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The Life of William Faulkner #2
The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962
By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"― Kirkus ), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The second and concluding volume of Carl Rollyson’s ambitious biography finds Faulkner lamenting the many threats to his creative existence. Feeling, as an artist, he should be above worldly concerns and even morality, he has instead inherited only debts―a symptom of the South’s faded fortunes―and numerous mouths to feed and funerals to fund. And so he turns to the classic temptation for financially struggling writers―Hollywood. Thus begins roughly a decade of shuttling between his home and family in Mississippi―lifeblood of his art―and the backlots of the Golden Age film industry. Through Faulkner’s Hollywood years, Rollyson introduces such personalities as Humphrey Bogart and Faulkner’s long-time collaborator Howard Hawks, while telling the stories behind films such as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. At the same time, he chronicles with great insight Faulkner's rapidly crumbling though somehow resilient marriage and his numerous extramarital affairs--including his deeply felt, if ultimately doomed, relationship with Meta Carpenter. (In his grief over their breakup, Faulkner―a dipsomaniac capable of ferocious alcoholic binges―received third-degree burns when he passed out on a hotel-room radiator.) Where most biographers and critics dismiss Faulkner’s film work as at best a necessary evil, at worst a tragic waste of his peak creative years, Rollyson approaches this period as a valuable window on his artistry. He reveals a fascinating, previously unappreciated cross-pollination between Faulkner’s film and literary work, elements from his fiction appearing in his screenplays and his film collaborations influencing his later novels―fundamentally changing the character of late-career works such as the Snopes trilogy. Rollyson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the composition of Absalom, Absalom! , widely considered Faulkner’s masterpiece, as well as the film adaptation he authored―unproduced and never published― Revolt in the Earth. He reveals how Faulkner wrestled with the legacy of the South―both its history and its dizzying racial contradictions―and turned it into powerful art in works such as Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust. Volume 2 of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated "writer's writer" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon. In his famous Nobel speech, Faulkner said what inspired him was the human ability to prevail. In the end, this beautifully wrought life shows how Faulkner, the man and the artist, embodies this remarkable capacity to endure and prevail.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
656 pages, Hardcover
Published September 22, 2020
13 people are currently reading
92 people want to read
About the author
Carl Rollyson
131 books141 followersCarl Rollyson, Professor of Journalism at Baruch College, The City University of New York, has published more than forty books ranging in subject matter from biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and Jill Craigie to studies of American culture, genealogy, children’s biography, film, and literary criticism. He has authored more than 500 articles on American and European literature and history. His work has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times and the London Sunday Telegraph and in journals such as American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. For four years (2003-2007) he wrote a weekly column, "On Biography," for The New York Sun and was President of the Rebecca West Society (2003-2007). His play, THAT WOMAN: REBECCA WEST REMEMBERS, has been produced at Theatresource in New York City. Rollyson is currently researching a biography of Amy Lowell (awarded a "We the People" NEH grant). "Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, a biography of Dana Andrews is forthcoming in September from University Press of Mississippi. His biography, "American Isis: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath" will be published in February 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of her death. His reviews of biography appear regularly in The Wall Street Journal, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Kansas City Star, and The New Criterion. He is currently advisory editor for the Hollywood Legends series published by the University Press of Mississippi. He welcomes queries from those interested in contributing to the series. Read his column, "Biographology," that appears every two weeks at bibliobuffet.com
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 25, 2023
Volume two concludes Rollyson's biography of Faulkner, perhaps the most extensive one so far. Generally it's quite good, though the long mini-essays on this or that Faulkner novel detract from the main purpose and make this volume more, at times, as with volume one, a Life and Works of instead of a Life only.
What is a plus is the attention given to scripts or script ideas Faulkner worked on. I don't recall such sustained attention to the hollywood years in Blotner's bio.
What is a plus is the attention given to scripts or script ideas Faulkner worked on. I don't recall such sustained attention to the hollywood years in Blotner's bio.
