The Portable Faulkner [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION WHEN the war was over—the other war—^William Faulkner went back to Oxford, Mississippi. He had served in the Royal Air ForciB in 1918. Now he was home again and not at home, or at least not able to accept the postwar world. He was writing poems, most of them worthless, and dozens of immature but violent and efiFective stories, while at the same time he was brooding over his own situation and the decline of the South. Slowly the brooding thoughts arranged themselves into the whole interconnected p.gir., jem-Uiatjwould form the substance of his later novels^ ^ 'I'hirpartemr^^ich almost all his critics have overlooked, was based on what he saw in Oxford or remembered frcîm his childhood; on scraps of family tradition (the Falkners, as they spelled the name, had played their part in the history of the state); on kitchen dialogues between the black cook and her amiable husband; on Saturday-afternoon gossip in Courthouse Square; on stories told by men in overalls squatting on their heels while they passed around a fruit-jar full of white com liquor; on all the sources familiar to a small-tovm Mississippi boy—but the whole of it was elaborated, transformed, given convulsive life by his emotions; until, by the simple intensity of feeling, the figures in it became a little more than human, became heroic or diabolical, became symbols of the old South, of war and reconstruction, of commerce and machinery destroying the standards of the past. There in Oxford, 1