Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934)

Summary

Peter Monro Jack, “William Faulkner Presents a Mixed Sheaf of Short Stories.” New York Sun, April 16, 1934, p. 22.

William Faulkner's new collection Doctor Martino and Other Stories, representing about half of the stories he has written since These Thirteen was published two and a half years ago, is a familiar compound. The bulk and the best, that is to say, is familiar; the new direction that his story telling talent seems at the moment to be taking is not promising.

There is a good story of the end of the Civil War, a better story of the Great War, a brief addition to the Sartoris sage, two post-war airplane stories, four stories of Carolina or Mississippi mental or physical cruelty involving violence, rape and killing, an exciting detective yarn, and three fantasies of the kind Mr. Faulkner is becoming increasingly and some of us are becoming decreasingly fond of. These last include “Black Music” and “Leg,” appearing here for the first time and persumably newly written.

The merit of his novels and stories, I think, has been to plunge from some sort of recognizable outward reality into the fatal mystery of the motives of human conduct. Sometimes the mystery is impenetrable, as in The Sound and the Fury, or complicated, as in As I Lay Dying or exhaustive, as in Light in August; occasionally no more than effective melodrama, as in Sanctuary, or in the story “A Rose for Emily.”

To reverse the process, and try to make a fact out of a mystery, produces more common place work than I had thought Mr. Faulkner capable of. “Beyond”–in this collection–is Mr. Faulkner's characters in Robert Nathan's “There Is Another Heaven” and not so credible.