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PARTISAN REVIEW
applied his dictum on a writer's life: he once wrote in the morning, over–
saw his farm (generally on horseback) in the afternoon (though, if that
day the farm was running under its own momentum, he would go hunt–
ing or fishing), and saw his friends at night, sometimes for quiet drinking
and a game of cards. Now he writes when he feels like it, missing days
and even weeks, sometimes writing for whole days at a time.
Because Faulkner seldom makes a public pronouncement, because
he infrequently appears in those centers where he is most appreciated,
and because he lives in a remote and private way, macabrt tales have
been told about him, fantastic statements have been attributed to him,
and characteristics have been lent him that he cannot honestly claim.
It
is difficult to demonstrate where the reality ends and the myth begins.
This much is worth bothering about: it is grotesque to speak of Faulkner
as illiterate, as it is absurd to say that he is arrogant, or rude, or violent,
or that his simplicity is a pose.
To take these absurdities one at a time,
illiteracy:
Faulkner has read
in an unco-ordinated way but he has read a great deal and he has read
exactingly; he is an intensive reader, going over one thing that interests
him many times (the Testaments, Shakespeare) . As a young man he
read, he says, everything and anything he could lay hands on. He read
all of Balzac in a week. ("I was in Paris with those people during that
week," he says.) He read the Russians in the same concentrated way.
He is informed enough (a writer shouldn't be too informed), and com–
bines to a remarkable degree, as Eliot said about de Gourmont, "sensi–
bility ... sense of fact and sense of history, and generalizing power."
Arrogance and rudeness:
On the contrary. He is courteous, a
gallant in the Southern manner, though this gallantry is personalized
and slightly satiric, and, all in all, the manner is engaging in the extreme.
At times, say at a small party when he feels at home, he is even cavalierly
playful. He is at all times profoundly, meaningfully, considerate.
Violence:
Surely everyone has acted violently at one time or
another, but an act of violence doesn't characterize a man as violent,
just as an experience of isolation doesn't characterize a man as a solitary.
What is mistaken for violence is an intensity in Faulkner that is felt but
which is manifested only in a poised equilibrium. What is something else
again is anger; he can get angry. Once, for example, a proofreader
broke up one of Faulkner's typical parenthetical statements that ran on
for at least twenty inches. Faulkner offered this reproof to the proofreader
on the margin of his proofs: "Goddam you, just don't touch it." Faulkner
is gentle; anyone gentler would be embarrassing.
Simplicity as a pose:
The famous Hollywood episode (Faulkner