March 29, 2023
I can’t possibly say how much, through the years, I have liked and admired the work of William Faulkner. After Hemingway, he was the first author I read in earnest, going back to when I was 17 or 18. Even in those early days, I was fascinated by biographical details, though there was no official biography. I haunted the stacks of the Duke East Campus library, finding old editions of Faulkner’s work along with a slender volume, The Private World of William Faulkner, which was originally a Life magazine profile. Faulkner himself famously hated any intrusions into his private life.
I assumed there must be some connection between the life he led and the books he produced. I wanted to be a writer myself, and had the obvious question, for any successful writer: How did you get where you are? How did you attain your eminence? In the case of Faulkner, that is almost an unanswerable question. His greatest works, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, came early in his career, when he was hardly formed as a human being. Absalom! Absalom!, a truly strange great work, came later, and he produced Go Down, Moses in his full maturity. Those for me are the greatest books in a long and brilliant career.
But the life is something else. Details that thrilled and fascinated me when I was young don’t have that effect anymore, when I have lived a decade longer than he did. I see his choices from the perspective of my advanced age, and they no longer seem exciting. I shake my head at them, if the truth be told.
His marriage is the first one, which came right around the time he was writing those great early works. I was fascinated, when I was young, that he married his childhood sweetheart, but only after she had married another man and lived elsewhere for a number of years, because her parents didn’t want her marrying this young man who didn’t have a future (any parents would have felt the same way). I thought it was great that, once he had written a great novel—The Sound and the Fury—he finally married her.
But what earlier biographies didn’t reveal (Joseph Blotner worked with Estelle Faulkner and became her friend) was that the marriage was unhappy almost from the start. Apparently Estelle had become an alcoholic during her first marriage (she said somewhere that she was drunk the whole time she was gone), and also used cocaine, so it seemed he was rescuing her from a bad situation rather than marrying the woman of his dreams. He did eventually have one child with her, but for most of his life was more interested in affairs with other women, including Meta Carpenter, Joan Williams, Jean Stein. He also spent a huge amount of time away from his wife and family, sometimes because he was out in Hollywood making money, but often because he wanted to be away. It was gallant to rescue his childhood sweetheart, but it was also the mistake of a young and naïve man. Who was he to rescue someone?
That relates to a second fact about Faulkner. He was devoted to his writing, as devoted as any artist ever, and often wrote in trying circumstances (he famously wrote As I Lay Dying during work breaks from shoveling coal at a power plant, and he wrote long stretches of Absalom! Absalom! in snatches of time from his work on Hollywood scripts, to name just two of the great novels). But he made things difficult for himself by wanting to be a major landowner (which he was, though the place he bought, which he called Rowan Oak, was always rather rundown), and to own an airplane, and a boat, and more and more land. The Alarming Paradox of the title, which comes from a letter that Faulkner wrote to an editor, is as follows:
“Every so often, in spite of judgment and all else, I take these fits of sort of raging and impotent exasperation at this really alarming paradox which my life reveals: Beginning at the age of thirty, I, an artist, a sincere one and of the first class, who should be free of even his own economic responsibilities and with no moral conscience at all, began to become the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows—of my mother . . . a brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two step children, my own child; I inherited my father’s debts and his dependents, white and black without inheriting yet from anyone one inch of land or one stick of furniture or one stick of money. . . . I bought without help from anyone the house I live in and all the furniture; I bought my farm the same way. I am 42 years old and I have already paid for four funerals and will certainly pay for one more and in all likelihood two more beside that, provided none of the people in mine or my wife’s family my superior in age outlive me, before I ever come to my own.”
But Faulkner helped create that situation. He had family obligations, but he created a lot of his financial problems by the way he stubbornly chose to live his life, to outdo his famous grandfather (the Colonel) and his ineffectual father. Those things weren’t important to his career.
