his way to become a literary household word. After two years at the University of Mississippi he enlisted in the Canadian Flying Corps, at the Armistice was a lieutenant. A dyed-in-the-wool Southerner but no unreconstructed rebel, Faulkner lives with a wife and two stepchildren on his own cotton plantation in Oxford, Miss, whence he makes rare, grudging expeditions to literary Manhattan. He still flies occasionally, in an old plane that belongs to a friend. Few of his Oxford neighbors know that Faulkner writes. He is considered none too well off, easygoing, fond of corn liquor. But, says he: “Ah write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.” He writes always in longhand, with pen & ink, in incredibly small script of which one sheet makes five or six printed pages. He plays jazz records while he writes; wrote Soldier’s Pay to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”As I Lay Dying he wrote in a power house, to the dynamo’s whirr. He says he never reads reviews of his books. The two books he most admires are Moby Dick and The Nigger of the Narcissus. His next book will be The Snopes Saga, for which he gives himself two years.