3

The Dividing Line

October 1936–February 1938

Flannel Unmentionables

“Breathless,” “chaotic,” “abnormal” are the adjectives applied to Absalom, Absalom! by A. B. Bernd, a follower of Faulkner’s work, in the Macon (GA) Telegraph (October 25), reflecting the tone of reviewers overwhelmed by the novelist’s “imagination and power.” Words catapulted at the reader with a “driving,” “tremendous” force: “You will find yourself absorbed, aroused, profoundly stirred, completely removed from your familiar world into the semi-lunatic asylum which is Mr. Faulkner’s Mississippi.” It took the reviewer six paragraphs to get to a plot synopsis, concluding: “Essentially this is the familiar tale of the rise and fall of a Southern planter,” told, however, with “freshness and new beauty.”

Bernd recognized but did not elaborate on the novel’s achievement: “Racial and sexual relations dominate the world of his brain; and he penetrates them and exposes them as no other American writer does.” What Faulkner exposed seemed beyond the remit or perhaps the ken of contemporary reviewers, many of whom could detect no clear motivation in the novel’s characters. A fed up Bernard De Voto (Saturday Review of Literature, October 31) dismissed the “familiar hypochondria of Mr. Faulkner’s prose. . . . In book after book now he has dropped tears like the famed Arabian tree, in a rapture of sensibility amounting to continuous orgasm.” Sentences that went on for more than a page and studded with parentheses marked a “style in process of disintegration.” Cameron Shipp in the Charlotte (NC) News (November 1) confessed he was “lost and terrified in the shadows and thunders” of Faulkner’s “involved prose” and yet called the novel his “master work.”

Outrage over a “disgusting” novel erupted in the Fort Wayne (IN) News (November 7)—also called “morbid” (San Diego Union, November 15), “macabre and sadistic” (American Spectator, February–March 1937), a “wearying welter of degeneracy and extravagant sordidness” (Hartford Courant, November 15), and full of “gratuitous horror” and “race fears” (Pseudopodia, Winter 1937). The El Paso Herald-Post (October 30) announced: “he has done his worst.” Under the headline “Dusk in White Faces,” C. L. Sonnichsen summed up: “The negro is the center of the problem. On the final page of the novel there is a prophecy that ‘in a few thousand years’ there will no longer be any pure white blood in the Western Hemisphere.” Hermann B. Deutsch, the journalist who served as a model for the reporter in Pylon, wrote in the New Orleans Item (January 24, 1937) that such reactions amounted to “a sort of Faulkner-phobia.” These reviewers, Deutsch suggested, were like those who could not bear to refer to long underwear other than as “flannel unmentionables.”

No reviewer seems to have considered that Absalom, Absalom!, given its title alone, is not simply a “violent tale of the South,” as Winfield Townley Scott put it in the Providence Sunday Journal (November 22). That the novel had national, let alone international and universal implications never occurred to reviewers, although Deutsch noted: “Absalom, it will be recalled, murdered his brother for the rape of their sister, Tamar, and lost his life in revolt against his father. Just why the one tale should be morbid and the other not, is unclear to this reviewer.” Wallace Stegner, born in 1909, a year before Quentin’s suicide, and about to publish his first novel in 1937, caught on to Faulkner’s epistemological purpose, noting in the Salt Lake City Tribune (November 29) that “we arrive at our knowledge—or rather, our surmises—of other people through these approximations, these driblets of information, from six or 600 sources, each driblet colored by the prejudices and emotions of the observer.” Readers craved certainty: “Accustomed to having our fictional characters complete, fully rounded, we feel cheated if an author rejects the omniscient lie at the basis of most fiction.” As such the novel represented, notwithstanding its faults, “a significant contribution to the theory and art of fiction”—“more searching, more profound and (in the progressive spell of inescapable doom which it lays upon the reader no less surely than upon the hapless characters that people its pages) more dramatic than anything Faulkner had hitherto given us.”

Malcolm Cowley (New Republic, November 4) helpfully placed Absalom, Absalom! in the tradition of the Romantic novel, singling out Sutpen as a Byronic hero, although at the same time the critic succumbed to a saga-of-the-South line that occluded Faulkner’s larger purposes. Perhaps the map Faulkner included, as well as the chronology and genealogy, abetted this idea that he had written a provincial work. Peter Monro Jack in the New York Sun (October 30) noted the Yoknapatawpha statistics on the map: “Area, 2400 square miles; population, whites, 6,298; Negroes, 9,313.” That Faulkner named himself the “sole owner and proprietor” provoked Jack to comment: “A queer sort of county” that apparently deformed its owner’s sensibility, making him think he could make it a “symbol of the world.”

It is remarkable that reviewers paid scant attention to Shreve, to his Canadian background, and to the significance of the Harvard dormitory-room setting. Paul Anderson, an exception in the San Mateo Times and Daily News Leader (December 5), regretted the “verbose collegian[’s]” prediction that “in time the southern negro will have become part of all the races of the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately the author has chosen an idiot halfbreed to symbolize his meaning. The inference is as irresponsible as it is unavoidable.”

