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I do not delude myself that Faulkner would have welcomed this book. But his reasons might have differed from his repugnance toward biographical investigations that began with Cowley in the 1940s and continued unabated. The biographical portrait proposed here has no interest in straightening his life out by way of retrospective fiction-making. It tries not to offer—he might have recognized—a monumentalizing of a life often gone badly wrong during its actual unfolding. More, this portrait attaches no blame to its subject’s missteps. My attempt is guided by one of the
stunning dimensions of Faulkner’s great work: its refusal to judge, even as it does not sentimentally excuse. The causes for stumbling, his work lets us extensively see, are too inextricable and incorrigible to warrant the fatuousness of judgment. Finally, I see the messiness of Faulkner’s life as the fertilizing loam for his novelistic soaring. Although he would have resisted this intrusion into his privacy, I fondly hope he might nevertheless have recognized himself in the mirror of my pages. And, more fondly yet, that he might have conceded my premise: that his extraordinarily troubling work was rooted—where else?—in his ordinarily troubled life.

Faulkner’s life revealed micro and macro causes for experiencing time as unmanageable turbulence. At the micro level, he suffered a number of traumatic events. A primary one involved his ill-timed and mismanaged erotic life, launched by his early failure (1918) to marry Estelle Oldham, his childhood sweetheart. Instead of eloping with him, she married Cornell Franklin and departed from Oxford, Mississippi, to live in Hawaii and, later, the Far East. During the next decade she returned often to Oxford, bringing with her not only the burden of a failed marriage but the two children who embodied the change it had wrought. Seemingly against his own better judgment, as well as against his underlying sense of this returned Estelle as “damaged goods”—no longer his “still unravished” Keatsean bride—Faulkner could not resist renewing relations with her. She finalized her divorce from Cornell Franklin in 1927, and they married in 1929, sealing a (re)union as foredoomed as it would prove to be inextricable. Theirs was a marriage Faulkner would spend the rest of his life committed to, suffering from, betraying, but never severing.

Inseparable from Faulkner’s mismanaged, ill-timed love life was his mismanaged, ill-timed war experience. Wounded by Estelle’s marriage to another man, he was determined to enter the Great War. This was easier said than done, since Faulkner—mindful of his ancestor, Colonel William C. Falkner of Civil War fame—was not eager to enter
his
war as a foot soldier. But he was too short, by half an inch—too light as well—to be accepted into the aviation section of the U.S. army. Undaunted, he made his way to Toronto, and—masquerading as the scion of an aristocratic British family—joined a flight training program with the Canadian air force. Although he did not earn his wings until late December 1918 (over a month after Armistice), Faulkner returned to Oxford in the role and uniform of a war veteran, full of stories of European flights—with self-declared wounds in his head and his knee to bear out his claims. Parading through Oxford’s streets, he came to be referred to as “Count No ’Count.”

Later, there was his brother Dean’s fatal crash (in 1935) in a plane that Faulkner (who had taken up flying for real after years of pretended wartime flight) had sold to him at a much-reduced price. Amateur aviation was all the rage in the early 1930s, and Dean’s disastrous love affair with the plane might have occurred without input from his older brother. Yet there is no way Faulkner could have viewed it with detachment, free of blame. In these instances, we can see how Faulkner mismanaged the event and came to be haunted by possibilities passed rather than seized, menaces signed on to before they later blew up in his face. His moves in time seemed out of joint, careening at a pace he did not master. Belated, untimely, he emerged more as the shaped creature in his own life drama than (as he would be) its lordly, shaping creator.

