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story to tell. Apart from his writing—which in Faulkner’s mind seems to have taken place in its own separate universe … he really didn’t do much.” Faced with this imbalance between the unforgettable events in the fiction and the forgettable ones (often sodden as well) in his life, biographers have employed a number of strategies. Blotner (who knew Faulkner and admired him greatly) tends to whitewash the life, making it more unblemished than it was. Frederic Karl tends to estrange the life into oppositions, juxtaposing it against the Southern frame in which it had its tangled roots. Parini, for his part, tends to reveal that Faulkner’s life was … just a life. Nothing “matchless” about it. In each of these biographies, we encounter grandeur in the art contrasted with messiness in the life, but a reader seeking to understand how this particular man was able to write this particular body of work keeps wanting more.
    How might we reconceive the two realms so that parallel lines begin to meet? The answer to this question requires treating what is failed in the life not as the opposite of what is achieved in the work—and therefore in need of whitewash or massaging—but rather as the work’s secret sharer, its painfully enabling ground. What tends to be missing from the biographies is a dialectical sense for how the life and the art come together as—so Faulkner put it in
Absalom
—“strophe and antistrophe.” On this model, the life is the negative of the work, the earthbound quarry for its splendid flights. Dialectical: the life’s relation to the work does not involve a recycling of personal experiences. Rather, Faulkner’s fiction revisits the dark, arresting stresses of his life, illuminating and transforming them unpredictably, diagnostically. The life and the work share a kindred turbulence. This is the turbulence of experience in ongoing time, suffered at first by the human being, then retrospectively grappled into verbal form by the writer. Grappled, not tamed. As Sam Fathers says of the wild dog Lion in Faulkner’s great story “The Bear,” “we don’t want him tame.” The work to be done requires wildness under harness—the wildness under harness that readers recognize as Faulkner’s signature.
    I do not delude myself that Faulkner would have welcomed this book. But his reasons might have differed from his repugnance toward biographical investigations that began with Cowley in the 1940s and continued unabated. The biographical portrait proposed here has no interest in straightening his life out by way of retrospective fiction-making. It tries not to offer—he might have recognized—a monumentalizing of a life often gone badly wrong during its actual unfolding. More, this portrait attaches no blame to its subject’s missteps. My attempt is guided by one of thestunning dimensions of Faulkner’s great work: its refusal to judge, even as it does not sentimentally excuse. The causes for stumbling, his work lets us extensively see, are too inextricable and incorrigible to warrant the fatuousness of judgment. Finally, I see the messiness of Faulkner’s life as the fertilizing loam for his novelistic soaring. Although he would have resisted this intrusion into his privacy, I fondly hope he might nevertheless have recognized himself in the mirror of my pages. And, more fondly yet, that he might have conceded my premise: that his extraordinarily troubling work was rooted—where else?—in his ordinarily troubled life.
    Faulkner’s life revealed micro and macro causes for experiencing time as unmanageable turbulence. At the micro level, he suffered a number of traumatic events. A primary one involved his ill-timed and mismanaged erotic life, launched by his early failure (1918) to marry Estelle Oldham, his childhood sweetheart. Instead of eloping with him, she married Cornell Franklin and departed from Oxford, Mississippi, to live in Hawaii and, later, the Far East. During the next decade she