That Absalom, Absalom! had a continental thrust and, ultimately, a world-historical vision escaped contemporary notice. With so much of literature and film treating the South as a peculiar anomaly in the national experience, Faulkner’s aims were almost entirely misconceived. William Troy in the Nation (October 31) did, however, point toward the future reception of the novel: “History and geography affect the form of the Sutpen saga, but its meaning will be found in a much deeper and broader interpretation of life as a whole. According to this interpretation, everything that has happened could have happened anywhere else in the world. The little drop of Negro blood that runs through Sutpen’s destiny becomes no more than the symbolical materialization of that irrational element which exists to thwart the most carefully planned designs of the human will.” Troy concluded that the book seemed “not only the best he has yet given us but one of the most formidable of our generation.” Other brief flashes of insight appeared in Lewis Gannett’s review (New York Herald Tribune, October 31): “I suspect that Mr. Faulkner is not really talking about the South at all but about a region of his own and kindred minds; and that if any war oppresses and burdens his imagination it is not the Civil War but the World War.” On December 28, Faulkner wrote to Bennett Cerf, thanking him for sending Basil Henry Liddell Hart’s The War in Outline, 1914–1918.1

Several generations of Faulkner scholarship have remedied the tunnel vision of the reviews. One scholar notes that Sutpen’s one hundred square miles created out of swampy bottomland measure up precisely to the dimensions of Washington, D.C., also designed by a French architect, with white houses built by slaves that are burned down. Sutpen’s failed design, it has been argued, is America’s fatal flaw. The Hundred’s architecture is never specified, never made southern, which allows for an ironic reading of Faulkner’s intention—showing how the South is integral to an understanding of what America has become, not the backwater many of Faulkner’s northern contemporaries disparaged in their reviews of his work. Washington, D.C., in its earliest years resembled the mudbound and ramshackle first years of Sutpen’s foray into the wilderness. Sutpen’s Hundred models Washington’s own crude yet arrogant aspirations to greatness. The very name of the nation’s capital identifies it with the father of the country, its progenitor, who did, in a manner of speaking, create a dynasty, with several Virginia presidents and the southern domination of government that ultimately came to grief in the Civil War. And so Sutpen’s Hundred, in telescoped form, mimics and mocks the nation’s destiny, a future that Quentin cannot contemplate because he is so fixated on the southernness of his experience. The South, set aside in Quentin’s mind from the rest of the country, is, in fact, inside as well as outside American history, distinctive and yet of a piece with the entire country. Sutpen is a Virginian, after all—the Virginian in a horrid way that revolts Miss Rosa, educated, as Faulkner was, in the sacred memory of Robert E. Lee. Coming from what became West Virginia, the part that went to the North, Sutpen is an outsider who becomes an insider, even if he is never quite accepted by his neighbors. His status, though, is in no doubt because of his association with General Compson, who acknowledges in Sutpen an equal. As General Compson’s confederate, Sutpen has to uphold what even today is the white pure-blooded notion of what the White House stands for. Yet no reviewer even thought to raise miscegenation and Sutpen’s downfall as an American phenomenon directly applicable then. Instead, Faulkner’s novel, begun during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–34), was admired or deplored as a species of Southern Gothic, with virtually no understanding that Sutpen’s triumph and his tragedy result from the recognition of one race and the repudiation of another in the service of imperial nation building on land originally occupied by other nations.2

Slavery and War the Hollywood Way

Negative reviews did nothing to damage Faulkner’s reputation, especially since influential reviewers considered Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s greatest work so far. And he was already considering a new book, The Unvanquished, a collection of six stories about “a white boy and a negro boy during the civil war,”3 he told his new publisher, Bennett Cerf, who had bought out Hal Smith and Robert Haas and had been delighted to publish Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner did not use the customary phrase, “the war between the states.” Did it matter that he was writing to a northern publisher? At any rate, he would revise the adventure stories, his “third-rate Kipling,” written for the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner’s.

Work on The Unvanquished straddled the fall of 1936 and the first part of 1937, when his Fox contract raised his salary from $750 to $1,000 per week. Faulkner finished “An Odor of Verbena,” in the last chapter of which Colonel John Sartoris comes to terms with his violent, dictatorial nature, telling his son he will go unarmed to confront his adversary. Sartoris refuses to kill again and is determined to do a little “moral housecleaning.” At nearly the same time,4 Faulkner dealt directly, for the first time, with the slave trade in The Last Slaver, a novel adapted for the screen and released as Slave Ship in June 1937. Captain Lovett, played by Warner Baxter in much the same mood as his Captain La Roche in The Road to Glory, is seemingly inured to evil and yet capable of recovering his humanity for the love of a young woman who cares for him. For his beloved Nancy (Elizabeth Allan), Lovett renounces slave trading, confessing: “I went into it when I was a boy. All it meant to me then was excitement. Boys have no sense. Then it was just my life—life farming in somebody else’s life. I never thought any more of it than that—and then I was older, before I knew it, and I met you. That told me what I—what I was, and what I was doing.” Lovett could almost be recounting the youthful experiences of Bayard Sartoris in The Unvanquished, reflecting on his own part in the iniquity of the war and resolving, like John Sartoris, to renounce what has been, in Lovett’s words, “dirty” and “filthy.”5

The released film does not include Lovett’s speech, unfortunately, and it transforms the moral complexity of Faulkner’s script in a more anodyne drama. Whereas in Faulkner’s version Lovett goes down with his burning, sinking ship in a conflagration reminiscent of Sutpen’s burning mansion, in the film Lovett successfully quells the mutiny of his slave-running crew, frees the slaves from the hold of his ship, and lives happily ever after with his Nancy on a Jamaica plantation. No Hollywood hero could be as complicit in evil as Colonel Sartoris or Sutpen and yet remain a figure to admire. In The Unvanquished, Faulkner works against the very Hollywood myths he had been hired to perpetuate. Just who is working that Jamaican land is a question the film never asks or answers.6 Even so, some of Faulkner’s work remained, including his description of the slave hold: “dark, cramped, lighted by torches” with slaves “packed like spoons in tiers.”7

Another script, “Splinter Fleet,” worked on in collaboration with a Fox screenwriter, Kathryn Scola, eventually made it to the screen as Submarine Patrol (1938), stripping out precisely those aspects of Faulkner’s work that would have made it a much more formidable film. Scola worked on the story line and Faulkner on the dialogue.8 The title referred to the World War I submarine chasers, made out of wood, assigned the nearly impossible task of sinking U-boats. The film’s hero is a Harvard-educated playboy, Perry Townsend III, whom no one takes seriously but who shows his mettle as an engineer, running the ship’s engines while under attack and helping to sink a U-boat. Faulkner maximizes the tensions between Perry and the working-class crew and complicates the story with a rivalry and a fight between Perry and Fender, whose girl, Susan, falls in love with Perry when he accidentally encounters her before reporting for duty. Perry rejects the offer of a safe desk job in the military, declaring: “This war is the biggest thing that will happen in our lifetime. If I dodged it, I’d never forget it. . . . Not what people would say about me after it was over and you and I had settled down—but what I would think about myself—the excuses I’d have to give myself that I couldn’t believe.” The words come right out of William Faulkner’s own biography, his characterization of Julian Lowe in Soldiers’ Pay, and what Faulkner would say to his nephew Jimmy about doing his part in World War II. The speech is also the most effective way to demonstrate why it is imperative for Perry to show the sub-chaser crew that he is one of them, notwithstanding his wealth and privilege.

