Word: snopeses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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In The Hamlet (TIME, April 1, 1940), Faulkner told how Flem Snopes, a repellent specimen of white trash, sidled into Frenchman's Bend. Now, in The Town (the second book in an intended trilogy), Faulkner takes Flem Snopes from his earlier triumphs over the steppingstones of other men'...
Originally, the county was inhabited by Sartorises, Varners and Comptons. Now it is just about all Snopeses-the twins, Bilbo and Vardaman Snopes, Wallstreet Panic Snopes, Admiral Dewey Snopes, Byron and Virgil Snopes and Montgomery Ward Snopes. (The reader is grateful for an occasional mnemonic rhyme, e.g., one Snopes is called Eck, "the one with the broken neck.") Malignant, hated, despised, physically maladroit, the Snopeses prevail over better men by their rapacity and lack of pride or shame. They are like monkeys on the backs of men, and they move to "the blind glare of the blind money...
...hopes that the Snopes family tree will flourish by association with the aristocratic De Spain. The gentle, white-haired local lawyer, Gavin Stevens (left over from Intruder in the Dust, etc.), loves Eula's adolescent daughter Linda; he wants her to get out of Jefferson because the Snopeses have taken over. But Flem hangs on to his prestigious wife and daughter until Eula puts a bullet through her brain and thus releases Linda for better things...
Through all this move the grisly minor characters of Faulkner's theater. The druggist is running a dirty-picture seance. Bad niggers chase good niggers with carving knives, fall together into the same ditch and talk philosophy. Four grotesque little Indians (the offspring of a stray Snopes and an...
Boris Pascuniak's sensitive directing keeps the story probable and well-placed; he is helped out a great deal by a delightfully pastoral musical score by Bonar Gillis. The acting, unfortunately, is less competent. Jane Cruikshank plays the Snopes daughter with a sheepish grin, while Basil Mange is never convincing...