Life and Work

 The Life of William Faulkner Volume 2: The Alarming Paradox 1935-1962 by Carl Rollyson.  University of Virginia Press.  622 pp.  $34.95

I can’t possibly say how much, through the years, I have liked and admired the work of William Faulkner.  After Hemingway, he was the first author I read in earnest, going back to when I was 17 or 18.  Even in those early days, I was fascinated by biographical details, though there was no official biography.  I haunted the stacks of the Duke East Campus library, finding old editions of Faulkner’s work along with a slender volume, The Private World of William Faulkner, which was originally a Life magazine profile.  Faulkner himself famously hated any intrusions into his private life.

I assumed there must be some connection between the life he led and the books he produced.  I wanted to be a writer myself, and had the obvious question, for any successful writer: How did you get where you are?  How did you attain your eminence?  In the case of Faulkner, that is almost an unanswerable question.  His greatest works, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, came early in his career, when he was hardly formed as a human being.  Absalom! Absalom!, a truly strange great work, came later, and he produced Go Down, Moses in his full maturity.  Those for me are the greatest books in a long and brilliant career.

But the life is something else.  Details that thrilled and fascinated me when I was young don’t have that effect anymore, when I have lived a decade longer than he did.  I see his choices from the perspective of my advanced age, and they no longer seem exciting.  I shake my head at them, if the truth be told.

His marriage is the first one, which came right around the time he was writing those great early works.  I was fascinated, when I was young, that he married his childhood sweetheart, but only after she had married another man and lived elsewhere for a number of years, because her parents didn’t want her marrying this young man who didn’t have a future (any parents would have felt the same way).  I thought it was great that, once he had written a great novel—The Sound and the Fury—he finally married her.

But what earlier biographies didn’t reveal (Joseph Blotner worked with Estelle Faulkner and became her friend) was that the marriage was unhappy almost from the start.  Apparently Estelle had become an alcoholic during her first marriage (she said somewhere that she was drunk the whole time she was gone), and also used cocaine, so it seemed he was rescuing her from a bad situation rather than marrying the woman of his dreams.  He did eventually have one child with her, but for most of his life was more interested in affairs with other women, including Meta Carpenter, Joan Williams, Jean Stein.  He also spent a huge amount of time away from his wife and family, sometimes because he was out in Hollywood making money, but often because he wanted to be away.  It was gallant to rescue his childhood sweetheart, but it was also the mistake of a young and naïve man.  Who was he to rescue someone?

That relates to a second fact about Faulkner.  He was devoted to his writing, as devoted as any artist ever, and often wrote in trying circumstances (he famously wrote As I Lay Dying during work breaks from shoveling coal at a power plant, and he wrote long stretches of Absalom! Absalom! in snatches of time from his work on Hollywood scripts, to name just two of the great novels).  But he made things difficult for himself by wanting to be a major landowner (which he was, though the place he bought, which he called Rowan Oak, was always rather rundown), and to own an airplane, and a boat, and more and more land.  The Alarming Paradox of the title, which comes from a letter that Faulkner wrote to an editor, is as follows:

“Every so often, in spite of judgment and all else, I take these fits of sort of raging and impotent exasperation at this really alarming paradox which my life reveals: Beginning at the age of thirty, I, an artist, a sincere one and of the first class, who should be free of even his own economic responsibilities and with no moral conscience at all, began to become the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows—of my mother . . . a brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two step children, my own child; I inherited my father’s debts and his dependents, white and black without inheriting yet from anyone one inch of land or one stick of furniture or one stick of money. . . . I bought without help from anyone the house I live in and all the furniture; I bought my farm the same way.  I am 42 years old and I have already paid for four funerals and will certainly pay for one more and in all likelihood two more beside that, provided none of the people in mine or my wife’s family my superior in age outlive me, before I ever come to my own.”

But Faulkner helped create that situation.  He had family obligations, but he created a lot of his financial problems by the way he stubbornly chose to live his life, to outdo his famous grandfather (the Colonel) and his ineffectual father.  Those things weren’t important to his career.

The final obstacle was his drinking, the great koan of Faulkner’s life.  Estelle Faulkner was apparently the kind of alcoholic who immediately registered alcohol, and was pretty much helpless from the first drink she took, while Faulkner could drink socially and get along fine, continue to work.  But from time to time—especially when he finished a major work—he would go on the kind of bender that is incomprehensible to me, as if he were trying to obliterate himself, and in this biography we see the difficulties he created for those who cared for him, who were dealing with a man who was often unclothed, totally incontinent, shit stains on his clothing and bedding, while he still begged for liquor.  Such moments continued after he had won the Nobel Prize.  Other biographies glossed over these moments, but Rollyson—rightly, I would say—writes about them in detail.  They’re a sordid side to the life of a great artist.

I came to feel that, after a certain point, Faulkner was writing in spite of his great travails, not because of them.  He needed to quit creating them.  He spent years in Hollywood doing screen work he was only moderately good at.  He spent years of his life on a major project—A Fable—that he probably shouldn’t have done at all.  He wrote the second and third volumes of the Snopes trilogy long after he had conceived of it, at a time when he material was no longer really alive for him.  Only at the end of his life did he get back to work that came out of his true creative place, The Reivers, which—though not a major work—shows us what he was still capable of, if he hadn’t spent so much time on other things.

I would say that the one truly great work from the second half of his life, and the one that dealt with race in the most complex way, was Go Down, Moses.  That is the late work I would read again.  He was only 45 when he published it.  But his best work was behind him.

I’m still a huge admirer of Faulkner’s work.  He remains one of the most important writers for me.  But I’ve read enough about his life.  Future biographers will have to do without me.