Carl Rollyson - The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934

Why read another biography of William Faulkner? New facts, new interpretations. I also wanted to write in the light and dark of previous narratives. His biographers remain silent on what they do not know and retreat to what must have been. Long stretches of even the longest biographies have not told me what I want to know. What did it mean to Faulkner to expend so much energy not only on his fiction but on his screenplays? What did his wife, Estelle, think, and what was she doing at crucial periods when only her husbands testimony is available? What is a biographer to do with her erasuresometimes self-inflicted?

As in a Faulkner novel, it is important to preserve the mysteries and not to pretend to know what is not or cannot be known, although, like his characters, I speculate, submitting questions that perhaps others will be able to answer or clarify. Identifying gaps in the evidence can reveal as much about Faulkner as what can be sourced. Minor figures abound because they reveal sides of the quotidian man ignored in previous biographies. I am that species of biographer who believes in presenting the whole man, not just those aspects of his life that pertain to the literary figure.

Although, like most biographers, I take a chronological approach, at times I backtrack, flash back, and flash forward because, as Faulkner said, all of time is inherent in every moment of timethe past, the present, and what is to come. To never deviate from chronology is to suppose life is a matter of just one damn thing after another. Even if that is so, books should not be so. Too many times stories are interrupted in a biography simply because of what happens next. Sometimes chronology has to be broken badly in order for the story to survive.

Like my predecessors, I owe an enormous debt to Joseph Blotner. Some paragraphs of this biography would need a note to Blotner for nearly every sentence, and that would be tedious and counterproductive. So I have not notated facts and details derived from Blotners two-volume and one-volume biographies, but in many cases I have cited his papers, when I can access the raw data that he later transformed on the printed page. Blotner, for a whole

They needed protection, she made clear, from another biographer: Carvel Collins, whose immense collection at the University of Texas is a treasure of primary sources, including interviews with people who had passed away by the time Blotner began his work. Judging by the notes in previous biographies, I am the first biographer to look at every one of the 105 boxes in the Collins collection. His interviews often corroborate Blotner but also add a good deal of texture to this biography. Collins began in the late 1940s to collect everything. By the summer of 1967, he had made more than thirty visits to Oxford, Blotner routinely offered to remove material that offended his sources.

As for the other biographers, they all have their uses. Anyone wishing to understand Faulkners southern background and family history had better read Joel Williamson. For acute psychological analysis, Fred Karl is the go-to biographer. Judith Sensibar restores Estelle Faulkner to an importance that other biographers have occluded. The reasons for her eclipse have their origins in Joseph Blotners reluctance to press her on several important issues. It is true that I felt the need for tact, not only because she had been a faithful friend, and I think, generally a good informant, but for Jills sake too, Blotner wrote to fellow scholar Floyd Watkins. In a way, for his [Faulkners] sakeyou can imagine my feelings of general ambivalence writing an intimate account of the life of my friend who in life had trusted me and whose trust I had tried to deserve. No subsequent biographer had Blotners access to Estelle, who died in 1972.