Town a-Building

Town aBuilding

THE UNVANQUISHED--William Faulk- ner--Random House ($2.50).

When Jules Romains published the first volume of his Men of Good Will he announced in sonorous phrases his purpose-- to write a vast work in which modern French society would be the hero. He might be compared with the builder of a city who lays out his streets in advance, builds one house beside the other methodically, pausing from time to time to call attention to the increase in population. But in building his city of Jefferson, Miss, in six novels and three books of short stories, William Faulkner has followed a far more devious path. In effect, he has put down one street and then built houses miles away from it. As the same characters (or their sons and grandsons) turned up in volume after volume, critics suspected that Faulkner had some unified plan that would become apparent when his cycle of books was completed. But when Pylon was published three years ago. with a high-pitched story of aviation that bore no relation to his other novels, critics began to wonder if he had any plan at all. And when Absalom, Absalom! appeared in 1936, it looked as if he had been laying out dead-end streets in the wilderness.

Last week a collection of characteristic Faulkner short stories brought his scattered characters a little closer together. A lively book in its own right, made up of seven tales of the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Unvanquished is also interesting for the light it throws on obscure episodes and characters in Faulkner's other novels. Because the stories are told by Bayard Sartoris, they close one of the gaps in the chronicle of Sartoris' family who, along with the Compsons, the Sutpens, the Coldfields, and their slaves, overseers and illegitimate children, make up much of Jefferson's past and present population. The stories are full of action and there are few of the involved Proustian passages that made Absalom, Absalom! almost unreadable. Instead, its outdoor scenes of fights with Yankees and highwaymen, its pictures of the transformation of well-bred Southern boys to horse thieves and killers, gives The Unvanquished something of the air of Two Little Confederates as it might be rewritten by an author aware of the race problem, economics and Freudian psychology.

Between its lines readers get a clear picture of the moral and cultural changes in the South in the ten years that the book covers, the questioning of old customs by little Confederates like Bayard, the persistence of old Southern conventions in situations that make them absurd. Thus, although Cousin Drusilla and John Sartoris have gone to war together, lived in military encampments, rebuilt the plantation, fought carpetbaggers, they cannot hold out against the good ladies of Jefferson. In the midst of domestic disorder, while Sartoris is killing two Republicans and holding an election at gun's point the good name of Southern womanhood must be protected, and Drusilla and Sartoris, two innocent, high-minded people who do not love each other, are forced to marry. This prepares the scene for tragedy in the next generation, is one of the aspects of The Unvanquished that suggest Faulkner knows exactly what he is doing in tracing the New South to its origin in the Old.

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