Faulkner’s script presaged a series of films he would write in the 1940s—all aimed to unite the American people in a war meant to overcome class and racial differences. Class is a constant feature of conflict in the script, and it is exactly what Darryl Zanuck ordered five writers to root out. Instead, Perry is transformed into a bland if well-meaning hero whose main worry is not German and Austrian U-boats but overcoming the opposition of Susan’s father, captain of a merchant ship. Captain Leeds rejects Perry because he represents the crass materialism of the upper class that uses up women like his daughter for their sybaritic pleasures. All that stands in Perry’s way is this father—not the crew who soon take to him and treat him, unrealistically, as just one of them. Absent from the film is Faulkner’s Perry, who looks at the crew “staring at him with hostile eyes—conscious that he is not one of them.”9 Faulkner shows him uneasy in a bar, “his obvious air of breeding, a little incongruous in this lusty atmosphere.”10 Susan, at first reluctant to accept Perry’s attentions, refers to his Park Avenue upbringing and says, “I belong to the—common people.” References to finger bowls and having tea add to the jibes at Perry’s genteel heritage. Especially revealing is Fender’s jibe that Perry is a Park Avenue “gentleman.” Such comments reflect Faulkner’s increasing understanding that modern warfare had no place for aristocrats and the gentleman’s code. In effect, Perry proves himself by becoming a grease monkey, making sure the engines of the ship run. He becomes Faulkner’s version of the upper-class man as Eugene O’Neill’s hairy ape, on whose power a whole ship moves. Perry, in Faulkner’s script, proves himself by getting his hands dirty, as Faulkner did working with mechanics at the airport and in his brief stint on a locomotive. Such gritty details are entirely absent from Submarine Patrol, as is a scene with a prostitute that the Production Code would have prohibited and that could have been taken from one of O’Neill’s nautical dramas.

Breakup

Faulkner continued to live in Hollywood with Estelle, accustoming himself to Meta’s realization that he would not marry her. In a canceled passage from A Loving Gentleman, Meta reflects with some bitterness on Estelle, “scarred by the realization that she was one of those dowries whom successful men marry in their youth, long before they have any real intimation of the renown into which they will come . . . attempting to pull herself upward to his level.”11 In the published book Meta explains that she turned to Wolfgang Rebner, who spoke to her love of great music in a way that Faulkner could not, and accepted Rebner’s marriage proposal in September 1936. Faulkner seemed resigned to losing her, but not without one last effort to dissuade her:

“I should have known it was coming,” he said after a stunned moment, “but I just wouldn’t let myself admit that it could happen.”

“Wish me happiness.”

“I do. I want you to always be happy. You know that.”

“No question.”

“You don’t feel that you can wait it out with me?” His eyes seemed to slowly darken, the whites shading into a sick gray.

“Before I know it, I’ll be thirty.”

“Give us a little more time, dear love.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. The great unforseeable. A lightnin’ bolt out of the sky.”

“You don’t really believe that, Faulkner.”

“No, ma’am. I can’t say as I do in our case.”

The spare dialogue would work well in a movie, with just enough physical business for the actors to elaborate: “He looked down at my fingers crosshatched on his own, limp and unmoving.” What saves the scene from just being a scene is her full acknowledgment of all the complicating factors: Faulkner’s concession to and then his rebuttal of Meta’s feelings. “You can’t live in Hollywood,” she told him. “No more than I can live in Oxford.” He agreed but persisted, saying it was not enough that Wolfgang, then a thousand miles away on an American tour, was a “fine person” who wrote passionate letters. She did not know him well enough. She brought up Jill, but he put his hand on her mouth to silence her. Then he relented, only to call her later proposing a meeting at her place. She said no: “I am not going to sleep with you anymore.” She had to endure his beseeching look and his plea for “one last time,” saying her attachment to Rebner reflected the “flush of pure romantic fantasy.” She was, after all her lapses, still a properly brought-up southern woman, the product of a “long matriarchal chain.” He seemed to accept her decision, but after a week he exploded, declaring he was not a monk.

Meta admitted it had been tempting to forsake her principles, which is why she called on her Aunt Ione to stay with her until she married Rebner. Sitting down to dinner with Meta and her duenna, Faulkner finally accepted his defeat in a scene he could well have written, with Aunt Jenny instead of Aunt Ione. Two days before her wedding, however, he showed up at midnight, bloody-faced, outside her apartment. “Estelle’s signature,” Meta said. He only shrugged, asked for a drink, but then said his wife had attacked him while they were driving, because he said Meta’s wedding made no difference. He still wanted her. He had lost his temper when Estelle had thrown a twenty-five-dollar compact out of the window. “I think she wanted to kill me, if not herself,” he concluded.

