Faulkner is a veritable cottage industry.
Scholars are forever trying to solve Faulkner as if he were a riddle. There are many conflicting Faulkners. There is the modernist/experimentalist Faulkner admired by critics and other writers who admire his lush, long, complicated sentences with the self-correcting syntax. There is the humanistic Faulkner exemplified by the Nobel acceptance speech as he said that we possess "a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance" and that the writer's duty is to write about these things. Edmund Wilson said that for Faulkner the big picture is everything. There is also the unreconstructed white Faulkner who never totally rose above his racial raising. "Go slow" he said never realizing it translated as "go never." He said he would fight for Mississippi against the United States and shoot Negroes if necessary.
The Faulkner critic and biographer has to somehow blend the good Faulkner and the suspect Faulkner.
You have to balance his repellant political positions with his meditations on race, racism, violence, and cruelty in America.
His infuriating gradualism vs. his condemnation of the South.
"Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."
Great writing is produced by the human heart in conflict with itself.
He made the books and then he died.
Faulkner makes great demands on his readers.
Rollyson adds nothing new of substance to Faulkner's story.
Rollyson says that Faulkner remained an unreconstructed southerner.
William Cuthbert Falkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897.
He grew up in segregated Mississippi and lived to the beginnings of the civil rights struggle.
Great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, a slave owner and Confederate officer.
Was killed on the street by a former business partner.
The Old Colonel looms over Faulkner's life as he wrote several novels.
His legends were handed down by Faulkner's grandfather, J.W.T. Falkner who read Dumas every year.
His father, far less successful than his forebears, ran a livery stable and a hardware store before becoming business manager at the Univ. of Mississippi.
His mother Maud was an amateur painter. He visited her every day even after he married.
Never finished HS though he was briefly a student at Ole Miss.
In the British air force though never saw action and came back to Oxford walking with a limp.
Failed poet.
Called "Count No Count."
In New Orleans with Sherwood Anderson who encouraged to write about his small Mississippi world.
Carl Rollyson is professor of journalism emeritus at Baruch College.
The Gora book is complicated dealing with Faulkner and the Civil War. I am not familiar enough with Faulkner's work to absorb i all.
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