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PARTISAN REVIEW
And since the ftrst is about her father, brother, sister, sister-in-law, and
Mabel Loomis Todd, a woman of lesser genius but perhaps greater interest
than Emily, the reader is forced to the conclusion that the life has failed as
a subject for biography .
Where Professor Sewall succeeds is in capturing the brutal intensity
of nineteenth-century New Englanders. The chapter on Emily's brother,
William Austin Dickinson , is a remarkable example of literary explication
applied to a non-literary ftgure . Sewall here simply places the reader within
the folds of that intensive New England conscience which produced so much
that appalls in American life but which produced the poetry of Emily Dickin–
son and Robert Lowell, too . William was both his father's ideal and his
father 's rival as far as Emily was concerned . In his life, far more than in
Emily's, one discovers the hard, tangible surface of pre-Civil War New En–
gland. Where
The Life ofEmily Dickinson
works is in its portrayal of some
of the people surrounding Emily, in its analyses of particular poems, in its
suggestion that the poems can best be viewed as a battleground between
rival camps claiming the poet's allegiance . But the life of the poet escapes.
Joseph Blotner's
Faulkner: A Biography
is another two volume work, a
massive 1,846 pages oftext followed by another 269 pages of notes and index.
The insistent details, the dredging up ofevery conceivable fact about Faulkner
and his family background, the desire to exploit the writer's private life
balanced by the equally visible desire to be fair to all concerned-all of this
seemed almost repellent as I worked my way through the ftrst volume . But
there is something ftnally appealing about Professor Blotner's insistence on
telling whatever there is to tell, so that by the time I had ftnished his
Faulkner,
I found myself strangely disappointed to have come to the end.
Blotner's
Faulkner
has not received a particularly good critical reception.
Given the nature of his subject matter and the length of this biography, this
was to be expected. He has picked the bones clean scarcely a generation after
Faulkner went to his death. But that is the nature of biography , and to his
credit he has performed his task with honesty as well as sympathy . If the
biography is too long, if it threatens to reduce its subject's life through the
relentlessness of detail piled upon detail, it succeeds in the end in imposing
Faulkner's own very human scope upon the reader.
Professor Blotner set out to reconstruct Faulkner's life with a minimum
of psychological interpretation and a maximum of fact . He does not explain
the man's contradictions, he simply states them, willing to permit the man to
rest in his vulnerability (the only place Faulkner permitted his readers to rest).
This is an ..official" biography, but it does not seek to disguise. Blotner deals
with Faulkner's alcoholism, his adolescent need to identify himself as an
aviator who had seen combat in the First World War (a need that would, at
