Blood from a Stone

In a review of Jay Parini's biography of William Faulkner, J. Peder Zane writes:

We hope that biographies such as Jay Parini's "One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner" will illuminate such episodes. Where did Faulkner get the fortitude to continue chasing what the world and experience saw as only windmills? How to explain the grand artistic leap that produced "The Sound and the Fury"? Perhaps if we know how he did it, we might be able to accomplish the same!

Surely this can't be the reason why otherwise intelligent people would want to read a biography of a writer, particularly one about a writer so disinctive in his accomplishments as Faulkner. Perhaps the idea is that the reader might learn not how to write like Faulkner, but how he summoned up the "fortitude" to continue writing in the face of all evidence that it wasn't getting him anywhere. One could imagine some readers who might be curious about such a thing, but if they have to see the reality of a writer dedicated enough to his talent and his vision to keep at it despite what the world seems to think of him corrorborated in a biography, those readers aren't likely to be the type to "accomplish the same" to begin with.

Why should we want to read biographies, perhaps multiple biographies, of writers whose primary claim on our attention is that they were writers, presumably producing work good enough that we continue to read it? I can't think of any viable reasons why we should. The facts of writing itself, the wheres and hows and how oftens, aren't that interesting, and it is these facts that define the writer's "life" insofar as we ought to have any interest in most writers' lives at all. We should settle for the primary fact that a particular writer found the time and the appropriate circumstances in which to write. Everything else is gossip, at best a record of the sorts of things a writer did when he wasn't writing, which again ought not to be of much concern to us since what separates a writer from everyone else, aside from those facts of writing already mentioned, is the work left behind.

What do biographies usually tell us about that work? In my experience, very little. Perhaps there are some truly great biographical works--Ellman's on Joyce, Edel's on James--that provide insight into their subject's work, that provide us with a way of approaching the work we can't get elsewhere, but unfortunately such books are few and far between. I'm sure Parini's book is perfectly competent, will give its readers a satisfactory enough sense of what Faulkner's life was like. Since Parini is himself both a novelist and a critic, it's quite possible what he has to say about Faulkner's books is interesting as well. But if I want some additional commentary about the books, I'd rather turn to a critical book Parini might want to write about Faulkner's work rather than a biography, which almost inevitably gets caught up in discussions about where ideas came from, upon whom certain characters are based, what episodes in the writer's life were transformed into fiction. I'm more interested in the ideas themselves, in experiencing the characters in their artistically embodied forms. I'm more interested in the fiction.

Zane concludes his review by declaring:

Many questions surrounding Faulkner's life are even harder to answer. Parini does not adequately explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County. Parini focuses on that "matchless time" from the late 1920s to the early 1940s when Faulkner produced at least a half dozen masterpieces, but can't begin to explain why his writing fell off thereafter. And the biographer doesn't explore the suicidal tendencies that fueled his drinking and later his horsemanship (which almost killed him on several occasions).

But then, you can't get blood from a stone. Parini's biography is about as good as it will get, which suggests the need for a different approach. Faulkner requires the kind of attention that has been lavished on another enigmatic William, Shakespeare -- a speculative biography modeled after Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant "Will in the World" or a novel such as Richard Nye's masterful "The Late Mr. Shakespeare." Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man.

I suppose readers interested in such voyeuristic subjects as Faulkner's drinking or his "horsemanship" might be disappointed in Parini's handling of them, but I can't imagine that anyone interested in Faulkner's fiction rather than his flaws as a human being would care even a microbit about these things. And why Faulkner's "writing fell off" after the early 40s--although I would argue it merely became more uneven--is less important than the fact that it did. The "why" question can even be answered more immediately by looking at the writing itself: Faulkner wrote less well, the concrete explanations for which can be discerned by examining the work itself carerfully.

