Faulkner’s Breakthrough

(The Faulkner Project) Intruder in the Dust from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954  Library of America  pp. 284-471  $40.00 ***1/2

In 1940 William Faulkner wrote his publisher seeking an advance on what he called a “blood and thunder mystery novel,” one in which a black man was arrested for murder, put in a jail cell, and solved the mystery from there, an intriguing idea if I ever heard one.  Faulkner was entering a difficult period in his life, not an unproductive time (he published Go Down, Moses in 1942, and soon after that began A Fable, on which he would work intermittently for eleven years), but one where he had trouble making money.  His stories had stopped selling to magazines, and he got caught in a restrictive contract in Hollywood which had him making $300-$400 per week, in contrast to the $1,000 he had once earned.  He was deeply in debt.  At one point in 1941 he wired his agent asking him to send him $100, part of which he used to pay his light bill.  Except for Sanctuary, all of his first twelve novels were out of print.

In 1944, Malcolm Cowley[1] began writing essays about Faulkner with the aim of restoring his reputation, letting Americans know that they had a Balzac in their midst, though his Comedie Humaine was set in a small corner of Mississippi.  The following year he created The Portable Faulkner, which got some of the best writing back into print.  It wasn’t until 1948, when he was fifty-one, that Faulkner wrote that blood and thunder mystery, and I’m astonished to read that it was this novel, which I at this point in my survey would call his least impressive (though it’s still Faulkner), which- relieved his financial worries.  He sold the film rights for $50,000, and the novel itself was his most commercially successful, selling over 15,000 copies.  Finally he was financially comfortable.  He was 51 years old.

The initial idea sounded great, and I was heartened to see that the murder suspect in question was Lucas Beauchamp, one of the most vivid characters in all of Faulkner, who has appeared before.  He seems to be one black man in Mississippi who refuses to act black; he’s descended from what he regards as aristocracy—an elder McCaslin—and always appears everywhere in a trademark broadbrimmed hat, which he wears at a cocky angle, and with a gold toothpick in his mouth.  He doesn’t defer to white men in any way.  He’d rather die than do that.  On several occasions he almost has.

Somehow this man managed to find himself in Beat Four—a notoriously lower-class white section, hostile to anyone but their own people—standing with a gun that had just been fired over a white man with a bullet in his back.  The circumstances, even to a sympathetic reader, are rather damning.  And the suspense isn’t whether he’ll be convicted in a court of law.  It’s whether he’ll be lynched before he gets to jail.

The novel is told from the point of view of the sixteen-year-old Charles Mallison (Faulkner seems to like seeing the action through the eyes of a young protagonist), who once had his own encounter with Beauchamp.  When he was four or five years old, he was out fishing with some friends (at least one of them was black, perhaps both) when he fell into a creek and was rescued by Beauchamp.  Like any white boy in Mississippi, he wanted to get back to the house of some white person, but Beauchamp insisted he come to his house instead, strip down completely and let his clothes dry on a wood stove, and, eventually, have a meal, which consisted of side meat, greens, a biscuit, and buttermilk.  When the boy tried to pay for the food, Beauchamp was insulted and threw the coins on the floor, making Charles take them back.  That was the boy’s introduction to Beauchamp, and is one of the more vivid scenes in the book.

It so happens that Charles’ uncle is the most prominent lawyer in town, Gavin Stevens[2], and as Beauchamp is entering the jail—in the view of a super-hostile crowd—he sees Charles and tells him he wants to see his uncle.  Stevens isn’t much interested in defending a black man accused of shooting a white man in the back, but he does go with Charles to see the man, and Beauchamp asks him to be his lawyer.  He insists he’ll pay.  But it’s Charles that Beauchamp really wants to see, because there are certain jobs in Mississippi that you don’t want to give to white men, but to their women and children.  He lets Charles know that he needs to go to Beat Four—a place where even he will be in danger—and exhume the body.  Because it will be obvious that the white man wasn’t killed by his gun.

It sounds as if I’m telling the whole plot of the book, but actually this is just the set up.  Eventually Charles, along with his black friend from that earlier encounter with Beauchamp, Aleck Sander, and a white middle-aged spinster named Miss Habersham (who was raised alongside Beauchamp’s deceased wife) set out to prove Beauchamp is innocent, at considerable danger to themselves (a fact which Miss Habersham would have dismissed with the word Pah.  She might be the single most courageous character in all of Faulkner).  The question is whether they’ll manage to do that before a mob lynches Beauchamp.

There are plenty of wonderful scenes and vivid characters along the way, especially the Sheriff of Jefferson, a massive fearless man named Hampton; a highlight of the novel is seeing him cook breakfast in his house at 3:30 AM, his customary time for arising.  But the book is marred by long stretches of Faulkner’s difficult prose—if there was ever a story that needed his Saturday Evening Post style, this was it—and also by the social commentary of Gavin Stevens, who seems to be the biggest gasbag in all of Yoknapatawpha County, and who speaks in Faulknerian prose.  He has the theory common to the vast majority of white Southerners that the racial question is the South’s problem and that they will solve it eventually; they don’t need a bunch of liberal white Yankees passing laws in Washington that tell them what to do.  They’ll solve it because of the good hearts of people like Charles and Miss Habersham and Sheriff Hampton and a handful of others.  They just need time.

I’m not at all sure I agree (I’m not a Southerner, though I’ve lived here for over fifty years).  There are plenty of good-hearted people in the South; there are also the Beat Four types, and the large mobs who vaguely sympathize with them, gathering outside the jail and acting menacing.  These people are still around in 2021.  They’re not all in the South.

The real problem is that this novel contains political commentary at all.  Faulkner elsewhere wrote about the issue of race not by expressing opinions, but by showing the problems in his narratives.  He’s not a political commentator; he’s a novelist of genius.  Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that this was his best-selling book, but it’s far from his best artistically.

On the other hand, as I said, it’s still Faulkner.

[1] A Pittsburgh boy, who grew up in East Liberty and went to Peabody High School, like my mother.  That building is still a school, but has been renamed Obama Academy.

[2] I’ve come to think that Stevens might be based on Phil Stone, the lawyer who was a great friend of Faulkner and his early mentor through the world of literature.  Stone’s daughter—of what must have been a late marriage—was my classmate at Duke.