Page Four HMCHGN ALYSnyMrh1,97 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Sunday, March 17, 1974 BOOKS The biography of William Faulkner: A brilliant, troubled man and his work to that work seems to have been his ballast throughout his often frustrating life. WIRE ME COLLECT WHAT POSSIBILITY OF ANY SUM WHATEVER A N D WHEN FROM ANY MSS OF MINE YOU HAVE. URGENTLY NEED ONE HUNDRED BY SATURDAY. When Faulkner writes this in 1941 (because his electricity is about to be cut off from unpaid light bills) to his agent Harold Ober, he has already written many of his greatest novels- The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, the financially successful Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, The Ham- let, and other less critically ac- claimed books. Yet his life was haunted with the specter of fi- nancial chaos. On his erratic and never large writer's income, he was supporting his own fam- ily (his wife, her two children by a previous marriage, his daugh- ter), his mother and her house, the widow and child of his youngset brother, and at various times other members of his fami- lv. Blotner gives us the evi- dence of Faulkner's letters to his publishers and agents as he prooses scheme after scheme to find monev somewhere for the nronerty tax, income tax, the local grocery's bill (which in 1933 had accumulated to 51200). Advance royalties are snent lon before novels are finished: the sales of short stories are Fanik- ner's most important items of business. If he can only sell to the Saturdav Evening Post. the highest paving of the slick ma- azines! A story placed there brought from $800 to S1,000: the other nrestige markets naid only $'00, $30, or nerhans $40. As he wrote when Americn Mercurv offered his agent 15 for a story, '"But that won't heln me enozi0h . . . I need a thousand. I will ijst have to knock ot so nething for the Post. I wish to hell T could find some man who would gamble on my fnture on a note, no contract. Damn these fool laws about usnry anvow.' Althongh he had mentioned a thousand dollars, what he really needed, be said, was ten thous- and. 'With that I could nay my debts and insurance for two years and really write. I mean, write. The man who said that the pinch of necessity, butchers and grocers bills and insurance hang- ing over his head, is good for an artist is a damned fool."' VAULKNER FIGHTS this im- possible financial battle for most of his writing career. Not until he has won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950 does he be- gin to earn enough to meet his bills and outdistance them. Tra- gic as the facts of these twen- tv years of Faulkner's life are, Blotner does not use the pathos inherent to rail against and un- appreciative America. Rather, he presents the evidence through his reconstruction of the life and the numerous letters Faulkner was writing to agents, friends, and publishers. Because of his controlled method, his refusal to set up obviously charged condi- tions, Blotner's depiction is con- vincing. One has only to consider these "facts" of the writer's existence to wonder that the hounded man wrote anything at all. For in- stance, when he begins the book which is to become Absalom. Ab- salom! he is rushing to fulfill a contract to his publisher for roy- alties already advanced. It is 1934. Faulkner is writing, simul- taneously, The Hamlet (finally published in 1940), Requiem for a Nun (apearing in 1951), and A Dark House (the working title for Absalom) as well as several short stories. After several false starts, he puts Absalom away and writes and publishes the 1935 novel about air shows, Pylon. Then in March of 1935 he 're- sumes Absalom, and writes on it steadily, desperately, for nearly five months. In mid-August, sty- mied by financial problems, he goes to New York for one of the visits he dislikes, making connec- tions, meeting possiblepublish- ers, drinking (Blotner aptly terms Faulkner's periodic alco- holism "a strategy of evasion"). From then on, finishing Absalom is interrupted by: (1) the tragic death of his youngest brother, Dean, as he flies in a week-end air show, No- vember, 1935. Faulkner assumes full responsibility not only for Dean's death (" I bought him the plane, I paid for his les- sons . . .") but also. for his young widow and their unborn child. (2) a personally debilitating ...:. . « . . .,. ul 4Sn l n r 28; then, changing studios, from April 9 to May 30. (4) returning home to severe financial problems, complicated by both his own and his wife's alcoholism. (5) the return to Hollywood in mid-July with his family and two retainers, and the problems of re-locating the entire family in such an expensive area ($550- a-month rent, in 1936), circum- stances only leading to continu- ing financial worries. That Faulk- ner was able to continue work- ing at all under such unsettling and unsettled personal conditions is surprising. The struggle that his life was shows not only in his relatively frequent bouts with the bottle, but also in his near death a few years later, 1940, when he hemorrhages internally with an undiagnosed perforated ulcer. ,0 V I N G A S the events of Faulkner's life are in themselves, B 1 o t n e r pre- sents them as parts-and only parts-of the complete scene. He keeps the reader in touch with Faulkner's position within his family and the community of Oxford, Mississippi. In 1933 Blotner mentions that Faulkner appeared in a series entitled "Prominent Citizens of Oxford." Faulkner was twelfth in the series (which would run to six- ty), having been preceded by the mayor, the university foot- ball coach, two physicians, and Joe Parks, among others. (His uncle would be thirty-fifth in the series.) The