The final obstacle was his drinking, the great koan of Faulkner’s life. Estelle Faulkner was apparently the kind of alcoholic who immediately registered alcohol, and was pretty much helpless from the first drink she took, while Faulkner could drink socially and get along fine, continue to work. But from time to time—especially when he finished a major work—he would go on the kind of bender that is incomprehensible to me, as if he were trying to obliterate himself, and in this biography we see the difficulties he created for those who cared for him, who were dealing with a man who was often unclothed, totally incontinent, shit stains on his clothing and bedding, while he still begged for liquor. Such moments continued after he had won the Nobel Prize. Other biographies glossed over these moments, but Rollyson—rightly, I would say—writes about them in detail. They’re a sordid side to the life of a great artist.
I came to feel that, after a certain point, Faulkner was writing in spite of his great travails, not because of them. He needed to quit creating them. He spent years in Hollywood doing screen work he was only moderately good at. He spent years of his life on a major project—A Fable—that he probably shouldn’t have done at all. He wrote the second and third volumes of the Snopes trilogy long after he had conceived of it, at a time when he material was no longer really alive for him. Only at the end of his life did he get back to work that came out of his true creative place, The Reivers, which—though not a major work—shows us what he was still capable of, if he hadn’t spent so much time on other things.
I would say that the one truly great work from the second half of his life, and the one that dealt with race in the most complex way, was Go Down, Moses. That is the late work I would read again. He was only 45 when he published it. But his best work was behind him.
I’m still a huge admirer of Faulkner’s work. He remains one of the most important writers for me. But I’ve read enough about his life. Future biographers will have to do without me.
www.davidguy.org
I assumed there must be some connection between the life he led and the books he produced. I wanted to be a writer myself, and had the obvious question, for any successful writer: How did you get where you are? How did you attain your eminence? In the case of Faulkner, that is almost an unanswerable question. His greatest works, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, came early in his career, when he was hardly formed as a human being. Absalom! Absalom!, a truly strange great work, came later, and he produced Go Down, Moses in his full maturity. Those for me are the greatest books in a long and brilliant career.
But the life is something else. Details that thrilled and fascinated me when I was young don’t have that effect anymore, when I have lived a decade longer than he did. I see his choices from the perspective of my advanced age, and they no longer seem exciting. I shake my head at them, if the truth be told.
His marriage is the first one, which came right around the time he was writing those great early works. I was fascinated, when I was young, that he married his childhood sweetheart, but only after she had married another man and lived elsewhere for a number of years, because her parents didn’t want her marrying this young man who didn’t have a future (any parents would have felt the same way). I thought it was great that, once he had written a great novel—The Sound and the Fury—he finally married her.
But what earlier biographies didn’t reveal (Joseph Blotner worked with Estelle Faulkner and became her friend) was that the marriage was unhappy almost from the start. Apparently Estelle had become an alcoholic during her first marriage (she said somewhere that she was drunk the whole time she was gone), and also used cocaine, so it seemed he was rescuing her from a bad situation rather than marrying the woman of his dreams. He did eventually have one child with her, but for most of his life was more interested in affairs with other women, including Meta Carpenter, Joan Williams, Jean Stein. He also spent a huge amount of time away from his wife and family, sometimes because he was out in Hollywood making money, but often because he wanted to be away. It was gallant to rescue his childhood sweetheart, but it was also the mistake of a young and naïve man. Who was he to rescue someone?
That relates to a second fact about Faulkner. He was devoted to his writing, as devoted as any artist ever, and often wrote in trying circumstances (he famously wrote As I Lay Dying during work breaks from shoveling coal at a power plant, and he wrote long stretches of Absalom! Absalom! in snatches of time from his work on Hollywood scripts, to name just two of the great novels). But he made things difficult for himself by wanting to be a major landowner (which he was, though the place he bought, which he called Rowan Oak, was always rather rundown), and to own an airplane, and a boat, and more and more land. The Alarming Paradox of the title, which comes from a letter that Faulkner wrote to an editor, is as follows:
“Every so often, in spite of judgment and all else, I take these fits of sort of raging and impotent exasperation at this really alarming paradox which my life reveals: Beginning at the age of thirty, I, an artist, a sincere one and of the first class, who should be free of even his own economic responsibilities and with no moral conscience at all, began to become the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows—of my mother . . . a brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two step children, my own child; I inherited my father’s debts and his dependents, white and black without inheriting yet from anyone one inch of land or one stick of furniture or one stick of money. . . . I bought without help from anyone the house I live in and all the furniture; I bought my farm the same way. I am 42 years old and I have already paid for four funerals and will certainly pay for one more and in all likelihood two more beside that, provided none of the people in mine or my wife’s family my superior in age outlive me, before I ever come to my own.”
