The Life of William Faulkner Read online

  The Life of William Faulkner

  The Life of

  William Faulkner

  THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD, 1897–1934

  Volume 1

  Carl Rollyson

  University of Virginia Press

  Charlottesville & London

  University of Virginia Press

  © 2020 by Carl Rollyson

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  First published 2020

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund), author.

  Title: The life of William Faulkner / Carl Rollyson.

  Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: Volume 1. The past is never dead, 1897–1934.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019032254 (print) | LCCN 2019032255 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813943824 (hardback ; volume 1) | ISBN 9780813943831 (epub ; volume 1)

  Subjects: LCSH: Faulkner, William, 1897–1962. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Novelists, American—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS3511.A86 Z9619 2020 (print) | LCC PS3511.A86 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032254

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032255

  Cover art: Faulkner in 1931. (William Faulkner Related Material from the Library of William Boozer, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

  I would have preferred nothing at all prior to the instant I began to write, as though Faulkner and Typewriter were concomitant, coadjutant and without past on the moment they first faced each other at the suitable (nameless) table.

  —William Faulkner to Malcolm Cowley, February 18, 1946

  Faulkner wrote as if there were no literature written in English before him, no century and more of convention and literary tradition established before he put pen to paper. He recreated fiction anew and set the novel free to better serve the twentieth century through a powerful, discordant, and irresistible torrent of language that crashed through time, space, and experience to tell the story of modern mankind in ways both tragic and comic. Faulkner would have written the way he did whether or not James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and the others had ever existed.

  —M. Thomas Inge, William Faulkner (Overlook Illustrated Lives)

  Contents

  Preface

  1. Beginnings: 1825–1910

  The Big Dog ∙ Portrait of the Artist ∙ Two Mothers ∙ The Code of the Gentleman ∙ Father and Mother ∙ Oxford ∙ Love at First Sight ∙ Lynching ∙ Estelle

  2. Apprenticeships: 1911–1921

  The Tramp ∙ The Poet’s Impresarios ∙ Love and War ∙ Northern Exposure ∙ Cadet Faulkner ∙ The Count ∙ The Catcher in the Rye

  3. Postings: 1922–1924

  Postmaster and Bohemian Poet ∙ Fame and Fortune

  4. New Orleans: Fall 1924–June 1925

  North Meets South ∙ New Orleans and the Marble Faulkner ∙ William Spratling and Other Famous Creoles ∙ Helen

  5. Wanderjahr: July–December 1925

  The Gay Life ∙ Elmer and Other Erections

  6. Return: 1925–1927

  Fascism and Everything ∙ Natural Man, the Gentleman, and War ∙ The Decadent Hero ∙ Faulkner and Anderson Finis ∙ Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles ∙ A Labor of Love ∙ Estelle and Other Entertainments ∙ The Dark Twin of a Man

  7. Coming Home: 1927–1929

  Improving on God ∙ A Crossing ∙ A Breakthrough ∙ Risorgimento in Yoknapatawpha ∙ Hark: A Coming Man

  8. Married: June 1929

  The Prince and the Pauper ∙ Mr. Bill, Billy, and Pappy ∙ The Strangest of Honeymoons ∙ Family Man

  9. All in the Family: The Sound and the Fury, October 1929

  Southern Decadence ∙ Benjy ∙ Quentin ∙ Jason ∙ Dilsey ∙ Estelle ∙ Maud ∙ The Lost Cause ∙ Alone

  10. Desire and Death: As I Lay Dying, 1929–1930

  Family Disasters ∙ The Technics of Art and History ∙ Byronic with a Touch of Mark Twain

  11. Old Days and New Ways: 1930

  Rowan Oak ∙ The Novelist ∙ Rebuilding and Revising

  12. Sorrow and Scandal: Sanctuary, January–August 1931

  A Death in the Family ∙ Writing Like a Devil ∙ The Home Touch of Interest

  13. Fame: September–December 1931

  Doing the Work of Global History ∙ The Hound Dog under the Wagon

  14. Home and Hollywood: 1931–1932

  Homebody ∙ Scenarist

  15. The Black Shadow: Light in August, October 1932

  The Past as Prologue ∙ The “Good Nigger” ∙ Toward a New Kind of History

  16. Hollywood at Home: October 1932–August 1933

  Hollywood Field Hand ∙ “The Most Anticipated Motion Picture of the Current Season” ∙ An Amateur Who “Does Not Truly Know His Way About” ∙ “Conventional Attributes and Uncontrollable Desires” ∙ Power

  17. Seeing It Both Ways: June 1933–December 1934

  Pappy without a Pencil ∙ Dark Houses and Flying Visits ∙ Retrospectives and Prophecies ∙ On the Way to Sutpen’s Hundred ∙ “Golden Land”

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Gallery follows page 234.

  Preface

  Why read another biography of William Faulkner? New facts, new interpretations. I also wanted to write in the light and dark of previous narratives. His biographers remain silent on what they do not know and retreat to what “must have been.” Long stretches of even the longest biographies have not told me what I want to know. What did it mean to Faulkner to expend so much energy not only on his fiction but on his screenplays? What did his wife, Estelle, think, and what was she doing at crucial periods when only her husband’s testimony is available? What is a biographer to do with her erasure—sometimes self-inflicted?