Meta married Wolfgang Rebner on April 5, 1937, and they departed for Europe. A letter to Meta from Henriette Martin, a friend of hers and Faulkner’s, reported he had gone on a “nonstop drinking binge,” resulting in an emergency visit to a Los Angeles hospital and a six-week convalescence. In May, Estelle and Jill departed for Mississippi. Cho-Cho had just married and had become pregnant, and Estelle wanted to be near her daughter. Estelle left behind a wasted-looking Faulkner, who remained in the rented Santa Monica house, attended by Narcissus McEwen, Jill’s nurse, who also cooked for him. At the end of June, he wrote to Estelle: “I’ve had such nice letters from Rowanoak that I have stopped worrying and now I can concentrate on just missing everybody. I am still in the house. Thought I might just as well stay . . . Have given two dinners . . . one last week for Coindreau . . . I want to hear about birthday party. Much love.”12

He worked on the script for Drums along the Mohawk, and on The Unvanquished.13 To an agreeable Will Bryant, he wrote to say he was now prepared to buy the rest of the property (four lots) surrounding Rowan Oak.14 When he thought of home, he thought of “Negroes” and became “animated and euphoric,” telling Henriette Martin about the ones at Rowan Oak and saying they had “courtesy of the heart.”15

A Voodoo Version of Absalom, Absalom!

It seems that sometime in the summer of 1937, William Faulkner met Dudley Murphy, then part of an independent production company, Associated Artists, organized as a profit-sharing scheme that provided an alternative to the hegemony of the studio system. The project never succeeded, but it lasted long enough for Faulkner to become involved, producing “Revolt in the Earth,” an adaptation of Absalom, Absalom!

Murphy’s approach to film, making the artist into a central figure, is beautifully realized in his haunting silent Soul of the Cypress (1921), set on the California coast on a cypress-covered cliff. A beautiful dryad is held captive, the title card explains, in the “gnarled and twisted branches of the oldest tree.” A musician is shown in silhouette piping his composition, like one of those faun-like figures in an early Faulkner drawing. His music is so enchanting that it melts the heart of the tree, liberating the dryad, who looks like the epicene dancing figures that Faulkner liked to depict. Drawn nearer to the music, she dances, swirling in ecstasy in her diaphanous dress and cape as if she might take flight. As she approaches the musician, seated high atop a boulder, the title card announces: “Unfortunate is he, the legend tells, who falls in love with a Dryad—and more unfortunate he who tries to capture her.” As he pursues her, she dances away, as Estelle danced away from Faulkner, as the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn pursue but never possess one another. The spirit the artist has summoned eludes him, a figure of the imagination he cannot catch. She longs to feel a human touch but also dreads what she has never experienced. She escapes into the ancient cypress, telling the musician he can be with her forever, an immortal, if he throws himself in the sea. The artist is torn between his overpowering love for the dryad and his “desire for life.” In despair he climbs to the cliff top and sways over it and plunges into the sea, his spirit becoming the song of the sea and uniting with the Soul of the Cypress.16

How Faulkner met Murphy and what Faulkner knew about Murphy’s work not even his biographer seems to know.17 Was Faulkner familiar with Soul of the Cypress, a nine-minute parable of the power of art and its demands on the artist? The film expresses a sensibility keenly attuned to Faulkner’s own aesthetic, and one that Faulkner had seen reflected in He Who Gets Slapped. Perhaps because of the abortive work on Slave Ship and the lack of studio interest in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner turned to a collaboration with Murphy, who had worked with European modernists like Ezra Pound and Fernand Léger. Murphy had also collaborated with Paul Robeson on the film The Emperor Jones (1933), a work Faulkner greatly admired and emulated. Who looked at “Revolt in the Earth,” other than producer Robert Buckner at Warner Brothers in 1943, is not known. Buckner thought very little of the work and even wrote to Faulkner, “I hope you had nothing to do with it.” Buckner advised against sending it around.18

The film opens on a marble statue of Sutpen striking a grandiloquent pose not so different from the old Colonel’s in the Ripley cemetery. Clytie, aged twelve, is shown gazing raptly at the statue, calling to mind, at least in a biographer’s mind, those black Falkners in the graveyard the white family did not acknowledge. The film periodically returns to her at the statue as the cynosure of the story. The sound of galloping horses dissolves into a shot of a black family’s cabin. It is the scene of Clytie’s birth, where a swaggering Sutpen scoffs at the “nigger voodoo” of an old black woman who calls the child a devil’s spawn, presaging a “revolt in the earth till Sutpen land has swallowed Sutpen’s birth.” The prophecy of Bon’s death and Henry’s disappearance—“one will die and one will ride away”—is only understandable, at this point, to readers of Absalom, Absalom! Nowhere is it explicitly said that Clytie is Sutpen’s child, or that Bon is Sutpen’s son and Henry’s brother. Faulkner had to know that in all likelihood the Production Code would not have permitted a film about miscegenation, and yet the script shows white people drawn to black people and to their doom, signified in the voodoo rites that subvert Sutpen’s supremacy. Both Henry’s and Judith’s treatment of Clytie implies kinship, as does her attendance at Sutpen’s statue long after he is dead and slavery has ended so that she owes no fealty to her master. Clytie and other black women are given a voice that is absent from the novel.19

Sutpen’s racism is blatant. He says a newborn calf is “worth a dozen of you niggers.” Another set of scenes show Sutpen rejecting his white daughter as well, born from his mating with Wash’s granddaughter, but Wash only threatens Sutpen, who walks away in disgust. He is now shown in conference with Henry as they watch Charles Bon in the garden courting Judith—without permission, Sutpen notes. Henry assures his father that Bon is a gentleman and will do the right thing, but Sutpen counters, “How well do you know him?” Sutpen tells his son he has been duped into admiring those urbane qualities in Bon that Henry lacks. Judith is called and told that Bon is a blackguard. She is defiant and seems to know more than either Sutpen or Henry do about Bon’s intentions.