But Faulkner helped create that situation. He had family obligations, but he created a lot of his financial problems by the way he stubbornly chose to live his life, to outdo his famous grandfather (the Colonel) and his ineffectual father. Those things weren’t important to his career.
The final obstacle was his drinking, the great koan of Faulkner’s life. Estelle Faulkner was apparently the kind of alcoholic who immediately registered alcohol, and was pretty much helpless from the first drink she took, while Faulkner could drink socially and get along fine, continue to work. But from time to time—especially when he finished a major work—he would go on the kind of bender that is incomprehensible to me, as if he were trying to obliterate himself, and in this biography we see the difficulties he created for those who cared for him, who were dealing with a man who was often unclothed, totally incontinent, shit stains on his clothing and bedding, while he still begged for liquor. Such moments continued after he had won the Nobel Prize. Other biographies glossed over these moments, but Rollyson—rightly, I would say—writes about them in detail. They’re a sordid side to the life of a great artist.
I came to feel that, after a certain point, Faulkner was writing in spite of his great travails, not because of them. He needed to quit creating them. He spent years in Hollywood doing screen work he was only moderately good at. He spent years of his life on a major project—A Fable—that he probably shouldn’t have done at all. He wrote the second and third volumes of the Snopes trilogy long after he had conceived of it, at a time when he material was no longer really alive for him. Only at the end of his life did he get back to work that came out of his true creative place, The Reivers, which—though not a major work—shows us what he was still capable of, if he hadn’t spent so much time on other things.
I would say that the one truly great work from the second half of his life, and the one that dealt with race in the most complex way, was Go Down, Moses. That is the late work I would read again. He was only 45 when he published it. But his best work was behind him.
I’m still a huge admirer of Faulkner’s work. He remains one of the most important writers for me. But I’ve read enough about his life. Future biographers will have to do without me.
www.davidguy.org
October 31, 2021
Through Carl Rollyson, I have gotten to know Faulkner, in all his complexities, which only makes me enjoy The Sound and the Fury even more.
September 11, 2021
This has been sitting on my shelves for a while awaiting my progress in reading Faulkner’s novels and the various works about the South that I have been picking up. My reading of Faulkner and about the South is not systematic enough to be dignified by the term ‘research’, however, as a Brit, it is a necessary process of familiarization with the society that Faulkner was immersed in and which, for me, is distant in terms of both time and prevailing cultural assumptions. One of the things i have gained from this second volume of biography, however, arises from Carl Rollyson’s insistence that Faulkner was not simply a regional writer but, through his commitment to the modernist project, was participating in a cultural moment that addressed more ‘universal’ themes. This is, to me, a bit of a false dichotomy, but it is a useful corrective to my own tendency to approach Faulkner as that exotic subject, the ‘Southern writer’.
Having acknowledged that, however, i have to say that Professor Rollyson’s tendency to dovetail events from Faulkner’s life with themes and incidents in his fiction remains somewhat jarring. [This tendency is evident everywhere throughout both volumes, but most explicitly summed up in Prof Rollyson’s discussion of ‘The Wild Palms’ where he compares Faulkner with the character Harry, saying that Faulkner ‘.. wrote the novel as it was published, with the chapter of one story breaking in upon another like a wave about to hit shore, or like the oscillation in Faulkner’s own life between Hollywood and home, between Meta and Estelle, with Faulkner in rented rooms feeling utterly bereft after hours on duty as a scenarist interned in a studio instead of in Harry’s hospital, sending money home to Oxford just as Harry sends two dollars to his sister [...] Life turns into a text, and the text turns into a life’ (p. 136)].