caption de- scribed Faulkner as EMINENT NOVELIST, POET A N D SCENARIO W R I T E R, LICENSED A I R P L A N E PILOT. Tragic as the facts of these twenty years of Faulkner's life are, Blotner does not use the pathos inherent to rail against an unap- preciative America ... Because of his control- led method, his refusal to s e t up obviously charged conditions, Blotner's depiction is convincing. It is also heartening to know that Bennett Cerf, his Random House publisher, never lost faith in his ability. He h'ad written to Faulkner in 1935, "'I think we'd rather have you on our list than any other fiction writer living in America. I know that those are strong words, Bill, but I mean them."' One of the best qualities of Blotner's biography is that he does include the purely literary matters of Faulkner's life. By seeing the work as integral to Faulkner's existence, Blotner makes correlations, adds critical judgments, and generally en- hances our understanding of a novel by using his own full bio- graphical knowledge. This ap- proach is particularly valid for the Faulkner account, simply because it is difficult to imagine discussing his life from 1926 to 1962 without some meaningful consideration of the nineteen novels and countless short stor- ies - many still unpublished- which he wrote during those years. Blotner also provides enough commentary from reviews and essayscontemporary with Faulk- ner's work that the reader un- derstands the general critical temper, a matter of concern to any writer. Faulkner usually said that he cared little what re- viewers said, but since his fi- nancial solvency depended on public reaction, he could scarce- Iy be so disinterested as he pre- tended. Blotner's handling of these quotations is efficient: ex- tensive quotation could have slowed this long study irreparab- ly, so he often summarizes the gist of opinion, and includes full reference in the copious notes- arranged by page and line, rath- er than by number - in the rear of each of the two volumes. ALTHOUGH it runs to over L2100 pages, Blotner's Faulk- ner is not a cumbersome study. The volumes provide an amazing amount of previously inaccessi- ble information. Few of Faulk- ner's letters were ever publish- ed; no other biographical study has been attempted (often there will be unauthorized accounts of is); few literary figures have in- cluded Faulkner significantly in a writer's life, in addition to the "authorized" book, which this their own memoirs and autobiog- raphies, simply because Faulk- ner had close contact with com- nnrati e-h fPr th,, t.. for the title of his last novel, The Reivers. Blotner justifies in- cluding detailed accounts of these ancestors, and rightly, because Faulkner himself made such ex- tensive use of them-or charac- ters like them-in his fiction. He gives much information about Faulkner's early friendships; his early and continuing love for Es- telle Oldham, which led to their marriage in 1929, just seven weeks after Estelle's divorce; and his generous and loving re- lationships with all segments of his family. Particularly valuable is the information about Faulkner's many stints in Hollywood. Leg- ends abound about his hatred of the movie business and his some- times unorthodox behavior as a screenplay writer. Blotner's ac- count validates some of the stories, but more important, it documents the quantity and quality of Faulkner's production there. Working on so many kinds of assignments, with so many different people - often chang- ing. scripts every two or three days - Faulkner had reason to dread the frantic months in Hol- lywood. His desperate financial need was his only reason for go- ing West. BLOTNER ALSO savors the mellow years-after the No- bel Prize, when Faulkner was teaching at the University of Vir- ginia, traveling for the State De- partment, and finally able to rest easy financially. We can sense the difference in Faulk- ner as he sees his family ma- ture, his books back in print, his life given ostensible value. He buys more land; peoples it with the inferior mules and horses that he always managed to choose; and keep riding. Blotner emphasizes the three falls from horses, one in 1959 and two in 1962, that led to his general dis- ability and death on July 6, 1962, just two months after The Reiv- ers was published. Blotner has given us an un- derstandable Faulkner. The need in his life for solace, for assur- ance, is imaged vividly through his turn to flying as well as to alcohol. Often he takes the Waco up for an hour, an hour and a, half, in the midst of a hectic weekend. Yet when he is writ- ing well, hard at work on a nov- el he enjoys, he flies only once in three or four months. His drinking is just as sporadic, and just as predictable. When all hu- man resources fail him, when his own imaginative powers are inadequate, Faulkner drinks - hard, purposefully, and necessar- ily; but drinking is usually a last resort. That Blotner can show both the frailty and the grandeur of his subject is possible partly be- cause of the coherence which permeates the book, and partly because of his own love for and understanding of Faulkner. And he so gently remarks in his mod- est one-page preface to the book, . . . perhaps I can here per- mit myself to say not just that William Faulkner was a great writer, but that to me he seems America's greatest writer of prose fiction. The narrative will perhaps revel more clearly how he seemed to me as a man. I cannot hope to look upon his like again. Faulkner, A Biography is an ef- fective whole, for desnite its length, it was written and pub- lished as a total presentation. Blotner knew where he was go- ing throughout the book, and could make editorial changes to