  As in a Faulkner novel, it is important to preserve the mysteries and not to pretend to know what is not or cannot be known, although, like his characters, I speculate, submitting questions that perhaps others will be able to answer or clarify. Identifying gaps in the evidence can reveal as much about Faulkner as what can be sourced. Minor figures abound because they reveal sides of the quotidian man ignored in previous biographies. I am that species of biographer who believes in presenting the whole man, not just those aspects of his life that pertain to the literary figure.

  Although, like most biographers, I take a chronological approach, at times I backtrack, flash back, and flash forward because, as Faulkner said, all of time is inherent in every moment of time—the past, the present, and what is to come. To never deviate from chronology is to suppose life is a matter of just one damn thing after another. Even if that is so, books should not be so. Too many times stories are interrupted in a biography simply because of what happens next. Sometimes chronology has to be broken badly in order for the story to survive.

  Like my predecessors, I owe an enormous debt to Joseph Blotner. Some paragraphs of this biography would need a note to Blotner for nearly every sentence, and that would be tedious and counterproductive. So I have not notated facts and details derived from Blotner’s two-volume and one-volume biographies, but in many cases I have cited his papers, when I can access the raw data that he later transformed on the printed page. Blotner, for a whole range of reasons, chose not to use certain discoveries about Faulkner’s life that become an important part of my narrative. As his daughter Jill sai
d, he told “hundreds of little white lies” that “lovingly protected” the family.1

  They needed protection, she made clear, from another biographer: Carvel Collins, whose immense collection at the University of Texas is a treasure of primary sources, including interviews with people who had passed away by the time Blotner began his work. Judging by the notes in previous biographies, I am the first biographer to look at every one of the 105 boxes in the Collins collection. His interviews often corroborate Blotner but also add a good deal of texture to this biography. Collins began in the late 1940s to collect everything. By the summer of 1967, he had made more than thirty visits to Oxford,2 and he continued to work on his biography until his death in 1990, never even beginning to write a narrative, so far as I know, but interviewing Faulkner, his mother, his brother John, and many other family members and virtually anyone who could contribute the minute particulars that Boswell and Johnson extolled in their conception of biography. Collins spoke with anyone who had contact with his subject. He remained an independent, and that was held against him. “Neither Bill Faulkner nor his family ever authorized Prof. Collins to do a biography,” Blotner explained to Morton Goldman, Faulkner’s former agent. “As a matter of fact, Bill expressed to me in conversation his anger over what he considered Prof. Collins’ intrusions into his private life.”3 Blotner routinely offered to remove material that offended his sources.

  As for the other biographers, they all have their uses. Anyone wishing to understand Faulkner’s southern background and family history had better read Joel Williamson. For acute psychological analysis, Fred Karl is the go-to biographer. Judith Sensibar restores Estelle Faulkner to an importance that other biographers have occluded. The reasons for her eclipse have their origins in Joseph Blotner’s reluctance to press her on several important issues. “It is true that I felt the need for tact, not only because she had been a faithful friend, and I think, generally a good informant, but for Jill’s sake too,” Blotner wrote to fellow scholar Floyd Watkins. “In a way, for his [Faulkner’s] sake—you can imagine my feelings of general ambivalence writing an intimate account of the life of my friend who in life had trusted me and whose trust I had tried to deserve.”4 No subsequent biographer had Blotner’s access to Estelle, who died in 1972.

  No one writes more incisively about Faulkner than Philip Weinstein. In smaller measure, I have profited from my reading of biographies by Judith Wittenberg, David Minter, Jay Parini, David Rampton, André Bleikasten, and Kirk Curnutt. I have also drawn on the short biographies of Faulkner by M. Thomas Inge, Carolyn Porter, and Robert W. Hamblin. Of necessity, what I write overlaps with previous books, but no one except a lazy reviewer could not see how my arrangement of events and discussion of Faulkner’s work differs from previous narratives. To do complete justice to this biography, you would need to place it page by page against the others, and who has time for that?

  In spite of all this previous biographical work, no biographer has integrated Faulkner’s screenplays, fiction, and life into one narrative.5 To do so has resulted in a biography much longer than I originally projected. In the last two decades Faulkner scholars have shown how Faulkner’s work in Hollywood contributed to the creation of his novels, but only recently have they looked at his screenplays in their own right. As Ben Robbins notes: “Most studies of Faulkner and film do not immediately take into account the idea that a craft as plastic as Faulkner’s could in fact be advanced through the exertion of new conventional conditions within Hollywood, overtly commercial or otherwise. . . . Faulkner both reshaped and was shaped by the alien territories of commercial film.”6 How the plasticity of all his work relates to the whole man has been one of my chief concerns. Certain screenplays like “The De Gaulle Story” and “Battle Cry” changed the nature of Faulkner’s writing, as Robbins argues as well for To Have and Have Not and Mildred Pierce: “Though his screenplays may not be as formally ground-breaking as his prose, the presentation of new social realities within his work for film is in fact at times more progressive than equivalent presentations in his novels.”7

  All Faulkner biographers have to confront his drinking. Why did he do it? He advanced some answers, and friends, biographers, readers, and scholars have advanced others. I report on what they said and what Faulkner did, but I do not attempt to offer a diagnosis. I don’t see how it could be done while he was alive or now that he is no longer with us. He seemed singularly uninterested in why he drank and showed scarcely any interest in stopping. In the end, I have to side with King Lear: “reason not the need.”

