We live in a time when misinformation and manipulation of data have become commonplace, so we find it difficult, sometimes impossible, to separate truth from falsehood or rumor. Researchers and biographers can provide us with cautionary advice, since in their search for truth, they have to be ever alert to the contradictions of truth and error. Here is an example from my own experience as a Faulkner scholar. The article appeared in the Mississippi Quarterly in 2007.
—————————
Biographical Fact or Fiction? William Faulkner, Estelle Oldham Franklin, and Abortion
All serious Faulkner students are familiar by now with the story of Faulkner as a wounded World War I flyer, back home in Oxford after the armistice, wearing his RAF uniform and wings, walking with a cane and a limp, and fabricating stories of his combat exploits and his plane’s being shot down over Germany. And while the story hung on as “fact” for nearly three decades[1] and still appears occasionally in a few ill-informed treatments of Faulkner, we now know that the story was altogether false, a fiction apparently invented and certainly perpetuated by Faulkner—perhaps to make himself appear more heroic, or brave, or manly than he actually was.
I mention this because of the recent appearance of another Faulkner story in which speculation and a degree of invention give some indication of wanting to become accepted as fact. In this case, however, it is not Faulkner but his biographers who seem bent on creating and spreading the myth. I find the situation particularly intriguing since the documents being cited to prove the story are in the Blotner Papers, the research files that Joseph Blotner compiled in writing his biography of Faulkner—files that since 1989 have been part of the Louis Daniel Brodsky collection of Faulkner materials now owned by Southeast Missouri State University and housed in the university’s Kent Library. I have a fairly extensive knowledge of this collection, as I have worked with Brodsky and the collection for almost thirty years, the last eighteen of those as the founding director of the university’s Center for Faulkner Studies.
All of the several Faulkner biographies recount how Faulkner was jilted by his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and how a decade later he married her following her divorce from her first husband. But Jay Parini’s recent biography of Faulkner, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, an excellent book in most respects, includes the following statement regarding Faulkner’s relationship with Estelle Oldham Franklin: “Faulkner and Estelle were . . . entangled in deep ways. Indeed, Estelle told Joseph Blotner that she had an abortion at about this time [1928-29], assisted by Faulkner, who may have been the father” (138). Parini’s note regarding evidence for this claim states: “This conversation was recorded in notes kept in the Louis Daniel Brodsky Collection in the Kent Library of Southeast Missouri State University” (442).
But neither L. D. Brodsky nor I know of any record of such a confession by Estelle Faulkner to Joseph Blotner. Moreover, a check of the documents that do exist in the Brodsky Collection reveals a far more complicated and ambiguous story than Parini’s succinct and seemingly unequivocal statement would suggest.
Parini did not visit Southeast Missouri State University to verify the accuracy of the information contained in his note, nor did he request copies of relevant documents from the Center for Faulkner Studies. Instead, he seems to have relied entirely on statements made by a previous biographer, Joel Williamson, whose William Faulkner and Southern History contains the following observation concerning Faulkner’s courtship of Estelle Oldham Franklin:
Brought together in this way, there might have occurred a serious complication in the affair between Bill and Estelle. Later, there was a rumor that Faulkner had caused a woman in Oxford to become pregnant, and the couple sought out a person who could procure an abortion for them. Awareness of the pregnancy, the ensuing anxiety, and effecting termination came at the very time that Faulkner was shutting himself up in his tower room and pouring his life into the story that was becoming The Sound and the Fury. Thirty years later Faulkner told Joseph Blotner that he had got Estelle pregnant before she was divorced from Cornell [Franklin]. He procured an abortion for her, he explained, and felt he had to marry her. [Williamson’s endnote superscript referencing the Brodsky Collection appears here.] But, of course, all of this might have been the Faulkner imagination running wild again. (220-221)
It is crucial to note here that while Williamson presents Faulkner’s telling Blotner the story as fact, he allows that Faulkner may have invented or exaggerated its content. By contrast, Parini’s version posits both the telling and the content as factual—though, strangely, the teller in his account is Estelle, not William.
Unlike Parini, Williamson did personally conduct research in the Brodsky Collection at Southeast Missouri State University (during two consecutive summers, in fact); and as evidence for the details included in the above paragraph, he cites two documents that he examined in the Blotner Papers. The first is the record of Joseph Blotner’s interview with “Jim M” [James Meriwether], dated January 24, 1968; the second is described by Williamson as “ms. note on typed sheet, ‘Ole Miss 1916’” (466). However, as will be demonstrated below, Williamson’s summary of the first document is greatly oversimplified, and his combining of the contents of the two documents with a single citation (note his placement of the superscript) creates a degree of confusion that may have partly contributed to Parini’s erroneous conclusion.
