Faulkner, William, 1897-1962
from Literature Online biography


William Faulkner (1897-1962) was one of America's greatest novelists and a Nobel Prize-winner, whose work is characterised by what he himself called his 'illimitable courage for rhetoric' (cited by Brodhead) and by a unique blend of high modernism and Southern localism. While taking inspiration from T.S. Eliot and James Joyce , Faulkner spent his career carefully building up the contours of an imaginary Mississippi county, Yoknapatawpha (closely based on his home county of Lafayette), whose detailed realisation has often been compared to the terrains invented by Balzac or Thomas Hardy . His writing 'always insists on its style' (Brodhead), to an extent that many -- especially early -- critics regarded as wilful obscurantism, and his best novels are riotously polyvocal, their multiple points of view acting as 'so many different ways of composing a world through words' (Brodhead). His trademarks include family decline, incest, race relations, vengeance, madness, memory, haunting and violence, enacted often without clear cause or principle and without poetic justice, but overseen by an implacable fate. While it is certainly true that 'when the tricky business of representing mental processes is concerned, sentences can veer off in strange directions, sometimes go on for pages, or seem to break down before their point is clearly made' (Rampton), Marius has argued that the seeming difficulty of reading Faulkner lies in the fact that 'the novels come to us as a block of experience, and it is up to us to make sense of them in just the way that it is up to us to make sense of the body of experience that is our own life'.

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on 25 September 1897, the eldest of four sons of Maud and Murry Falkner -- he later re-added the 'u', which had been removed by an ancestor, the 'Old Colonel' who, according to biographers such as Gray, was a prominent family 'ghost' and inspiration for figures such as Old Bayard in Sartoris / Flags in the Dust (1929/1973). The Falkners moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1902. Murry, who had a clerical job at the University of Mississippi, was something of a dreamer and never kept his family in much more than genteel poverty; Maud seems to have been a powerful figure with artistic leanings, who was very close to William. Another prominent figure in Faulkner's childhood was his black nanny, Caroline Barr, a model for the warm, redoubtable Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury (1929). It is notable that father figures are recessive or lacking in Faulkner's early and middle novels -- only coming to prominence in later works such as The Reivers (1962). Fraternal and brother-sister relationships are the stuff of much Faulknerian drama (Bayard and John Sartoris in Sartoris / Flags in the Dust ; Benjy, Caddy and Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury ; the various Bundren siblings in As I Lay Dying , 1930; Henry and Bon in Absalom Absalom! 1936) and biographers have speculated that Faulkner's close but turbulent relationship with his younger brother Dean lies behind some of these fictional sibling bonds. Both Faulkner and Dean took up recreational flying in the 1930s and Dean, as did John Sartoris, died in an air crash (in 1935, not long after Faulkner's novel Pylon had fictionalised a recreational pilot's death). Faulkner was not an aficionado of school, often playing truant and finally leaving in eleventh grade (1915). He mingled with Mississippi university students in the following years and enrolled as a 'special student' for a few semesters after the First World War (1919-20), but he had little formal further education. He began to write 'aesthetic' poems in 1915, while working at various odd jobs, and published several in student periodicals in 1919-20, as well as writing a verse play, Marionettes , for the university.

Faulkner enlisted in the Canadian Air Force in 1918, but had not finished his training when the war ended. He seems to have embellished his wartime experiences considerably, though he later stood back from his tall tales (Gray). The figure of the returning warrior was of considerable imaginative import ( Sartoris / Flags in the Dust hinges on the return from war of young Bayard, the death of his brother John, and the ghosts of past Civil War-era ancestors) and informs his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), at whose centre is the figure of wounded soldier Donald Mahon. This novel, though not much more than promising apprentice work, also initiates the Faulknerian technique of multiple viewpoints: Mahon himself is not so much the protagonist as the centre around which other characters' perceptions revolve. Before his first novel, though, Faulkner, helped by his early mentor Philip Stone, published a collection of poems, The Marble Faun (1924), and spent time in New York, New Orleans and Paris before returning to the place that was to become the lifeblood of his fiction, Oxford, Mississippi.

Inspired by the advice of the famous regionalist Sherwood Anderson , whom he met in the early 1920s, Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha tale was a story entitled 'Father Abraham' (though this was not published until 1983), but the place really emerged in the novel that began in 1927 as Flags in the Dust , but -- after being turned down by Faulkner's publisher -- was re-written as Sartoris (1929; the original Flags in the Dust was eventually published in 1973). The novel introduces the prominent Faulknerian theme of memory and family 'ghosts', telling the story of dashing pilot Bayard Sartoris and staid, dreamy lawyer Horace Benbow, whose sister Narcissa marries Bayard. The story is intercut with those of Bayard's dead brother, John, and of Civil War-era ancestors whose exploits seem to have been based on those of earlier Fa(u)lkners. Rampton summarises the book's theme as 'how a family's legends affect the way the past presents itself to the minds of the living'. The unusually close brother-sister bond of Narcissa and Horace Benbow would be developed in the incestuous feelings of Quentin for his sister Caddy in The Sound and the Fury and the potentially incestuous relationship of Bon and Judith in Absalom Absalom! . Horace and Narcissa resurface in Sanctuary (1931), in which Horace -- by now troubled with forbidden desire for his step-daughter -- is the lawyer who fails to save a wrongly accused man from being convicted of raping a judge's daughter.