In the background during these early scenes the sound of “nigger laughter” is heard, and then, as Bon enters Sutpen’s library, the sound of tom-toms erupts, as in The Emperor Jones, along with an ambient laughter and drumming that grows ominously louder. But Sutpen is apparently satisfied with Bon’s representations, and Henry and Charles depart for New Orleans aboard a steamboat to the accompaniment of more sensuous “negroid” music. A dissolve returns the scene to Clytie beside Judith as the half sisters watch preparations for Judith’s trousseau. The black women laugh and make snide references to the old black woman’s prediction about the devil’s spawn. In New Orleans Henry and Charles attend a quadroon ball that is also engulfed in “negroid” music while women parade in masks that make it impossible to know if they are black or white. Henry is shocked at Bon’s duel with the man who has escorted the beautiful octoroon Bon unmasks at the ball. She is Bon’s wife, and her escort is shot dead. When Henry is made to understand what has happened, the sound of the tom-toms recommences. An outraged Henry is introduced to Bon’s son by the octoroon as the background laughter rises and Henry rushes home to prevent Judith’s marriage to Bon, although he refuses to give his reasons but instead looks directly at Clytie. Sutpen declares the marriage will go on, and Henry departs to murder Bon, returning to announce that now Judith cannot marry him. On Bon’s body Judith finds the locket that she presumes holds her daguerreotype but that contains, in fact, one of Toinette, the octoroon wife.

Sutpen has banished Henry, but the two meet again as Henry is dying on a Civil War battlefield with shells sounding like the savage beat of tom-toms as the film segues to a voodoo ceremony in a jungle on the periphery of the Sutpen house, where the black women talk about how the prophecy has come true as Judith paces in the house to the beat of the drums and then is shown after a dissolve on a battlefield with her dead father. She is taken away by a northern soldier and in a subsequent scene is shown in a delivery room in a northern hospital, where she has given birth even as her head turns from side to side to the beat of drums only she can hear. Clytie, too, has survived the war, found a mate, and produced a child.

What takes a whole novel to relate becomes the first act of the movie, which now flashes forward to a seventy-year-old Clytie staring at the statue, which is overwhelmed by jungle growth. The film cuts to a bayou where Charles and Henry had once traveled on a houseboat, which is now a wreck that Wash’s son, also named Wash, occupies. In the next scene, set in 1910, the Sutpen house is now a ruin inhabited by Clytie, who gazes at a photograph of Judith and a baby, her granddaughter, Miriam. This memento, inscribed to Clytie, comes from another world, where Judith inhabits an English garden like a “grand lady” and is present at the wedding of Miriam to an English clergyman, Eric. Judith is grateful that she has escaped the Sutpen curse, which her progeny will never know, although a dissolve to Clytie activates the drums as the telegram from Judith announcing Miriam’s marriage is read to her black aunt as yet another dissolve segues to black people singing spirituals at Miriam’s wedding. The music excites Miriam as Judith assumes the same pose as Clytie hearing about Miriam’s marriage. So disturbed is Judith that she grabs Miriam and takes her home.

At the wedding Eric has heard about a white voodoo doctor in a New Orleans bayou, who is seen in a cut to be a Kurtz-like figure who has gone native in a jungle drum scene, which, in turn, cuts back to a theater box where Eric and Miriam are entranced by a play about “a white man making himself a black king in a white country.” A fascinated Eric proposes they visit Judith’s ancestral home, exactly what Judith has feared. Miriam exclaims: “No, no! It would kill Grandmama for me to go back. She won’t even let me talk to her about it.” Yet Miriam sways and pants in a movement that is “completely negroid.” She is taken by the art on the stage exactly as Murphy’s dryad was driven to the music by the sea. An aghast Eric is embarrassed as Miriam’s “face is animal.” As she writhes against him and the tom-toms beat, he capitulates to her plea that they go to the bayou. “Now! Tonight!”

The second act reveals a white witch doctor (Wash’s grandson) in a voodoo ceremony wearing cow horns and a Prince Albert coat. He cuts a woman’s throat, and several scenes follow of Judith aboard ship evidently in pursuit of Miriam as she rides through a swampland frightened by snakes but urged on by Eric, who does not seem to hear the tom-toms. Then Clytie and Miriam finally meet at the Sutpen house, recognizing one another instantly. Now everyone hears the drums from the voodoo ceremony. Miriam listens and is “restive.” Eric spots the voodoo witch doctor, now in overalls, as Miriam grows frightened and demands that they leave. But Eric is thrilled to see and hear the real thing, so much better than the stage show at the Albert Hall. The besotted Eric is willing to pay for a voodoo service just as Wash shows up and Miriam, nearly hysterical, wants to leave. Clytie, refusing to indulge Eric’s desire for a voodoo service, tells him, “You go home.” But Eric persists as Miriam shuts herself in the house. The second act ends as he plans his excursion, even though Miriam pleads with him not to leave her.

The third act opens with Eric, now a “tropic-exploring Briton” aboard a boat on the way to witness a baptism. Miriam tries to follow in the jungle and almost falls into quicksand, saved from death by Wash, who nonetheless frightens her because of his sinister “faun-like” expression. “You belong to this land,” he tells her. Miriam runs back to the Sutpen house but in a frenzy dashes into the garden where an “inhuman” Wash lurks. Cut to Miriam in Wash’s cabin, a prisoner saying to herself she must be “mad.” And then she enjoins Wash: “I must go back. Let me out!” But to the increasing sound of the drums she sways next to Wash, who dances with abandon.

Clytie has sent a message to Eric requesting his return to the Sutpen house. She tells a baffled Eric he must take Miriam away with him. Against a chorus of rising and falling laughter, an outraged Eric declares he will discover what Clytie is hiding. Like Judith, Miriam is now tormented by the drums Eric cannot hear. She begs him to take her away before nightfall. He won’t leave because he is determined to write a book about what he has seen. Out in the jungle, awaiting the start of another ceremony, Eric is accosted by Clytie, who tells him he must take Miriam away by daybreak: “Ain’t you know dis place done run her whole family out?” Miriam, evidently released from Wash’s cabin and unable to sleep, is shown again at the Sutpen house, calling for Eric, who is out in the jungle, crop in hand like a European explorer surrounded by Africans he is “trying to intimidate by his sheer lack of skin pigment.” He rushes at them, but they simply vanish into the jungle. Clytie confronts Wash in the garden, raising a rib from a pig she has slaughtered, which terrifies him, and he strikes her down. As Miriam paces madly in her room, Eric is lost in the jungle. Cut to Wash picking up Clytie’s rib and plunging into the jungle, followed by Miriam, whose voice Eric hears crying out to him as she sinks into quicksand. Dissolve to Wash beside the houseboat wreck wearing the white witch doctor’s headdress as the scene dissolves into daylight with Clytie once again brooding before Sutpen’s statue. The laughing, chanting blacks are heard repeating the Sutpen curse. To them it sounds like a joke. “It do sound funny,” one of them says. “Whut you reckon it mean?” Another says: “I don’t know dat. I do well to ’member how to say it.” Amid laughter one says, “Ain’t dat a fack.” Then a snake “writhes down from the statue and away into the jungle.”

