William Faulkner
From Philosopedia
Faulkner, William (25 September 1897 - 6 July 1962)
Faulkner, a major American novelist, was not an active member of any organized religion. Further, according to Martin Seymour-Smith's Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature (1976),
- He is the most violently uneven and complex of all the great non-intellectual novelists of the century: for he worked essentially from intuition and passion and never from what an educated man would call thought. In Faulkner it worked, probably because what he believed was creditable mentation acted as a true objective correlative for his complicated emotional and moral concerns. If anyone believes that he possessed a mind in the usual sense, let him read the text of the Nobel Prize speech (1950); cliché-ridden, naive, its words as flatly fail to do justice to its portentous theme as do the speeches of politicians. But, in what is rightly conceded to be his great period (1929-40), Faulkner possessed something more precious than a mere mind: an imagination outraged both by his own violent impulses and by the tragedy of how decency (in the American South) becomes misdirected into a starkly anti-human terrorism itself arising from an irrational fear.
Seymour-Smith describes Faulkner's A Fable (1954) as
- a pretentious and rhetorical Christian allegory set in France. Faulkner was not a Christian (not, that is, a 'believer') but his best work is shot through and through with Christian symbolism and the figure of Christ's passion obsessed him
Faulkner in 1949 received the Nobel Prize in literature and is known for The Sound and the Fury (1929), The Hamlet (1940), A Fable (1954, winner of a Pulitzer Prize), and The Reivers (1962, winner of a Pulitzer prize). As I Lay Dying (1930) has been cited by the American Library Association as a book that book-banners target.
The family name originally had been Falkner, and he was the great-grandson of William C. Falkner, the prototype of the Colonel Sartoris who was described in his novels centered on “Jefferson” in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County.
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Faulkner made a brief statement about his belief “that man will not merely endure: he will prevail . . . because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance” and “the writer’s duty is to write about these things.” His use of “soul” and ”spirit” had no theological overtones, and he was disinterested about religious matters.
Affairs
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, and they had two daughters (Alabama, who died when nine days old; and Jill, who was born 24 June 1933). The media has publicized his extramarital affair not only with Meta Carpenter - Howard Hawks's secretary and script girl - but also from 1949 to 1953 with Joan Williams, a young writer.
In 1994, Meta Wilde died. Her 1976 best seller, A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter Wilde, details an eighteen-year romantic affair which they had had and which started while she was working as a script supervisor on the 1936 film, The Road to Glory, for which Faulkner was a co-writer.
Williams, in The Wintering, made Faulkner the subject of their relationship.
Truman Capote claimed Faulkner also had a romance with Jean Stein, daughter of Hollywood movie tycoon Jules Stein. According to Capote in Gerald Clarke's Capote: A Biography,
- Faulkner fell madly in love with her, and he was going to divorce his wife so they could marry. But her parents said they would never speak to her again if she did, and she had to stop seeing him. She told him one day over lunch at the Algonquin. When I stopped in at Random House that evening - I had a key and used to go there sometimes - I heard this terrible sobbing from the little room they gave him. The room was dark, and he was lying on the couch, completely drunk; a bottle of bourbon was sitting on the floor. 'It's all over,' he kept saying. 'It's finished. It's ended.' I sat down beside him and took his hand and said, 'It's just Truman.' I stayed there for a couple of hours, until he fell asleep. He went back to his wife in Mississippi, and Jean married Bill vanden Heuvel. When faulkner died a few years later, it was really of a broken heart.
At Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi, Faulkner died of heart failure and is buried at St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford, Mississippi.
