Huh? In what sense was he a bad stylist? What is "good style in the Gibbon sense"? And what does Gibbon have to do with anything?
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Faulkner was a literary iconoclast. Many of his sentences have no subject or predicate, just a string of words that create an image, often beautiful or powerful, but not strictly English in Gibbon's sense. James Joyce is also tarred with this brush. Great books, no doubt. Challenging the reader, certainly. But while their books are taught in universities throughout the world, very few writing courses teach students to write like this. Hemingway referred to Faulkner's literary style as "drunk writing." I suspect Papa was correct. Often the style is very effective, nonetheless.
Patrick King
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