  I abjure one primary function of the literary critic. I refrain, in most cases, from dwelling on the flaws in Faulkner’s work, except insofar as contemporary reviews rendered such judgments, thus providing a view of his evolving reputation. Faulkner biographers and critics have assessed his strengths and weaknesses, but my main concern is to understand how his work functions and to explain how his life and work can be coordinated in narrative terms. I don’t believe, at this advanced stage in the work on William Faulkner’s life and career, that readers need my opinion, except to state the obvious: I believe he is a great writer, and all of his work fascinates me and has done so for more than fifty years. Similarly, with the exception of Absalom, Absalom!, which seems caught up in the very process of revision, I have not tried to trace in detail Faulkner’s process of composition, even though Michael Millgate and other scholars have shown how studying various drafts of his work enriches our understanding of his genius. To replicate their work, or even to add to it, would make this long biography even longer and truly test the patience of even the most dedicated Faulkner reader. Nevertheless, I have included crucial details about Faulkner’s working methods and drafts, relying, in the main, on the Digital Yoknapatawpha site: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/.

  That Faulkner was a paradox, and one that should not be too easily explained, is the point of this biography. Or to put it another way: What you think you know about William Faulkner may be true, and everything you think you know about him has to change.

  I began my work on Faulkner as an undergraduate, inspired by M. Thomas Inge at Michigan State University, and then continued on with Michael Millgate at the University of Toronto, producing a dissertation and my first book, Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner. The debt owed to these fine scholars is immeasurable. I owe many other debts to Faulkner critics, which I have acknowledged in my narrative and notes.

  Right from the beginning, when I had only a book proposal and a sample chapter to show, I had the invaluable support of Linda Wagner-Martin, who wrote in support of my work and has been a continuing inspiration. In the summer of 2014, during a stay in Oxford, I had the pleasure of lunching with Jay Watson, the Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi, who patiently listened to my plans for a new Faulkner biography and provided much-needed encouragement and the invitation to give a keynote talk at the summer 2015 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. On that same trip, I met and interviewed Larry Wells, the husband of Dean Faulkner Wells, and a fount of information and contacts that I sorely needed. Larry generously put me in touch with William Lewis Jr., the current owner of Neilson’s Department Store, where Faulkner was a customer. Mr. Lewis knew Faulkner and was most welcoming and informative during our interview. Just as important was Tommy Freeland, another Larry Wells contact and the son of Phil Stone’s law partner. Mr. Freeland gave me a tour of the Stone law office and told me a good deal about his father’s dealings with William Faulkner. Through Larry I was also able to contact Sandra Baker Moore for her memories of the Faulkners and of what it was like for her to live next door to Rowan Oak in the 1940s, when her mother, Kate Baker, owned a dress shop in Oxford. I have been extremely fortunate to find those still living with memories of Faulkner, including Salley Knight, whose recollection of Faulkner in Virginia came to me via my contact with Scott Beauchamp.

  Thanks to Jay Watson’s invitation to Gloria Burgess, who spoke at the 2016 Faulkner
and Yoknapatawpha Conference, I was able to interview her and continue a correspondence that has yielded a significant insight into Faulkner’s efforts to help people of color.

  Steve Railton, who has done so much to further Faulkner studies with Digital Yoknapatawpha, helped me out at a crucial moment when a website went down and has been a strong supporter of my biography. I relied on the estimable Molly Schwartzberg, Curator of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the University of Virginia, not only for much help with the vast Faulkner archive but also with connecting me to members of the university and Charlottesville community who had memories of William Faulkner. Ellie Sohm shared with me her University of Virginia undergraduate paper about Faulkner’s relationship with his daughter Jill at a crucial time in the development of my biography. Sara Barnes was a wonderful tour guide and all-around facilitator during my visit to the university to deliver the first William and Rosemary MacIlwaine Lecture in American Literature. That lecture, I’m happy to say, prompted an email to Richard Garcia from Donald Nuechterlein about his experience with William Faulkner in Iceland that was forwarded to me. After my lecture, “Faulkner’s Virginia Persona,” I had the pleasure of speaking with George Thomas about those Faulkner days on the University of Virginia grounds. Others in the audience for my lecture came forward with their own William Faulkner stories. I am grateful to all of them.

  Robert Hamblin, former Director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, has been an invaluable source of information as he guided me through their indispensable Faulkner collection. Christopher Rieger, the current Director, has been equally helpful and generous. He made available to me a grant that allowed extended stays at the Center for Faulkner Studies so that I could complete my research in a timely fashion. On the premises, I had the excellent help of Roxanne Dunne, and of the indispensable Tyson Koenig, who sorted out many of the photographs reproduced in this biography.