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A FAULKNER BIOGRAPHY FOR OUR TIME One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini (HarperCollins, 2004. 462 pages. Illustrated. $29.95)
One of the ineradicable memories from the televised U.S. Army-McCarthy hearings of fifty years ago is the often querulous voice of one senator, asking recognition from the chairman on a point of personal privilege. I begin by making the same appeal to the reader, for this review is written not solely from the often-sought stance of objectivity but sometimes, unavoidably, from the personal and subjective as well. It is much informed by memory-mine of William Faulkner when I knew him, the many volumes I read by and about him, and my own experiences in researching and writing two biographies of him.
Jay Parini's Life of Faulkner does everything a good literary biography should do. It integrates the life and the work. Beginning from the matrix of region, home, and family, it goes on to identify the essential events and to trace the developing skills of the writer through his juvenilia and his experimentation in various forms on through to his discovery of his true metier. It tells the reader what he needs to know about the contents of the works analyzed and then goes beyond content to form. It provides information from other biographers and critics, adjudicated by a critical intelligence that is acute and discriminating, so that the reader can trust his assessment, doing justice to the minor works as well as to the major ones, especially those produced in that "one matchless time," Faulkner's phrase for the time when the writer is "hot," in his own life a period of more than a dozen years in which he created a series of masterpieces. Other critics see this period as being longer and the number as being larger, but the reader will find his own favorites treated with sympathetic perception. For the reader who wishes to penetrate further there are a dozen and a half pages of brief helpful notes and a generous bibliography of Faulkner works followed by selected criticism that measures Faulkner's achievement and reception over four decades.
Parini moves with ease over this span in twelve chapters wellnamed from the work and the criticism and divided by subtitles...