Collected Stories (1950)

Summary

Horace Gregory. “In the Haunted, Heroic Land of Faulkner's Imagination.” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, August 20, 1950, pp. 1, 12.

In the early years of the present century when undergraduates in colleges made their first discovery of Chekhov, every one who dreamed of writing a book some day felt the sudden impulse to write, if nothing else, the perfect short story. It seemed so easy: if almost any one on a fortunate occasion could tell a story, then it followed naturally that any one could write it and with the slightest effort could become both rich and famous. And today when more short stories than ever are being written, the perfect story, or if less than that, the story worthy to be remembered, is just as rare as ever. In contemporary literature a number of the stories and short novels of William Faulkner seem to possess an immortality; some few of them have haunted the imagination of their readers, including other writers, for nearly twenty years. Are the stories perfect works of art? Not many, for William Faulkner is not that kind of artist: some of the stories, no matter how highly we may regard them, contain blurred passages of prose, or if read for themselves alone, seem willfully obscure. Why is it then that Faulkner's writing has the sign of genius and the promise of an enduring life?

One answer to this question is that Faulkner always has something to say, but beyond that answer there is the likeness that he bears (which does not mitigate in the least his individual qualities) to certain writers who have stirred and guided the sub-channels of fiction during the first half of the twentieth century–if one becomes literal, three of them are not of this century at all.