William Faulkner: Modernism Unvanquished
What does it mean to be a Faulknerian biographer? In his new book "William Faulkner" (Overlook, 104 pages, $19.95), M. Thomas Inge supplies the answer right off:
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.
To be a Faulknerian biographer, one has to be bold, to realize that source studies (what Faulkner absorbed from other writers), social and cultural context, psychological analysis — indeed all the staples of modern literary criticism and biography — do not avail when it comes to portraying the greatest writer in the English language save Shakespeare.
Mr. Inge, a Southerner steeped in Southern literature and history, and eyewitness to a Faulkner lecture at the University of Virginia (the biographer includes a charming sketch he made of his subject), understands that it is best just to stand back, so to speak, and simply describe the career of a writer who admitted that his genius was a gift he could not explain.
The lesser Faulkner — the one who wanted to be a poet — failed precisely because he was derivative and wanted to show that he could write like A.E. Housman, T. S. Eliot, Keats, and the other greats he worshipped. Only when Faulkner decided to put away his books did he rise to the magnificence of "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," "Light in August," "Absalom, Absalom!," "The Wild Palms," "The Hamlet," and "Go Down, Moses" — works that defy categorization, products of savage humor and searing tragedy, embodying an epistemology that has enticed generations of scholars and general readers.
Faulkner has often been described as a "difficult" author. His answer to that charge was to suggest reading his work again. There is no better advice to be had. What certain reviewers decried as chaotic was in fact writing of exquisite order and perception. Faulkner is fathomable, but you need to take the time to take him at his word. I was heartened recently to find on amazon.com a lively volume of chatter about "Absalom, Absalom!" — not among academics but among readers who had found their way to greatness and wanted to share their knowledge of it with others.
Faulkner appeals to us on a gut level. We want to know who his characters are, why they are telling their stories, why others contradict their stories, why, in the case of "Absalom, Absalom!," all of them are fixated on Thomas Sutpen, who came to Jefferson, Miss., where he built himself a mansion and started a dynasty and then somehow destroyed it all. Albert Camus was right when he said Faulkner had brought Greek tragedy into detective fiction.
Although I was introduced to Faulkner back in my undergraduate days by Mr. Inge and went on to publish my own book on Faulkner, I still had much to learn from this deft, cogent book, which is certainly the definitive introduction to Faulkner. Mr. Inge dispels a few myths and misperceptions.
Myth No.1: Faulkner was a neglected writer whose reputation need rehabilitating by the critic Malcolm Cowley, whose publication of "The Portable Faulkner" in 1946 set off a re-evaluation of the novelist that led to a Nobel Prize in 1950. Not so. Until reading this biography, I did not fully appreciate the cumulative impact Faulkner made on readers in the 1930s and 1940s, even as Hemingway and Fitzgerald outshone him in the public eye. Faulkner's original and "difficult" novels received discerning reviews. Certainly Cowley's "Portable" was propitious, but it was not decisive.
Myth No.2: Faulkner was an acquired taste among the literati, and sales of his work did not pick up until after the Nobel Prize. In fact, "Sanctuary," "Pylon," and "The Wild Palms"were best sellers. It is true that Faulkner went through a dry period in the mid-1940s when most of his books were out of print, but by 1948 his novel "Intruder in the Dust" was another best seller.
That Faulkner had his detractors is hardly worth mentioning, although Mr. Inge scrupulously gives them their due. An unconventional man, Faulkner was bound to irritate some reviewers because of his relentless quest to shatter the norms of storytelling. Who would dare to begin a novel from the point of view of an idiot? And yet having Benjy Compson do so in "The Sound and The Fury" produced some of the greatest imagist prose of this century. Who would create a novel by alternating chapters with a passionate love story, rather like "A Farewell to Arms" with those devoted to the tall tale of a convict caught in a Mississippi flood? And yet the emotional entanglements evoked in these juxtaposed narratives suddenly collide in the convict's terse concluding word, "Women!" — which makes "The Wild Palms" such a powerful tragicomedy.
Mr. Inge's book is a wonderful addition to the Overlook Press series of illustrated biographies. His selection of photographs is astute: He puts together sequences of images that suggest the rhythms of Faulkner's life
This biography is a miracle of compression, made possible only because its author has distilled a lifetime of devotion to his subject into this small gem of a book.