First, the document that serves as the basis for the first part of Williamson’s summary, Blotner’s typed, post-interview record of information supplied by Meriwether, reads:
During the spring or summer of 1928 (when WF was working on TSATF Jim thinks) WF got a girl in Oxford pregnant and was terribly upset about it. He would go into his room and work on the ms. and that would shut everything else out. CC [Carvel Collins, an early Faulkner scholar and biographer] once told Jim he talked to the man who had served as intermediary in arranging the abortion. Jim wonders if it could have been E [that is, Estelle]. (Remember Mrs. Conkling’s repetition of the scurrilous tale that E was pre[g]nant when she married WF.) (Blotner Papers, Box 8, Folder 4)
While Williamson accurately refers to this story as “a rumor,” his concise and straightforward treatment fails to reflect the almost Faulknerian complexity and uncertainty of the document. Unraveled, Blotner’s statement explains that some unidentified man once told Carvel Collins who told Jim Meriwether who now tells Blotner that Faulkner had gotten some unidentified woman in Oxford pregnant, and Meriwether speculates that the woman might possibly have been Estelle, and Blotner agrees that such a conclusion is plausible since Mrs. Conkling [Eula Dorothy Wilcox, a longtime friend of Faulkner] and others believed that Estelle was pregnant when she married Faulkner. (I assume that the parenthetical sentence at the end of the note reflects Blotner’s own thought, though, of course, it could also be a detail supplied by Meriwether.) All of this is clearly more than “rumor”: it is rumor stacked on top of rumor (he said that he said that he said) in a manner reminiscent of the convoluted and ambiguous narrative strategy that Faulkner employs in Absalom, Absalom!
The second document Williamson cites is as problematic as the first. While it is understandable that Williamson missed this point, it is actually two documents in one. At the top of the page, under the heading “OLE MISS 1916,” Blotner has typed all of the mentions of Estelle Oldham to be found in the 1916 school yearbook: she is listed on the “Sophomore Academic Class Roll,” as secretary of “The Girls’ Cotillion Club,” and as a member of “Les Danseuses.” Then, toward the bottom of the page—on a subject and source altogether unrelated to the information at the top—Blotner typed: “WF said he got Estelle pregnant befire [sic] she was divorced from Cornell. He procured an abortion for her and felt he had to marry her” (Blotner Papers, Box 1, Folder 17). Since there is no date on this page to indicate when Blotner typed the document, Williamson’s phrase “Thirty years later,” which introduces this part of his narrative, must be taken as a rounded and approximate figure.
While these two isolated sentences typed by Blotner at the bottom of a separate document would appear to offer solid evidence for Williamson’s claim, repeated (though with the shift in attribution) by Parini, such is not necessarily the case. For one thing, is Williamson correct in assuming that the sentences represent a statement made by Faulkner to Blotner? That certainly seems to be the most plausible interpretation; on the other hand, the statement seems so surprisingly terse and truncated for such a traumatic and momentous event that one wonders if Blotner might not be simply recording an item of hearsay as a reminder to himself for further investigation. This latter interpretation is the one that Blotner now insists, these many years later, is the correct one.
I have discussed this matter on two occasions with Joseph Blotner. The first time was in 1993, shortly after the appearance of Williamson’s biography, and after Panthea Reid contacted me for copies of the documents that Williamson cited as evidence for Estelle’s rumored abortion. Reid was especially interested in the matter because at the time she was working on an article about The Wild Palms, in which Harry Wilbourne kills his lover, Charlotte Rittenmeyer, by botching her abortion. Reid was naturally curious as to whether that fictional incident had any direct correlation to some actual event in Faulkner’s life. When I sought to locate for Reid the two relevant documents in the Blotner Papers (which had not been completely inventoried and indexed at that time), I found the first document but was unsuccessful in locating the second. Lacking that second document, of course, I could only conjecture that Williamson may have either misinterpreted or erroneously recorded the information in the files. It was this impression that led me to contact Blotner for possible clarification of the matter.
Blotner was adamant and convincing in his insistence that neither Estelle nor William Faulkner had ever discussed with him the issue of an abortion. “Neither one of them ever volunteered any such information, and I never would have asked them about such a private and personal matter,” he told me. Since I had not seen the second document at that point, I accepted Blotner’s explanation, informed Reid of what Blotner had said, and then dropped the matter, returning to my own Faulkner work.
The appearance of Parini’s biography, with its repetition of the abortion story—and its assertion not as possibility but as fact—sent me back to the Blotner Papers to search again for Williamson’s second piece of evidence, and this time I found it. But now the matter had become more complicated than ever. Not only had Williamson’s allowance for a degree of exaggeration become Parini’s fact, but also there was an apparent contradiction between what Blotner had typed in his research notes and what he had told me on the phone. So I called him again.
