William Faulkner Day by Day

For a writer who fiercely guarded his privacy, especially after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950 and becoming a literary celebrity, who professed a desire that “the printed books” be his only imprint on history, and who once proposed as his “obit and epitaph both” a single line—“He made the books and he died”—William Faulkner (1897–1962) left a massive documentary trail for posterity, one that has proven irresistible to biographers: literary, critical, psychoanalytic, feminist, popular, authorized, unauthorized, over a dozen in all since Joseph Blotner inaugurated the genre in 1974. Most recent among that cohort is Carl Rollyson, whose two-volume Life of William Faulkner was published in 2020. In William Faulkner Day by Day, however, Rollyson proposes a different kind of biographical undertaking. His wager is that, by stripping away the interpretive and narrative scaffolding that is ordinarily the biographer’s stock in trade and leaving only the bare facts of what Faulkner said, wrote, and did, as they can be reconstructed and assigned a date from letters, interviews, publishers’ files, contracts, press coverage, daybooks, inscribed volumes, deeds, wills, bills, receipts, aviator’s logbooks, tax documents, farm records, and on and on, what remains—a Faulkner annals, if you will—might serve two purposes. On one hand, William Faulkner Day by Day offers itself to the reader as a reference work, somewhat like Michel Gresset’s Faulkner Chronology of 1985 but much more granular in its details and ranging much farther beyond the literary career and into the personal life than Gresset attempted. As a reference work, the book invites an ad hoc sort of approach, dipping into the material on a whim or as one’s own particular agenda demands. On the other hand, Rollyson’s book issues an implicit invitation to readers to play biographer themselves, to read through the work in its entirety and supply their own narrative scaffolding, to come to their own judgments about the meaning of the author’s life, writings, and career. Rollyson thus aims to kindle future biographies that might build on the foundations he has not so much laid as excavated.Though Rollyson’s timeline ends with Faulkner’s burial in Oxford, Mississippi, on the day after the author’s death in July 1962, it begins eighty years before Faulkner’s birth, with Mississippi statehood in 1817. From there, it takes thirteen pages for Faulkner to get himself born. Here the going is closer to year by year than day by day, as Rollyson gathers milestones from three generations of Faulkner’s ancestors. The record remains fairly bare-bones until 1918, the year Faulkner turned twenty-one. That year was eventful for several reasons. In the spring, his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, married another man, and a brokenhearted Faulkner sought a change of scenery, joining his friend Phil Stone in New Haven, where he quickly hired on at a munitions company ramping up its workforce for wartime (35). A few months later, seeking a more glamorous way to contribute to the war effort in Europe, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps by impersonating a British citizen, and on July 9 he reported for cadet training in Toronto, where he remained until his discharge in December, a month after the Armistice, without ever having seen action or even flown a plane (37–44). What he did do, however, was to make his first big splash in the archive, thanks to his many letters home throughout his first extended period away from Mississippi. Largely as a result of this paper trail, 1918 marks the spot where Rollyson’s book begins to make good on its title. Although 1917 rates fewer than a dozen lines in the chronology, it takes ten full pages, and almost ninety different calendar dates, to cover 1918. From a documentary standpoint, then, if not necessarily a narrative one, the year of Faulkner’s majority doubles as the annus mirabilis of William Faulkner Day by Day, the real takeoff point.From here, Faulkner has forty-four years of life left, and it takes almost 250 pages, or roughly six pages per year, to resolve them into their constitutive days. Nowadays, of course, credit card transactions and smart phone data could easily yield a far more copious record of even the most mundane American life, but one has to admire Rollyson’s resourcefulness, and sheer moxie, in gleaning the archive so exhaustively for day-by-day details. Still, the approach does lead to some infelicities. One does not, for instance, have to admire the book’s editing. It gives frequent evidence of having been assembled at the word processor, through extensive cutting and pasting, rather than having been composed there. As a result, many items wind up out of place in the chronological sequence, while others are repeated there, sometimes confusingly or contradictorily so. Faulkner appears to complete the manuscript of Soldiers’ Pay, his first novel, on May 11 and May 25, 1925 (61), then there are entries for the novel’s publication on February 2 and February 25, 1926 (68). The Sound and the Fury was not published on October 7, 1928, as page 72 would have you believe, but on that date the following year, as noted correctly two pages later. The publication of a short story in 1932 is mishandled in the same way (94). One could go on to cite many more mistakes like these, which more careful editing and proofreading should have caught, along with any number of misspellings and mispunctuations sprinkled throughout the volume. Admittedly, these are minor distractions, but they add up, particularly for readers taking up Rollyson’s challenge to find a figure in the carpet among his chronological threads.Rollyson’s quest to fill as many dates as he can on the Faulkner calendar leads to other problems. How many times, for instance, does a reader really need to be told that the Faulkners had dinner or drinks with Malcolm Franklin, Estelle’s son from her first marriage (207–17)? There are nine identically worded entries from 1962 to the effect that Faulkner watched the television sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? at a friend’s home (285–86). By the same token, the numerous entries for the office hours Faulkner held as writer in residence at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958, also identically worded, grow numbingly repetitive (256–58). Some readers will question whether such incursions on their patience and focus are ultimately justified for the sake of completeness. Indeed, simply varying the diction a little would have helped the days go by.Does the gambit of letting the reader supply the narrative pay off? For this critic, the results of a cover-to-cover reading were a bit of a mixed bag. While I cannot say that I came away from these pages with a new biographical paradigm or center of gravity for Faulkner, there were some interesting epiphanies along the way, ones that might bear fruit in the hands of the right scholar. In my own work, for instance, I have been guilty of discounting the six years from Go Down, Moses (1942) to Intruder in the Dust (1948), by far Faulkner’s longest gap between novels, as something of a lacuna in the Faulkner story. Yet day by day, events chug along at roughly the same pace as elsewhere, and the documentary record remains as fulsome as in other, more eventful years from a literary perspective. What fleshes out the record is Faulkner’s deep, ongoing preoccupation with World War II—despite how little fiction he wrote about it—along with his intensive creative labors in Hollywood, his personal war effort, where he worked on several projects with a patriotic focus. Of the nearly 8,000 items on Faulkner listed in the MLA International Bibliography, only around half a dozen take World War II as an explicit subject. A day-by-day methodology would suggest that more critical attention to this period, and to the impact of the war on Faulkner’s imagination, is warranted.Turning to the following decade, Faulkner’s series of affairs with young women forms a significant, and uncomfortable, part of the day-by-day chronicle. But what surprised me, on a different frequency, was the way the dramatic adaptation of his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun circled the globe during the late 1950s and early 1960s, playing to audiences in Paris, Zurich, Berlin, Madrid, Athens, London, Copenhagen, and Buenos Aires, between New York runs both off and on Broadway. The cumulative itinerary, which would not have stood out so strikingly had it emerged in more leisurely fashion from a longer biographical narrative, is impressive, and suggestive. It helped me see that Faulkner scholars have much more to learn about how this particular Faulkner tale and its dramatic presentation shaped the author’s international reputation and impact over the final decade of his life. Such are the serendipities, and the vagaries, of shadowing a writer’s life day by day.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.