Arts and Letters

Faulkner's storytelling appeals to me so much, I suppose, because it is the kind of storytelling I remember as a child down in the northern neck of Virginia. Sitting in a row of men on some rickety porch while the women were clearing the dishes off the supper table, some hot August night when the dryflies shrilled, rocking and smoking or chewing tobacco, a man would start talking. Usually he didn't explain who the people were he was telling about. You were supposed to know that. It would be he or she or sometimes what's his name did this or that. Gradually out of a web of seemingly disconnected incidents a story would evolve. Characters in situations scary or mirthful would take shape. A scene would light up as if you were there watching. Listeners would draw in their breath or laugh and slap their knees. I'd be sitting on the porch steps keeping out of sight for fear somebody would notice me and send me off to bed, never minding the mosquito bites, listening till my ears burst.

Reading Faulkner brings that lost world back. It's so often an eleven-year-old boy who is the listener through whose ears the outlandish scrambled tales pour into the reader's blood. Faulkner's writing has a way of pouring direct into the bloodstream like a transfusion. It was his old-time rural storyteller's gift that enabled him somehow to keep his steaming turgid inventions, blood and thunder mixed with often false psychological subtleties out of the psychiatrist's clinic within the margins of the tall story tellingly told. You are carried away whether you believe it or not. At his best Faulkner's gothic caricatures of men and women, for all the claptrap of the plots, come to life as Dickens's did. Always the emotions ring true.

Storytelling is the creation of myths. A good acting myth doesn't have to be plausible but it has to impose its own reality on mankind. I defy anybody who has been reading Faulkner to look at a map of the state of Mississippi without expecting to find Yoknapatawpha County there.

Faulkner's characters impose their nightmare reality upon you because they are built out of truths. The truth of the stirrings of the flesh and blood and passion of real men observed tenderly and amusedly and frightenedly, just as Homer made his goddesses and heroes real because he built them out of traits he knew in men and women. In Faulkner what I like best is the detail, the marvelously accurate observations he built his narrative out of, the raw material of his inventions. Has there ever been a bear more real than Old Ben in Go Down, Moses? His unendingly cordial study of the struggle between the bloods of various races under one man's hide is truthtelling of the highest order. So are his descriptions of the happy symbiosis that builds up under certain conditions between men of discordant races and disparate backgrounds. The Chickasaw Indians who bought the steamboat, the hound dogs, the hunting dogs, the little fyce dogs, the horses, the mules, the trees, the streams and the swamps; and the kitchen clock, I think it was in Soldiers' Pay, that ticked out: Life, death; life, death.

And now the great storyteller is dead. I don't imagine death came too hard to him. He had met death before many times in his storytelling. His stories are full of the knowledge of death. He did not meet death as a stranger.