Word: faulkner
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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...
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...
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...
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...