A frontiersman.

One Matchless Time

A Life of William Faulkner Jay Parini

HarperCollins, $29.95, 462 pp.

William Faulkner is now an institution, first biographed thirty years ago by Joseph Blotner in two massive volumes. Since then a comparably long and wastefully repetitive 1989 book by Frederick Karl (1,131 pp.) attempted with dubious results to take the measure of Faulkner psychologically. Meanwhile the Library of America has brought out four volumes of carefully edited texts of Faulkner's novels; and many collections of letters, interviews, and conversations have given us perhaps more than we want to hear from the sage of Oxford, Mississippi. Jay Parini's relatively brief critical biography is not the first in that line, having been preceded by David Minter's workmanlike study of twenty-five years ago. But Parini's candid, personal, and extremely readable book is the place to send readers looking for an overview of an extraordinary sixty-four-year literary career. His book is old fashioned in that it is addressed to the "general reader" we like to hope still exists: in an age of academic commentary devoted to making writers even more difficult than they already seem, Parini proposes to examine Faulkner's work "in a straightforward way."

Of course Faulkner's life, like all lives, was anything but straightforward. Parini emphasizes how obsessed Faulkner was with patrimony, to the extent that he

  spent a lifetime meditating on his origins, dwelling on his
  great-grandfather and grandfather, as well as his father. They were
  alive in his skin, inhabiting his dreams, permeating his fiction.
  Relations between fathers and sons lie at the core of his work from
  first to last.

This is a good an "explanation" as can be found for Faulkner's tortured, unflagging concern--to use a mild word for it--with paternal relationships, especially in the major novels from the 1930s, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!

An arresting if drastically simplified way of explaining the obsession with fathers would be to note that few male sufferers from the disease could claim that, like Faulkner, their great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had all been shot--with mortal consequences to great-grandfather (known as The Old Colonel) and near-mortal ones to Faulkner's father, Murry. Faulkner managed to avoid being shot and instead embodied frontier heroism or foolhardiness in the tall tales of his fiction. Another "frontier" virtue or vice, heavy alcohol consumption, he laid claim to early on and never relinquished. "A normal instinct, not a hobby," he called it late in life, and in following such an instinct he more than lived up to his paternal ancestors.

D. H. Lawrence once remarked about William Butler Yeats's poetry, "He seems awfully queer stuff to me now--as if he wouldn't bear touching." Something akin to that feeling came over me as I followed Faulkner's experiences, as non-judgmentally reported by his biographer. To begin with, there is his rather quixotic enlistment in the Canadian air force during World War I. Although the war ended before he got beyond preliminary training, he subsequently made up many stories about his aeronautic feats. Back home in Oxford, he enrolled in the university but soon dropped out ("He wasn't much of a student," notes Robert Penn Warren). He then worked at the university post office where, in Parini's words, he was "more nuisance than help"; indeed his brother Jack said it was amazing that under his aegis any mail actually got delivered. Students would complain and throw pebbles and debris at his office while Faulkner sat inside, reading various magazines those students subscribed to, and working on the arty poems that would constitute his first published book, The Marble Faun (1924). He was eventually fired for, in a colorfully appropriate phrase, "mistreatment of mail."

Faulkner's sojourns in New York City and New Orleans, his cultivation of literary figures like Stark Young and Sherwood Anderson, and his close dependence on his mother Maud (who sent him, when he lived in New Orleans--at age twenty-seven, Parini reminds us--such items as soap, toothpaste, cookies, and cake) provoke, at best, amusement as we wait for genius to break out. And so it does: after the "promising" first two novels, Soldier's Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), there comes, with The Sound and the Fury, accession into the grand style and the grand subject--the South. Publication of that novel in 1929 heralded the beginning of thirteen remarkable years during which Faulkner wrote the work for which he will be remembered and reread: As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942). In addition to these there is the fine collection of related stories (The Unvanquished, 1938), which Cleanth Brooks rightly called, in an interview with Parini, the best place to begin reading Faulkner. Two further novels from the period, Sanctuary (1931) and Pylon (1935), are something other than major: the former won him some notoriety; the latter not even Parini, trying to be sympathetic, can make much of a case for.

As a Faulkner nonspecialist, though I have read all the novels except his final one The Reivers (1962) and the early Mosquitoes, I am indebted to Parini for directing me to the essay Conrad Aiken published on Faulkner in the Atlantic Monthly (November, 1939). In this pioneering essay, Aiken noted that the first fifty pages of each new novel were always the hardest, "that each time one must learn all over again how to read this strangely fluid and slippery and heavily mannered prose." Aiken was aware of Wyndham Lewis's clever and disparaging chapter (in his Men Without Art) on how bad Faulkner's style was; but instead of dismissing it as merely bad, Aiken described how its sentences showed an "elaborate method of deliberately withheld meaning," "a persistent offering of obstacles, a calculated system of screens and obtrusions, of confusions and ambiguous interpolations and delays," the single purpose of which was to keep things "fluid and unfinished, still in motion, as it were, and unknown, until the dropping into place of the very last syllable." This brilliant criticism has never been improved upon in the countless accounts of Faulkner's style that followed in the next six and a half decades. Either, as Aiken says, the reader must make up his mind "to go to work, and in a sense to cooperate," or he must throw the book aside and find another author.

Faulkner himself was aware of the difficulty his writing presented, and he once wrote Malcolm Cowley that it stemmed from "trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way." Since Parini devotes at least a few pages of level-headed commentary to each of Faulkner's books, any reader will find oneself in occasional disagreement. This one is unconvinced that Light in August is "an undeniable masterpiece" (it was the novel Lewis picked on especially for the pretentious concoctings of its sentences). And although Jean-Paul Sartre considered Sanctuary a masterpiece and (Parini adds) "modern critics generally agree," I don't, and would like to hear from the biographer-critic whether it seems so to him. My own list of Faulkner at his best includes the books where he is most a writer of comedy, almost always of the grotesque sort. So I would single out As I Lay Dying, the section in Miss Reba's brothel from Sanctuary, the "Old Man" chapters about the tall convict and the flood (in The Wild Palms), and various episodes involving the Snopes family from The Hamlet. It's even possible to argue that the Jason section from The Sound and the Fury is the one that's held up best over time, mainly because of its nasty wit.

The last twenty years of Faulkner's life, in which he won the Nobel Prize but wrote no further really memorable fiction, make rather tough going for the biographer, and many sentences inform us that he was drinking heavily or detail another trip to the hospital for drying-out. Parini has talked to Joan Williams and Jean Stein, two of Faulkner's young loves, and also to his daughter Jill, and their presence helps animate the pages about his later life. At one moment Parini records a French writer with whom Faulkner traveled, Monique Salomon, as remembering that one day he consumed twenty-three martinis, "although this must be an exaggeration," writes Parini straightforwardly. But everything Faulkner did throughout his life and writing was exaggeration. You could make a similar claim, minus the martinis, about, say, Milton, or Coleridge, or W. B. Yeats--such are the ways of genius.

William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College. He is the author of Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews (University of Massachusetts Press) among other works.