One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner
By Jay Parini
HarperCollins,492 pages, $29.95
In the beginning there was Carvel Collins, known as “the Faulkner man” because he had earned the writer’s trust early on and used his access to compile an enviable trove of papers for the Big Book to come. Unfortunately, Collins, buried under the pile, proved incapable of wrestling his mass of material into the major opus he intended. Instead, the foundational work turned out to be Joseph Blotner’s “Faulkner: A Biography,” a 2,000-page masterwork representing some 15 years of sleuth work, study and analysis. Despite Collins’ displeasure (his codicil permitted access to his papers for all interested scholars except Blotner), the Blotner biography has stood since 1974 like a Mt. Everest among the foothills of subsequent scholarship.
For subsequent biographers, books could still be written about peripheral matters. Joel Williamson, for example, exhumed evidence of scandal among Faulkner’s grandparents–thievery, abandonment of family, possible miscegenation–in “William Faulkner and Southern History.” And Lawrence Schwartz, in “Creating Faulkner’s Reputation,” argued that the writer’s postwar rise to eminence was engineered by Southern and New York intellectuals (Allen Tate, Irving Howe) intent on propagating conservative Cold War values. (Schwartz never explained how the radically anti-war “A Fable,” in 1954, abetted Cold War values.) But mostly, what remained by way of biography was reminiscences of friends, relatives and associates who knew the writer in varying degrees of intimacy.
Unlike these ancillary studies, Jay Parini’s “One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner” undertakes a full-scale, comprehensive account of the writer’s life and work in less than one-quarter the number of Blotner’s pages. His approach, after acknowledging that “my debt to [Blotner’s] book is profound,” is to intertwine Faulkner’s life story with brief analyses of Faulkner’s writings as they chronologically emerged during that life story. A novelist, poet and biographer (his life of Robert Frost won a 1999 Heartland Prize), Parini brings to the daunting shelf of Faulkner scholarship some 30 years of thought, study and research–initially prompted by his sometime Vermont neighbor, Robert Penn Warren–and a novelist’s sense of pace, structure and character. As applied to an actual life, however, Parini’s fictive imagination is a mixed bag, sometimes yielding astute insights, at other times a dubious stretching of the evidence.
Both kinds of commentary are evident in the first hundred pages, where Parini traces the family history from its founding father, the legendary “Old Colonel” William Falkner–Confederate hero, lawyer, wealthy business entrepreneur, politician and successful author–to the early stages of Faulkner’s career in the mid-1920s. Admirably succinct but thorough, Parini traces the strong-father-weak-son profile through three generations: from the Old Colonel to his alcoholic son, ironically dubbed “Young Colonel”; from the latter in turn to his feckless, ne’er-do-well son Murry (Faulkner’s father); and from him to his bookish, undersize, seemingly effete oldest son, the future author, dubbed “Count No ‘[Ac]Count” by town wits. As a would-be war hero whose nearest approach to the front lines was Toronto (for flight training), William Faulkner suffered the shame of seeing his younger brother Jack return from the Argonne Forest with serious wounds in his knee and skull. The best William could do was buy an officer’s uniform, scour up a cane and affect a war-related limp (when he remembered) upon his return from Toronto.
Unfortunately, the ubiquitous reach of critical theory, abetted by Freudian excess, sometimes weakens Parini’s argument, nowhere more so than in matters related to sex. Critical theory, the dominant mode of literary criticism during the past quarter-century, reads literature through the lens of ideology: Marxism, feminism, black studies, queer studies and the like. Though the ideologies are harmless in themselves, they become problematic when allied with imperialist ambition–a drive to colonize every territory in sight. In this book, what theorists would call the “queering” of William Faulkner begins with speculation about “homosexual feelings” in his middle teens (an older friend of his was gay); it continues with the claim that “Faulkner was writing about himself” while describing “phallic obsessions, homoerotic passion, incest, and the like” in his early, unpublished manuscript “Elmer”; and it reaches its apex in the argument of Richard Godden and Noel Polk that Ike McCaslin in “The Bear” believes his father ” ‘a homosexual miscegenator’ ” who may also be the lover of his twin brother. One need not be a homophobe to judge such arguments too implausible to deserve repetition in this biography.