Macro time for Faulkner was no less disorienting. Born in 1897 into a once illustrious Mississippi family now down on its luck, Faulkner grew up as a son of the New South ambivalently enthralled to an Old South, impotent since 1865. His mind was stocked with the manners, extravagances, and racial norms of an earlier time. Faulkner thus experienced repercussions set loose by ancestors long dead, troubles more broadly regional, if not national, yet for all that troubles he could not disown. He was war-wounded not just by the Great War he tried to participate in, but by the Civil War of his great-grandfather’s romantic exploits—the defining war of Southern manhood, that other war he missed. So micro time exploded upon him—as sudden assault, a moment’s invasion—before he could get his bearings and read its promise/menace, while macro time affected him no less damagingly, because of its long-accumulated burden of implication. Inasmuch as nothing passed (once and for all) in Faulkner’s time-arrested South, the dead of 1865 lost none of their deforming power. Under the impress of the old ways of doing things, he bought (in 1930) his own “big house,” Rowan Oak. There his traditional model of largess and noblesse oblige prompted him to support a retinue of black servants. He took financial responsibility for parents and siblings and their orphaned offspring as well. Finally, imbued with a residual sense of the charm of older ways, Faulkner remained throughout his life a hunter and a horseman. Such behavior led to his getting thrown repeatedly and further damaging an already badly damaged back. Much of this lifestyle was belated—consisting of insistent (and, often, once-aristocratic) roles summoned into play by the call of a past that refused to pass.

What was missing in Faulknerian time was manageability: time as neither micro (shard-like, invasive) nor macro (accumulated over decades,
overwhelming), but in-between and negotiable. Manageable time fuels the Western liberal narrative of progress—the story of individual struggle and resolution. But neither Faulkner’s life nor his art featured progress. In his life he experienced, and in his art he explored, the unwanted “other” of progress. Both the life and the work reveal an individual incoherently aggregated in time. Social space in Faulkner’s life and work appears, likewise, as aggregated rather than ordered. Ostensibly segregated spaces fail to quarantine difference; leakage occurs everywhere. Genealogies of scandalously mixed blood haunt his novels, perhaps his life as well. In so doing, they complicate the tidier narrative of American exceptionalism, revealing the underweave of the American success story.

Such, in outline, is the gesture of unpreparedness—of belatedness in time and inefficacy of role—constituted by Faulkner’s life. In the pages that follow I amplify, enrich, and supply nuance to this gesture. But I have no interest in laying out, extensively, the multitude of known facts about Faulkner’s ancestry, his family, his acquaintances, his part-time jobs, his escapades in New Orleans, his interludes in Hollywood, his travels for the State Department (in the 1950s, after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize and become famous), his teaching stints at Princeton and the University of Virginia. I attend to these, but I want to center on the bonfire, not get enmeshed in the innumerable sticks and branches of data that may, at best, have contributed indirectly. Biographies regularly seek to provide an exhaustive anatomy of a life’s sticks and logs: too rarely do they reveal the conflagration these made possible.

Like all writers concerned with Faulkner’s life, I am embarked on a narrative of why he matters. But in order to keep the priority of
cant matter
in mind, I have sought to minimize the traps of linear time, retrospective clarity, achieved becoming. I pursue his career in time in ways that make room for the role of stumbling—of being in the dark, under assault rather than gaining control—in both the life and the work. Life as a forward-moving and unrehearsable lurching, art as a retrospective and precious ordering: can this opposition—once it is transposed to the scene of writing—even be contested? Can
cant matter
be
put into words
at all? When Faulkner insisted (repeatedly) that his work never escaped failure, however grand or even magnificent, he was being neither coy nor falsely modest. Writing—because it operates otherwise than life—is condemned to failure. It is not the experience of stumbling through time, it can never substitute for that experience. Faulkner became a great writer when he first realized (or wrote as though he realized) that there is something intrinsically mendacious about narrative’s treatment of time. Narrative seizes life trajectories condemned
to stumbling and—by the act of
telling
them—binds those trajectories into retrospective order. Dedicated to the fiction of becoming—the calm finally attained, after the storm—rather than attempting (impossibly) to say the real in its present incoherence, narrative seems shaped so as to console. Or at least to domesticate, render tame. Its normal mission is to supply what we surely have too little of in our moment-by-moment lives: grace, cogency, purpose.