Stories of various generations of the Sartoris family make up the novel The Unvanquished (1938), which is a loose collection of tales, most of which had previously been published in periodicals; the best known is 'An Odor of Verbena'. Sartoris was generally seen by critics as a considerable advance on its predecessor, Mosquitoes (1927), now commonly viewed as Faulkner's worst novel. Marius tersely summarises its plot as follows: 'a group of people are run aground in a yacht on Lake Pontchartrain outside of New Orleans and they talk a lot'. In both this work and Soldiers' Pay Faulkner owes an obvious debt to modernist writing (especially Joyce and Eliot 's 'Prufrock'), using techniques of symbolism and fragmentation and creating characters more of ideas than flesh and blood, 'marble-faun type characters', as Rampton, alluding to Faulkner's early poetry, describes them.

In 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, whom he had dated as a teenager -- he had been bitterly disappointed when she first married another, but by the time they got together, after her divorce, he had experienced other loves (notably Helen Caird) and the marriage was not destined to be totally happy: Faulkner had frequent affairs, including those with Meta Carpenter whom he met while working as a Hollywood script-writer in the 1930s and Joan Williams. Estelle and Faulkner had two daughters, Alabama (who died aged just nine days in 1931) and Jill (b. 1933). Faulkner's domestic life was doubtless harmed by his bouts of excessive drinking -- he spent numerous spells in drying-out clinics but never overcame his addiction. In 1930 Faulkner bought the antebellum mansion Rowan Oak, that would become the permanent family home.

The Sound and the Fury was, according to Brodhead, 'the book in which Faulkner first fully discovered how to write like Faulkner'; and Bassett claims that the great mystery of Faulkner study is 'to explain the evolution of The Sound and the Fury out of three competent but hardly distinguished novels and a decade of rather fragile poetry and short prose'. Compared to the relatively conventional narratives of his first novels, The Sound and the Fury is more like a 'long tone poem' (Marius), constructed from four interlinked narratives. The subject is the decline of a Southern family, exemplified by the gradual disintegration of a figure who is given no voice of her own, Caddy Compson. The first section is told by the mentally impaired Benjy Compson, a man in his thirties with the mind of a toddler, and is the 'tale told by an idiot' from which the novel derives its title; subsequent sections are told by Quentin Compson, brother to Benjy and Caddy, who is in mental turmoil because of his sister's promiscuity -- his concern for her honour leads him to attempted murder, incestuous fantasies and finally suicide; by a third sibling, Jason; and by a third-person narrator.

As well as their different narrative perspectives, the novel's sections are temporally disjointed: Benjy's 'present' is about eighteen years after Quentin's (which is the day of his suicide), though both dwell obsessively on memories -- Benjy's mostly of episodes involving Caddy in their childhood, and Quentin's of more recent occurrences, surrounding Caddy's adolescent sexual awakening. In the third section, Caddy's illegitimate daughter, another Quentin, is the focus of much of Jason's attention, often sadistic. The difficulties of time-scheme are exacerbated by Benjy's section barely distinguishing between past and present, so that Jason's section is necessary to make sense of earlier chronology -- as in life (and the lives depicted in the novel) we must return to earlier details in order to discover meaning. It is difficult to adequately summarise The Sound and the Fury , which remained Faulkner's favourite of his novels, but Faulkner regarded Caddy (who gradually disappears from its pages) as the key, famously asserting that 'I, who never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl' (cited widely, in Gray, for example). The novel is full of cruelty and trauma -- Benjy's castration, Quentin's suicide by drowning, Jason's violence to his niece, and that niece's repetition of her mother's promiscuity -- but its language is often highly poetic, the novel showcasing the birth of the famous Faulknerian 'accumulated' sentence, 'expanded to incredible lengths' (Willis, in Brodhead, ed.) with often combined epithets. Benjy's language, however, is simple in both vocabulary and construction, though often opaque in meaning, as in the following extract, recalling Caddy's kindness:
Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep.
Benjy's narrative is mostly, as here, concerned with sensory impressions in all their immediacy, while Quentin deals in abstractions, not least time and memory: in one scene he tries to arrest time by breaking the hands off a watch. The final section of The Sound and the Fury (which tells of Jason trying to recover money his niece has taken from him, money that was hers by right; and Dilsey's attendance at an Easter service) is often associated with the black nanny Dilsey, as she comes to prominence here. A strong character who preaches common sense and good values, Dilsey exemplifies Faulkner's tendency to portray blacks in a somewhat idealised way -- his black characters are shown to be happier and better grounded because they 'remain close to a concrete world of values -- less perverted by abstraction -- more honest in recognizing what is essential and elemental than are most of the white people' (Howe, in Brodhead, ed.). This tendency (found also in 'The Bear', for example) means they are often objectified as exemplars of patience, honesty and courage, rather than being given individual subjectivity (Gray). Faulkner is preoccupied with race and identity, most strikingly in a character whose negro blood is never confirmed: in Light in August (1932) it is the orphan Joe Christmas's uncertainty about whether he is of mixed race that seems to precipitate his downfall. Intruder in the Dust (1948) is another novel with a question of race at its heart, using a 'whodunit' structure to dramatise racial injustice.

