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Count No 'Count: Flashbacks to Faulkner by Ben Wasson

1984; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1984.0035

2158-415X

Arthur F. Kinney,

American Literature and Humor Studies

Studies in American Fiction237 This book, in short, does what good criticism should always do—it makes us uneasy in our previous judgments. It makes a valiant case for Howells' psychological sophistication and for his courage; it is probably most vulnerable to the charge of symbol-hunting in places where Howells had less than full control over his material. Yet in one important respect it gives Howells too little rather than too much credit: Prioleau's governing idea of fiction as self-therapy threatens to reduce all sexual hesitancy to prudery and thereby makes a symptom out of self-control. It weakens the power of Howells' fictional contests between—in the operative terms of Prioleau's study—the id and the superego. Howells, like Freud, saw stalemate here, not an opposition of good and evil; it is extravagant to find in his last fictions a celebration of what Norman O. Brown calls "polymorphous perversity." But whether or not Prioleau is fully convincing, she has written an eye-opening book. For readers interested in placing this intriguing version of Howells in the long history of his changing reputation, the Cadys' collection of critical pieces written during Howells' lifetime will be welcome. The introduction is brisk, and, of course, deeply informed. One may follow Howells in these pages as he moved from fresh Western voice, to the ideologue of realism, to respectable taste-maker, to elder statesmen—all roles more or less imposed upon him by his audience. The essential texts are here—James's 1886 essay and his moving letter on the occasion of Howells' seventy-fifth birthday; the Crane interview of 1894; James Russell Lowell and Henry Adams on the early work; as well as less-wellknown , but valuable responses from Thomas Sargent Perry, Mayo Hazeltine, and others. One catches a glimpse of Anglo-American literary rivalry in the eighties, of Twain's devotion, of James's preference for Howells the romancer who creates Hawthornian gardens to Howells the chronicler of his times, of Mencken's grudging admission that American prose was re-made by the stuffy Dean—an observation that foreshadows Edmund Wilson's discussion of the "chastening of American prose style." At the center of all the praise and scorn is of course the curiously mysterious figure of Howells himself, who remains not so much elusive as impressively restless. The Cadys are at work on a selection of criticism since Howells' death, which should, if the present volume is any indication, again be more than a convenience. Harvard UniversityAndrew Delbanco Wasson, Ben. Count No 'Count: Flashbacks to Faulkner. Introduction by Carvel Collins. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1983. 206 pp. Cloth: $12.95. Ben Wasson's lifelong silence regarding his long-time friendship with William Faulkner has been especially disappointing, for he figures in several key periods of the novelist's life. He was with Faulkner when both were students at Ole Miss; he served as one of Faulkner's earliest critics and became his first agent; he introduced Faulkner to important people in New York and, later, in Hollywood. Most importantly, it was Wasson who singlehandedly transformed an unacceptable Flags in the Dust into a publishable Sartoris and so was instrumental in the form and publication of the first Yoknapatawpha novel. We should therefore be grateful to the University Press of Mississippi for posthumous publication of Wasson's memoirs, a unique document that must play a part in any thorough assessments of Faulkner the man and Faulkner the writer, and complementing it with archival photographs. 23 8 Reviews The acceptance of Flags in the Dust by Harrison Smith at Harcourt Brace for their initial list and the subsequent handling of it constitute the longest and one of the most overtly fascinating parts of Wasson's book (pp. 84-97), although we learn nothing of his principles for change or any of the changes themselves. (For this we still need to turn to Joseph Blotner's biography and to subsequent essential textual studies by George Hayhoe and Thomas McHaney.) Still there is some compensation in the first-hand account of the publication of Sartoris swiftly followed by Wasson's persuasion of Evelyn Scott—seen here in one of...