[A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955), Contemporaries (1962), and particularly for On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writing since the era of William Dean Howells. In the review below, he offers a mixed assessment of William Faulkner: A Critical Study, faulting Howe for failing to fully assess Faulkner's Southern background.]

Although Faulkner seems at last to have come into his own, Irving Howe's book [William Faulkner: A Critical Study], the latest of several recent critical studies, makes one wonder how much of Faulkner's new prestige is due to the lack of competition rather than to our own clear and positive realization of his originality. As Mr. Howe says, he is now "the most impressive living American novelist"—and no wonder, considering how starved we are for novelists with half his boldness and depth, and what a succession of anticlimaxes we have been getting, from Caldwell and Steinbeck, up to Hemingway and Dos Passos, the once dominant novelists of our period. Surely there is something about Faulkner himself that explains why perhaps no other American writer since Melville has in our time so deeply affected the thinking of so many people everywhere in the world.

Mr. Howe, whose study of Sherwood Anderson was published last year, is a shrewd critic, and he writes of Faulkner's achievements as a practicing novelist with a wary respect. He has a good many observations to make that should help readers in going through the novels. But he writes as if the height of critical good sense is to stand between those who ignorantly disparaged Faulkner and those who now find him "a spokesman for traditional values." His book seems to have been put together with insights gathered from every critical approach rather than from a firm idea of what makes Faulkner the original he is.

To tell us what Faulkner's novels are "about," Mr. Howe opens with an analysis of what he calls the "Southern myth"—myths he considers the "raw material" of literature. He emphasizes the social antagonisms and historical illusions in Faulkner's background, outlines the social structure of Faulkner's imaginary world, and gives us a whole chapter on Faulkner's changing attitude toward the Negroes. He then analyzes and evaluates each of the principal novels as works of art—the most helpful part of his book, and one in which he writes with acuteness and feeling about those particularly remarkable works, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.

There is no real connection between the two sections of the book, for Mr. Howe is not sure how "raw materials" lead to finished works of art in a writer's mind. He tells us what the "Southern myth" is and to what extent Faulkner does (and does not) accept it. He then declares that Faulkner has been "testing" the myth, that "this testing … is basic to the Yoknapatawpha novels and stories; and from it comes his growing vision as an artist." But what Mr. Howe means by "testing," as one sees in his chapter on Faulkner and the Negroes, is fundamentally Faulkner's changing opinions of one aspect or another of Southern society.

Even if these attitudes played as overwhelming and exclusive a role in Faulkner's novel as Mr. Howe thinks they do, this would still not explain where the artist found his point of release, or how it is that a Southerner named William Faulkner can realize his own solitary and complex vision of human destiny out of experiences familiar to everyone in the same society.

If a critic sets out to interpret so much of Faulkner in terms of the South alone, he should not only emphasize its social structure but also do justice to its inner culture, in which religion has been so influential, and in which rhetoric is a force that works for spiritual continuity. It is always a delicate procedure to relate a writer to his "background," but one should at least assess all the resources in the place he comes from. Not all Southern illusions are historic self-deceptions, though they may seem so to outsiders.

When a Civil War veteran in Sartoris admits that he never really knew what the war was about, Mr. Howe tells us that "in the absence of knowledge about the meaning of the war, little remains but the romantic sentimentalism to which Faulkner repeatedly succumbs." "Absence of knowledge about the meaning of the war" is quite a general failing among soldiers in most wars, and some wonderful things, from the Iliad and War and Peace, have been written around it. How odd it is, in any case, to assume that soldiers who cannot give a name to what they are fighting for are fighting for nothing. For surely it is the heroic traits called out by war, the intimate solidarity and the unconscious beauty of a common effort, that Faulkner wants to elegize in the little passage Mr. Howe disparages as "romantic sentimentalism."

Mr. Howe admires Faulkner's novels, but he does not grant him much mind of his own—or, for that matter, much of a mind. Faulkner, in one of his characteristic interpolations and asides, rails against the cruel "Player" or "Cosmic Joker" in command of the universe for his indifference to human hopes and needs. Mr. Howe comments that "in such passages, one looks for but seldom finds some tinge of irony, some anxiety that the philosophical kite may be perilously high." Too high for whom? Not for the Faulkner whose soliloquy on history and the human will finally bursts out of Absalom, Absalom! and sends the book reeling precisely because he is a thinking novelist for whom every Southern fable is only a fresh excuse for continuing his unending meditation. Nor for the Faulkner who in Light in August caught in the eloquent bleakness of his country characters a whole range of feeling so much like Thomas Hardy's in its silent condemnation of life.

Mr. Howe assures us that the philosophical side of Faulkner is "fortunately" a "minor" one, and explains Faulkner's anguished speculations on human destiny as "a reaction to the drone of small-town optimism," by "a provincial intellectual dipping into the treasures of folk-wisdom and bringing up moldy odds and ends of cracker-barrel pessimism." All such a passage means is that Mr. Howe is disparaging with a blunt and heavy hand whatever in Faulkner embarrasses his own views. Such writing helps to explain why Mr. Howe finds Faulkner lacking in the qualities of a great writer. Faulkner, he says, is a "genius," but because of a "failure of intellect," simply not in a class with Joyce, Lawrence and Kafka. How does Mr. Howe know that Faulkner's vision of life is inadequate, since he never comes to grips with it in Faulkner himself?