[Faulkner] was a richly gifted writer and there are times when he writes with real genius. He is keenly observant, and when he so wishes can be stereoscopically graphic. He gives us the intimate feel of an old banker's run-down bank and an easy-going little town, its age and southern heat, by referring in passing to the gold lettering on the bank's windows as 'cracked'. He evokes idle days spent sitting on the steps of a country store by letting us catch on the wing a reference to those steps as 'heel-gnawed'. A dog nosing in a cupboard has a 'barometric tail'. The dusty, hot air is 'insect-rasped'. The frost tonight will shrink the water in a pool about 'rank bayonets of dead grass in fixed glassy ripples in the brittle darkness'. On a wet day the sounds of the guns 'linger in the air like a spreading stain'. When the sun has half-set behind hedges a horseman 'rides stirrup-deep in cold air'. And so on, his eyes and ears recording automatically, his excellent memory reevoking. He seems possessed when at work by a terrific power of concentration, to have been explosively responsive to every experience, to have been courageous whether as a woodsman, a hunter after big game, a cross-country horseman, or a writer driven by penury—one cannot say poverty because he was a spendthrift with a folie de grandeur—to earn writing-time by any and every means from painting roofs in his meagre and sometimes mean little home-town of Oxford (Miss.) to hack-writing under the most humiliating circumstances in Hollywood.
Gifts he had galore: so many that had this been all he had he might be known today as one of the more highly talented of American novelists. Unhappily for him, he possessed much more than talent. He had genius, upsoaring, outpouring, exultant, eloquent, capable of so lighting up his little, local world as to turn it into a great kingdom…. At each new venture one wonders: will he be a Daedalus or an Icarus? 'Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.' Like Joyce he should have said it every day, clutching his talent to guide his genius. All too often he flew too near the sun. (p. 16)
