Genius-

THE HAMLET--William Faulkner --Random House ($2.50).

The locale of The Hamlet is Frenchman's Bend, a little clump of houses sunk 20 miles deep in the country from Jefferson (presumably Oxford), Miss. The time is the late 19th Century. What the story's essential subject is, God--and just possibly William Faulkner--knows. Apparently it is a study of the village itself, chiefly in terms of an evil clan of intruders named Snopes. The volume is built in four books, like the four movements of a symphony.

Book One is a sort of muted epic on those tricks of sharp rural trading which become the legendary material of country store gossips. It tells how cold Flem Snopes, a tenant farmer's son, gains complete power over Will Varner, who virtually owns the town. Other Snopeses turn up on the horizon.

Book Two is a piece of natural history in human terms: the story of a queen bee. Eula Varner is a semi-superhuman embodiment of unmitigated sex, already embarrassingly female at the age of eight. As she ripens, the male community establishes itself in quavering, fighting concentrics of courtship: first raw boys, then slick sports in shiny buggies. But it is Flem who finally gets her. He takes her to Texas.

In Book Three the idiot Ike Snopes falls in love with a cow. Mink Snopes murders a widower named Houston. The villagers, to cure the idiot of "stock-diddling," slaughter the cow and require him to eat of her. In a gruesome scene Houston's hound attacks Mink. Mink is caught and jailed.

In Book Four Flem returns from Texas with a string of insanely wild piebald ponies and sells them to his neighbors. They break loose in horrendous slapstick and pervade the countryside. Mink gets a life sentence; Cousin Flem doesn't lift a finger to help him. Two bourgeois and a desperate peasant invest all they have in a plot of land where Civil War treasure is known to be buried. They find Flem has hoodwinked them as he has everyone else. When last seen, Flem is on his way to larger operations in Jefferson.

If that were all there was to the book it would be plenty, though no man could quite judge of what. But for Dionysian William Faulkner the story is, as usual, a mere set of springboards and parallel bars for the display of one of the most dazzling and inchoate talents in contemporary letters. The reader who takes in the show exposes himself to so furious a narcotic cyclone of Poe, Melville, Mark Twain and original Faulkner that the best he can do is to hang on to his hat and wits. As the storm screams past he may discern a number of things, mainly favorable to the author and to his own pleasure:

> Through his people, both normal and daemonic, through his animals, through his fascination in the mysteries of gesture, tones of speech, stature of objects, phases of weather, and through his magical ability to isolate them in words, William Faulkner records the much-investigated South more subtly and truly than any dozen more simple reporters on it.

> If an anthology were made of it, this novel would contain perhaps 100 each of almost incredibly beautiful poems, lyric paintings, scenes from motion pictures. Faulkner has learned more from films, and could give them more, than any other writer.

> Whatever their disparities, William Faulkner and William Shakespeare share these characteristics: 1) Their abundance of invention and their courage for rhetoric are bottomless. 2) Enough goes on in their heads to furnish a whole shoal of more temperate writers. 3) By fair means or foul, both manage to play not for a specialized but for a broad audience.

> In passages incandescent with undeniable genius, there is nevertheless not one sentence without its share of amateurishness, its stain of inexcusable cheapness.

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