How can I bring to life a condition that biography as a genre is designed to transcend? How convey—in what is after all a narrative—the reality of Faulkner’s stumbling in time, and of his learning how to write that stumbling? I attempt to do this in several ways, with certain attendant costs and consequences.

I have chosen to thematize Faulkner’s life and art as a narrative—in five different keys—of trouble encountered but not overcome. Devoting an extensive chapter to each of these keys, I begin chapter
I
with an exploration of Faulkner’s tormented life between November 1927 (when his publisher rejected
Flags in the Dust)
and June 1929 (the month of his marriage, sought yet dreaded, to now-divorced Estelle). That chapter then turns a doubt-darkened eye on Faulkner’s earlier writings. It homes in retrospectively, as he might have done, on their greatest weakness: their playing it safe, their refusal to expose and tap their author’s vulnerability. Such self-risking would emerge full-blown in the masterpieces soon to appear,
The Sound and the Fury
and
As I Lay Dying
.

Chapter 2
opens with an earlier crisis—perhaps the most anguishing experience in Faulkner’s life—his failed elopement. That chapter traces his careening life for the next dozen years, ending with a consideration of the masterpieces that emerged between 1929 and 1932:
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary
, and
Light in August
. In
chapter 3
, the biographical and the cultural lenses widen as I probe Faulkner’s ways of living and writing his region’s racial confusion. I seek to lay out arguably his greatest claim on us—his extraordinary entry into the nightmare of Southern race relations, in
Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!
and
Go Down, Moses
.

Chapter 4
illuminates the countermoves—drunken binges and love affairs—Faulkner pursued as bids for peace (or failing that, at least as temporary escape from the insoluble predicaments of his life). This chapter ends by probing the novels of erotic passion—
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
and
The Hamlet
—that he wrote while enthralled with Meta Carpenter. Finally,
chapter 5
(“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”) attends to the replays and repetitions—as well as the frustrations and the fame—that filled Faulkner’s
later years. At the same time it proposes, in summary fashion, a brief account of the later work from
Intruder in the Dust
through
The Reivers
.

None of these chapters scrupulously respects chronological order (although my narrative does advance—erratically—in time). Instead each chapter, entering the life at a moment of sudden or cumulative stress, stays with the dynamics and fallout of that stress in ways that no biography committed to progressing responsibly from 1897 to 1962 can afford to do. In this sense, I seek to “compose Faulkner,” rearranging the materials of his life and art so as to seize on latent patterns within a larger troubled weave.

I “compose” him in another sense as well. I pretend now and then to “become Faulkner,” to narrate—as subjective experience not seen past or later diagnosed—some of his moment-by-moment dilemmas. In these vignettes I seek less to recuperate the life into meaning than to articulate it as process, to fashion—and pass on to my reader—something resembling its turbulent texture. Although the biographical data buttressing these simulations are well established, such sequences involve—of course—invention on my part. I am not so naïve as to believe that I could actually “become Faulkner”! My aim is heuristic: to simulate (at crucial instances) the precious life-reality that escapes all biographies—what it might have felt like
to be Faulkner
, in present time and cascading trouble. Invention, then, not for its own sake, but to put flesh on the primary bones of my argument: that unmanageable trouble in time emerges as the fault line joining Faulkner’s discretely disturbed life with his inexhaustibly disturbing novels.

I approach the great novels as the bonfire that it took his stumbling and off-balance life to make possible. After all, the fundamental reason we write (and read) biography is that its subject produced work of great magnitude. We want to know in what generative soil that work was rooted. We want to know about the man’s life—the sticks and branches that make it up—but mainly in the service of a larger desire: how does such magnificent work come out of this particular life?

That question guides my book. Nothing guarantees that I will succeed, but—as Faulkner might have said—this is at least the right way to fail. Exploring the turbulence that marked his life, I seek to do justice to the ways in which the feel and texture of his great novels—their enabling assumptions and tortuous procedures—reprise and unforgettably transform such turbulence.
²
The measure of my success can only be the extent to which my work inspires you to go to the novels themselves. There, in the temple of his prose, the identity of Faulkner that matters most resides.
³