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1897—September, 1902” (chapter 9, the first on Faulkner’s own life) and as short as “Autumn 1921” (chapter 20, a tumultuous few months). More openly than in most biographies, Blotner’s chapter titles signal his employment of linear time as a structural principle for plotting his subject’s life. Between the opening time-title and the closing one (“May-July 1962”), Blotner was able to order a life span of sixty-five years, to shape its becoming. Looking back at the celebrated achievements of the men and women who are their subjects, what can biographers do but narrate their subjects’ lives coming into focus over time? Biographies go from birth and insignificance to death and the loss of someone who, finally, mattered so much. But what if, to himself, the subject of the biography remained persuaded that life did not add up, that life was “the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere andman stinks the same stink”—himself included—and that his own experience
cant matter
(FCF 15)?
    Faulkner was convinced that his own life was not worth the telling. The more Malcolm Cowley attempted (in 1946) to wrest from him a biographical narrative (as part of Cowley’s introduction to
The Portable Faulkner
), the more Faulkner resisted. A few years later, when Cowley sought approval for a larger biographical essay, Faulkner eloquently rebuked the entire enterprise: “this [the biographical essay] is not for me. I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents. It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.… It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died” (FCF 126). This memorable statement (one finds variations of it throughout Faulkner’s pronouncements) deserves consideration. And not just because Faulkner’s insistence is motivated in part by his determination to stop lying about his role in World War I. More deeply, the rebuke intimates an insight into the pitfall of biography itself. It is as though Faulkner glimpsed that biography is incapable of doing justice to the inconsistency and waywardness of its subject’s actual life in time. The life itself loses its messy authenticity when it enters the monumentalizing mangle of biography: it emerges straightened out, time-ordered, false.
    From Blotner in 1974 through Jay Parini (2004) and André Bleikasten (2007), Faulkner’s biographers rehearse not
cant matter
but their various constructions of why the life of Faulkner does matter. This is what biographers do. And yet they all run into trouble. Grateful as one is for their detailed account of the events that make up Faulkner’s life—and my debt to the authorized biographer, Joseph Blotner, is enormous—one comes away with the sense of something crucial missing: something that might compellingly connect the disturbed life with the disturbing work that arose from it. Too often the two are treated as parallel tracks that do not meet. We get Faulkner’s story but not, as Henry James would put it, the story of that story, the yeasty possibilities of its troubled inner structure. Or, to use Faulkner’s own metaphor in
Absalom
, the biographers scrupulously provide a multitude of sticks—the innumerable twigs and branches of the life and the work—but not their incandescence when brought together, not the bonfire. We do not get the composite
gesture
that an imaginative placing of the life against the work—the work against the life—might let us glimpse.
    The biographers’ admiration for the work—which certainly
does matter
—motivates their desire to find in Faulkner’s life a kindred story of achievedbecoming. But one ends up discovering, as Jonathan Yardley put it in his review of Parini’s
One Matchless Time
, “there isn’t all that much of a