The Life of William Faulkner, page 52
Faulkner apparently did not mention to his callers that a collection of his poetry, A Green Bough, was in production. “I won’t bother you about the ‘Poems’ contract,” he wrote Smith. “Give me the best you can, tho, I am going cold-blooded Yankee now; I am not young enough anymore to hell around and earn money at other things as I could once. I have got to make it by writing or quit writing.” And his novel was “about finished,” he assured Smith, who had now reorganized his firm as Smith & Haas, dissolving the partnership with Jonathan Cape. Chatto & Windus continued to publish Faulkner in Britain.6
In March, Random House published the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary. A growing sense of his marketability prompted Faulkner to think he could get five thousand dollars for a serialization of Light in August. But he did not act like a commercial author, telling Wasson he did not want a word changed: “This may sound not only hard, but a little swell-headed. But I can get along somehow if it is not serialized.” It was not. Still, acting like a commodity, he husbanded his autograph, telling Paul Romaine, a bookshop/publisher of a Faulkner story, “Miss Zilphia Gant,” in a Texas Book Club edition, that he would sign only a few copies: “I hate to be stingy, but the damned autographs are like cotton down here: the more you make the less it is worth, the less you get for it. And I have got to live on either it or cotton, and I cant make anything farming.”
In April, nearing the end of his work on Light in August, which would not be published until October, Faulkner signed a six-week contract with MGM for five hundred dollars per week. Screenwriting now became imperative because Faulkner would never see the four thousand dollars owed to him for Sanctuary. Cape & Smith went into receivership and was liquidated in May. At the moment he had no income from magazine sales of his stories, and he had a five-hundred-dollar bank overdraft. A train ticket and an advance from MGM sent him west and to the most prestigious Hollywood studio.
Scenarist
What did Faulkner know about filmmaking? He had a well-developed visual sense that could even be called cinematic in a novel like Sanctuary. By 1929 or 1930, he seems to have become a fan of Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels, which were inspired, in part, by silent films.7 Ward explained Harrison Smith’s decisive response when the artist brought his portfolio to the publisher’s office: “so enthusiastic and so complete that on leaving I seemed more to float than walk down the steps of the brownstone. I was buoyed up by the warmth of his words and the vote of confidence implicit in his promise of a contract in the next mail.”8 Cape and Smith published Ward’s first woodcut novel, Gods’ Man, in 1929, the same year as the appearance of The Sound and the Fury. In 1933, Smith published A Green Bough with Ward’s woodcut illustrations, which Martin Cohen describes in terms that apply to cinema: compositions filled with the tension of “long rays and controlled curves; the cuts’ size varies from page to page creating, along with intentional black-white imbalances, the reader’s urge to press on rather than to linger with the energetic figures on each page.”9 “Black-white imbalances” is a suggestive phrase for a reader of fraught interracial confrontations in Absalom, Absalom!, a novel that in theme and coloration resembles Ward’s second novel, Mad Man’s Drum, which Faulkner pointed out as a favorite.
Gods’ Man is like Faulkner’s Elmer, a portrait of the artist, but even starker in its “depictions of good and evil on a Faustian theme,” Art Spiegelman observes: “Our Hero, a destitute artist seeking fame and fortune, accepts a magic brush from a Mysterious Stranger. His rapid rise proves hollow, but he flees the corrupt City, meets a beautiful goatherd, and lives a life of Edenic beatitude until the Mysterious Stranger comes to collect payment and Our Hero dies.”10 The eruptions of the mysterious, dark strangers into the plots of Faulkner’s first MGM scenarios may owe something to Ward’s fable of the artist and its evocation of eruptive erotic forces.
Faulkner’s own intricate sense of a visual text of the kind he had produced in his handmade, handsewn volumes made him particularly susceptible to Ward’s drawing and to silent films with their emphasis on scenes and intertitles bound together into an art that some critics, like Rudolph Arnheim, supposed could never be surpassed by the talkies. In Faulkner’s first treatments, the very spare use of dialogue that could be put in a sentence or two is reminiscent of silent movies.
