William Faulkner is indisputably one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He was awarded virtually every honor a writer can receive during a lifetime (Nobel, Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc.) and his place in the American literary canon has held firm as we approach the centennial of his entry into the world of letters. Like most great artists Faulkner is a complicated figure. In “One Matchless Time” literary critic and biographer Jay Parini delivers a truly fantastic narrative treatment of Faulkner’s remarkable life and times.
Born into a minor gentry family (the Falkners, the author would later add the “u” to his name) in northern Mississippi in 1897, Faulkner’s early life was privileged and protected. His family’s household in the university town of Oxford was staffed by black servants who were held in semi-captivity (they received no salary but lived rent-free in the Faulkner home and received occasional spending money). Much to my surprise, the great writer was virtually uneducated. He dropped out of high school his junior year and then, upon returning from a brief stint in Canada as a cadet in the Royal Air Force (RAF) at the tail end of World War I, he took one semester of languages classes at Ole Miss. Thus completed the formal education of William Faulkner. He never wanted nor tried to be anything other than a writer and with the exception of a few years bumbling around as a postal clerk on the Ole Miss campus in the 1920s and then briefly as an overnight supervisor at a power station also at Ole Miss he managed to support himself his entire life by the work of pen.
Two themes dominate Parini’s narrative of Faulkner’s life. The first is Faulkner’s nearly lifelong struggle with money. The second is his entirely lifelong struggle with alcohol.
It is amazing to read how poorly Faulkner was compensated for writing some of the greatest fiction in American history. For instance, A Light in August, one of Faulkner’s masterpieces, was published in 1932 and earned the author a grand total of $750 (or about $15,000 in today’s dollars). “The obsession with money that seems to dog Faulkner throughout his life must, I think,” Parini writes, “be regarded as a measure of his waxing and waning feelings of stability, value, purchase on the world.” For a period of about 15 years, from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, a period Faulkner referred to as “One Matchless Time” and Parini adopted for the title of his biography, the author published a major novel nearly every year while also churning out roughly 60 short stories. Faulkner was forever chasing dollars. The leading national magazines of the day, such as Saturday Evening Post, would pay up to $1,000 for a single piece. Even more lucrative was contract assignments for the major Hollywood studies, work that Faulkner found demeaning and unfulfilling, but financially irresistible. He would often go west for periods of three months or more to work on movie scripts, earning as much as a $1,000 a week, all in an effort to meet his obligations to his creditors and sustain his sprawling farm in Oxford called Rowan Oak. On one occasion in the 1930s Faulkner was so desperate to stay solvent he took out an advertisement in the local Oxford newspaper declaring to all local merchants that his wife did not have his permission to open new lines of credit with them. Parini writes that Faulkner’s money troubles really only ceased in 1948 when he sold the movie rights of his novel Intruder in the Dust for $50,000 and collected the $30,000 cash prize for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a haul that added up to a little less than a million dollars in today’s money.
If Faulkner eventually got his financial affairs in order, his struggle with alcohol would plague him his entire life and ultimately lead to his early death. Parini chronicles a life of addiction so deep that it is difficult to fathom. He writes that Faulkner drank with a “suicidal rage.” Faulkner was not your classical functioning alcoholic like other giants of literature, such as Hemingway. Rather his dependence on alcohol was frequently physically debilitating. He would go on benders that would last for days at a time and would more often than not end up with him in the hospital for several days to recuperate. Indeed, Parini so frequently remarks on Faulkner’s admission to medical facilities in “One Matchless Time” it is impossible to keep track of them all, but it seems likely that Faulkner was hospitalized for reasons related to his intoxication perhaps 20 or 30 times. Over the years his severe inebriation led to serious accidents. One time in New York City in the 1940s, Faulkner blacked out in the bathroom of his hotel and fell back into the radiator, scalding his back so badly that he required skin crafts. Later, in the 1950s, his French guides on his tour of Paris would report that Faulkner drank 23 martinis in a single afternoon. (Parini notes that this is too much alcohol “even for William Faulkner.”) What is perhaps most remarkable – and disturbing – is that no one in Faulkner’s life – not his fellow alcoholic wife, Estelle, his beloved daughter, Jill, his brothers or hunting buddies or his agent or publisher – ever appeared to make a concerted effort to get him to stop drinking (or if they did Parini does not record it). When Faulkner suddenly dropped dead at a Memphis hospital in 1962 where he was recuperating from yet another extended bender it appears as though his body finally gave out.
What I loved about this biography is that Faulkner’s life itself reads like a novel, although certainly not one of his own. He is a shy and often enigmatic figure with a penchant for telling tall tales about himself, especially when he was young and insecure and living a bohemian lifestyle in New Orleans and Greenwich Village in the 1920s. He was small (5’6” and 150lbs.) and southern and not terribly handsome or refined. Alcohol became an escape and a refuge, as was the flattering company of a pretty young woman. Faulkner once wrote, “every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate intention of impressing some woman.” Never have truer words been written. Later in life, when he was in advanced middle age and well established as one of the foremost American authors of his generation, Faulkner would carry on long term love affairs with eager young female writers, which sometimes led to surreal scenes, such as when the Nobel Laureate in Literature is providing his lover and Bard College undergraduate helpful tips on improving her English term paper. Faulkner endured a decades long loveless marriage and these relationships provided him with sexual gratification no doubt, but Parini writes that they provided the author much more than just that. Faulkner, it seems, needed comfort and support and encouragement, not just as a writer but as a man.
I tend to read mostly about presidents and generals and titans of industry, but “One Matchless Time” stands as one of the very best biographies I’ve read in quite awhile and it left me terribly impressed with Parini as a biographer. In fact, I ordered his piece on Steinbeck before even finishing his treatment of Faulkner. I can think of no higher praise than that.
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