“Does a True Artist Care What His Audience Thinks?” (New York Times Book Review, June 28) quotes only one of William Faulkner’s multiple personalities

Ayana Mathis, bestselling novelist and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, says that “In the end, a finished work is independent of the artist…A book in the world speaks for itself…William Faulkner said famously: ‘But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important.’ ”

The following is from my post of February 19, 2014:

“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). Pages 18-25 are by 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…”