Blotner recalled our previous conversation and once again insisted that he had never discussed with either of the Faulkners the matter of an abortion. Faulkner was “too private an individual” and Estelle “too much a lady,” Blotner said, to discuss such a matter with others, even the closest of friends. Moreover, he had no recollection of typing the two sentences that I read to him about Faulkner’s admission. And he had been “shocked” to read the abortion passage in Parini. The crisis in Faulkner and Estelle’s relationship at this time, Blotner explained, resulted, in his opinion, from Estelle’s fragile nervous condition brought on by her separation and impending divorce from Franklin.
This second conversation with Blotner drove me back into his two biographies of Faulkner. In the 1974, two-volume edition, there is no reference to the abortion story that Blotner had recorded in his notes, and the lovers’ crisis, whatever its cause, is described (like several other unflattering aspects of Faulkner’s life and career) in a very discreet and circumspect manner (618-620). However, in the 1984, considerably revised (and, some would say, more objective and less reverential), one-volume edition, while there is still no mention of a possible abortion, there is an allusion to the crisis and some unspecified rumors concerning its cause:
There would be rumors long afterward about their relationship at this time, that it had encountered some sort of crisis. If this was true, neither he nor Estelle would have been likely to reveal it, especially this most private of men. If this did in fact happen, the crisis was somehow surmounted, but it is not hard to imagine how difficulties and anxieties would have made his writing an escape. . . . (212)
Interestingly, this passage makes the same point about the Faulkners’ concern for privacy and reluctance to reveal personal matters that Blotner subsequently emphasized in his two phone conversations with me. At the same time, however, the reference to writing as a means of escape from crisis is curiously similar to the statement in the summary of the Meriwether interview: “[Faulkner] would go into his room and work on the ms. and that would shut everything else out.” This similarity could be taken to suggest that the “rumors” to which Blotner is alluding are those of the abortion story passed on to him by Meriwether.
Blotner also inserted into the 1984 biography a revealing excerpt from Faulkner’s letter to his editor Hal Smith shortly before the marriage:
I want $500. I am going to be married. Both want to and have to. THIS PART IS CONFIDENTIAL, UTTERLY. For my honor and the sanity—I believe life—of a woman. This is not bunk; neither am I being sucked in. We grew up together and I don’t think she could fool me in this way; that is, make me believe that her mental condition, her nerves, are this far gone. And no question of pregna[n]cy: that would hardly move me: no one can face his own bastard with more equanimity than I, having had some practice. Neither is it a matter of a promise on my part; we have known one another long enough to pay no attention to our promises. It’s a situation which I engendered and permitted to ripen which has become unbearable, and I am tired of running from the devilment I bring about. This sounds a little insane, but I’m not in any shape to write letters now. I’ll explain it better when I see you. (240)
Even allowing for some exaggeration and possible fabrication on Faulkner’s part (for example, there is no known proof that he ever fathered any illegitimate children[2]), this statement clearly evidences an emotional crisis in Faulkner and Estelle’s relationship. Certainly, Faulkner’s expression of alarm to Smith can be interpreted as a veiled allusion to an abortion, but it could also just as conceivably be a reference to other, more verifiable conditions: Estelle’s pending divorce, the (presumed) adulterous relationship between her and Faulkner, family and community reaction to that relationship, or her alcoholism.
At this point, instead of calling Blotner again, I mailed him a photocopy of the document in question, asking if looking at it again might refresh his memory about its intent and/or its source. Here is Blotner’s written reply to that inquiry:
Dear Bob,
Thank you very much for your letter and for the copy of the page from my Faulkner notes in the collection. It clears everything up and demonstrates the worst error of that kind I ever made.
The lines, “WF said he got Estelle pregnant before she was divorced from Cornell. He procured an abortion for her and felt he had to marry her.” were typed on my typewriter.
I should have prefaced those lines with attribution: Interview conducted by me with ________ ___________ on ________ __ ______. My notes do not provide that information. I think I can remember clearly who said those things to me early in my research, but to make a possibly erroneous attribution now, some forty years later, would only compound the error. William Faulkner never said anything of that kind to me.
I am writing Jay Parini and Joel Williamson to ask them to make a correction whenever their books offer the opportunity. I want to do whatever I can to prevent what you say: “the rumor taking on a life of its own and showing signs of wanting to become ‘fact.’”
I will be very grateful if you will attach a copy of this letter to the page in the file you copied and sent to me and to correct my error in any way that seems useful to you without thus perpetuating it.
