Dollar Cotton

IN Men Working John Faulkner proved that he could write a talented novel of what may be called the sociological school. Dollar Cotton, though it has many social applications, is a portrait. Otis Town — “Old Man Town" — is a cotton grower of the Mississippi Delta, the line of whose fortunes exactly parallels that of the post-war boom and depression. From nothing he becomes a millionaire, riding the rise of the cotton market, and then, refusing to recognize that the bubble has burst, is ruined in both wealth and health. Told this way in bare outline, it sounds like a very old story; but Mr. Faulkner tells it in a new way. For Old Man Town is a massive figure, repellent and pathetic. He has a peasant’s passion for the soil without a peasant’s parsimony and meanness: in fact he cares nothing for money, is almost lacking in human affections, is very shrewd in small matters and an innocent in large; but cotton and the black soil of the Delta are, as his only friend says, his poetry. They are also his morality, providing him with the only conscience he has. Perhaps the author has loaded the dice against him in giving him the kind of family he has, and perhaps the final scenes concerning his wife and daughter are too melodramatic. Nevertheless, Old Man Town looms against a horizon. R. M. G.