The relationship of life to text, for Prof. Rollyson, seems to resolve itself into little more than identifying parallels between life events and incidents within the novels. Is this to illuminate the life of the biographical subject or the mainsprings of the literary works? I don't know but, whatever the case, it is an approach that seems to leave scant room for the complexity of the ‘universal’ themes that Rollyson argues that Faulkner embraces via the modernism and experimentalism that marks his literary production.
There is precious little in this volume about Faulkner’s intellectual influences. We learn that Faulkner and Estelle made regular trips to bookshops and bought their reading matter for the week; we learn too that Faulkner liked detective novels and publicly disavowed being a ‘literary man’. There is a tantalising moment when, in discussing the critical reviews of ‘The Town’, Prof Rollyson notes that ‘Don Quixote’ was ‘a book Faulkner read every year’ and about which Faulkner’s wife is quoted as saying: “There was a lot of ‘Don Quixote’ in William Faulkner” (p. 481). This, apart from Faulkner’s comments on Ernest Hemmingway, is one of the few references to Faulkner’s literary interests and there it is, left hanging, without elaboration or further comment. Frustrating.
While that is a gap there is much of interest in this book, in particular in the exposition of Faulkner’s film writing, much of which did not get to the screen and little of which is easily available to the casual reader. Prof. Rollyson's argument that this engagement with film was not marginal in Faulkner’s work and is a neglected influence on his literary production is convincing.
Having acknowledged that, however, i have to say that Professor Rollyson’s tendency to dovetail events from Faulkner’s life with themes and incidents in his fiction remains somewhat jarring. [This tendency is evident everywhere throughout both volumes, but most explicitly summed up in Prof Rollyson’s discussion of ‘The Wild Palms’ where he compares Faulkner with the character Harry, saying that Faulkner ‘.. wrote the novel as it was published, with the chapter of one story breaking in upon another like a wave about to hit shore, or like the oscillation in Faulkner’s own life between Hollywood and home, between Meta and Estelle, with Faulkner in rented rooms feeling utterly bereft after hours on duty as a scenarist interned in a studio instead of in Harry’s hospital, sending money home to Oxford just as Harry sends two dollars to his sister [...] Life turns into a text, and the text turns into a life’ (p. 136)].
The relationship of life to text, for Prof. Rollyson, seems to resolve itself into little more than identifying parallels between life events and incidents within the novels. Is this to illuminate the life of the biographical subject or the mainsprings of the literary works? I don't know but, whatever the case, it is an approach that seems to leave scant room for the complexity of the ‘universal’ themes that Rollyson argues that Faulkner embraces via the modernism and experimentalism that marks his literary production.
There is precious little in this volume about Faulkner’s intellectual influences. We learn that Faulkner and Estelle made regular trips to bookshops and bought their reading matter for the week; we learn too that Faulkner liked detective novels and publicly disavowed being a ‘literary man’. There is a tantalising moment when, in discussing the critical reviews of ‘The Town’, Prof Rollyson notes that ‘Don Quixote’ was ‘a book Faulkner read every year’ and about which Faulkner’s wife is quoted as saying: “There was a lot of ‘Don Quixote’ in William Faulkner” (p. 481). This, apart from Faulkner’s comments on Ernest Hemmingway, is one of the few references to Faulkner’s literary interests and there it is, left hanging, without elaboration or further comment. Frustrating.
While that is a gap there is much of interest in this book, in particular in the exposition of Faulkner’s film writing, much of which did not get to the screen and little of which is easily available to the casual reader. Prof. Rollyson's argument that this engagement with film was not marginal in Faulkner’s work and is a neglected influence on his literary production is convincing.
May 30, 2022
Makes me want to go back and re-read everything he wrote. This biography and analysis of Faulkner's writings is not for anyone unfamiliar with his work.
March 5, 2025
Blotner, Parini, Rollyson... All good bio's of this amazing life.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews