T r THE MICHIGAN DAILY SU3 NDAY, NOV. 29, 1936 IN THE WORLD of BOOKS FAZULKNER Incoherence Mars His Attempt To Achieve A Masterpiece Sherwood Anderson Portrays Mountain Girl's Life In City Months Of. For Twe FROM SNOW TO SNOW, by Frost. Holt. 75 cents. Year Are Setting lve Poems By Frost ABSALOM, ABSALOM! By William Faulkner. Random House. $2.50. By PROF. JOE LEE DAVIS (Of the English Department) After the harassed reader has puz- zled out what happens in Absalom, Absalomn! with the assistance of the chronological outlinesand the gene- alogical table at the back of the book (and these are in error concerning the important dates 1909 and 1910), he is impressed with the possibilities of the 'tale which Mr. Faulkner has attempted to tell. Unlike Mr. Faulkner I will begin at the beginning. The boy Thomas Sut- pen is nothing but "poor white trash," yet he has a heart. When a servant at an ante-bellum Virginia mansion reprimands him for coming to the front door, that heart receives an abiding hurt, out of which is evolved the Sutpen ruling passion and life- long design. Finding that Eulalia Bon, the wife he has taken in Haiti, has negro blood that will prove fatal to his achievement of aristocratic re- spectability, Sutpen puts her and her son aside in New Orleans. He comes to Mr. Faulkner's imaginary Jeffer- son in imaginary Yokna(patawpha County, Mississippi, the scene of all the Faulkner novels with the excep- tion of Soldiers' Pay, Mosquitoes, and Pylon. He acquires there a hundred acres of land, imports a wagon load of savage negro slaves and a French architect, and builds a mansion. He marries Ellen Coldfield, the impec- cably respectable daughter of a local merchant and begets Henry and Ju- dith. These two, he opines, will per- petuate inviolate the Sutpen name and blood. Then nemesis overtakes his dream iii the person of his put-by son, Charles Bon, whom Judith falls irre- vocably in love with and Henry mur- ders. After the Civil War, in a des- perate effort to beget still another son, Sutpen outrages the genteel sen- sibilities of Rosa Coldfield, Ellen's younger sister, and brings about his own destruction by offending the long-quiescent pride of Wash Jones, his poor-white tenant and the grand- father of his latest mistress. Judith consoles herself in her immeasurable bereavement by mothering Etienne Bon, the son of her dead Charles and his octoroon mistress. Etienne, tortured victim of miscegenation like Joe Christmas in Light in August, marries a full-blooded negress. After the death of Judith and Etienne, there are left at Sutpen's Hundred only Clytemnestra, the daughter be- gotten by Thomas Sutpen of a negro slave, and the semi-idiot, Jim Bond, the spawn of Etienne and his negress wife. Finally, in the winter of 1909, when Clytemnestra burns the dilapi- dated mansion, along with herself aid the aged and penitent fugitive murderer, Henry Sutpen, who has come home to die, only the semi-idiot Bond, reminiscent of Vardaman in As I Lay Dyng and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, remains alive to symbolize the ultimate frustration of the Sutpen dream and the ulti- mate decadence of the old feudal South. With :iuch a tale to tell, Mr. Faulk- ner might have written a novel rich in social significance, in psycholog- ical revelation, in philosophic sug- gestiveness, and in the catharsis of genuine tragedy-in other words, the masterpiece that Soldiers' Pay and Sartoris suggested he had the power to write, and that The Sound and the Fury and Light in August showed he was trying to write, and that the publishers and some of the reviewers of Absalom, Absalom. mistakenly suppose he has written. Instead, he has merely repeated all his charac- teristic indiscretions as an artist and has surpassed himself only in achiev- ing a new nadir of unreadability. The Sound and the Fury is more difficult to follow, but not to get through. One of Mr. Faulkner's artistic in- discretions is his penchant for Gothic sensationalism, at is worst in Sanc- tuary. In Absalom, Absalom! this penchant has led him to transform the Sutpen mansion into a veritable haunted castle concealing its awful secret, to endow Sutpen himself with a demonism as fantastic as that of Montoni in Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mys- teri~ of Udolpho, and to harrow the nerves by such episoes of gratuitous sadism as Wash Jones' bloody effi- ciency with scythe and butcher knife. Another of Mr. Faulkner's artistic indiscretions is his preoccupation with K I r Y e i t i i l i c t r t d s s b S i t f i3 p C S f n KIT BRANDON, A PORTRAIT by terpret human life in human terms Sherwood Anderson. Scribners. with remarkable accuracy and $2.50. beauty, but he cannot interpret hu- By ARNOLD S. DANIELS man life in terms of machinery.. It is a historical fact that Sher- Kit's best friend in the factory wood Anderson once wrote a great town is Agnes, a tough, experienced, book. Extant copies of Winesburg, worker, who has witnessed strikes Ohio, which was first published in and violence. She hates the mill 1919, are undeniable proof of his ' owners, and the power which theyj greatness. represent. Yet on the same pages In view of his previous work, it is through which Agnes tells in fu- surprising that Anderson has written rious, almost hysterical words of her as inadequate a book as Kit Brandon. hatred, Anderson salaams before the! About the life of his main character, golden statues of the Dukes, "The a Virginia mountain girl, who moves Dukes the new kings." To phrase E from the hills to an industrial town it mildly, this is inconsistent. And to great cities, he has attempted to Anderson is inconsistent throughout. weave a picture of American life in He presents on one hand the views ROBERT FROST the days when bootleggers waxed of Agnes, asking for fairer treatment strong, the lustier, bloodier days of of her fellow workers, pleading, for a just a few years ago. chance to live, and on the other hand In the early phase of the book, An- he praises the Dukes, building a great derson writes about people whom he kingdom of wealth, crushing human RT does understand, simple mountain happiness and human lives. folk. The contrast between that part The book rings true to a certain Pens Napoleonic Novel of the book and the chapters devoted extent as far as the general course W to the life of the industrial town of Kit's life is concerned. Fleeing Wilth HUn~d red Days where Kit works in the great mill her mountain home, she gets work in As Backg round clearly indicates Anderson's greatest a cotton mill, and there Anderson weakness: he attempts in Kit Bran- teaches her to love the machines and THE BALLAD OF THE HUNDRED don to write about things which are their dizzy, ceaseless activity. From DAYS, by Joseph Roth, translated far beyond his ken. He does not the mill she is graduated to a position from the Germah by Moray Firth. understand the life of people living in as a daring chauffeur for a gang of New York, the Viking Press, 1936. a factory town, cannot appreciate bootleggers, and she acquires a myth- 303 pages, $2.50. their problems. He is able to in- ical reputation for daijng. Her mar- '_*_ riage to the son of the leader of the a muddled mysticism, carried to its bootleg gang is a failure, and she be- By JOSEPH GIES extreme in Light in August. In Ab- comes a solitary, lonely person, liv- Joseph Roth, best known for his salom, Absalom! most of his main ing only for the excitement of driv- Radetzky March of a few years ago, characters become vaguely symbolic ing fast cars loaded with White Mule has added another to the long list of of suffering or bale, and the char- from the hills to the cities. attempts by authors of all nationali- acter who serves as the center of Finally the vengeance of justice eference adumbrates compassion. overtakes the gang. Kit escapes and ties to give an accurate and intimate Still another of Mr. Faulkner's ar- is picked up by Anderson, to whom portrayal of Napoleon I, in a book istic indiscretions is a psychological sheds p ty Anderon, to whhe titled in English The Ballad of the emphasis that is traceable partly to telth story of her life, to whicharHudeDys Dostoevsky and partly to Freud. This added bits of information about mphasis gets out of hand in both her collected by the author. At no Writing with a slight foreign ac- Thasis getnsnoth uryand igothttime during the telling of the tale cent, Herr Roth gets off to a labori- 'he Sound and the Fury and Light does Anderson catch