Word: blotner
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...