“I saw a fine movie,” Faulkner wrote to his mother in early April 1925, “‘He Who Gets Slapped,’ with Lon Chaney. Make Bob Williams get it.”11 Williams, the husband of Faulkner’s cousin Sallie Murry, owned Oxford’s Lyric Theater, which had originally been Murry Falkner’s livery stable. Faulkner saw his first films in the Lyric. The critics concurred with him: “At the Capitol this week there is a picture which defies one to write about it without indulging in superlatives. It is a shadow drama so beautifully told, so flawlessly directed that we imagine that it will be held up as a model by all producers,” wrote Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times (November 10, 1924). Worthy of Chaplin and Lubitsch, Hall concluded. Shadow drama is what Faulkner had attempted in The Marionettes.
The film is about a diminutive scientist, Paul Beaumont, duped by his tall and imposing patron, Baron Regnard, who claims the scientist’s discoveries as his own. The Baron slaps Paul in a public meeting, evoking the laughter of their colleagues. Even worse, Paul’s beloved has collaborated in the fraud that has led to Paul’s humiliation. She tells him he is a fool and a clown, and, in a line that spoke to Faulkner, she scornfully asks what poor Paul has to offer her besides his silly face and books. The duplicitous female is a staple of Faulkner’s MGM treatments.
Paul leaves the Baron and his female accomplice and becomes a “common clown,” as one intertitle explains, turning his humiliation into a performance of “He Who Gets Slapped.” In short, Paul becomes an artist, making art out of his misery. Intermittent shots of a laughing clown spinning a globe—the globe Paul once spun as he dreamed of thrilling the world with his discoveries—depict the mask of the artist having the last laugh. A hundred slaps a night and Paul laughs, becoming famous for his art, as one circus performer puts it. Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand faces, plays Paul as a dedicated, even maniacal artist, mobilized in silent film better than in any other graphic medium. During his act, in his mind’s eye, Paul sees the faces of the jeering scientists as he performs in front of the laughing circus audience, amused at the clown who declares he will prove the world is round and gets slapped and slapped again by his fellow clowns when he apologizes and announces the world is flat. Every claim and counterclaim provokes slaps. Then Paul sees the laughing Baron in the audience. Paul has to say no more than “there is” for the slaps to come faster and faster, timed to the tempo of the convulsing audience and clowns. In a final humiliation the heart sewn to Paul’s gown is ripped away and buried in the center ring as a mock funeral cortège enters to carry Paul away. The Baron comes backstage but does not recognize Paul in his clown costume or that Paul has divined that the Baron’s purpose is to seduce Consuelo (Norma Shearer), Count Mancini’s daughter, who has become a circus bareback rider. Consuelo awakens Paul’s devotion and then his love, which he declares to her, only to be playfully slapped since she believes he is only joking. Rejected twice, as Faulkner was with Estelle and Helen Baird, Paul intervenes to prevent the Baron from marrying Consuelo, who has been essentially sold by her father, the impecunious Count. In a confrontation scene, the Count stabs Paul, but Paul has locked the doors to the room, where he releases a caged lion that mauls and murders the Count and the Baron. Paul staggers to the circus ring announcing that the world must have love and tragedy as he collapses in death—a “new act,” one of his fellow clowns announces. Paul tells Consuelo he will die happy because she will be happy with her male bareback rider partner (John Gilbert). Paul’s dying agony is also his joy and his art. It would not be surprising to have Paul repeat Faulkner’s later refrain that between grief and nothing he would take grief, since Paul has made art out of his grief. He who gets slapped is the masked tragicomic artist, as Faulkner well knew. He also knew what heights film could attain as art.
On May 7, Faulkner’s first day at the studio, he showed up bleeding from a cut on his head, the result, Sam Marx suspected, of drinking. Marx offered to get a doctor, but Faulkner said he had come to work. Dealing with a beginner, Marx wanted Faulkner to familiarize himself with the typical Hollywood product and then submit a treatment—not a fully developed screenplay but more like an idea for a film with scenes and some dialogue and a plot that other writers would perfect. In short, Faulkner, who said he had an idea for a Mickey Mouse film, felt trapped and already shortchanged. MGM could not make a Disney product, obviously. Did Faulkner have to be told this much, or was the Mickey Mouse idea a way of asserting his independence, no matter what? Disney films and newsreels were all he watched, Faulkner told Marx. But that was not true. Did he have in mind the visual inventiveness of cartoons that contrasted sharply with the crude and awkward action of many early talkies—retrograde cinema compared to what Faulkner had admired about He Who Gets Slapped seven years earlier?
