Word: faulknerisms
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...