The New York Times obituary notes:
Joseph Blotner did a bit more. He spent 10 years writing a two-volume, 2,115-page, 8 1/2-pound biography of the great American novelist so chock-full of details — down to postmarks and menus — that some critics dismissed it as overwhelming.
But Mr. Blotner’s “Faulkner: A Biography,” published in 1974, became a definitive source on the Nobel laureate from Oxford, Miss., one that no subsequent biographer could ignore. It drew on the full access to Faulkner’s papers and letters that the writer’s family had granted Mr. Blotner, as well as the personal relationship that the New Jersey-born Mr. Blotner and his literary idol nurtured over bourbon and branch water.
The obit goes on:
Mr. Blotner also faced the problem of writing the truth about a friend whom he worshiped. He gave short shrift to Faulkner’s romantic affairs and his nearly suicidal drinking bouts, and some critics complained that he had failed to connect Faulkner’s work with his chaotic life.
One of the “romantic affairs” given “short shrift” was with Meta Carpenter in Hollywood. In identifying people in photographs from that era, Estelle (apparently purposefully) misidentified her, so bothering Carpenter that this was one of the reasons she wrote her memoir A Loving Gentleman in the mid-70s, describing her relationship with Faulkner in detail.
Weird Google images result: The third picture that pulls up in a search for Meta Carpenter is a picture of Estelle Faulkner….
I think I began the one-vol. version, but I must not’ve finished it, since I know next to nothing about Faulkner. (I always think of the sendup in Barton Fink.)
Is there one Faulkner bio to read now, less oblique about his flaws without making them the focus of the book?
My favorite for years has been Joel Williamson’s William Faulkner and Southern History. Williamson’s background as a Southern historian stands him in great stead on the background, historical, family, etc. Less good on analysis of the books, which I didn’t need any way. Highly recommended.
Blotner is unreadable. The two volume and its footnotes are great places to look things up and confirm details, or to start research of ones own. But reading it straight through is nearly impossible. Over the years, I’ve probably read half or more of it in pieces.
Thanks, NMC!
… IMHO, a lot of literary biographies are deadly dull, b/c the subject put all his time and effort into his work. Joyce and Wordsworth come to mind. It may be a rule of thumb that there’s an inverse relation b/t how great a writer is & how interesting his life is.
Maybe my favorite literary life I’ve read in the past few years was Fiona MacCarthy on Byron. Depending on whether you think he or Woolf were first-rate writers, they’re exceptions to my rule.
I think Faulkner may be a bit of an exception on that, Anderson. First, his family history is essential to the story because of the way it became his source material. And the family history is pretty interesting stuff, even more so holding it up against what Faulkner did with the material. You got the Civil War, deserting, Forrest, several generations of people shooting and being shot, and the whole time making up stories that overdramatized all of the above. Second, his inventions of his own story give the biographer an interesting challenge, although much of that was resolved by Blotner; those who follow Blotner’s lead just have an interesting story to retell. Third, and this relates to his marriage and its troubles: They matter as background to his fiction. Estelle and her story crop up again and again, in very mixed ways, as Temple Drake (I’m not kidding), Eula Varner, and even Caddy Compson (Faulkner said the image that drove TSATF was the boy looking up and seeing Caddy’s muddy underwear, her looking in the upstairs window. Read Caddy = Estelle, and puzzle through Faulkner thinking of his childhood crush on Estelle Oldham as incest-like). Faulkner’s marriage was much of it made in hell. The biographers get at his strange relationship with women in his youth, but probably don’t mine all there is to mine in his relationship with Estelle.
Further; How could anyone make Byron’s life boring.
Twain would be another example of a life so interesting it would be hard to write a bad bio, although he covered it better than anyone else could.
Is there one “out there” on Sheila Bosworth, who wrote Almost Innocent and Slow Poison? I’d sure like to know where that Louisiana wizard came up with the characters who populate her novels.