Sound and Fury Over Unwritten Faulkner Bio

Carvel Collins is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on William Faulkner. Some say Collins indisputably is the authority, in the way that Coca-Cola is the soft drink or Nikon the camera. There is one major difference in such a comparison. Those are products, with something tangible to show. The problem with Collins is he hasn’t written the biography.

Collins, 74, lives a quiet life on the rural fringes of Vista, a small “bedroom community” in the northern tier of San Diego County. Vista boasts of having the best weather in the world. Collins lives with his wife in a rambling, disheveled house, not unlike the kind one might find in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

It’s a plain house, offering refuge--but from what? The winds of the Midwest that Collins tired of? Criticism, pressure? The memory of Faulkner himself?

It isn’t just Collins and his wife who share the house. Memories and memorabilia dwell there as well. So many papers, dating back 38 years, when Collins first started writing (researching, analyzing, agonizing over?) The Book.

Scores of Articles

For some reason, he just hasn’t written it. He has written scores of articles on Faulkner--one of history’s least-understood literary behemoths--not to mention scores of introductions to scores of other books, all leading up, many have hoped, to The Book. His book.

There’s “William Faulkner: A Life on Paper,” introduction by Carvel Collins. There’s “New Orleans Sketches,” a book of Faulkner drawings, introduction by Carvel Collins. There’s “The Unvanquished” by Faulkner, introduction by Carvel Collins. Many other books, by or about the genius, offer Collins’ introduction. Wherever the name William Faulkner appears, that of Carvel Collins often is close behind.

Collins is a tall, gentle man with broad shoulders and a storehouse of memory about a literary giant. Friends consider him brilliant and gifted. He has the cunning, one says, of a river-boat gambler. If he ever played poker, he’d be a giant, another says. That friend, like others, is puzzled and saddened that Collins hasn’t written the book.

“He should have written it in 1955,” the friend said. “But he’s been scooped over and over again by lesser scholars.”

No one questions Collins’ credibility. He is, they say, the definitive Faulkner scholar with impeccable credentials who has held the trust of dozens of Faulkner contemporaries, many of whom died long ago.

No one, they say, will ever duplicate those interviews. No one will provide the insights that he can.

Many worry, however, that his insights and decades of tortuous reporting may never be published, thus depriving literature and society of the kind of definitive work that a writer such as Faulkner deserves.

Collins was the first professor in the world to offer a course on Faulkner. (Today such courses are common, in this country and others.) He did so at Harvard, from 1942 to 1945, before Faulkner had captured the Nobel Prize (a 1949 award marking a turning point in critical acceptance of his work. The author won the National Book Award in 1951 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 and 1963). Collins also taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1950-67) and at the University of Notre Dame (1967-78). He left Indiana, tired of the winters and wanting to settle “someplace warm.” He and his wife picked Vista.

He is under contract to do his book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has been since the 1960s.

“We fully expect to publish it, when it’s ready,” said Helene Atwan, director of publicity for the New York firm.

What happens if the book isn’t written? Has Collins provided a backup?

University of Texas

He has in the University of Texas, which owns the rights to the Collins archives. Some material has been sold already, with the balance to come after his death, according to Cathy Henderson, research librarian for the university’s Humanities Research Center.

For his part, Collins vows to finish it and denies he’s ever had writer’s block.

“Why have I been so slow?” he asked. “A set of sequences. Faulkner never wanted his biography to be published. I promised him I wouldn’t publish one during his lifetime. Then he died unexpectedly (in 1962). The widow, under immense pressure, committed to have (Joseph) Blotner do it.”

Blotner’s is a two-volume tome published in 1974. He was an aide during Faulkner’s writer-in-residence years at the University of Virginia in the 1950s.

“In most cases the authorized biographer has a terrific inside track,” Collins said. “It occurred to me that no matter how high the quality of mine, people would still say, ‘Let’s wait for the authorized book.’ If I did go ahead, the author of that would have mine to draw on. I decided to wait until his was out.

A Wait for Revisions

“Well, his came out. It had so many errors in it, I felt pressure to wait for revisions (which Blotner made in a new book in 1984; that book, Collins said, is also “rife with inaccuracy”). I didn’t want to supply information for his revisions.