On Faulkner’s first day at MGM, Sam Marx assigned him to Flesh (1932), a wrestling picture follow-up to Wallace Beery’s success in the prizefighter film The Champ (1931), for which he won an Academy Award for best actor. Faulkner said he did not know who Wallace Beery was, so Marx set up a screening of The Champ. The actor played crusty, lovable rogues. In the screening room, Faulkner asked the projectionist, “How do you stop this thing?” It is a curious remark, if it is exactly what Faulkner said. He certainly knew about film projectors as early as 1913, when they were cranked in the Oxford opera house. His question, at least in retrospect, seems portentous: How do you stop getting caught up in the mechanism of making movies? Suddenly, it seems, Faulkner realized he had committed himself to a means of production that put him onto the revolving stories of the movie industry, repetitious and utterly predictable, much as Charlie Chaplin’s character in Modern Times (1936) would be trapped in the turning wheels of machines. At the twenty-minute mark, Faulkner said it was pointless to watch more since he knew how the film would end. He walked out.
After four days, with Faulkner a no-show, Marx wrote to the MGM legal department requesting the cancellation of the writer’s contract. Then on May 16, Faulkner reappeared, telling an improbable story about wandering for a week in Death Valley. But in fact the adventure had been proposed by Hubert Starr, then practicing law in Hollywood. Starr decided to get his drunken friend out of Hollywood just as Hal Smith had earlier sent Faulkner to Florida to recover from an alcoholic binge. Along with another friend, Bill Elliott, Starr took Faulkner, then in hot flannels, to a J. C. Penney to get him outfitted for the desert trip. Faulkner emerged in white duck pants, as shown in Starr’s photographs. Faulkner, still drunk, wandered away, and the two men had to catch up with him walking a block or so away from them. Then, at a hot spring in Death Valley, they immersed Faulkner, finally sobering him. He said that until his hot spring wake-up he had no memory of their journey. Starr believed that for the rest of the trip he managed to keep his friend away from liquor, but later Faulkner told him, “That’s what you think.” Starr remembered they stopped at Dante’s View for a panoramic look at Death Valley. Starr estimated they covered something like six hundred miles in three days, enjoying the flowers and the quality of the light. It is no wonder that Faulkner could give Marx only the vaguest idea of where he had been during his absence.12
By May 19, Marx had reinstated Faulkner with the legal department and settled him into a studio building. Within a week he would begin turning out an impressive number of treatments. Now calmed down, Faulkner made a good impression on Bill Elliott’s wife, then his fiancé. She remembered a beach scene when the waves swept her hard against the shore so that the top half of her bathing suit came off. Faulkner, dressed in a sport coat and reading a book, went out to pick her up, saying that when she emerged from the foam she looked like Aphrodite. She thanked him and said his comment reminded her of the dashing Sir Walter Raleigh. Faulkner’s conversation, she remembered, often contained literary allusions, which is perhaps why her remarks, he said, interested him. He described himself as an Anglophile. At the beach he became quite animated and talkative. She visited Starr in the evenings at his house in Rustic Canyon and often found Starr and Faulkner playing chess. She called him a “lone wolf” and did not know he was married. Her husband wanted to be a writer, and she said Faulkner would look at Bill Elliott’s work and make suggestions that Elliott had trouble understanding. Faulkner showed her a novel in progress (presumably Light in August), but she found his handwriting hard to decipher. He complimented her penmanship and seemed impressed with her style, saying to her husband that she should not be so self-deprecating. She found Faulkner penetrating.13 He would pick up on the way people said things. She had lived in Africa and the Orient, and Faulkner seemed to enjoy her memories,14 which, in an oblique way, he may have drawn on, along with Estelle’s, in his earliest screen treatments of women living abroad.
Faulkner arrived in Hollywood near the end of the pre-Code era, when films began to back away from boldly exploring and exploiting sexuality and violence, capitulating to conventional morality. Films like Laughing Sinners, Safe in Hell, and The Road to Ruin (all released in 1931) would be impossible to make a year or two later. For a brief period, then, the neophyte scenarist would experience a degree of freedom in his choice and treatment of subject matter, suiting studio assignments to the emerging themes of his novels, even if, in the end, he capitulated to the ruling studio and Production Code stipulations.