the mad, con- ous start, with a rather pointless here is much probing into the char- fused spirit of the times. although often entertaining and cters only for the purpose of mak- occasionally absorbing 200 pages, ng their motivation more mysterious. omniscient narrator. This style, de- then swings into action in earnest in Also, there is an undue specialization spite indubitable incidental felicities, the final third of the book, and scores n the pathology of lacerated per- is without a parallel for flatulence repeatedly with carefully restrained onality. And, finally, there is gro- and incoherence, even in any of Mr. dramatic passages and effective de- esque overstressing of the role played Faulkner's previous work. There are scriptions. n human experience by such stuff of perpetual motion sentences that do The story concerns the love of a iightmare, such fantasia of the un- not stop running even after being simple-hearted, simple-minded laun- onscious, as the urge to incest and tackled in midfield by hefty paren- dress from Napoleon's native Cor- he dread of miscegenation. thetical sentences and sentence frag- sica for her emperor, and the trials, We come now to the most besetting ments. There are panting sentences tribulations and frustration result- f Mr. Faulkner's artistic indiscre- that halt only because they are over- ing. The book is divided into four ions, and that is his tendency to in- come by their own excessive coordi- parts: the return of Napoleon from lulge in unrestrained and bizarre ex- nation or overlapping subordination, Elba for the last desperate rally from perimentation with technique and as the handbooks say. Forlorn pro- which the volume derives its name; tyle. This tendency was a healthy nouns appear with their lost ante- the life story of the laundress, An- ign in his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, cedents skulking after in parentheses. gelina Pietri; the downfall of )ut it makes As I Lay Dying seem Trios of adjectives romp in the wake Napoleon following Waterloo and the abored and mars the tale unfolded of their nouns with a kind of lyrical death of Angelina, which comes at n The Sound and the Fury and in, abandon.-_ the hands of a Royalist mob in Paris Pylon. In Absalom, Absalom! it is To defend the studied syntaxless. atal. The story of the Sutpens is spontaneity of the prose of Absalom, ?resented as Quentin Compson, one Absalom. on the ground that it ex- Sf the memorable characters of The presses the flow of Quentin's con- CHRISTMAS CARD Sound and the Fury, hears it from sciousness as the center of reference ORDER NO' Miss Rosa Coldfield and from his or that it is an attempt to equate ather in September, 1909, and as artistically the locutions of excited STUDENTS S ie reviews it with his roommate speech or thought is no palliation for 1111 South University Shreve one night at Harvard in 1910, what it does to the reader. _ 11__ SuthUniversity _ ]ow Quentin narrating, and now vhrevea interru ting him n dri nn RobertE By SIDNEY BOBB That stock term of reviewers, "slender volume," which usually pre- cedes a mollifying statement that what there is is very good indeed, may well describe this bound leaflet as Napoleon is boarding ship for England. There are only two characters in the book worth remembering, Napo- leon and Angelina, and Angelina is rather a dull sort. It is difficulty to feel sympathy for a simpleton, and her misfortunes at the hands of a brutal sergeant-major lover, her broken heart and even her frightful death hardly stir the reader. Not so Napoleon! Wrong, ironic, incredible as it is, the humiliation of the great arrogant conqueror re- mains far more moving and poignant than the anguish, suffering or death of any of those millions crushed be- neath the juggernaut of his ambi- tion. The conqueror of Europe looks for the last time at the sky of France, the Emperor of the West prepares to become the captive of St. Helena, and we feel sorry for him in spite of ourselves. Knowing he does not deserve our sympathy, we are unable to withhold it. In this one phase of the book, Roth accomplishes something. He man- ages to reconcile the different parts of Napoleon's character for a mo- ment, and make him appear convinc- ing by his very inconsistencies. In this connection he succeeds where Manuel Komroff failed last summer with his similar novel, Waterloo, Roth's Napoleon is neither a wooden villain nor a tin soldier, but 'an impetuous, imaginative genius, som- bre, erratic, impatient and compas- sionate, all by turn and all at once. The signing of the abdication is one of the best scenes: Napoleon calmly dictating while his generals silently weep. And again, when he learns the name of the English ship and captain who are to transport him to England, he thinks, "These names will be made immortal by me, an honor they do not deserve!" The poor people, loyal to the end, and the soldiers, are rather well done, although it is difficult to avoid mak- ing a detrimental comparison of Roth's work in this line with the stirring and memorable sketch of Balzac, The Napoleon of the People. And anyway, aren't there enough novels already with the Hundred Days for background? of 12 of Robert Frost's most recent poems. However, it does not follow that they are "all roses"; they are merely in the best Frost tradition, and to many this will be sufficient. But this cycle of poems should be valuable to the critical reader be- cause, in its small space, it clarifles most of the poet's merits and his chief fault. It must be admitted that no poem of Robert Frost ever lumbers along in ,its rustic pas de seul without exe- cuting at least a few graceful steps. We may be bored for three stanzas and then light upon a really good, phrase which compensates, in part, for the rest of the poem. The virtue of the phrase invariably lies in a juxtaposition of a simple form of ex- pression with a striking image. Take, for example, this description of but- terflies in April. "There is more unmixed color on the wing Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry." But the poet is not always so suc- cessful in capturing this proper com- bination; too often, he omits the striking image and gives us mere simplicity, which is worthless in it- self. Moreover, Frost's is not the impressive and meaningless sim- plicity of Blake or Housman; it is merely irritating. For all his touch- ing sincerity and genuinely poetic temper, he finds the roles of bucolic moralist and gentle commentator the easiest and most relaxing, and this -for, after all, the man is no Words- worth-is to be regretted. W- -w w- rs r - -1 R ' s " 1 - -- -----Wl I, The Class of '39 PRESENTS "DERBY DAY" r The 1936 SOPHOMORE CABARET r Friday and Saturday December 4 and 5 Michigan League Admission 25c rr~.. r -~ A r w up I I 1I S and STATIONERY W -$1.00 Box UPPLY STORE Phone 8688 0111C zn pt.,, g4W Ufl±n1111, an. nowi both merely thinking in unison. This technique represents a miscegena- tion of James, Conrad, and Joyce, to employ a metaphor which Mr. Faulk- ner would appreciate. It is a tech- nique of extreme indirection, it in- volves a bewildering legerdemain with chronology, and it results in an un- necessarily mechanized suspense. Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quen- tin, and Shreve, whether talking or thinking or in a letter, express them- selves in a style not dissimilar from that of the occasionally intruding BO OK S - Current A Few of This Year's Best Titles N Did You Know We Have 300 MYSTERIES Carl Van Doren - THE BORZOI READER. Nordhoff and Hail - THE UNTY TRILOGY. George Blake - THE SHIP BUILDERS Gilbert Chesterton -AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Constance Rourke - AUDOBON. Henry Thoreau - MEN OF CONCORD. William Herbert Hobbs - PEARY. Schevill - FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE A. E. Housman - MORE POEMS. Dorothy Parker - NOT SO DEEP AS A WELL. $3.50 3.00 2.50 3.00 3.00 4.50 5.00 5.00 2.00 2.50 100 1200 100 100 75 PLAYS NOVELS BIOGRAPHYS POLITICAL BOOKS TRAVEL BOOKS THE COLLEGE BOOKSHOP State Street at North University Prompt Attention Given to Special Orders at iu BLUE BIRD BOOK NOOK Rental Library Nickels Arcade WAHR'S BOOKSTORES 316 South State Street Main Street Opposite Court House lkl' 'i I I -_ . i 0 F9 Alex Says that after " , 424 At, ' "'r % " 1 lLI E LE~ A kia.' POlINT AOHT Alex m 4 3. i f hopes you have a keen time at Soph mmw receiving I I= I I i I "~c &'l\ rcrA nii1rK TI1tI VFR T FE DEE I FIE I5