This horror-movie version might well disappoint readers of the novel,20 and anger some with all the references to “nigger laughter,” but not so for Faulkner, who saw adaptations of his fiction as entirely autonomous work in which he and others could change the nature of his characters and rewrite plots and themes, as he did with the Sartoris twins in “War Birds.” Clytie, who seems to have a knowledge never revealed in Absalom, Absalom!, remains in “Revolt in the Earth” an enigmatic, inscrutable figure, the unknowable Sutpen, the survivor, the Clytemnestra whose role in the murder of Agamemnon (Sutpen) is occluded, as it is in different versions of her actions in Greek mythology and drama. She stands in “Revolt in the Earth” as a kind of medium, attuned to the forces that undo the white people, who are surrounded by black people they do not comprehend, notwithstanding white claims to superiority. The relentless laughter and drumming serve as an abiding mockery of white mastery. And though the script does little to develop the white witch doctor, it is apparent that Wash, who refers to himself as a poor white, has more in common with the blacks—or fears he has more in common with them—than he allows himself to admit except when he dons the witch doctor mask. For all its melodramatics, “Revolt in the Earth” powerfully presents the black rebuke to white power in a work that is akin to Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, also set in New Orleans. Black sensuality, as depicted in that novel, and in Faulkner’s script, may seem offensive—equating black people with animality—but African Americans also represent a life force, a closeness to nature from which Sutpen is separated and which he tries to defy by treating both his slaves and Wash’s granddaughter (he calls her a heifer) as merely animals. Their animality is human, and white people are in the sway of it as much as black people, but the white people seek to deny that truth by mastering black people. Even Judith, who tries to escape the family’s fate, cannot resist writing to Clytie and sending photographs of Miriam, acknowledging their bond even as she tries to attenuate it by staying away.

The juxtaposition of jungle and garden scenes, the cultivated and the elemental aspects of existence, overcome some of the limitations of the horror-movie format, as do the scenes in England, on the stage, and other scenes in New Orleans at the octoroon ball, where Henry cannot function in a civilization built on the masking that the old Colonel exploited in The White Rose of Memphis. In “Revolt in the Earth,” Charles Bon dies not because of his black blood—at least not so as the censors would notice—but because of his easy commerce with color that so offends Henry’s notion of a gentleman. Bon’s unmasking of himself—showing to Henry that the courtesies and manners and ceremonies (including marriage) are so many masks that are the accoutrements of a gentleman—leads to his murder. And Miriam, never told about her family history, is bound to sink in the quicksand of its dodgy identity. In short, the Sutpen saga is a voodoo horror show, a curse of the Sutpen arrogance and inhumanity. Sutpen’s statue is not crumbling like Shelley’s Ozymandias, but the jungle (nature) reclaims it. The earth has revolted against those who have sought to dominate it.21 In the voices and laughter of the black people chanting about the earth swallowing up the Sutpens, the history of their white rule “remains only in the talkings of the black descendants.”22

That Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s would film anything resembling “Revolt in the Earth” seems inconceivable. How it seemed to Faulkner is impossible to say. Even so, that he went ahead anyway and produced, along with Dudley Murphy, a Eugene O’Neill–inspired script, is testimony to his desire to do more than just pick up his check.23

Returns, Revisions, and Reunions

In Mississippi in the fall of 1937, Faulkner believed he was done with Hollywood. “I don’t like scenario writing,” he told an interviewer: “I don’t know enough about it. I feel as though I can’t do myself justice in that type of work, and I don’t contemplate any more of it in the near future.”24 He had made $21,650 for the year. During the winter of 1937–38, he purchased Bailey’s Woods, adjoining Rowan Oak, and a 320-acre farm seventeen miles away. “I am home again,” Faulkner wrote to Will Bryant on September 2, “returning to my house and oaks and cedars with the same pleasure, the same lift of the heart which, God willing, the sight of it will always give me and which I shall very likely take into the earth with me when my time comes.”25 And yet he kept finding reasons to leave home.

In September, he had begun to work on a new partitioned novel, The Wild Palms, and by the middle of the month he was in New York, where he met Meta’s new husband and inscribed for her copy number 1 of Absalom, Absalom! A month later, he met his new sympathetic editor, Saxe Commins, who took care of him in New York City as he suffered through one of his worst alcoholic bouts, passing out and burning himself badly on a radiator in his hotel room. Meta’s husband, Wolfgang Rebner, remembered seeing Faulkner in his hotel room still drinking and repeating, “It was ludicrous.”26

Yet Faulkner’s writing went well, but a little more slowly, he said, for a forty-year-old.27 By November, back home, he wrote Robert Haas at Random House that he had “got myself mentally together.”28 He spoke as a man and novelist who had tried to be in several places at once and found it torturing, as his painful back kept reminding him. He would need to have some skin grafting done, he told Eric Devine, his old New York friend.

Faulkner never seems to have regretted the dire consequences of his drinking—in company, at least, treating it lightly. After one of his benders he would say to Donald Klopfer, Bennett Cerf’s business partner, “Well, Donald, I’ve been a bad boy.”29 Phyllis Cerf told the story of meeting Faulkner at a party and pointing out his dirty trench coat and a hole in his socks. “I know,” was all he said. He charmed everyone, including Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. William Paley, and journalist Quentin Reynolds and his wife, Virginia. Enchanted with the company, he had a wonderful time. Writer Robert Sherwood’s wife, Madeleine, admired Faulkner’s perfectly shaped head, and he offered to give it to her when he died. She said she did not believe it. So he wrote it out, “I, William Faulkner, hereby bequeath my head when I am dead to Madeleine Sherwood.” Bill always giggled about it, Cerf recalled. Then he got drunk and did not show up the next day. Bennett said: “Bill it’s so horrible. You’ve had ten days in New York and you’ve spent the entire time, because of getting drunk, in a hospital”—to which, Faulkner rejoined: “Bennett, it was mah vacation and I can spend it anyway I want to and I had a good time.” He said good-bye to the Cerfs and went home.30

Revising The Unvanquished in Hollywood, Oxford, and New York placed Faulkner right on the dividing line of his commercial and literary careers, which were constantly crossing over one another, as he made entertaining Saturday Evening Post short stories into serious fiction.31 The first sentence of “Ambuscade” (summer 1862), the first chapter of The Unvanquished, introduces a vivid, immediate retrospective: “Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map.” The narrator is Bayard Sartoris, the old Bayard of Flags in the Dust, reminiscing about his youth, when along with his black companion he fashions a ground map of the Vicksburg siege. Compared to Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished may seem a minor work, an adventure story along the lines of a Hollywood product—like Slave Ship—with a very selective treatment of the peculiar institution and characters you can root for and others you can despise. But like Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished explores a broken-up past that is fitfully recalled. Its chapters are episodic, historic moments rather than a continuous, integral narrative of a historical period as in traditional historical novels such as The History of Henry Esmond or in films like Slave Ship and Drums along the Mohawk. Unlike Thackeray, Faulkner does not attempt the portrait of an age. Historical figures rarely make an appearance in his fiction, as Generals Marlborough and Webb do in Esmond. And Faulkner makes no sustained effort to disguise his narrative as a memoir or to employ archaisms—a favorite ploy of Scott, Thackeray, and many other historical novelists. As in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner essays an approach to the past knowing full well that the whole of it cannot be recaptured.

Whereas the boys assiduously water their evaporating miniature trench to mimic the terrain of battle, the older Bayard as narrator muses on the tyranny of time that the boys and all mankind battle. The earth will absorb life faster than the boys can live it. Loosh, Ringo’s uncle, sweeps away the chips the boys have employed like toy soldiers and announces: “There’s your Vicksburg.” He “kind of surged up out of the darkness right beside us,” Bayard recalls in a phrase that suggests Loosh is the black reality, the slave owners’ defeat, which is about to change their lives. Loosh is drunk and perhaps celebrating the Union victory, presaging freedom for Loosh and his fellow slaves, although Bayard does not say as much or acknowledge that he is exploding the fanciful myth of loyal darkies, the staple of post–Civil War sentimental fiction and movies. A character like Loosh is inconceivable in Slave Ship, where the slaves are simply shown as whipped victims of white slavers, or even in the nostalgic reminiscences of the war in Flags in the Dust, in which slavery is merely a backdrop to the main action of the white characters. The Unvanquished, hardly begun, is bowled over by a black man. The boys are baffled. How could a slave know more than Bayard’s father, Colonel Sartoris? Loosh is presented with very little darkie dialect. He may be a slave, but he has articulated his independence and sense of equality even if he does still refer to “Marse John.” If Bayard reaffirms his father’s authority to Ringo, he nevertheless confides to himself: “niggers know, they know things.” In Absalom, Absalom!, General Compson pieces together important parts of the Sutpen story by talking to his slaves. This novel matured in the mind of the young boy who listened to Callie Barr and other black people and understood they were intelligence agents, no matter how bound they were to white masters.

Bayard and Ringo are black and white brothers in all but blood and alternate at impersonating Union and Confederate generals in their war games. As children they can enjoy what Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon could not share as soon as an awareness of race separates them: “Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny ‘Granny’ just like I did, until maybe he wasn’t a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane.”

When Colonel Sartoris, Bayard’s father, returns home, his son announces that Loosh has news, a startling development to the father whose son regards him with awe. But the Yankees have the Colonel on the run, like the game little Confederate in Faulkner’s schoolroom cartoon. The Unvanquished retains some of that youthful identification with the Lost Cause, but the Yankee officer who enters the Sartoris home after the boys shoot at one of his soldiers is a gentleman who treats Bayard’s Granny with respect and chooses to ignore the boys, who hide under her skirts. A few years later, Dana Andrews would play just such a courtly Union soldier in Belle Star (1941), reflecting what Faulkner had already shown: a tremendous need for Americans to honor heroes on both sides of the war.

Colonel Sartoris realizes he is fighting a lost cause and that his slaves will soon be released from their fealty to him: “Father said that Louvinia would have to watch him [Loosh] too, that even if he was her son, she would have to be white a little while longer. Because if we watched him, we could tell by what he did when it was getting ready to happen.” Ringo wants to know what “it” is. He does not understand that Colonel Sartoris anticipates that Union troops are coming to occupy his land and that Loosh will know about their arrival sooner than anyone else. In Colonel Sartoris’s absence, Loosh proclaims: “Ginral Sherman gonter sweep the earth and the Race gonter all be free!” Biographies of Sherman say as much: Slaves deserted masters and supplied Union troops with what they knew about the movements of Confederate troops.32

Colonel Sartoris is gallant, courageous, fatally flawed, doomed, and he knows it. He has to reckon with a world he has made and is now being unmade. Like Sutpen, Sartoris is not destined for a happy ending. He knows it better than Granny, who tries to preserve the world she has known by recovering property appropriated by Union soldiers while taking advantage of Union army incompetence. She forges documents that enable her to acquire more mules to sell back to criminal black marketeers who eventually murder her. The incorruptible Granny who washes the boys’ mouths out with soap for various infractions is caught in the chicanery of war, having started out to do nothing more than to protect and preserve her family. She is aided by the family’s slaves, especially Ringo, who completely identifies with the southern cause, thinking of Yankees only as invaders intent on destroying his homeland.

