“BETWEEN GRIEF AND NOTHING: THE PASSIONS, ADDICTIONS AND TRAGIC END OF WILLIAM FAULKNER” by Lisa C. Hickman (McFarland, 221 pages, $40).
Hear the name William Faulkner and you think of his work. Short stories like “Barn Burning” or long ones like “The Bear,” such novels as “The Sound and the Fury” or “Absalom, Absalom!” The tangled prose, those thorny truths. And his greatest creation, a small world as real to us as the dirt under our feet, the mythical Yoknapatawpha County.
Yet the work wasn’t enough. It never is. When we’re fascinated by the art, we must find out all we can of the artist. So we know Faulkner the man, deeply flawed and self-destructive. Conductor of his own doom. That’s the one author Lisa C. Hickman chronicles, with painful detail and almost clinical attention, in “Between Grief and Nothing.”
This Faulkner drank not just to excess but to oblivion. He tortured his body, falling down steps while bingeing or off horses even more obstinate than him. He carried on affairs that damaged an already fraught marriage with his wife, Estelle.
They had barely wed when she began to wonder what she’d gotten herself into. His “brooding silences.” His haphazard grooming. His single-minded focus on his work — it was 1929 and he was reading proofs of “The Sound and the Fury” — rather than his new wife, even as they were celebrating their nuptials with a trip to Pascagoula on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.