Dark-Ride Through Dawn

GO DOWN MOSES --William Faulkner --Random House ($2.50).

Reading the new Faulkner is like taking what carnival people call a "dark-ride": one of those slow Tunnels of Love which alternate blank darkness with suddenly illuminated views of dancing skeletons or Swiss lakes. Go Down, Moses is a dark-ride well worth taking. Stretches of it are blank enough; but some of the views beat those of any other U.S. writer.

The book is made up of seven stories. They are about the same set of people: Mississippi planters and Negroes and their descendants; and have a common theme: the land. A linked theme is that of blood and its heritage. Negro-white miscegenation pads through the pages like a housecat, and the presence of Indians makes a sort of bottomless pit into the past. Subthemes, which have more interest for Faulkner than for his readers, are money (one 100-page story centers on his old theme of buried treasure) and what he calls the "curse" which is laid on the South.

Poetically rather than rationally, Faulkner manages to bulldoze the reader into believing that the South is indeed accursed, but he is never very clear why or how. On mixups of money and genealogy he constructs passages as intricate but not as rewarding as a five-voiced fugue. On the pre-cotton Southern wilderness he is superb. Nearest thing to a central character is old Ike McCaslin, who has retained, throughout his life, the born huntsman's anarchic feeling for the wilderness.

> In The Old People, Ike, at twelve, kills his first buck and is initiated into manhood: the "son of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw chief" steeps his hands in the deathblood and marks his face.

> In The Bear, the wilderness is epitomized in Old Ben, an almost immortal bear; Ike, now 16, is in at his death, at the death of the dog who was fierce enough to hold him, at the death and primeval funeral of Ike's Indian mentor. Not many years later Ike sees the beginning of the wilderness' end. The forest is sold to a Memphis lumber company, and Faulkner's description of the sinister little locomotive prodding in the wilderness is one of the best passages he has written.

> In Delta Autumn, Ike, in his late 70s, comes again, perhaps for the last time, 200 miles from Jefferson, down through the slowly peeling palimpsest of civilization and of his memory to what little is left of true wilderness, cramped in the deep inverted apex of the Delta.

Faulkner knows his own country as few men do. His details of farming, hunting and folkways are as tangible as rusty nails and as tough as legal writ. There are magnificent flashes of a dirt lane which runs "pale and dim beneath the moonless sky of corn-planting time"; of a godforsaken Arkansas farmhouse in which an ex-slave sits in a frock coat, reading through lensless spectacles; of a blow across the "hard hollow-sounding face" of a mule; of a rattlesnake's "thin sick smell of rotting cucumbers"; of some moving, semiliterate pages from an old plantation ledger:

"Percavil Brownly 26yr Old. cleark @ Bookepper. bought from N. B. Forest at Cold Water 3 Mar 1856 $265. dolars

"and beneath that, in the same hand:

"5 mar 1856 No bookepper any way Cant read. Can write his Name but I al ready put that down My self Says he can Plough but dont look like it to Me. sent to Feild to day Mar 5 1856"

Faulkner is perhaps the most gifted of living U.S. writers. He can be as funny as Mark Twain, as exalted as Melville, as solid as Joyce and as dull as Dreiser; but he has never done a book which has the sure, sound permanence of any of these men. Go Down, Moses, like most of Faulkner, is brilliant and uneven. Its special value is its evocative (though local) exploration of the U.S. national source and dawn. In it is a sometimes merely yeasty, sometimes 100-proof sense of those powers and mysteries of land and the people on it which make a nation.

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