An Obsession with Privacy
DEEMER, CHARLES
An Obsession with Privacy Selected Letters of William Faulkner By Joseph Blotner Random House. 488 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer The literary giant dies,...
...The result is a distorted picture of both the man and the artist...
...To discover that he occasionally loved, hated, despaired, contemplated, and laughed, one would have to turn to Blotner's previous two-volume biography...
...The remarks about poverty and privacy appeared early...
...By 1958 he was complaining, "I can't keep tourists out of my front yard...
...in 1949, "it is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books...
...At one point he was writing two stories a week but selling fewer than half of them...
...In the late '40s and '50s, following the appearance of The Portable William Faulkner, his reputation at home started its slow, unyielding climb, accompanied by ever-increasing demands for privacy...
...Still, the leitmotif remains the wish to be left alone...
...Or whatever you want to tell them...
...The scholar in me, though, can embrace the cool logic of the publisher's blurb: Because Faulkner insisted upon living as far away from the public eye as possible, we are privileged, now that he is dead, to see the private side of the man...
...All my native land did for me was to invade my privacy over my protest and my plea...
...Since 1953, when Faulkner wrote that, his reputation at home has grown immensely...
...Death, as poets know as well as businessmen, shall have no dominion...
...So if criticism is in order, it must focus on the curious compromise dictating Joseph Blotner's choice of letters—an attempt to respect Faulkner's privacy while simultaneously betraying it...
...Thus the voyeur in me cannot avoid feeling shamed...
...But William Faulkner had mixed feelings about the industry, and if one walks away from this volume with a certain discomfort, as I do...
...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer The literary giant dies, the posthumous work appears, then the fat definitive biography, and finally the letters...
...Add to this Blotner's careful exclusion of letters already in his biography that may be more privacy-invading yet draw a full and passionate Faulkner, and you find yourself wondering whether the author wasn't right about certain inevitable produots of the literature industry...
...In 1939, with The Sound and the Fury, As 1 Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom.' published, he could claim, "I am the best in America, by God...
...it is because one has taken him at his word here: "What a commentary...
...He also turned down commissioned assignments from Esquire and the Post...
...He was hacking out a "pulp series" for the Saturday Evening Post and doing studio work in Hollywood, both under the financial pressure of supporting various family members, and declared: "The man who said that the pinch of necessity, butchers and grocers bills and insurance hanging over his head, is good for an artist is a damned fool...
...Reading the Selected Letters, then, is rather like scanning the mail of someone whose correspondence insists on not being shared...
...In 1946 he wrote, "I don't like having my private life and affairs available to just any and everyone...
...at another, he wired his agent to sell anything at any price and send money immediately...
...Three years later he refused to answer an American Mercury magazine request for biographical information and a photograph to accompany an accepted story, instructing his agent: "Tell them I was born of an alligator and a nigger slave at the Geneva peace conference two years ago...
...Despite Faulkner's financial problems, he kept on writing...
...After winning the Nobel Prize that year, Faulkner declined a Time magazine cover story and a Life picture feature...
...The young man used his letters, as the older one seldom did, as a kind of practice for the real writing, describing the Continent's life and scenery just as he might in a novel...
...in 1948 he was "working tooth and nail in my lifetime ambition to be the last private individual...
...And the next yeat: "What I should do (or any artist) is to give all my income and property to the bloody govt and go on WPA forever after...
...In 1927, the year Mosquitoes was published, he wrote that he had "no income beyond that derived from more or less casual manual labor...
...I have deliberately buried myself in this little almost illiterate town," of Oxford, Mississippi, he said in 1951, "to keep out of the way...
...Nonetheless, the primary theme of this collection is his demand for privacy—the wish "to blue pencil everything which even intimates Chat something breathing and moving sat behind the typewriter which produced the books...
...By the '30s, Faulkner's tone became less flippant...
...The present book begins in earnest when Faulkner is in Europe, writing to his mother...
...France gave me the Legion d'Honneur...
...Indeed, at best the Selected Letters provide a superficial overview, with their author spending most of his time complaining about the lack of money and privacy...
...Scholars will no doubt find these interesting and useful...
...That is the way the American literature industry works...
...To be sure, some technical discussions about the punctuation of The Sound and the Fury and the titling of Intruder in the Dust are included...
...Sweden gave me the Nobel Prize...
Vol. 60 • March 1977 • No. 7
