Robert W Hamblin - Myself and the World: A Biography of William Faulkner

Myself and the World

A BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM FAULKNER

Robert W. Hamblin

Publication of this book was made possible in part
by a generous donation by the Center for Faulkner Studies
at Southeast Missouri State University.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright 2016 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hamblin, Robert W., author.

Title: Myself and the world : a biography of William Faulkner / Robert W. Hamblin.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015044558 (print) | LCCN 2016001781 (ebook) | ISBN
9781496805607 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496805614 (epub single) | ISBN
9781496805621 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496805638 (pdf single) |
ISBN 9781496805645 (pdf institutional)

Subjects: LCSH: Faulkner, William, 18971962. | Novelists, American20th
centuryBiography. | BISAC: JUVENILE NONFICTION / Biography &
Autobiography / Literary. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary.

Classification: LCC PS3511.A86 Z78435 2016 (print) | LCC PS3511.A86 (ebook) |
DDC 813/.52dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044558

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To the memory of Louis Daniel Brodsky

I WISH TO EXPRESS MY SINCEREST THANKS TO ANN ABADIE, who recommended me for this project to the University Press of Mississippi, and to Leila Salisbury, the director of the press, who invited me to write the book. Both have been extremely helpful at every stage of production.

My initial study and appreciation of Faulkner developed under the tutelage of two outstanding professors who were both noted Faulkner scholars: Thomas Daniel Young, in whose undergraduate Southern Literature class at Delta State University I first read Faulkner; and John Pilkington, my graduate advisor at the University of Mississippi. Dr. Pilkington directed both my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation on Faulkner, in the process becoming my mentor and friend for life.

My late dear friend of thirty-six years, Louis Daniel Brodsky, not only afforded me the unique opportunity to partner with him on numerous projects related to his marvelous collection of William Faulkner materials but also taught me more than I can ever say about generosity, loyalty, friendship, and (another mutual interest of ours) poetry.

I wish also to acknowledge my huge indebtedness to my Teaching Faulkner associates at the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conferences at the University of Mississippi: Jim Carothers, Charles Peek, Arlie Herron, Teresa Towner, and Terrell Tebbetts. One could not find more pleasant companions with whom to discuss and debate Faulkner.

Ann Abadie and Charles Peek read this book in manuscript and offered many useful comments and suggestions.

Over many years my university, Southeast Missouri State University, provided generous, ongoing support of my Faulkner research and teaching and also granted me the signal honor of serving as the founding director of its Center for Faulkner Studies.

My greatest debt of gratitude, as always, is to my wife Kaye, for her patience, understanding, encouragement, and love.

WILLIAM FAULKNER WANTED NO BIOGRAPHY. HE ONCE WROTE to Malcolm Cowley, the well-known literary critic, It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.... It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.

Still, on another occasion he admitted to Cowley, I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world. At the University of Virginia, he told a group of students: Any writer, to begin with, is writing his own biography because he has discovered the world and then suddenly discovered that the world is important enough or moving enough or tragic enough to put down on paper or in music or on canvas, and at that time all he knows is what has happened to him. In that same statement Faulkner went on to emphasize the crucial importance of the creative imagination in the growth and development of the artist, yet the biographical element remains the foundation on which the imagination builds.

Following the publication of a number of detailed biographies, beginning with Joseph Blotners massive Faulkner: A Biography in 1974, we now know that Faulkner was among the most autobiographical of novelists. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction are grounded in his own personal life and that of his family and region.

But it is not enough to examine the external facts and events of those lives and histories. There is also the inner Faulkner, the one he tried so hard (though ultimately without success) to hide from the world (and sometimes, it would appear, even from himself). As demonstrated by so many of Faulkners experimentations in narrative viewpoint, there is objective reality but there is also perceived or subjective reality. And for Faulkner, as for his characters, both of these categories are of the utmost significance. In this little book I try to do justice to both Faulknersthe private as well as the public man.

Faulkner was right to insist that his books and not his life should be our principal concern. But the best preparation for reading those magnificent books is to have a good understanding of the life and experienceboth outer and innerfrom which they grew.

If this book leads readers to want to read (and reread) Faulkners novels and stories, it will have served the purpose for which it is intended.

Myself and the World

I WANT TO BE A WRITER LIKE MY GREAT-GRANDDADDY, BILLY Falkner told his third-grade classmates. Years later Billys brother Jack was not surprised when he heard this story, believing that Billy had patterned his life in many ways after his famous ancestor, William Clark Falkner, who came to be known as the Old Colonel.

That ancestor, who died eight years before Faulkner was born, had lived an adventurous, rags-to-riches life. Born in 1825 somewhere in Tennessee as his family migrated westward from the Carolinas, he spent at least some of his formative years in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, where his parents settled for a time. However, around 1840 Falkner migrated to Pontotoc, Mississippi, to cast his lot with an uncle, T. J. Word, his mothers brother and a prominent north Mississippi lawyer. Census records from that period suggest that Williams father, Joseph, had died, so perhaps the oldest son set out to seek support for his widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters.