This start to Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography (1974) is simple, funny and revealing. It succinctly frames Faulkner’s character: the unease and fussiness and pain and the need for attention. Possibly even the grief. And in reading Faulkner’s life story–the discomfort in his skin and his land, his attempts to write and rewrite, his chronic creation of persona after persona (to be someone else), his dramatic personal failures, his daily grappling with himself, the page and the world–I found it easy to return to this initial touchstone.
It’s a fact that becomes a metaphor.
It also helped when I found myself on page 319 (or 523 or 700) and had lost the thread of the story in all the biographical details. Blotner often took lumps for his kitchen-sink approach to this project, but I think, in this case, we’re better off having more than less.
It may be the only first line of a biography that I actually remember.
[Advance warning: I will return to Faulkner a lot.]
