What kind of person was William Faulkner, according to an investigative reporter and Faulkner scholars?

“He prefers to be an enigma and one can believe that he will always remain one, even to himself, for his inconsistencies pass artistic license. His is not a split personality but rather a fragmented one…He is thoughtful of others, and oblivious to others; he is kind, and he is cruel; he is courtly, and he is cold;…a man of integrity who has contributed to a false legend about himself. Of more serious importance, he is a great writer and a bad writer.” —The Private World of William Faulkner, Robert Coughlin. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1953.

Coughlin is today mainly remembered for his article about Faulkner in Life magazine (expanded in the above-referenced book) to which Faulkner famously responded with outrage in his essay “On Privacy” (1955). To assess the credibility of Coughlin’s view that Faulkner’s personality went beyond being split—that it was fragmented—I looked up Coughlin in Joseph Blotner’s respected biography of Faulkner (1974/1984). Blotner says, “…his description of the man himself was the best ever written.”

“Who is Faulkner?” was one of the main questions asked at a conference in 1997 honoring Faulkner’s centenary (Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect. Edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2000). The first five pages of the book are remarks by Joseph Blotner. Pages 18-25 are by a professor of English, Noel Polk:

“…Who was William Faulkner? Only in that split, that bifurcation, which becomes a multiplication, can we hope to locate him…[Polk draws our attention to] a little-read piece [by Faulkner] called ‘Afternoon of a Cow,’ putatively written by one Ernest V. Trueblood, who tells us that he has been ‘writing Mr. Faulkner’s novels and short stories for years’…Ernest V. Trueblood is thus the architect of Faulkner’s literary mansion…The Faulkner-Trueblood split is a particularly interesting one, partly because Faulkner had used the Trueblood pseudonym very early in his career…The two Faulkners, the Faulkner Faulkner and the Trueblood Faulkner…lived side by side with each other, in the same household…The two Faulkners didn’t always live in harmony with each other, and perhaps came at times to hold each other in a kind of disdain or even contempt…Thus we have the Faulkner who could write powerful novels of racial injustice in Mississippi coexisting with the Faulkner who would shoot Negroes in the street to defend Mississippi against the United States…; the Faulkner who could write such powerful portraits of family dysfunction and the Faulkner who could tell his own daughter that nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children…”