From May 7 to June 16, Faulkner worked on four unproduced treatments. “Manservant,” sent to the script department on May 25, is set in India but seethes with the cultural tensions that enliven Estelle’s stories and the sexual innuendo that suffused pre-Code films. The action begins with Das, a Malay, packing for his master, Major Blynt, who is off to Calcutta to see the “woman in the photograph, whose reputation is well known” as a “high-class demi-mondaine.” Already, Faulkner was following Sam Marx’s injunction to “write for the camera.”15 In the initial intrigue of the opening scenes, Das is developed as Blynt’s colored double: “We learn that between the woman and Das there is a definite affection. Das loves her because his master does. She depends on Das to take care of the man she loves.” The following scenes develop the backstory of the woman in the photograph. Judy is an American who cannot cope with the “hysteria and fast living” of white colonials and goes “to pieces” after her husband dies. A year later she appears in Calcutta, recovering from an affair with a “shady” character and the trauma of losing her baby. After another period of promiscuity she meets Major Blynt and becomes as faithful as a wife. Das professes an inability to understand white people, and when he dresses in European clothing he is called “comical,” and yet the transference of feeling that animates the Das-Blynt-Judy triangle, with Blynt at the apex, is reminiscent of the Charles Bon–Henry and Judith Sutpen triangle in Absalom, Absalom! with Bon at the apogee of a family fraught with racial tension. Faulkner had not yet, in film or fiction, figured out how to fulfill poor Paul’s dying declaration in He Who Gets Slapped that the world must have love and tragedy. The words “shady” and “fast living” in Faulkner’s treatment reflect the pre-Code clichés he drew on. Like Estelle, Judy is under the sway of her family as she tries, back home, to bury her past and recover from the loss of a child. Judy never speaks of her past to her father, who only knows “something tragic happened to her.” Blynt, meanwhile, becomes a famous scientist. In a contrivance acceptable in a Hollywood melodrama, Blynt meets Judy’s sister, Marcia, and visits her family estate, not realizing that Judy, who refused five years earlier to marry him because of her sullied reputation, is now home. Blynt has to fend off Marcia, who jumps into his bed in an impulsive moment that recalls Emma Jane’s bold kissing of Needham Chang in “Star Spangled Stuff,” except that the racial mixing of Estelle’s story cannot be shown in a Hollywood film, although Das’s romantic attachment to both Blynt and his beloved Judy is the subtext. Das knows and sees all, including the machinations of a maid in love with Blynt, who decides to poison him since she cannot have the Major for herself. The vigilant Das maneuvers to reunite Blynt and Judy but takes the fatal poison himself. Tragedy then becomes inept farce in Faulkner’s treatment: a “CLOSEUP shows” a bottle “labeled ‘Poison.’” The treatment is crude and undeveloped but also suggestive: “Das knows that if he were to tell Blynt the drink is poison, Blynt would not believe him.” In the end, serious themes are sentimentalized: “ON SHIP—Judy and Blynt—they are married. They are taking Das’ ashes back to the home which he had not seen in fifteen years.”
On his first outing, for all his faults, Faulkner did a creditable job, providing many opportunities for the camera to view the action through windows and doorways, creating an intimate, invasive sense of watching and speculating on human behavior. Faulkner deftly deploys photographs and newspapers to heighten curiosity and reflect the passage of time. Using Das as the linking figure—the “whole plot hangs on his accurate guesses”—not only unifies action and theme but also presages the speculative dynamic, the watching and waiting that distinguishes novels like Absalom, Absalom! and The Town.
The speed and tenacity of Faulkner’s work in this new setting is remarkable. The script department received his second treatment the day after he turned in “Manservant.” “The College Widow” seems a reworking of “Night Bird,” the two-page treatment he wrote for Tallulah Bankhead, in which the heroine goes out with undergraduates as a belle in the manner of Temple Drake and also Estelle, since she (the character is never named) is in love with an undergraduate her parents will not permit her to marry. She becomes involved with a mysterious older man who stalks her. Frightened, she flees and marries her first love, that undergraduate who has “now become successful.” The scary older man returns, her husband shoots and kills him, the heroine miscarries, and she divorces her husband and is “now déclassé,” like Judy in “Manservant” and a more extreme version of Estelle.
