An excerpt from the novelist E.L. Doctorow's recent reflections on Faulkner and As I Lay Dying (NYRB, May 24, 2012):
Faulkner had never lived as rarefied an existence as Hemingway, a man who organized his life around pursuits—hunting, fishing, writing, war reporting. Faulkner’s life was messier, less focused, a struggle from the beginning to make enough money to survive: he was a school dropout, and worked at various jobs—postmaster, bookstore clerk—and he held down the midnight shift in a coal-fired power plant, where, as it happened, he wrote most of As I Lay Dying. He was an air cadet in Toronto when World War I ended and unlike Hemingway had to pretend to the combat experience that had eluded him. He wrote poetry before he ever considered fiction, fell in love with a woman who married someone else, bought a house in some disrepair and did all the renovations himself, lost his brother to an airplane accident for which he felt responsible, and became a heavy drinker presumably to deal with the intensity of his writing life.
Some of this hits home for me, because I've written a book about the relationship-rivalry between Faulkner and Hemingway. Both writers, to some degree, had lives that were messy and unfocused--though for different reasons.
Doctorow's take on As I Lay Dying is compelling. We could think a lot of how courage is explored in the novel--especially with Jewel and Addie Bundren.
The link to the full story (available only to NYRB subscribers):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/24/faulkner-as-i-lay-dying/
No comments:
Post a Comment