Facts-Fatal and Fertile
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing FACTS-FATAL AND FERTILE BY PEARL K. BELL o n the evidence of a pair of recent offerings —Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography (Random House, 2 vols., $25) and Wallace...
...Throughout his career, writing and crusading at a tempo that would have killed another man long before it felled DeVoto at the age of 58, he was ravaged by secret terrors which the world, knowing only his cocky maverick intractability, scarcely guessed at...
...In presenting his invented "postage stamp of native soil," Yoknapatawpha County...
...DeVoto was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1897...
...And since, as Stegner remarks, "there was no more moderation in him than there is in gunpowder," DeVoto carried his offensive to a self-destructive extreme in The Literary Fallacy, published in 1944...
...Yet he never summons up the audacity to state a straightforward critical judgment, to discriminate and choose, to question and explore...
...Blotner, unmoved by wonder, plods calmly past this awesome question, a keeper of records to the last...
...Faulkner's widow and daughter let him use everything...
...Although he began his journalistic career with Menckenesque derision of the booboisie in his native Utah, he became such an implacable enemy of the literary esthetes that he is sometimes remembered only as a flag-waving philistine...
...Let any man, woman, or child come on the scene, however unimportant, and Blotner affixes a label—blue-eyed, curly-haired, tall (short), thin (plump), bespectacled and/or mustachioed—as though they were wanted by the FBI...
...After Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1950, and the glare of fame could no longer be turned off at will, he occasionally forfeited his legendary anonymity to speak out on such public issues as school integration and the creeping decay of individual dignity in contemporary America...
...What was its source...
...The "capital-A Artists" were abysmally ignorant about the country, knowing nothing of its strength and majesty...
...For him Cambridge was always the one place in America where a person could lead a genuinely intellectual life...
...Blotner's triumph of matter over mind is 2,115 pages long, took almost a week to read, and left me feeling like the last bleary survivor of a Depression dance marathon, cheated in the end of the prize...
...But he was refused a permanent appointment and, consequently, was forced to earn his living by grinding out hack serials for the slicks...
...And to this end he created a dense and gargoyled prose that was unique in American literature...
...And how, recalled Mrs...
...the other, in Virginia Woolf's words, looks for "the creative fact, the fertile fact, the fact that suggests and engenders...
...What kept him on fire through those spectacular years from 1929 to '36, when he was writing his greatest books...
...In 12 years of hard and worshipful labor, Blotner surely meant not to bury Faulkner but to praise him —still, bury him he does...
...He is not in the least self-effacing in his chronicle of their friendship...
...Stuffed with piously salvaged minutiae, Faulkner is a milestone of sorts— the reductio ad absurdum of academic literary hagiog-raphy...
...In 1953, Faulkner remarked to his young mistress...
...Once he stopped writing awful Swin-burnian poetry, Faulkner was driven to capture "not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present...
...Howard Mumford Jones after he died, how he could wake up a room...
...Nonsense, he fulminated in his loudest professional-Westerner voice—from Cambridge...
...In its way, DeVoto's Cambridge was as mythical a region of the mind as Yoknapatawpha County, but he cherished the dream passionately enough to give it his ardent dedication...
...Et tu, Blotner...
...Moreover, Blotner relies not just on other persons' memories but on his own, since he taught at the University of Virginia in the late '50s, when Faulkner spent part of each year there as writer-in-residence, and became an adoring intimate of the novelist...
...Witty, pointedly informative, critical as well as compassionate, affectionate without being mawkish, The Uneasy Chair tells a turbulent and moving story with style and brio...
...Caught in a religious and emotional divide between his embittered Catholic father and his Mormon mother, the boy was a misfit from his earliest years, and felt even more so at Harvard when he came East as a transfer student...
...F n devastating contrast, Wallace Stegner's The Uneasy Chair is biography at its literary best, and an object lesson for the Blotners of this world who toil but do not spin...
...I wonder if you have ever had that thought about the work and the country man whom you know as Bill Faulkner— what little connection there seems to be between them...
...The boom of Bernard DeVoto's belligerent thunder during the fierce cultural battles of the '20s, '30s and '40s is often recollected in grossly distorted ways, and for all the wrong reasons...
...Only in his late 30s did he find his true vocation as a historian of the Western frontier, and go on to produce solid books...
...The one gives us a flat recital of facts, facts, facts...
...Yet in the midst of a biography that mindlessly caricatures the very erosion of privacy Faulkner deplored, Blotner writes with a perfectly straight face of a reporter who came uninvited to the novelist's door: "This was the job they did in a society of tawdry values where few esteemed privacy and the average reader delighted in personal details about celebrities...
...Writers & Writing FACTS-FATAL AND FERTILE BY PEARL K. BELL o n the evidence of a pair of recent offerings —Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography (Random House, 2 vols., $25) and Wallace Stegner's The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (Dou-bleday, 464 pp., $12.50)—there are two divergent ways of writing biography...
...Above all, DeVoto wanted to teach at Harvard...
...Unlike other American novelists of his generation—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Wolfe, who frantically gobbled experience that could go white-hot into the next page—Faulkner was a brooding observer, a visionary obsessed with the demons of Southern destiny...
...Blotner is not only locked into slavish step with the iron march of chronology, he indulges every pedantic irrelevancy his tightly circumscribed scheme allows— including pedestrian summaries of each poem, story and novel, along with microscopic attention to its stages of composition...
...his books went beyond recountings of the most recent binge, or love affair, or the months of servitude in Hollywood for Jack Warner (to whom authors were "schmucks with Underwoods...
...Any request that threatened Faulkner's vigilant isolation, even one from his friend and most sympathetic critic, Malcolm Cowley, was summarily turned down...
...What secret springs fed Faulkner's monomaniacal ambition and courage during the long period of stony rejection and indifference...
...A panegyrist of the West who wouldn't think of living there, he enjoyed shocking the Cambridge ladies with his exaggerated Rocky Mountain crudeness...
...I don't know where it came from...
...Let Faulkner make even the briefest visit to New Haven or Pascagoula, and Blotner is standing by with the city's history, population, chief products...
...He never scrutinizes his subject from an ironic distance, or with a little cool detachment, or through some unencumbered idea floating free of the graduate-student apparatus of scholarly research, tape recordings, letters, scrawled changes in manuscripts, interviews...
...More accurately, he was an anti-anti-American...
...It is even more astonishing to realize how little our understanding of Faulkner's work is enhanced by all these blue-eyed, curly-haired, bespectacled facts...
...What an irony it is that the most grotesquely detailed inventory of an American writer's life yet published should be the posthumous fate of William Faulkner, who resisted the prying of strangers as assiduously as Hemingway wooed it...
...what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made...
...Let Faulkner send a postcard home from Paris, and we learn that it "went out that afternoon at 2:45, stamped with the legend Rue Vaugir-ard...
...Like countless other gauche and frightened young men from the provinces before and since, DeVoto was seduced by the university's patrician aura, its civility and cultivation...
...He was a difficult, generous and exhausting friend...
...For many anguished years he tried in vain to succeed as a serious novelist, all the while abrasively attacking those literary intellectuals whose avatars were Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, and who saw America as a cultural wasteland tyrannized into mediocrity by philistine puritanism...
...It is my ambition," he wrote Cowley about a projected piece in Life, "to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books...
...Stegner, putting DeVoto's particularly outrageous blunders in their place, has now redressed the balance, detailing the man's achievements as a conservationist, a historian and a public defender on a dozen fronts...
...There he came perilously close to sounding like the Yahoo Sinclair Lewis accused him of being...
Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 9