keep the pace lively and the de- tails germane in terms of the total effect. The difficulties of maintaining continuity and focus when separate volumes of a three, four, or five volume study are published - and written- separately, a book at a time, are here diminished. Naturally, the work of writing such a study as a single book - with all research materials "on hand" at once - must be fatiguing, to say the least. BLOTNER'S biography should grove tattimpeccable schol- arship is not the dry-as-dust oc- cupation that the non-academic world sometimes pretends. It is rather, in Faulkner, the means one compassionate human be- ing uses to prove to the world at large that William Faulkner was not only a great prose stylist, but an equally great man himself. All the tragedy of Faulkner's frustrating personal life - and the persistent jo he managed to find in moments of it - only deepened his devotion to that elusive craft of writing. his mas- ter and his torment. That Blot- ner can make us feel this pas- sion so clearly, in his own ob- jective and understated presen- tation, is surely proof that he has mastered his own difficult craft, that of the perceptive and chary biographer. Today's writer. . . Linda Wanner is Profes- sor of Enalish at Michigan Daily Photo by ROLFE TESSEM Joseph Blotner The making o# a biographer: An 1 year ordeal By LAURA BERMAN "I'VE NEVER felt this naked and vulnerable," Univer- sity Professor of English J)seph Blotner confessed last week. "Every time a critic says anything negative, I think he hates me. Professor Blotner's case of writer's jitters is understand- able. Eleven years of his life have gone into the making of William Faulkner, A Biography, eleven years of research and writing and painstaking editing. "At this point, I'm just happy it's finally out," Blotner says. Blotner's long-awaited biography of one of America's greatest writers is destined to be an important work. New Times magazine has already named it one of the three major biographies of the year, it was hailed by Publisher's Weekly as a humanitarian work" and the Book-of-the Month Club has made it an alternate selection. The biography has its roots at the University of Vir- ginia where Blotner and Faulkner met. In 1957, Blotner was on a committee to select a writer-in-residence for the school and Faulkner seemed a logical choice. He was a recent Nobel prize winner and his daughter was enrolled at the university. The two men shared common interests, (they both liked to go to track meets and football games), and they became friends. "I think he came to trust me because I made no de- mands on him; I respected his privacy," Blotner now.re- calls. "I realized that he was an extraordinary person and a great artist and I did everything I could to shield him from people who wanted to-exploit him." BLOTNER REMEMBERS Faulkner as "a Southern gen- tleman" who 'would sooner read Herodotus than a mod- ern American author, and who came to school armed with a manuscript handwritten on one continuous roll of paper. Faulkner would sit in his office and transcribe, slowly and painstakingly, using the two finger typing method. "I put all thoughts of writing about him out of my mind," Blotner says. "You can't be somebody's friend and turn around behind their back every few minutes to take notes." Faulkner died in 1962 and the Faulkner family ap- proached Blotner some time later to write a biography. Because the family authorized the work, Blotner had unique access to all of Faulkner's correspondence and papers. Blotner approached his task with a reverence for his subject and a knowledge of the work's importance. "I loved doing the work because I knew it was important. Being William Faulkner's friend gave it an added dimension," he says. From 1963 until 1967, Prof. Blotner researched his ma- terial, visiting 6 states and several countries in Europe in pursuit of information about Faulkner. He spoke with a Faulkner friend in Mexico, with Random House editors in New York and with the janitor of a hotel in Stockholm. In August 1967, Blotner sat down to put it all together. It was a massive project, one that would eventually ex- ceed 2000 pages. All the information Blotner had so assidu- ously gathered was organized in three separate files, di- vided by year, by title and by the names of people who figured in Faulkner's life. Blotner would go through the year file to pinpoint chronology, sort thi-ough the apnropriate people file to fill in quotes and conversation, and then work with the title file, weaving the writing of each Faulkner novel into the main narrative thread of the writer's life. Work on the biography became something of an obses- sion to Blotner, albeit a quiet professorial obsession. "I tried to work on it every day," Blotner says. "After I got out of class or before class or when I finished grad- ing blue books, I would work on it. At home I would read over the novels and study criticism. I could never quite put it out of my mind." " AY WIFE probably began to resent the time I was spendingson the biography," Blotner admits. "She said she felt as if she'd been living with two men for a long time-Joseeh Blotner and William Faulkner." The first draft was completed in 1969, but then there were rewrites and conferences with editors and copy edi- tors who needed time to read the work. And the index had to be done (Blotner did it himself). Then, in the midst of putting the finishing touches on the biography, Blotner discovered important new material. The publication date was postponed and reostoned. Now, that the book is finally published and critics are pondering the result of a decade's work. 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