As I Lay Dying (1930) is often judged Faulkner's masterpiece. It is the story, in fifteen intermingled voices, of the poor-white Bundren family's journey to bury their matriarch Addie Bundren in her home town of Jefferson, a journey beset by troubles, including fire, flood and the increasing smelliness of the corpse. It swaps the patrician characters and claustrophobic setting of The Sound and the Fury for a no less dysfunctional but extensive, carnivalesque family saga. The novel's keynote is pride and stoicism -- 'It never bothered me much', says Cash (Addie's son and coffin-maker) of a six-day journey in a springless wagon with a broken leg. Gray describes its structure as 'restlessly dialectical', offering us its characters as they see themselves and as they are seen by others, so that identity is in constant flux. Meaning, he argues, is found in the 'warring space between voices', and language is insistently attention-grabbing ('furious attitude' as Faulkner describes human lives' 'ravel[ling] out' at one point) and intrinsically untrustworthy: as Addie Bundren muses,
I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.
Of course, much of the power of As I Lay Dying comes from the disjuncture between characters' unprepossessing external appearances and such framing of their thoughts to illuminate the human condition. Bedient (in Brodhead, ed.) observes that the pitting of fierce pride against naked human vulnerability -- forces he sees personified in the characters of Cash and Darl, two of Addie's sons, the latter of whom is consigned to an asylum when they reach Jefferson -- is the structuring principle of As I Lay Dying ; but others have found it in fatalism (epitomised by Anse, Addie's husband), which 'comforts' because it 'removes the weight of responsibility' (Marius).

From the formidable Addie (who oversees the making of her own coffin at the novel's opening) to the pregnant and panicking Dewey Dell, As I Lay Dying provides some of Faulkner's most notable female characters. His next novel, Sanctuary presents another striking female, the irresponsible, innocent but unwittingly wicked (because utterly self-absorbed) Temple Drake, whose flirtatiousness precipitates a grisly series of events including her own infamous rape with a corncob and the eventual wrongful conviction of a man who is then burnt to death by a lynch mob. The novel was a succes de scandale , and its depiction of a lurid underworld of bootleggers and brothels into which judge's daughter Temple is drawn was a departure for Faulkner. In the same year the short-story collection These Thirteen appeared. Other books of the early 1930s were a second poetry collection, Green Bough (1933), the story collection Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), and Pylon (1935), a poor novel about a pilot's death. These less important works were bracketed by two powerful novels, Light in August (1932) and Absalom Absalom! (1936). The former tells the stories of Lena Grove, a heavily pregnant woman seeking her runaway lover, and Joe Christmas, a drifter turned murderer when his affair with a lady of a higher class ends with her renunciation of him. Lena and Joe never meet, but their parallel stories represent two forces that affect the novel's community as they pass through -- Lena's 'placid life force' (she ends the novel still stoically journeying, now with her baby) and Joe's 'wild and tormented' questioning, which leads to the murder and his castration and lynching (Marius). Another significant figure in the book is the Rev. Gail Hightower whose high ideals blind him to the sordid realities of his own domestic life, and a prominent theme is talk, rumour, gossip, the force that, in a small-town environment, seems to take on a life of its own.

Absalom Absalom! is a 'collection of narratives gathered in the consciousness of the doomed Quentin Compson' (Marius), whom we meet at Harvard, some months before his suicide. Though the novel does not cover the same stories as The Sound and the Fury , it is, Marius suggests, essential to join the two books, to recognise, for example that Quentin's assumption of a story of incest might reflect on his own tortured state of mind regarding his sister (see also Irwin, in Brodhead, ed.) and that he will shortly kill himself. The story Quentin is reconstructing is that of Thomas Sutpen, a self-made planter whose almost demonic energy is driven by the desire for revenge upon the rich whites who turned him from their door as a child. Through narrations by characters including Quentin's room-mate and Miss Rosa Coldfield -- who was once engaged to Sutpen, previously married to her sister, but refused to marry him after he insisted she conceive a child first -- we piece together, with Quentin, the story of Sutpen's life and the mystery of why his son Henry murdered his sister's suitor, Bon (it is possible that Bon was the octoroon son of Sutpen and his Haitian first wife, so the match would have meant both incest and miscegenation). Such an outline cannot do justice to the novel's rich evocation of the power and threat of memory and story-telling, the slippery nature of history:
Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool [. . .]
Requiem for a Nun (1951) would later state the point more starkly: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.'

Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel constructed from stories about the McCaslin family (whom we first met in The Unvanquished , 1938) and is most notable for its centrepiece, 'The Bear', which is often reprinted in isolation as a powerful meditation on American wilderness and masculinity (with typically Faulknerian side-issues of miscegenation and incest). It has been said that Faulkner 'spent the first half of his career doing his work, and the second half trying to say how he did it' (Brodhead), and it is generally accepted that his work declined after the early 1940s, indeed after the intensely creative years that began with The Sound and the Fury (1929) and ended with Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Some critics (for example Bassett) have argued that The Hamlet (1940) and Go Down, Moses still show him near the height of his powers, but his best works were certainly written within a very short period. 'Novels' like The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses , which consist of short stories yoked together, or The Wild Palms (which is effectively two unrelated novellas told in alternating chapters) present certain infelicities of form; and the Snopes trilogy ( The Hamlet , 1940; The Town , 1957; The Mansion , 1959), which represented Faulkner's fullest working out of his Yoknapatawpha terrain in chronicling the rise to prominence of the rapaciously self-serving redneck Snopes family are less enjoyed than his earlier works. The Hamlet is based on previously published separate stories about the Snopes family, including 'Barn Burning'. Knight's Gambit (1949) was a collection of detective short stories, using a recurring observer character, Gavin Stevens, who also features in the Sutpen novels and others. Gray suggests that these and later novels such as Intruder in the Dust represent a shift in style from the radically open to the declamatory, and are 'vitiated by Faulkner's apparent need to strike the public pose and make the public statement', thus becoming 'nostalgic and monolithic'. Requiem for a Nun is a curious hybrid, part novel, part play, written in collaboration with Joan Williams (with whom Faulkner had an affair), that returns to the life of Temple Drake, now related by marriage to Gavin Stevens, and events surrounding the murder of her infant daughter. It was later adapted for the stage by Albert Camus (1956). A Fable (1954) -- a complex work about the reincarnation of Christ during the First World War, about strife and innocence -- took Faulkner a decade to write and, though it was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize, is not highly regarded today. The Reivers , the novel published shortly before Faulkner died, is a picaresque romp that owes as much to Faulkner's family reminiscences as to imaginative power.

Faulkner died on 6 July 1962, having become ill after a bad fall from a horse. Though now assured of his place near the top of the American literary canon, and the subject of countless volumes of criticism, Faulkner did not achieve early or consistent success. His work was patchily admired by critics and certain novels ( Sanctuary , for example) sold well, but all his earlier works were out of print by 1945 and he was in danger of being consigned to obscurity. Malcolm Cowley 's Pocket Faulkner (1946) did much to return him to prominence. During the early 1930s, Faulkner was often financially straitened, and attempted to ease the situation by selling short stories to magazines and, from 1932, by stints as a Hollywood script writer. He was responsible for several well-known film scripts, including The Big Sleep (1946). His finances improved greatly when several of his novels were made into films, including Sanctuary as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), The Intruder in the Dust (1948) and The Hamlet as The Long Hot Summer (1956); and in his later, post-Nobel, years he became prosperous by lecturing, undertaking overseas tours on behalf of the US State Department (including to Venezuela and Japan), and serving as a writer in residence at the University of Virginia. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature (actually awarded in 1950) and subsequently several other honours, including the Legion d'Honneur (1951) and two Pulitzer Prizes that seem as much influenced by his grand-old-man status as by the quality of the books rewarded (1955, for A Fable and 1962 for The Reivers ).

Faulkner's life and work have been almost obsessively chronicled in the past few decades, with volumes ranging from weighty biographies (such as Richard Gray's The Life of William Faulkner , 1994) to specialised studies such as Michael Wainwright's Darwin and Faulkner's Novels: Evolution and Southern Fiction (2008). Perhaps the most useful books for the non-specialist are collections of essays by different critics, such as Richard Brodhead (ed.) Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (1983). Contemporary criticism is well represented in Nicholas Fargnoli (ed.) William Faulkner: A Literary Companion . Individual critics' views of a range of novels may be found in Richard Marius, Reading Faulkner (2006), and John E. Bassett, Visions and Revisions: Essays on Faulkner (1989). A useful slim volume about Faulkner's life and works is William Faulkner: A Literary Life by David Rampton (2008).

SJ , 2011