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Michael Hoffman is a filmmaker known for creating complex and layered stories with great attention to detail and character. A skilled writer and director, he has worked on both feature films and documentaries, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Emperor's Club, Game of Six, and the ESPN documentary Out of the Blue. The Last Station is his most recent film.

Jay Parini is a professor of English & Creative Writing at Middlebury College in Vermont. A writer and academic, he is best known for his novels and poetry. He is the author of the novel The Last Station, which is now a major motion picture from Sony Classics.

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William Faulkner was a literary genius, and one of America's most important and influential writers. Drawing on previously unavailable sources -- including letters, memoirs, and interviews with Faulkner's daughter and lovers -- Jay Parini has crafted a biography that delves into the mystery of this gifted and troubled writer. His Faulkner is an extremely talented, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage who somehow transcends his limitations. Parini weaves the tragedies and triumphs of Faulkner's life in with his novels, serving up a biography that's as engaging as it is insightful.

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William Faulkner was a literary genius, and one of America's most important and influential writers. Drawing on previously unavailable sources -- including letters, memoirs, and interviews with Faulkner's daughter and lovers -- Jay Parini has crafted a biography that delves into the mystery of this gifted and troubled writer. His Faulkner is an extremely talented, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage who somehow transcends his limitations. Parini weaves the tragedies and triumphs of Faulkner's life in with his novels, serving up a biography that's as engaging as it is insightful.

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One Matchless Time

Perennial

Chapter One

Origins

A Sense of Place

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
-- Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

A sense of place was everything to William Faulkner, and more than anyother American novelist in the twentieth century, he understood how tomine the details of place, including its human history, for literary effects.His novels, from the outset, are obsessed with what T. S. Eliot once referredto as "significant soil," but the outward details of place quicklybecome inner details as Faulkner examines the soul of his charactersthrough the prism of their observations, their rootings and branchings,their familial and social as well as geographical contexts. Place, forFaulkner, becomes a spiritual location from which he examines a truthdeeper than anything like mere locality. Faulkner saw himself as takingpart in a great process, moving through history and, in an intriguingway, creating a counterhistory of his own.

He would focus in his fiction on a parallel universe based on the"real" universe of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner's invented region,Yoknapatawpha County, was named after an actual stream thatran through Lafayette County, the name itself meaning, according toFaulkner, "the water runs slow through flat land." Lafayette was amongseveral counties created by various acts of violence in northern Mississippiin the 1830s, when the native Chickasaw tribe was driven westward,displaced by a procession of planters, slaves, and small farmers, all of whom worked together to fashion an economy based on cotton.At least for a while -- before repeated plantings of cotton depletedthe topsoil -- this economy worked well for the white population ofLafayette, especially those living at its middle and higher end. Not surprisingly,this prosperous class regarded the abolition of slavery as athreat to their way of life and joined forces with those who believed insecession.

Their allegiance to the Old South was, for the most part, unwavering.In Faulkner's fiction, the Sartoris clan would stand in for this class,the planter class, and their failure over generations is one of his mostcompelling themes, counterpointed by the implacable emergence of theSnopes clan, representing the greedy, unscrupulous white folks whocome from the outlying country and who form a kind of counterpointto the Sartoris clan, although it is somewhat misleading to regard thisdialectic in a simplistic fashion, since there are admirable Snopeses andselfish, inconsiderate members of the Sartoris family.

The Civil War came as a tidal wave, sweeping over northern Mississippiwith a vengeance. Oxford itself -- Faulkner's hometown, and thefocal point of his imagination -- was ransacked by Union troops (whichincluded many liberated slaves in their ranks) in August of 1864. Theaftershocks of this horrific war reverberated through the decades, andFaulkner's characters might be considered survivors of an originaltrauma, often unspoken, absorbed and transmogrified in their own livesand relived as other kinds of trauma. Even World War I, which obsessedFaulkner, was in a sense an extension, for him, of the original war, whichdestroyed families by pitting brother against brother, father against son.(Faulkner plays out some of these conflicts in A Fable, a late novel setmostly on the western front, and in many stories.)

It is in the nature of things for violent acts to repeat themselves, eventhough the original source of the violence is lost to view. In many ways,Faulkner's writing is about uncovering these hidden sources of disruption,about following their echoes and unconscious reenactments downthe decades. Even the form of his narratives -- obsessed with revision asmuch as vision -- often reproduces the content, with the novels and stories("a few old mouth-to-mouth tales," as Faulkner says in Absalom, Absalom!)doubling back on themselves.

Lafayette County was indeed a representative county, even withoutFaulkner. As Don H. Doyle notes, "Quite apart from Faulkner's unique contribution to the history of this county and region, Lafayette County,Mississippi, stands on its own as a southern community whose historycan reveal much about the larger past of which it is part."1 One tends,when thinking of the Old South, to concentrate on the more settledparts of that region, from Virginia southward through the Carolinas andGeorgia and Alabama. Mississippi, at the western border of the OldSouth, occupied a liminal territory on the wilder edge of frontier society.It was, as a result of its position, more dynamic, less predictable,and therefore appealing to a writer's imagination, a place where he couldexplore the "human heart in conflict with itself," as he said in his Nobeladdress in Stockholm in December 1950.

Faulkner examined a wide range of social classes, each struggling forsurvival in a county that fell between piney hills and richly fertile rivervalley. Two rivers dominated the region: the Tallahatchie and the Yoknapatawpha-- the names themselves like poems in the ears of a youngboy sensitive to language. During Faulkner's childhood, the lower ranksof society were dominated by sharecroppers and "poor white trash,"who course vividly through his fiction. Of course, before the Civil War,there were the slaves -- the rock bottom of society, who later become"free" Negroes and who worked the fields after the war in much thesame way they worked the land before the war. Faulkner would writeabout them frequently, and with sympathy, although not with the samepassion or inwardness that he reserves for white characters.

Forty percent of the white families in Lafayette County owned slavesbefore the war, as Doyle notes, with half of these families owning fiveslaves or fewer. (A few families owned more than a hundred slaves, butthis was exceptional.) The slaves themselves made up roughly half ofthe county's population. Nearly a century later, the balance between theblack and white population remained roughly the same. Needless to say,blacks in post–Civil War Mississippi lived close to the poverty line,sinking into a period of deep subjugation from which they would findlittle relief until the civil rights movement of the 1960s began to lifttheir burden, however slightly ...

Excerpted from One Matchless Timeby Parini, Jay Excerpted by permission.
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