Malcolm Cowley on William Faulkner’s Concern for Privacy and Tolerance for Inconsistency

At a time when Faulkner’s books were mostly out of print, Malcolm Cowley, as editor of The Portable Faulkner (1946), helped to revive Faulkner’s literary career. Cowley discusses his friendship with Faulkner in The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962  (NY, Viking, 1966).

One issue discussed is Faulkner’s famous concern with privacy. For example, when Life magazine asked Cowley to write a story on Faulkner, Faulkner was so upset with this invasion of his privacy that he discouraged his friend, Cowley, from writing it. And so, as Cowley had warned Faulkner, Life then hired someone else, who was not a friend, to write the story.

But Cowley had to write an introduction for The Portable Faulkner, so he still had to write something biographical. And he found that false information had previously been published which exaggerated Faulkner’s military experience. Cowley wanted to correct the record, but Faulkner wanted Cowley to just avoid repeating the false information and to avoid personal information in general. (Perhaps Faulkner had told people different things at different times about his military experience. As Faulkner said in the Paris Review interview, ask him the same personal question on different occasions and you may get different answers.)

Faulkner expressed his attitude this way: “I will want to blue pencil everything which even intimates that something breathing and moving sat behind the typewriter which produced the books.” He also said, “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.” He wanted his epitaph to be: “He made the books and he died.”

At another point, Cowley, commenting on what Faulkner had described in letters about his writing process, said, “Faulkner had often written as if the author, too, were an imagined character.” Note (added Feb. 16): To clarify what is meant here, the "imagined character" was not a character of the story, but was a narrator who was an alternate personality.

So perhaps Faulkner’s concern for privacy was due to his fear people would discover that no single individual called William Faulkner really existed.

Another issue discussed by Cowley was Faulkner’s attitude toward inconsistencies in his writings. In working on The Portable Faulkner, Cowley had found numerous instances in which the same events were discussed in different books or stories, but with glaringly inconsistent details. The most famous example was how Faulkner changed the story of The Sound and the Fury in an Appendix written many years after the book was originally published.

Faulkner wrote to Cowley: “The inconsistencies in the appendix prove that to me the book is still alive after 15 years…it is the book itself which is inconsistent: not the appendix. That is, at the age of 30 I did not know these people [the characters] as at 45 I now do; that I was even wrong now and then in the very conclusions I drew from watching them [he got the story from “watching” the characters]…”

What does Faulkner mean that “the book is inconsistent,” not he? “I listen to the voices [of the characters],” Faulkner told Cowley, “and when I put down what the voices say, it’s right. Sometimes I don’t like what they say, but I don’t change it.” Unless and until the characters or the book tells him something different.