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least , be called " adolescent" in anyone but a great writer) , his middle-aged
affairs with Jean Stein and Joan Williams, his need for shock therapy and
psychoanalysis. And through it all the reader is struck by the need for a mask.
Is this inherent in the lives of American writers or is it, rather, something that
was most prevalent in the famous generation of the twenties? In place of the
staid southern moralist for whom violence was a legacy of what we as a people
had done to ourselves and the land, we discover a man who, in his strengths as
well as in his weaknesses, is very much like us, forced to seek refuge in the
appearance ofwhat he pretends to be-reticent writer, heroic aviator, bohe–
mian, Hollywood scriptwriter, hunter, father, husband , lover, fox-hunting
squire in Virginia, through it all a man who must write , a teller of stories .
Blotner is not interested in the interior life alone . The presence of the
man is powerful , and the biographer refuses the temptation to justify Faulk–
ner's life .
It
is the work which makes the man a giant. As a man, he sometimes
seems an extended cliche. And Blotner is willing to give us that , too . Faulk–
ner 's inconsistencies , his attitudinizing, his frequently banal notions about
women and politics- all of these are presented as they were. There is no
attempt
to
make his breakdowns and alcoholic retreats into a kind of life's
poetry, as I believe Carlos Baker tried to do in his depiction of Hemingway's
suicide. Faulkner's tendency toward drama frequently betrayed him in his
life , if not in his fiction . Like so many writers who achieve fame , he became
self-conscious about his role. The man is far less appealing as a public voice in
his later years than he was as the pretense-ridden bohemian known to his
fellow Oxfordians as' 'Count No-Count. " But it is the writer whom Blotner
makes most alive for us . To see him debt-ridden , conscious of his role as father
and husband , working through the Hollywood days on material that was
mendacious and trivial , only to return to his room at night to create
Absalom!
Absalom!
is to see the price the man was willing to pay to bail out the writer.
And because of
his
desire to give us the writer, Blomer's
Faulkner
is
indispen–
sable . One can criticize it as too long; one can object that it does not change
our view of Faulkner but rather confirms it . But here we have the man made
into the writer, the talent gargantuan, the life not explained but realized.
Of all the writers whose lives have attracted recent biographical studies,
Lincoln Steffens has been best served by his biographer despite the fact that he
is least in need of a biographer's attentions. Other than his collected
Letters,
the only one of Steffens's books of interest today is
The Autobiography .
Despite Justin Kaplan's attempt to bring him up-to-date, to make him im–
ponant to us , Steffens seems more, rather than less, distant from our concerns
today. Kaplan is the author of the best of all the biographies about the much–
biographed Mark Twain , and he manages to get beyond the reader's instinc–
tive skepticism, to demythicize Steffens from the ravages of his own
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