“Now the problem is--and I don’t want to sound like a whiner--the false conceptions and statements made by so many other authors. The mistakes are so numerous, I feel a need to correct those as well.”

His latest project (another introduction) is, at the moment, what keeps him busy. He often works through the night, then sleeps until noon. His work space, in a room behind the garage, is filled with the residue of 3 1/2 decades of research. He stations himself on a bed amid the clutter. He lies there “to think,” to dictate into a tape recorder. After years of recorded thought, the result is quite a collection. It is also imposing, considering the molasses-slow process of having to transcribe such a thing. Maybe he should do as Tom Wolfe once did, a friend said, and make the notes the book. To use the friend’s word, the research is “fascinating.”

Others are inclined to back that up. Dean Faulkner Wells is the 50-year-old niece of William Faulkner. Her father was Faulkner’s youngest brother, who died before she was born.

Dean Faulkner was a barnstorming pilot. Brother William bought him a plane, which crashed and burned with Dean in it. Feeling a responsibility to the unborn child, Faulkner raised the niece, who was given the name of the father who died.

Happy That They Met

Dean Faulkner Wells doesn’t remember the first time she met Carvel Collins. She’s just happy she did.

“A great, great man,” she said. “He, without a doubt, knows more about William Faulkner than anyone alive--even than me. His will be the definitive biography.”

Wells was asked if she and her husband, Larry Wells, author of the new novel “Rommel & the Rebel” and owner of Yoknapatawpha Press in Oxford, Miss., ever wonder why Collins hasn’t written it.

“Of course we do,” she said. And then her tone was one of urgency: “ I just wish he would get on with it . Larry and I believe it will be a truly major work.”

Wells believes Collins is not intimidated by the task but rather is merely gut-wrenchingly accurate. He has taken more pains, she said, than any other Faulkner chronicler, earning the trust and esteem of many of her uncle’s friends.

“My mother (who remarried and moved away from the Faulkner household when Dean was 6) says Carvel has not only been one of her best friends for years but that she’s been behind him all the way. She believes in Carvel.”

Many do, not the least of whom was Dean’s uncle.

Collins met Faulkner in 1948, with no announced plan of doing so.

He went to Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, “just hoping to observe him in the town square.” When a listener hearing this remark looked surprised, Collins said, “You know how he treasured his privacy.”

By 1948 Collins already knew that “much of the stuff about him in print was false. And what can you say if you meet someone, other than, ‘I really like your books’? Finally, a mutual acquaintance said it really was insulting (to Faulkner) to spend all that time in town asking about him and not go and meet him.”

When they finally did meet, the talk was of horses, not literature.

“He had just bought a five-gaited mare for his daughter,” Collins remembered. “We talked mostly of that. Forty other times I went to Oxford (this remark delivered with a sigh), many of those since his death.”

Ultimately, Faulkner talked (or agreed to talk) of more than just horses. He and Collins spoke of literature, his literature, the kind that produced “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying” and “Absalom, Absalom!”

James Meriwether, Faulkner scholar at the University of South Carolina, believes “deeply” in Collins’ work. He believes even more deeply, however, in the legacy of William Faulkner and doesn’t think a definitive book can ever be written about “a man so big, a writer so enormous.”

There is “no such thing as definitive,” he said. “I’ll quote F. Scott Fitzgerald who said there can never be a good biography about a truly great writer--he’s too many people. If he’s any good, that is.

“I can imagine any number of first-rate biographies by first-rate critics, who do their homework. Carvel’s would be one of those--I’ve stressed before his great authority and validity of research. But he’s published precious little of that research. For that reason, his professional reputation is just not as high as his capabilities. He’s worked on the magnum opus for years. Only shards and pieces have appeared, almost as a tease.” (It should be noted that Collins doesn’t consider Meriwether a friend. “If anything,” one friend said, “they’re bitter rivals.”)

Collins’ expertise goes back a long way, even before the end of World War II.

First Faulkner Scholar

“He was the first real Faulkner scholar,” Meriwether said, “at a time when Faulkner was appreciated critically by a growing number of people, but no research had been done on him. He undertook with great energy and thoroughness to learn everything he possibly could--in the 1940s.