What would it mean to "explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County." Explain what? Why it is his "signature achievement"? Read the books and find out. Where an analogy to such and such a location or dwelling or geographical feature depicted in the novels might be found in or around Oxford, Mississippi? Who cares? How Faulkner brooded on the history and social realities of Oxford and its environs and was able to transform it all into compelling fiction that also managed to capture something essential about the American south? This is indeed an interesting question, well worth a book, but unfortunately a biography is not the sort of book that is going to be able to answer it very effectively.

As to a "speculative biography" along the lines of Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare: Why on earth would we need such a thing? Greenblatt has written a "biography" meant to compensate for the lack of known facts about Shakespeare. We know the facts about Faulkner. No "unconventional" reshuffling of these facts is going to shed any more light on Faulkner's work. (If we knew the facts about Shakespeare, no such biography of him would accomplish much, either.) I don't know if it's true or not that "Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man." I still can't figure out why anyone wants to know the "unconventional man" in this way in the first place. Read the books, dammit.

Comments

[tom]

Dan,
This is the third or fourth time I've read one of your anti-biography posts. I understand your reaction to undergraduates' biography-is-destiny approach to analysis, but some of us are curious about writers who have given us pleasure, pissed us off, or otherwise made us think in a new way. I agree with you that only so much of a writer's life can inform the writing itself, but I still enjoyed reading the profile of Alice Munro in NYT (the subject of another post).
cheers,
Tom

[Kevin Holtsberry]

I admit I like biographies. I recently read Jane Smiley's Penguin Life on Charles Dickens and enjoyed it (http://collectedmiscellany.com/archives/000295.php). I know I am not going to read all of Dickens so I enjoyed reading an intelligent bio on his life and his work. I don't want psychological analysis masquerading as biography, but I do enjoy an intelligent discussion of what an author's life was like; how his work was received at the time; how his life and work changed over time' etc. I am not looking for some sort of Gnostic truth about the subject just well rounded knowledge.

[Chris]

I'm not as hostile toward bios as you, Dan, but I do question why we need _another_ Faulkner bio at this point. It's only about fifteen years, I think, since Frederick Karl's enormous bio came out, and at the time that book was considered an adjunct to Blotner's massive work, not a major reassessment. Could a new view really be in the offing now?

I have to admit that as a young and completely unpublished writer I was inspired by Karl's book, particularly by that specific juncture Zane cites. I seem to recall that Karl himself was somewhat astonished by the direction Faulkner chose to take: he's watched Soldier's Pay and Mosquitoes fail, he's seen Flags in the Dust turned into Sartoris, he's experiencing financial hardship as he embarks upon his marriage. I believe Karl puts it, "We would not expect him to write Sound and the Fury at this time." Nowadays, perhaps not.

[Ray Davis]

I'm considerably more obsessional in my dislike of biographies, but have to admit they're pretty much what "literature" means for most of the people who give "literature" what commercial life it has. In the absence of community, what art has to sell is self-worth.

Since at least the nineteenth century, the poetry audience has spent more energy imagining being Poets than paying attention to the taste of the words; that's just spread to other areas of writing as they've become less culturally central. Since commercial narrative requires a hero with whom the audience can identify, any art that works toward different goals tends either to be embedded in such narrative or ignored. We see a Jackson Pollock painting as part of the Jackson Pollock story, with ourselves as the lead (or, should we not be a Pollock fan, our abusive spouse as the lead). "The sporadically OK Sex Pistols supplied the soundtrack to the fabulously successful Sex Pistols story."

We protest, but it's inevitable under our circumstances. I try to read James Joyce's novels for themselves, but Joyce had to playact Stephen Hero before growing up enough to produce them.

[Dan Green]

Kevin: If you think about it, in most cases you already have answers to the questions you pose before you even begin a biography of a writer: A writer's life is likely to be like anyone else's, except he/she wrote books. Except in the rarest of instances, a writer's work was received as most serious writing is received: mostly with indifference. A writer's work is going to change over time in exactly the way you would expect from someone growing older. (You can also determine this for yourself by reading the books.)

Chris: I would not discount the possibility that a reader might be inspired by Faulkner's (or any writer's dedication to his art in the way you describe.

Ray: Once again, you speak wisely.