Nor does Faulkner make out that well in heterosexual theory, so to speak. From that same early work, “Elmer,” Parini deduces that “Faulkner seems incapable of processing sexuality, which he sees as ‘sinister, dirty.’ ” Whoa, now! Some of Faulkner’s characters see sexuality that way–Doc Hines ranting about “womanfilth” in “Light in August,” or Quentin Compson, Joe Christmas and Labove showing Puritan revulsion in their three novels–but by no means are these their creator’s attitudes. From his earliest sketches, Faulkner yearned after the old Greek ethos, the age of nymphs and fauns, precisely because of its healthy acceptance of sexuality. The very title of “Light in August” ascribes to the skies of Greek antiquity a better light than that of Puritan Mississippi, where a young woman suffers stigmatization for being pregnant out of wedlock.
Though exasperating, these threads of theory are in the end a minor distraction from Parini’s main text. In the main, his deft handling of biographical fact forms a riveting narrative of the artist’s incessant struggle with family responsibility, worry about money, artistic frustration (including bad reviews) and the demon alcohol. For context, Parini derives new information from a wide assortment of interviews with Faulkner’s family and friends (his daughter Jill, his lover Joan Williams), with his Hollywood associates (Elia Kazan, Gore Vidal, Anthony Quinn), and with a variety of literary acquaintances (Robert Penn Warren, Graham Greene, George Plimpton, Alastair Reed, Albert Moravia, Mario Vargas Llosa). Though at times a little too deferential to previous scholarship, not all of which is worthwhile, Parini gets great mileage from his perusal of letters and other documents stashed at Yale University, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia and the New York Public Library.
Working largely from these sources, Parini brings to life the passion and pathos of Faulkner’s love affairs–with Meta Carpenter, with Joan Williams, with Else Jonsson (a Swede associated with the Nobel Award), with Jean Stein. With deepening poignancy, these relationships move inevitably from sweetness toward heartbreak as one sweetheart after another breaks off the affair to marry someone else. The experience seems to verify John Updike’s thesis (with some debt to Freud) about the incompatibility of the sexes: for the male, marriage and passion are incompatible (which is why Faulkner never divorced Estelle to marry his paramour), whereas for the woman a romance must lead to marriage or she will consider it a failure and move on.
Parini’s title comes from Faulkner’s description of his period of greatest creativity, from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. It was one matchless time, in fact, encompassing such masterpieces as “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Sanctuary,” “Light in August,” “Absalom, Absalom!,” “The Hamlet” and “Go Down, Moses.” For each of these books and all the others, Parini provides a brief analysis and evaluation, but apart from refreshing a reader’s memory, these pages are too limited a venue for so complex an oeuvre.
The biography, however, is ample and vivid, such that the master comes alive in these pages. Some of the tidbits are exquisite, including his encounters with E.E. Cummings, Albert Einstein (” ‘one of the wisest of men and one of the gentlest of men,’ ” Faulkner declared) and Dylan Thomas, to whom Faulkner raised a five-minute toast in a crowded room with a voice made incomprehensible by his Mississippi accent and alcohol.
Among the strengths of Parini’s book are his accounts of Faulkner’s film work and of the surprising amount of time, expense and plain hard work the artist invested in Greenfield farm, the 300-acre spread he bought near Oxford, where he installed his brother Johncy as caretaker. Calling himself “a Mississippi farmer,” it turns out, was not a mere affectation.
“One Matchless Time” is a worthy contribution to Faulkner scholarship. To be sure, Blotner’s vast opus remains the biography to reckon with, but Jay Parini offers a fine second choice for readers not ready to assault Mt. Everest.
