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William Faulkner: American Writer : A Biography

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... leaving a dried mass hard to swallow, not to mention digest. However it is possible to savor some flavors from the man's life, and there are moments of insight embedded in all the verbiage.

It was a glorious spring Sunday morning in 1993; I was on the square in Oxford, and a wonderful bookstore was open "for services." A fitting place to buy the book, and later wander with it around Faulkner's estate of Rowan Oaks; I was blessedly alone since it was closed for renovations. Clearly the setting set high hopes for the book, yet still...

Make no mistake; it is all there, starting with the larger than life character of his great-grandfather, the "old colonel," through his own life as a returning WWI "war hero," with embellished tales of service, and trying to gain traction as a writer through most of the `20's, which included joining the "Movable Feast" in Paris. Finally it "clicked" in the year 1929, the "annus mirabilis," and in 30 days as he famously worked on the night shift at the water works, he wrote "As I Lay Dying," the title inspired by a line from the Odyssey. "The Sound and the Fury," and "Light in August" were complete in a short period, and within 20 years he was seated next to Bertrand Russell in Stockholm, receiving the Nobel Prize for literature. He had only 12 more years of life, one highlight of which was a year at the University of Virginia.

His personal life is also there, from the need to embellish war service, to the numerous rejections for women, to the alcoholism and the later philandering, no doubt making up for those earlier rejections. Faulkner once said that he spent a lot of his life "fumbling under women's skirts." But Karl does not convey the passion of any of this; it is dealt with in that dry academic detached style.

More useful is certain descriptions of the mythical Yoknapatawpha county, as rendered on page 182, how pretty it looked from a distance, which hid such graphically conveyed matters at the "...drying spittle of religious controversy..." Later, (p286), Karl summarizes Faulkner's genius: "This transformation of what appeared on the surface a rather low-keyed place into a beehive of rancor, hatred, and violence, intermingled with routine life, was a great act of imagination, and Faulkner's greatest contribution to American fiction."

Karl describes the influences of other writers, such as James Joyce, on him, and in turn how Faulkner influenced a generation of Latin American "magic realism" writers. In "The Unvanquished," a chapter is entitled "The Vendee," and in an interview with Coindreau Faulkner said that from his reading of Balzac's "Les Chouans," he felt "Southerners and people from La Vendee had much in common." Later (p725) Karl quotes Sartre, who said: "for the youth of France, Faulkner is a god."

Five years before this book was published, Joseph Blotner also wrote a "door-stop" biography of Faulkner, yet at "only" 788 pages it was considerably less than this tome. It is a shame, perhaps some in the academic world proclaim these works, but the general reader could use a livelier, briefer biography of perhaps the greatest American writer.