Books: Saga’s End

THE MANSION (436 pp.)—William Faulkner—Random House ($4.75).

U.S. literature registers a milestone this week: Flem Snopes is dead. His death in The Mansion closes a William Faulkner trilogy that stands alone in U.S. writing for its wild, weird comedy, its savage indictment of rapacity and greed, its haughty indifference to the reader’s bewilderment as he tries to follow some of the most obscurely motivated characters in any literature. The Hamlet (TIME, April i, 1940) and The Town (TIME, May 6, 1957) proved that the Snopeses were never far from Faulkner’s mind even as he was writing other books that in sum won him the Nobel Prize.

The Money God. Like a singular breed of evil locusts, Flem Snopes and his clan showed up in Mississippi’s Yoknapatawpha County at precisely the moment when the old Southern aristocracy had become a pushover for vulgar, illiterate climbers. Flem’s god was money, because money was power, and in the end it led even to respectability. To get money, he trampled over the less cunning, blandly jobbed the unsuspecting; he married the casually pregnant daughter of the big man in Frenchman’s Bend, and with equal blandness allowed himself to be cuckolded by a banker because it helped Flem to become the bank’s president. Behind him he left a trail of foreclosed mortgages, underhanded legal victories, cold-blooded assaults on human decency. In him Faulkner raised a monument not only to the worst kind of Southerner, but to the worst in man everywhere. When, in the present book, Flem is murdered by a pathetically ignorant relative for the best of Snopes reasons, the killing seems not only justifiable but long overdue.

Even more than most windups of multiple novels, The Mansion ties up so many loose ends that the string can sometimes hardly be seen for the knots. For a good deal of the way, The Mansion recapitulates the first two books. Flem’s dirty deals,Wife Eula’s electric sexiness, Daughter Linda’s womanly inheritance from her mother, nice Lawyer Stevens’ frustrated hankering for them both—none of these can easily be appreciated without some help from The Hamlet and The Town.

Keeping Up with the Times. In this volume, Faulkner carries the story well beyond World War II, and it is precisely the new material that seems least convincing. Characters get in and out of wars in a way that seems merely to pass time. Linda marries a New York sculptor who is also a Jew and a Communist, but by the time he gets himself killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War, the whole episode has the look of merely trying to keep up with the times. Jefferson, Miss, (really Faulkner’s home town of Oxford) sees dramatic changes after World War II, but the comments on housing developments, new cars and the Negro problem sound tacked on, like dutiful after-dinner small talk.

The best things in The Mansion are the old things: Flem pulling a dirty stratagem to latch on to more property, the heartbreaking description of the raw deal that led ignorant Mink Snopes to murder a rich landholder, the devastating characterization of Huey Long-like Politician Clarence Snopes, who rises from rural bully to candidate for Congress. If the Snopes family is unforgettable, it is because Author Faulkner understands them as deeply as he hates them. And like so many hates, it seems like a first cousin to love. As always, the Faulkner writing has its quota of awkwardness, irritation, downright sloppiness. And just as surely, much of it seems in the end like some kind of smoldering, personal poetry that stands out defiantly imperfect and unassailable.