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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1930
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30aug
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1930s) Light In August
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Books
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
Light in August
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(October 17, 1932)
</p>
<p> Those who from experience expect each Faulkner tale to be
more gruesomely Gothic than the last will be disappointed in
Light in August. Not nearly so horrible as Sanctuary, it would
still make hair-raising cinema of the Dr. Caligari model. Like
the late great Joseph Conrad's method of spinning a yarn,
Faulkner's roundabout, circular; sometimes the suspense is
awful, sometimes merely interminable. Like Conrad, Faulkner
makes his people coherent to an unlikely and omnireminiscent
degree. Unlike Conrad, Faulkner depends upon madmen for his best
effects. From the vasty deep of nightmares and bogeymen he can
summon up ghosts that haunt nurseries and still frighten some
grown-ups. With fewer bogeymen than usual, a happy issue out of
some of its afflictions, Light in August continues the Faulkner
tradition by a murder, a lynching and a good deal of morbid
fornication.
</p>
<p> Unlike his chief rival, Ernest Hemingway, short, wiry,
triangular-faced William Faulkner came late to popularity; not
until The Sound and the Fury (his fifth book) was he on his way
to become a literary household word. After two years at the
University of Mississippi he enlisted in the Canadian Flying
Corps, at the Armistice was a lieutenant. A dyed-in-the-wool
Southerner but no unreconstructed rebel, Faulkner lives with a
wife and two step-children on his own cotton plantation in
Oxford, Miss. whence he makes rare, grudging expeditions to
literary Manhattan. He still flies occasionally, in an old plane
that belongs to a friend. Few of his Oxford neighbors know that
Faulkner writes. He is considered none too well off,
easy-going, fond of corn liquor. But, says he: "Ah write when
the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day. He
writes always in longhand, with pen & ink, in incredibly small
script of which one sheet makes five or six printed pages. He
plays jazz records while he writes; wrote Soldier's Pay to
Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." As I Lay Dying he wrote in a
power house, to the dynamo's whirr. He says he never reads
reviews of his books. The two books he most admires are Moby
Dick and The Nigger of the Narcissus. His next book will be The
Snopes Saga, for which he gives himself two years.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>