Flying Fable

PYLON--William Faulkner--Smith & Haas ($2.50).

William Faulkner's latest fairy tale about the human race contains no bogeyman, but as usual his protagonists have their hearts in the wrong place. Tacit thesis of Pylon is that airmen are not people, but a race apart, unaccountable, sinister, inhuman. "They ain't human like us. . . . Crash one and it ain't even blood when you haul him out; it's cylinder oil the same as in the crankcase." Though Author Faulkner obviously admires his creatures, they will seem to most readers less god-like than monstrous. But those who can manage to skip Faulkneresque psychology will find many a passage in Pylon that will make their breath come faster.

Setting of Pylon is the city of "New Valois." New Orleanians will quickly pierce the thin disguise, will wryly admit the biting likeness of the "Feinman Field" to their own "Abe" Shushan airport, reclaimed at enormous expense from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Dubious hero of the tale is a nameless and quixotic reporter, who is covering an airmeet at Feinman Field and stumbles on a queer situation, a flying triangle. Laverne, the woman-apex, is technically married to Shumann, a racing pilot, and her little boy bears his name. But she has no idea whether Shumann or the other member of the menage, a parachute jumper, is really the father. None of them knows, and none-- except the boy, who violently resents being reminded of his uncertainty--seems to care. The reporter falls desperately in love with Laverne, does everything he can to get in the trio's good graces. He hands over his apartment to them, lends them money, tries to get his editor interested in them. In return they cold-shoulder him, rob him when he is drunk. Because Shumann's plane is obsolete, the only way he can place in the money is by cutting risky corners at the pylons. By tricky work, the reporter gets him a dangerously overpowered plane for the third day's race, so that Shumann can win a really valuable prize. On the second turn the plane cracks up, goes to pieces in the air and Shumann's body hurtles into the lake. Laverne holds his death so much against the reporter that she will not even see him before they leave town.

Author Faulkner likes Joycean agglutinations. Example from Pylon: " 'Deposit five cents for three minutes please,' the bland machine-voice chanted. The metal stalk sweatclutched, the guttapercha bloom cupping his breathing back at him, he listened, fumbled, counting as the discreet click and cling died into wirehum."

Faulkner fans, who have learned to expect some new grotesquerie of abnormal psychology in each new Faulkner book, will find in Pylon what they are looking for on p. 195, can safely hail it as the first description in any language of love-making in the air.

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