stomach hot, savage, and courageous with whiskey, he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.

“The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask.”

Joe winds up in “Jefferson,” the pivotal Southern town in Faulkner’s work. Here Joanna Burden, who is the descendant of Northern abolitionists who settled in the South to befriend blacks, but who has long withdrawn from the hostility of her neighbors, falls madly in love with Joe Christmas after he has confided that he may be a Negro. Faulkner the Southerner thinks Joanna a helpless, useless do-gooder on the eternal race question. With understandable irony directed at Joanna’s missionary attempts to “save” the Negro, Faulkner portrays Joe chafing against his sexual bondage to Joanna. He cannot bear her constantly praying over him between her sexual transports. Outraged that, for her, he is just another symbol of his supposed blackness, not an individual in his own right, he can get away only by murdering her. He runs and runs in a circle that resembles his own life—asleep from exhaustion, even as he runs—until he is finally mutilated and murdered by Faulkner’s “premature Nazi,” who holds up the bloody knife and cries, “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell.”

But that is not the end of this great work. The peaceful, loving world that Joe Christmas has never known as an everlasting victim, the Christ symbol “things are done to,” comes back to end the book with Lena Grove, who began it. Light in August opens unforgettably with Lena, a pregnant young woman from Alabama sitting beside a road in Mississippi, her feet in a ditch, her shoes in her hand, watching a wagon that is mounting the hill toward her with a noise that carries for a half-mile “across the hot still pine-winey silence of the August afternoon.”

In Paris at the end of the war, I heard Albert Camus praise this as full of “the dust and heat” that, as “another Southerner” from Algeria, he loved most in Faulkner. Lena has been on the road for a month, riding in a long succession of farm wagons or walking the hot, dusty roads with her shoes in her hand, trying to get to Jefferson. There, she firmly expects, she will find her

lover working in a planing mill and ready to marry her; Jefferson, for her, is the big city. She will put her shoes on at last.

The lover of course runs away, but Lena is so wonderful, loving, and pure that another man at the planing mill turns out to be the one her heart really needs. All ends in a spirit of love and longing, and, after everything that poor Joe Christmas has been put through, that is exalting. When Lena has her baby, Joe Christmas’ grandmother, who never really knew what her mad husband had done with his own grandson, imagines that the infant is her great-grandson, and pitifully hopes for a second chance for Joe.

“I am not saying he never did what they say he did. Ought not to suffer for it like he made them that loved and lost suffer. But if folks could maybe just let him for one day. Like it hadn’t happened yet. Then it could be like he had just went on a trip and grew man grown and come back. If it could be like that for just one day.”

Faulkner’s knowledge of the human heart was equaled only by the range and depth of his imagination. How lucky we were to have him!