Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson ed. by Kerry McSweeney (review)

HUMANITIES 435 and point of view. Kreiswirth argues his thesis - that the significant elements of the major Faulkner are present in the minor poet and novelist - without blurring the importance of The Sound and the Fury as Faulkner's first great work. In other words, Kreiswirth advances his argument tactfully and economically, making use of the latest Faulkner scholarship and of a wide-ranging body of contemporary critical theory. Kreiswirth deftly and concisely fastens on Faulkner's poetry, on an imitation and transformation of a Swinburne poem and on 'The Lilacs: in order to establish quickly Faulkner's characteristic modifications of other writers' work in the course of finding his own voice. This critic never belabours pointsalready made by others or by himself in previous articles. And he consistently traces Faulkner's' fragmented organizational strategies : which were to prove so essential to his most distinguished novels. Soldiers' Pay receives a particularly instructive cliscussion that helps one to link it to The Sound and the Fury and to later works. One comes away from the chapter on Faulkner's first novel with a deep impression of how fastidious and resourceful he would be in reusing and adapting his initial themes and techniques in his subsequent prose. Faulkner's progress towards greatness was not always smooth or unerring, as Kreiswirth demonstrates in chapters on Mosquitoes and Flags in the Dust. The latter, in particular, represented a discovery of new material but no corresponding invention of a new technique. Not until The Sound and the Fury did Faulkner learn 'how to read - and hence reuse - himself: Kreiswirth concludes. The phrase is apt, for Faulkner - in the two novels preceding his first great one - seemed to flounder and then fix upon a wealth of material he could not interpret satisfactorily. The Sound and the Fury thus constituted for him a summa summarum: 'Image complexes and characterconfigurations from earlier texts are reassembled and reinterpreted; previously explored structural patterns and techniques are renovated and put to new use.' Given Kreiswirth's impressive command of Faulkner criticism and contemporary critical theory - he might have used the latter to probe Faulkner's prose more perSistently - it is to be hoped that he will extend the approach of this first book to other phases of Faulkner's career in order to explain how itis that the writer, in novel after novel, continued to read himself anew. (CARL E. ROLLYSON JR) Kerry McSweeney, editor. Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson Seeker and Warburg. xvi. 303. £15.00 At the reception after his investiture, the newly knighted Angus Wilson was remembered by the Queen from a previous occasion: 'Oh, yes, you 436 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 write those lovely novels.' Obliged to reply, Sir Angus confessed that he also wrote essays and gave lectures, whereupon the Queen: 'Those must be lovely too.' Since the Queen - unlike Wilson - does not come from a fiction-reading family, she would no doubt find some of the essays collected here rather hard gOing. The diversity and depth promised by the title is found not only in the fiction considered, which ranges across the history of the English novel from the eighteenth century to the present, but is also characteristic of the essays themselves. Wilson's diversity is inclusive enough for him to cross the Channel to consider the work of Zola, Proust, Camus, Claude Simon, and Gunter Grass. Indeed, since Conrad few English writers have been so aware of French fiction. This selection of thirty-two essays - made with Wilson's assistance and accompanied by a brief and self-effacing Foreword - is an extension of his role as man of letters, a role ably played as President of the Dickens Fellowship, the Kipling and the Powys Societies, and, more recently, the Royal Society of Literature. The intensity of his public commitment to the role of artist and his commitment to fiction - the engage quality of his imagination and art - informs this collection, distinguishing it from academic criticism on the one hand and mere belletrism (of the sort Woolf and Forster sometimes offered in their critical writings) on the other. For Wilson, the novel is certainly no laughing matter, at once...