“His major efforts have been biographical, but he’s edited Faulkner and done critical writing about him. The major effort has been to learn as much about Faulkner’s life as anyone possibly could. It was work undertaken with great difficulty, because when Faulkner was alive, he was very antagonistic to people wanting to know about him, even to Carvel.”

Meriwether has authored critical studies of Faulkner but once promised Faulkner he would never write a biography--even after the author died.

“Joseph Blotner undertook the official biography, and that’s been a real obstacle to Carvel, whose research is much more detailed,” Meriwether said. “You’ll find general agreement among scholars--they’re mystified about the long period of time Carvel’s worked on the book, with nothing to show. It’s caused widespread feeling that Carvel doesn’t know as much about Faulkner as he says he does. But I know he does.”

Blotner concedes the criticisms about his work. “I react to the charge on two levels,” he said. “First, mine was a book of more than 2,000 pages. There are errors in it, but I tried to correct them in a second volume (published in ‘84). I realized inevitably that there would be errors in the book--I worked on it 10 years--but I wanted to publish it and did.”

The primary charge is that Blotner had the blessings (and the rose-colored observations) of Estelle Faulkner, the widow with whom Faulkner’s marriage was often unhappy. What resulted, critics charge, is an often-glossy version of otherwise prickly events.

Blotner sighed. “With Mrs. Faulkner, I tried to be as accurate and as informative as possible. I think any biographer does the best he can. I didn’t go in with a bias. These people were my friends, but my first objective was to tell the truth. One of the first things Mrs. Faulkner said was to tell the truth and shame the devil. I tried to do that. I tried to do the best I could.”

Collins the critic believes Faulkner remains largely--sadly--unappreciated, a victim of myth and nonsense.

“They say he only wrote when he was drunk,” Collins said. “He drank, but it never interfered with his work. They say that talented though he was, he was mainly a regional writer--the creator of Yoknapatawpha County (in Mississippi). Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a writer for the ages. He spoke universal truths, with authority and vision.

Guarded His Privacy

“It also isn’t true that Faulkner didn’t read, that he was uneducated. He might have tried to give that impression at times, but only because he zealously guarded his privacy. Privacy was everything to him.”

Collins got interested in Faulkner in 1929, as an undergraduate at Miami University in (ironically) Oxford, Ohio. “The Sound and the Fury” had just been published, trapping Collins in its spell.

“He was a genius. Without question,” Collins said, taking on a passioned look. “Most who have criticized Faulkner are not. I am not. They are not. He was extremely well read and, like any genius, had the ability to pick out the things in literature that would fit his artistic needs.”

His best book and Faulkner’s favorite, Collins said, was “The Sound and the Fury.” Its stream-of-consciousness style has been the bane of many a college freshman’s fall semester. It is full of sound and fury, signifying confusion and many a sleepless, addle-brained night.

Faulkner idolized James Joyce, Collins said, and marveled at the way he had modeled “Ulysses” after Homer’s “The Odyssey.” Collins believes Faulkner used that technique, which he called “the mythical method,” to create “The Sound and the Fury.” Written from four extraordinary viewpoints, including that of a mentally retarded child, the book parallels “the Christ story” and, he said, Freud’s theory of personality.

River of Pleasure

He sees one child, Benjy (the idiot), as the id , Jason (the suppressive parent type) as the superego , Quentin (the suicide victim) as the ego unable to balance it all, helpless at holding a family together. Collins sees Caddy (the sister) as the libido , the life force coursing through the veins of each, giving the only pleasure he’ll ever know to Benjy the id.

In some ways, it seems, Faulkner is the force that runs through Collins, a river of pleasure giving him life. Seen in this light--the light of august joy--it makes no difference whether The Book ever gets written. It isn’t the product that matters, it’s the search, the process of ongoing discovery.

In other words, he is happy just reading Faulkner, knowing about him, seeking his truth.

“No, no,” he said with a bright smile. “I’ve never tired of knowing Faulkner. My joy in this search is inexhaustible. Never been dull. The more you know, the more you realize how divine he really was.”