John Wesley Thompson Falkner, III, who upon the publication of his
novel Men Working in 1941 adopted the spelling of the
family name
made famous by his older brother William, published eight novels, a few
stories and articles, and a volume of reminiscences. He left in addition, at
his
death in 1963, a considerable body of unpublished work. The first three of
his published novels were widely reviewed; we have not listed reviews here
since the significant ones are accessible in standard reference works. But
the
last five novels, representing his mature art, were published between 1951
and 1960 in paperbacks and scarcely noticed. To our knowledge, the only
serious review of any of the series was an account of the first, Cabin
Road, by Harry Serwer in The Freeman, XIII (March
24, 1952),
415. According to the publisher's estimates, total sales of these five books
mounted, however, to between 2,000,000 and 2,500,000. Nevertheless,
they
are already rare. John
Faulkner came to notice again with the posthumous publication in 1963 of
My Brother Bill, the volume of reminiscences; but aside from
this the
only work by him now in print is his second novel to be published,
Dollar
Cotton, which first appeared in 1942.[1]
John Faulkner's papers, including manuscripts of all the published
works
as well as the unpublished ones, have now been deposited by Mrs. Faulkner
in the Mississippi Valley Collection of the John Willard Brister Library at
Memphis State University. Our work with the papers, however, was carried
out through the courtesy of Mrs. Faulkner while they were still kept in an
old quilt chest at the Faulkner residence in Oxford, Mississippi.
The value of John Faulkner's work for the student of literature must
lie
primarily in its own merits but also in its being a second and distinctive
treatment of the Matter of Lafayette County. Beginning about 1938, he tried
different approaches to the hill types of Beat Two, the northeastern part of
the county. From the tragic, the macabre, the naturalistic, and the
sentimental, he developed at length a pure humorous style in the last five
novels.
These, beginning with Cabin Road (1951), comprise a
series in
which the pervasive comic theme is the mutually uncomprehending
relationship of the natives of Beat Two and the modern American State. We
regret that
the accidents of publication make it inconvenient to speak of Faulkner's
fictional "Beat Six," to use the title of his first and as yet unpublished
novel.
A beat in a Mississippi county is one of five autonomous political units
which brooks little "federal" power in either the county seat or the state
capitol but has felt it from Washington, first in the Civil War and in
Reconstruction and lately in the guise of welfare, conservation, and racial
integration. Faulkner came to exploit this situation for the purposes of
non-judgmental humor. It is a pity that "Beat Six" with its connotation of
a
fabulous dimension has not been available as a designation for the series of
novels, which perforce is referred to somewhat confusingly as the "Cabin
Road" series or as the "Beat Two" series.
Faulkner's humor is in the tradition of the Old Southwest. We find
that it
meets every criterion of the genre as defined in recent scholarship and,
more
important, that it succeeds in the aim which has always been dominant in
the
genre — to raise a hearty laugh. As reviewers observed of
Men
Working, in which the humor is often macabre in contrast to the
sheer
good humor of the last novels, the humor is free of condescension and
brutality, which have marked many of the earlier tales of the Old
Southwest.
Faulkner sets up a contest in human fecklessness between his natives, on
the
one hand, and townsmen and representatives of the Government, on the
other, and keeps the hands even.
John Faulkner's Beat Six — the Cabin Road world grounded
in the
actual Beat Two — will inevitably suggest comparison with William
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. John's creation is more limited in every way
than
William's, but within the limitations John achieved independent distinction.
Even comparison with the humorous passages in William Faulkner, which
have themselves been appreciated as superlative instances of the Old
Southwest kind, or with William Faulkner's treatment of Cabin Road types
such as the Snopes clan, shows, in our opinion, marked distinctions of
style,
tone, and purpose. Some of John's unpublished work, especially the novel
"Beat Six" and a local history entitled "Mississippi Hill Country," provides
background not only for John's published fiction but for some of William's
as
well.
Students of bibliography will be particularly interested in John
Faulkner's
publication history. With the shift from hardback to paperback books which
occurred with the publication of Cabin Road, his career was
radically
affected. No doubt the circumstance that William Faulkner was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature at that time and certain other circumstances
contributed to the eclipse of John's reputation, but the chief cause seems to
have been the practice of not noticing paperbacks whose quality was
disguised by garish covers and cheap prices. The appearance of John
Faulkner's novels in an ephemeral, popular format is, however, one of the
characteristics they have in common with their nineteenth-century
predecessors in Old Southwest humor.
