Word: faulkner
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...megabiography of Henry James, Leon Edel avoided pedantry and trivia while still painting a detailed picture. Realizing the significance of this achievement, Edel explained his principles in a book called Literary Biography. His conclusions now stand as an apt indictment of Joseph Blotner's eight-and-a-half pound Faulkner: "the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation." Blotner fails this test; he does not disengage the essence of Faulkner's life...
THIS BIOGRAPHY is overwhelming in both the good and the bad sense. Over a decade of brilliant (obsessive?) research has produced the facts that Faulkner fetishists crave--and who has read Faulkner and is not in a small way a fetishist for facts about this mysterious man? Although I do not consider my own hero-worship of dead authors excessive, I did find it interesting that Faulkner patronized Aunt Rose Arnold's New Orleans whore-house at Chatres and Jackson Square. Similarly, Blotner's account of Faulkner's Hollywood years is as interesting as Time's "people" section...
Blotner's dedication to trivia, however, has unearthed information that sheds light on Faulkner's fiction. An early jotting regarding Absalom, Absalom! reveals that Faulkner was concerned more with the way his different narrators--especially Quentin--obtain their information about Colonel Sutpen than he was with the Sutpen story itself. The young Faulkner's correspondence with Sherwood Anderson records an amusing fantasy world of swamp animals they created...
Whatever criticism is levelled against Blotner's work, it remains at least an indispensable source of all the minute facts on Faulkner, offered as minute facts, and can be a starting point for other biographers more interested in Faulkner the writer. More than mere picayune megabiography, it is reference realism; facts are presented simply as facts, and simply because they are facts...
...Faulkner's mysterious life was more than a mere succession of facts, making him prime material for a psychological literary biography. Faulkner insisted that uncovering personal facts would merely invade his privacy and would not provide a key to his fiction. His works (with the exception of Mosquitoes) are not directly autobiographical, but rather imaginatively derived from the totality of his experience. Like James he regretted that letters lived on as a record of his private life, and tried to have them destroyed. But whereas Edel gives details on James only as they relate to the life of the mind...