Intrusion in the Dust

To live over other people's lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same--since it was by these things they, themselves lived. --Henry James

ON JUNE 2 of my sophomore year, the 62nd anniversary of Quentin Compson III's putting flatirons in his shoes and jumping off of the Anderson bridge, I spent the evening with a girl, who was then a close friend and was then from the South, reading Absalom, Absalom! for our English 700 exam (back then it was and it deserved to be called 700). We read to each other by the light of a street lamp on the bridge next to the secret plaque marking the spot from which Quentin was said to have jumped. Such dedication to Faulknerian trivia is cute for a sophomore, but it is unproductive for an official biographer.

In his three-volume megabiography of Henry James, Leon Edel avoided pedantry and trivia while still painting a detailed picture. Realizing the significance of this achievement, Edel explained his principles in a book called Literary Biography. His conclusions now stand as an apt indictment of Joseph Blotner's eight-and-a-half pound Faulkner: "the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation." Blotner fails this test; he does not disengage the essence of Faulkner's life from the eternal clutter of days and years in order to write of the life of the mind, the emotions, and the creativity.

Edel's and Blotner's differing approaches delineate two modes of megabiography, a field defined by Boswell in his study of Samuel Johnson. There is the "definitive" biography, which leaves the reader on a first-name basis with the subject, weeping at his funeral. And there is the "picayune" biography, which leaves the reader with so many personal, intimate but unnecessary and non-integrated facts that he feels like taking a shower. Often, the picayune biography is an "authorized" work, written by a worshipping professor after the death of a great writer. Lytton Strachey anticipated Blotner's contribution to this genre more than fifty years ago when he remarked on "those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead...with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design."

THIS BIOGRAPHY is overwhelming in both the good and the bad sense. Over a decade of brilliant (obsessive?) research has produced the facts that Faulkner fetishists crave--and who has read Faulkner and is not in a small way a fetishist for facts about this mysterious man? Although I do not consider my own hero-worship of dead authors excessive, I did find it interesting that Faulkner patronized Aunt Rose Arnold's New Orleans whore-house at Chatres and Jackson Square. Similarly, Blotner's account of Faulkner's Hollywood years is as interesting as Time's "people" section.

Blotner's dedication to trivia, however, has unearthed information that sheds light on Faulkner's fiction. An early jotting regarding Absalom, Absalom! reveals that Faulkner was concerned more with the way his different narrators--especially Quentin--obtain their information about Colonel Sutpen than he was with the Sutpen story itself. The young Faulkner's correspondence with Sherwood Anderson records an amusing fantasy world of swamp animals they created.

Whatever criticism is levelled against Blotner's work, it remains at least an indispensable source of all the minute facts on Faulkner, offered as minute facts, and can be a starting point for other biographers more interested in Faulkner the writer. More than mere picayune megabiography, it is reference realism; facts are presented simply as facts, and simply because they are facts.

The discovery of this massive array of facts makes Blotner's failure to approach the mind of the writer all the more inexcusable. He could have, as Edel suggests, used psychology, like Freud's Leonardo da Vinci, Erikson's Young Man Luther, and David Donald's Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. Henry James was suited to Edel's psychological approach--in fact demanded such treatment--because, as the editor of the James letters said, "his life was no mere succession of facts such as could be recorded and compiled by another hand; it was a densely knit cluster of emotions and memories, each one steeped in lights and colours thrown out by the rest."

Faulkner's mysterious life was more than a mere succession of facts, making him prime material for a psychological literary biography. Faulkner insisted that uncovering personal facts would merely invade his privacy and would not provide a key to his fiction. His works (with the exception of Mosquitoes) are not directly autobiographical, but rather imaginatively derived from the totality of his experience. Like James he regretted that letters lived on as a record of his private life, and tried to have them destroyed. But whereas Edel gives details on James only as they relate to the life of the mind--he analyzes James's doodles and word-games, and his "Freudian" slips in mis-writing dates on letters--Blotner presents all of the minute details as pedantic facts. Even the events that cry out for psychological interpretation--Faulkner's wife's suicide attempt on their honeymoon, his younger brother's death in an airplane stunt, his debilitating drinking--are spit out undigested, with the unexplored mention that they may have had psychological consequences.

PSYCHOLOGY IS NOT the only way to have better approached the facts. Malcolm Cowley, the critic most responsible for Faulkner's reputation, would have had Blotner use synecdoche--the detailing of a minor incident as an illustration of a larger idea. But rather than use synecdoche, psychology or any other method, Blotner includes trivial facts whenever his copious research uncovers them.

The product is a massive march of minutiae organized by no other apparent guiding force than chronology. Blotner adheres slavishly to "the inexorable tick of the clock" that Edel urged biographers to avoid at all costs. The chapter headings, "Dec., 1918--September, 1919/September, 1919--June, 1920...," are almost selfparodies of Blotner's conception of biography.

The chronological ordering is at times confusing as well as ridiculous. For example, Blotner opens the description of the writing of Absalom, Absalom! in 1935 in his usual meticulous way: "On March 30 he had taken a sheet of paper with printed margins and written at the top, in blue ink, the title Absalom, Absalom!. He underlined it twice and dated the sheet in the upper left hand corner." He then describes two false starts set at Harvard. So far, very interesting. After a plot analysis of the first chapter, Blotner breaks to tell us about a three-hour flying practice in Memphis. Then he returns to the book to analyze chapter two, switches back to the real world for a discussion of Oxford politics and two hours of flying, then back to the typing of chapter two and an analysis of chapter three. The only value of such adherence to chronology is that it makes Faulkner's antichronological depiction of the Sutpen and Compson stories seem logical by comparison.

Faulkner's life exudes a mysterious aura which the pedestrian and meticulous treatment by Blotner fails to convey. Those cherished myths--the rum runs in the Gulf of Mexico, Sherwood Anderson's promise to get Soldier's Pay published if he did not have to read it--are set straight as if "for the record." Pleasant Sunday picnics come across as only data.

By far the most disgraceful part of this biography, because Blotner is no Boswell and could not pull it off, is the final section on the period in which Blotner knew Faulkner. The absurdity begins with "I had glimpsed him for a moment from the other end of the long, dimly lit corridor," and continues for 230 pages until Blotner's tasteless discussion of his realization that his would be the last hand to touch Faulkner's coffin as it was laid into the ground. Having suffered through these maudlin worshippings, it would be embarrassing to look Mr. Blotner in the eye.

The total result is that we know more about Faulkner than we can justify by healthy curiosity: reading this biography with relish would be like watching more than one episode of the PBS saga of the Loud family.

Joe Blotner. BlotnerBlotnerBlotner Blotner. We could have guessed just from the sound of the name of the biographer that the approach would be neither magical nor mysterious. It's good, it's all there, but it's Blotner. Why not Carvel Collins, Cleanth Brooks, Malcolm Cowley? These names (and writings) ring, echo Quentin Compson, promise a more magical treatment--a story told worthy of the great story-teller. But Collins fought with the Faulkner family a while back--sin number one for a megabiographer--and his biography had to wait for Blotner's. Cleanth Brooks will eventually come out, I hope, with his second volume of Yoknapatawpha, which probably will be the most analytic and thought-provoking treatment. Cowley will probably do what the rest of us should read the studies which this mammoth work will prompt and from them realize what Joe Blotner should have realized from the beginning and what Faulkner himself often said--that the life of the man could be found in the work of the mind (but not the reverse) and that the best understanding of Faulkner comes from reading about that small postage stamp of native soil, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, of which he was sole owner and proprietor.