Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner

Man in the Middle: Faulkner and the Southern White Moderate

Man in the Middle Faulkner and the Southern White Moderate For Evans Harrington Faulkner wrote Intruder in the Dust in the winter and early spring of 1948, seasons during which the Mississippi Democratic party geared itself for a vital confrontation with the national Democratic party at the summer convention in Philadelphia over the report of President Truman's Commission on Civil Rights. Truman was urging Congress "to adopt his civil rights program embodying voting rights, employment opportunities, and other provisions destined to draw fire from Southern Democrats" (Winter 141). Governor Fielding Wright called a meeting of Mississippi Democrats for February 12, Lincoln's birthday, inJackson. Allmembers of the legislature attended, hoping to find some way to counter in advance the proposed civil rights planks in the national party's platform. On February 22, Washington's birthday, Mississippi Democrats met with representatives from the Democratic parties of nine other Southern states to plan strategies to force upon the Democratic platformplanks favoring states', rather than civil, rights. Failing to sway the national body at the August convention, the entire Mississippi delegation and part of Alabama's walked out. In a subsequent convention in Birmingham Southern delegates founded the Dixiecrat party, which nominated the fiery states' rights Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president and Mississippi's own Governor Wright for vice-president. Mississippi voted 87 percent for the Dixiecrat ticket, and was joined in the colossal losing battle by South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama (Winter 144). The political and emotional 220 Faulkner and the Southern White Moderate issues at stake in this Dixiecrat year—states' rights, anti-lynching laws, mongrelization, the future of the white race, and other associated issues—were surely not lost on William Faulkner as he wrote Intruder in the spring and then saw it through the press during the summer. Intruder was published on September 27. On October 23 Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Yorker that Intruder seemed to have been at least "partly . . . stimulated by the crisis at the time of the war in the relations between Negroes and whites and by the recently proposed legislation for guaranteeing Negro rights. The book contains," Wilson went on, "a kind of counterblast to the anti-lynching bill and to the civil-rights plank in the Democratic platform." This was a line that many reviewers would take, and most commentators since have generally agreed with Wilson's assessment that "the author's ideas on this subject are apparently conveyed, in their explicit form, by the intellectual uncle, who, more and more as the story goes on, gives vent to long disquisitions that seem to become so 'editorial' in character that . . . the series may be pieced together as something in the nature of a public message delivered by the author himself" (Wilson 335-36). About the time Wilson's review appeared, Faulkner paid his first visit to the New England home of Malcolm Cowley, a friend since their collaboration on The Portable Faulkner of 1946. Cowley had reviewed Intruder for The New Republic along the same lines as Wilson, although he had been a bit more generous than Wilson. In writing about Faulkner's visit, Cowley reports that Faulkner discussed Intruder in terms that might have been an "indirect answer" to his review: "[Gavin] Stevens, he [Faulkner] explained, was not speaking for the author, but for the best type of liberal Southerners; that is how they feel about the Negroes" (Cowley 110-11). In this comment to Cowley, Faulkner seems to be distancing himself from Stevens's views on the South's racial problems in a waythat should make the average New Critic very proud, although to be sure, it is not a distance many new or old critics either have been successful at finding. Yet barely three months later, in January 1949, Faulkner sent to Robert Haas, at Random House, a two-page addition to Intruder , along with instructions to insert it if there were ever a second Faulkner and the Southern White Moderate 221 printing: it was something, he wrote, that he had "remembered . . . last year only after the book was in press" (SL 285). The addition was to Stevens's long argument that Southern blacks and whites are the only homogeneous groups left in the United States. The addition has Stevens conclude this speech with the prediction that social and political assimilation of whites and blacks will eventually result in the extinction of the...