Robert Penn Warren on William Faulkner, 1934

I've had more than one occasion here to criticize the poet and onetime Southern Agrarian reactionary Robert Penn Warren. But I was surprised at his evaluation of William Faulkner's work in one of his articles from the Agrarian days, "T.S. Stribling: a Paragraph in the History of Critical Realism" The American Review 2:4 (1934).

Most of the article is devoted to the novelist T.S. Stribling. But near the end, he makes a comparison of Stribling's fiction to Faulkner's that is surprisingly perceptive about Faulkner's work. He writes:

Take the "poor whites" of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying ... As a citizen, in his practical and public rôle, Faulkner may want to see a broadened way of life possible for the back-country people of Mississippi; but he is too much of an artist to commit himself to the easy satire of the reformer or aesthete. And it is doubtful that Faulkner, the citizen, approves of Pop Eye, the gangster, or of Temple Drake; but his distaste as a citizen is not the theme of Sanctuary. And when the mother in The Sound and the Fury rebukes her child for using a nickname, saying nicknames are common, the effect is not a piece of satire on her pretensions, but something more immediate, human, and profound; it is perhaps a pathos at this clinging to a symbol of gentility and self-respect in the midst of decay, and if the scene is complicated with irony it is an irony that the symbol should, after all, be so futile and so stupid.

Notice that Warren is being critical of Faulkner because as "a citizen" he "may want to see a broadened way of life possible for the back-country people of Mississippi." Warren's reservations about Faulkner's intentions "as a citizen" is understandable; it's hard to imagine how a reader of As I Lay Dying would be impressed with the Southern Agrarians' idealized notion of subsistence farming and the glories of the superstitious, uneducated, and isolated country life.

But the rest of the comment shows that Warren had sense enough to portray his characters in a realistic light in a complicated environment that recalls those of real people.

He continues:

Light in August employs all the material familiar in Stribling's work, race prejudice, class prejudice, sectional prejudice, and violence, but with a far different effect. Christmas, the white Negro of Light in August, ... is caught in an insoluble problem that can only end in tragedy; it is a problem so fundamental that he cannot evade it, no matter what he does or where he goes. ... Christmas does pass as white, even in the South, and does go North, and does have, not one, but many white women; but these things are ultimately irrelevant to the circumstance of his life. Even if he were rich and successful, his character being given, they would remain irrelevant. The death of Christmas has some tragic dignity; the lynching of Toussaint [in Stribling's story] is a mere butchery, or on another view, a competent piece of legerdemain to point [a] a moral if not adorn a tale.

The primary difference, a difference perhaps more of intention than of achievement, between the work of Stribling and that of Faulkner seems to be this: the drama that engrosses Stribling is a dram of external circumstance, a conflict drawn in the purely practical world; the drama that engrosses Faulkner concerns a state of being, a conflict involving, to some degree at least, the spiritual integrity of a character.

I have to give Warren credit here. At this stage of Faulkner's career, Sanctuary had made Faulkner famous. But Faulkner's work was shocking, and remains so today. And conventional critics accused him of using sex and violence gratuitously, as sensationalism. It was a ridiculous charge. But one might think someone like Warren, who at that time found himself comfortable among the "Radicals of the Right" publishing in The American Review, would have been tempted to share a traditionalist, moralistic view of Faulkner's work.

But despite his very conservative worldview, Warren could evidently appreciate the value of Faulkner's work, which was anything but conservative at that time, and even less so in the years after 1930.

Tags: robert penn warren, william faulkner