With all best regards as ever,
/s/ Joe
I have honored Blotner’s request by placing this letter with the document in the Blotner Papers to which it refers. But we are still left with an enigma: did Estelle Franklin secure an abortion that Faulkner had arranged for her? And if so, was Faulkner the father of the child? Based on the documents created by Blotner, cited by Williamson and Parini, and reexamined by me, the only possible answer to the question is perhaps, but perhaps not. Certainly the evidence of the key documents in the Blotner Papers seems far too insufficient and questionable to support an assertion as positive as Parini’s, and it would be most unfortunate if his version is picked up by other scholars and offered and accepted as demonstrable truth—as the stories of Faulkner’s World War I experiences were for such a long period of time. At the same time, although Blotner chose not to include the information in his two biographies, his research notes, as Williamson discovered and I have verified, do include references to a rumored abortion—along with Blotner’s typed notation that Faulkner told someone (whether Blotner, as Williamson inferred, or someone else) that he had gotten Estelle pregnant and arranged for an abortion for her. As his letter to me explains, Blotner believes that this note represents not a direct statement by Faulkner but rather a summary of what someone other than Faulkner had said. Yet, as Blotner himself acknowledges, this is a recollection some forty years after the event. Thus, much like a Faulkner novel, and quite unlike the war stories of Faulkner’s young manhood, this story of Estelle’s abortion has no clear-cut and obvious resolution, but only contradictions, uncertainties, and various possibilities. And the absolute truth of the matter, in all likelihood, can never be known.
[1] Even Faulkner was repeating the stories as fact as late as his April 3, 1943 letter to his nephew Jimmy Faulkner, a pilot during World War II: “I would have liked for you to have had my dog-tag, R.A.F., but I lost it in Europe, in Germany. I think the Gestapo has it; I am very likely on their records right now as a dead British flying officer-spy” (Selected Letters of William Faulkner, 170).
[2] Readers have wondered whether the short story fragment, “And Now What To Do,” in which the protagonist has gotten a girl “in trouble” and then left the state (A Faulkner Miscellany, ed. Meriwether, 147), has any basis in Faulkner’s actual experience. Meriwether dates the fragment “during the latter part of the 1920’s” and adds, “The most unusual feature of the piece is its very clear autobiographical element” (145). However, whether every detail in the story is autobiographical is debatable.
There's no "one thing" in this essay that I am able to select and respond to right now! This is one that will, for me, have to be revisited.
I was definitely captured by the abortion speculation, especially since I know that a failed one occurs in The Wild Palms. (Semi-related, the speculation also brought to mind baby Alabama, her premature death, and Faulkner's subsequent donation of an incubator to the local hospital.)
I was then grabbed by the mention of Joel Williamson. I haven't read his Faulkner and Southern History in its entirety (...I hate spoilers, and in texts like that have to skip around to avoid plot and character details for works I haven't read yet). However, I continue to be very interested in this book and use it as a reference sometimes. The most recent example of this would be in reference to Lucius Priest. Williamson has this fictional man's name as Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Priest, which would make it nearly identical to the name of real-life southern politician Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar... but Donald King, one of the most-read members of the WFBC, said that the "C" is for "Carothers" and not "Cincinnatus". So, as a whole, I'm no longer confident about JW's conclusions.
Now, what got me most excited in this essay is that you knew and interacted with Joseph Blotner! If you remember my "Gen Z at a Taylor Swift concert" simile I used for the WF Scholar Roundtable, that is absolutely how I feel knowing that I am just one person removed from him, and I increasingly feel a need to document the first and second generations of Faulkner scholarship... Cowley, Meriwether, Kartinger, T. Davis, Lowe, Atkinson, Reiger etc.
There's no "one thing" in this essay that I am able to select and respond to right now! This is one that will, for me, have to be revisited.
I was definitely captured by the abortion speculation, especially since I know that a failed one occurs in The Wild Palms. (Semi-related, the speculation also brought to mind baby Alabama, her premature death, and Faulkner's subsequent donation of an incubator to the local hospital.)
I was then grabbed by the mention of Joel Williamson. I haven't read his Faulkner and Southern History in its entirety (...I hate spoilers, and in texts like that have to skip around to avoid plot and character details for works I haven't read yet). However, I continue to be very interested in this book and use it as a reference sometimes. The most recent example of this would be in reference to Lucius Priest. Williamson has this fictional man's name as Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Priest, which would make it nearly identical to the name of real-life southern politician Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar... but Donald King, one of the most-read members of the WFBC, said that the "C" is for "Carothers" and not "Cincinnatus". So, as a whole, I'm no longer confident about JW's conclusions.
Now, what got me most excited in this essay is that you knew and interacted with Joseph Blotner! If you remember my "Gen Z at a Taylor Swift concert" simile I used for the WF Scholar Roundtable, that is absolutely how I feel knowing that I am just one person removed from him, and I increasingly feel a need to document the first and second generations of Faulkner scholarship... Cowley, Meriwether, Kartinger, T. Davis, Lowe, Atkinson, Reiger etc.