Footnotes to Genius

By Paul Gray

FAULKNER: A BIOGRAPHY by JOSEPH BLOTNER 2,115 pages. 2 vols. Random House. $25.

Back in 1930, when he was virtually unknown, William Faulkner was informed by his agent that The American Mercury wanted a biographical snippet to preface one of his stories. "Don't tell the bastards anything," wrote Faulkner. "It can't matter to them." In 1958, when Saxe Commins, his longtime editor at Random House, died, Faulkner grieved: "I'll have to hunt up somebody else now who will stop anybody making the William Faulkner story the moment I have breathed my last."

Faulkner breathed his last in July 1962. He had found no one to protect him from the ensuing scramble for his literary remains. Family cooperation and the right of access to private papers soon went to English Professor Joseph Blotner, a younger man whom Faulkner had befriended during his last years as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Blotner spent the next twelve years of his life studying Faulkner--with weighty and almost entirely lamentable results.

His book is a monstrosity: flaccid, mawkish, stuffed with the wrong kind of speculation and unnecessary detail. (Blotner notes not once but twice that Faulkner had "shapely" feet.) How can even the most fact-crazed scholar need to know the names of the Little League players whom Faulkner occasionally watched in Charlottesville?

Despite Faulkner's strictures about privacy, the author's life did need telling. The greatest American writer of this century was supremely indifferent to the fanciful legends his name collected. As Critic Malcolm Cowley noted in 1947 in The Portable Faulkner, an anthology of the author's work: "Most of the biographical sketches that deal with him are full of preposterous errors." Blotner's years of research, therefore, were spent in a noble cause. How, then, did things go so wrong? The author's foreword offers a clue to his--and much of modern biography's--ruling flaw. He has written, says Blotner, a biography of the works as well as the author, "since each element of them was in some sense a product of his total life." In short, whatever adds bulk to the "total life experience" has got to be important.

No writer can be measured in such a fashion--Faulkner, as he once pointed out, least of all. "Now I realize for the first time," he wrote a friend in 1953, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don't know where it came from."

Not from formal education, which he abandoned in high school. The learning that mattered to him began almost at birth. His childhood in turn-of-the-century Oxford, Miss., was spent listening to Civil War tales told by old men who had been at Shiloh and Appomattox. He absorbed family pride indirectly from his illustrious great-grandfather Colonel William C. Falkner (as the name was then spelled), hero, scoundrel, founder of a railroad and writer who became the doomed, quixotic colonel of Sartoris in 1929. Blotner devotes 50 pages to the recitation of every known fact about the old colonel, forgetting that what history remembers and what Faulkner knew are different matters. Faulkner's South was a brooding presence, its fading grandeur stained by the sin of slavery, its future mortgaged to developers and parvenus.

Thank God. Oxford gave Faulkner a home, a past and Yoknapatawpha County, a patch of "rich, deep, black alluvial soil," where his imagination took root. Mississippi nurtured his gift by constricting his life. But Blotner's plodding chronology obscures the fact that Faulkner changed very little from the aloof young man released after R.A.F. training in 1918, whose apparent idleness ("Count No Count") scandalized the town. With demonic singlemindedness, Faulkner set out to do what he wanted--write. If distracting jobs were forced on him, he saw to it that they were short-lived. When he was fired from his job as postmaster at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner snapped: "Thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who's got two cents to buy a stamp." His later, desperate visits to Hollywood were made simply to earn enough money to live and work back home. They delayed but did not affect his writing at all.

Driven men are rarely considerate of others. With evident unhappiness, Blotner notes Faulkner's truly monumental drinking bouts, which friends and relatives learned to predict. Whenever he began reciting Shakespeare's poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle," a siege of gin and bourbon was imminent. The author's domestic life was a Faulknerian blend of the Gothic and the genteel. In 1918, his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham wed someone else. Faulkner waited. After ten years her marriage broke up, and Faulkner proposed. Their lifelong union was outwardly placid, Faulkner the proper country squire, Estelle his lady. But their mutual drinking produced nightmarish battles as dramatic though less destructive than those between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Unlike Fitzgerald, Faulkner never replayed these struggles in his writing. In fact, precious few of the thousands of personal details Blotner offers shed any new light on Faulkner's novels. That is not the point Blotner wants to make, but it is an extraordinary discovery. And it is most tantalizingly true of the years between 1928 and 1936. But those years mark a time of creative intensity unparalleled in American letters, when Faulkner turned out Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!

If Blotner thinks that any of these novels is better than another, he does not let on. (His approach is to trace the stages of writing and then, after publication, quote some reviews.)

Given enough patience and endurance, readers can piece together several contradictory Faulkners strewn through Blotner's chronicle. There was the country humorist whose quips kept strangers at bay. (After listening to Thornton Wilder eagerly discuss the meaning of the title Light in August, Faulkner replied: "You know I never thought of that. It just sounded pretty.") The loving father vies with the tyrant who once told his daughter Jill: "Nobody remembers Shakespeare's children." Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech rang with hope: "I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail." Yet at practically the same time, he was telling Estelle: "The human race stinks."

This mini-five-foot shelf will not be the last word on Faulkner. The valuable tools of scholarship have not cleared a path toward the subject; they have built a fortress around it. What the hook's appearance signifies, however, is that the people whom Faulkner referred to as "academic gumshoes" have asserted their clammy hold upon him. In graduate classrooms across the country, students now will be required to read the book. Sad news, that, not only for Faulkner and his readers but for such writers as Pound, Eliot and Wallace Stevens, whose "definitive" biographies have yet to fall upon US.

Paul Gray

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