Steven Riddle's enthusiasm for William Faulkner is catching, so I've been tasting a bit of "Absalom, Absalom!" as you would a strong whiskey. Also been reading about Faulkner in an exchange of letters between Shelby Foote and Walker Percy:
Percy: "Reading about Faulkner and Meta Carpenter...W.F. probably the horniest little man in Mississippi. Another possible semiotic study: the relation of horniness to art in general and fiction in particular. Are novelists hornier than poets or do the artists have it best of all, Picasso the horniest and longest lived of all. Of course I've done this novelistically (f--king as the sole remaining channel of re-entry into the world from the orbit of transcendence and abstraction) but not semiotically-scientifically."Leafing through the book (titled "The Correspondence of Walker Percy and Shelby Foote") I see again and again praise heaped upon a sort of holy trinity of American writers: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. Twain gets a mention, but of the modern American writers, it's those three.
Shelby Foote: "I agree with you about the horniness. I thank God for every sinful lustful thought I ever had; they're the very coin of my enterprise, and as R.E. Lee said, when asked if his fondness for the ladies continued into his postwar years, 'I perceive no diminution.' Faulkner is a good case in point. I've known some of his exprotogees. Premature orgasm was his hangup, a splendid one I think, indicative of lust in its purest form. I remember Caruso's wife said of him when someone asked her about his infidelities, 'I never blamed him. A woman could touch him and he'd burst all in flame.'"
Shelby Foote on Faulkner's writing style: "Faulkner crossed Conrad with Sherwood Anderson."
And it's sad that Foote was probably right in saying "you have to give your all" because each also made this list (numbers 2, 3 & 5) of drunkest writers. London and Fitzgerald and Kerouac certainly killed themselves with the drink. (Link via Irish Elk.)
It twould seem that great artists are pretty far from being saints given they're horny and drunk all the time. You could say artistry and sanctity are mutually exclusive although there were exceptions. (Or should that read "was an exception"?)
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