The first draft of “Retreat” (summer 1863), the second chapter of The Unvanquished, began in much simpler form, focused exclusively on action, on what could be shown on a movie screen:

Joby set the lantern down and he and Loosh dug up the trunk where we buried it last summer. Granny carried the lantern and it took Ringo and me both to help carry the trunk back to the house but I dont believe it weighed a thousand pounds. Joby began to bear away toward the wagon.

“Take it into the house,” Granny said.33

This Saturday Evening Post version is replaced with the novel’s evocation of a remembered scene, filtered more problematically through Bayard’s consciousness, through the struggle to reclaim the past and to reflect how phantasmagorical the scene seemed to a boy trying to assimilate a conflicted family’s effort to sustain itself in war:

Then they stopped—Joby and Granny, and while Granny held the lantern at arm’s length, Joby and Loosh dug the trunk up from where they had buried it that night last summer while Father was at home, while Louvinia stood in the door of the bedroom without even lighting the lamp while Ringo and I went to bed and later I either looked out or dreamed I looked out the window and saw (or dreamed I saw) the lantern. Then, with Granny in front and still carrying the lantern and with Ringo and me both helping to carry it, we returned toward the house. Before we reached the house Joby began to bear away toward where the loaded wagon stood.

The “we” in the first passage becomes “they” in the second, for the story of The Unvanquished becomes Bayard’s studied witness to a past he participated in but did not fully understand and that he will have to rectify in the novel’s last chapter, “An Odor of Verbena.”

With every previously published story that became a chapter, Faulkner added similar complexities, exploring Bayard’s shock as his world disintegrates. The first draft, “And then Ringo and I looked at one another because we heard the key turn in Granny’s lock.”34 becomes “Then Granny shut the door behind us and then Ringo and I stopped dead in the hall and looked at one another. Since I could remember, there had never been a key to any door, inside or outside, about the house. Yet we had heard a key turn in the lock.” Bayard struggles with memory—“since I could remember”—and is as confused as his black companion. What kind of world of locks and keys does he now live in? The powerful disruptions of the war are rendered in the most homely details, not in dramatic battles, which play no part in the novel except as hearsay. That is why Loosh’s knowing comments are so disturbing. How can a slave be in control of the information that Bayard and Ringo have to absorb? The two boys are constantly playing catch-up to discover what Loosh already knows. House slaves like the loyal Louvinia are there, just as they are in Gone with the Wind. She still wears the master’s cast-off hat, but the life that Bayard and Ringo have counted on is in retreat. Loosh senses the momentous changes about to occur. When he declares his freedom and refusal to help safeguard the family silver, Granny tells him that it belongs to John Sartoris and asks, “Who are you to give it away?” Loosh replies: “You ax me that? Where John Sartoris? Whyn’t he come and ax me that? Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man what dug me free.” The novel never mentions the slave trade, but the “black dark” is redolent of the dark, crammed human cargo holds of slave ships. In Slave Ship, the slaves have no voice; in The Unvanquished Loosh looses his.

Part of the authority that Colonel Sartoris and other slave masters exercise is a fiction, a system of tyranny that is a collaborative enterprise between white and black people, an improvisatory ruse that the war will bring to an end. The McCaslin twins, Buck and Buddy, focal characters in Go Down, Moses, appear in “Retreat” trying to retreat from slavery, living in a two-room log cabin and turning over their fine manor house to their slaves, driving them “into the house and lock[ing] the door with a key almost as big as a horse pistol; probably they would still be locking the front door long after the last nigger had escaped out the back.” The McCaslin regime is comic but also calamitous. They are a joke but also a parable about the folly of supposing that, in the end, slavery can survive as a rational and logical system—even as a kind of socialist enterprise, share and share alike in a kind of parody of 1930s Communist politics. Before the war, the brothers were eccentrics, but now they are the remnants of what was always an absurd system they could not entirely do without any more than Faulkner could maintain his family without his black retainers. Colonel Sartoris says the McCaslins are “ahead of their time” because they believe they belong to the land, not that the land belongs to them, a theme Faulkner would develop in Go Down, Moses, even as he identified himself on the map of Yoknapatawpha as its sole owner and proprietor and steadily increased his Rowan Oak domain.

“Raid” depicts the disintegration of slavery and the plantation system. “ ‘Raid’ kept my thoughts on Robert Peel, Manager of Polk Plantation, whose farm hands in 1866 took up a march of religious fervor to cross the Jordan & go over into Canaan. They got as far as Yocona river & some crossed tho Peel retrieved most of them,” Will Bryant wrote to Faulkner.35 The chapter was written in the wake of the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities that began with World War I and continued into the 1970s, bringing six million African Americans northward in a racial tide. Although Ringo regards himself as apart from what is happening to his people, Bayard, in retrospect, realizes the boys were caught up in a mass movement that overwhelmed their own efforts to keep the Sartoris domain intact:

the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his [Ringo’s] people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, “This is what we will find”; he nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there—one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they dont know where, empty handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom.

Bayard treats mass migration as problematic, but are these migrating black people “blind to everything” any more deluded than Bayard and Ringo, grounded in their own mythology? In retrospect, Bayard seems aware if not exactly attuned to the changes that are about the transform his native land.

Gradually, The Unvanquished becomes less about the war itself—the battles and the heroics—and more about the displacement of white and black people. Bayard, Ringo, and Granny are on the move, following the trail of the advancing Union army. They begin to “pass big fires, with niggers in wet clothes crouching around them and soldiers going among them passing out food,” even as Granny and her gang rely on Yankee largesse. When a Union soldier looks at the commanding officer’s order to supply Granny, he comments: “I guess the General will be glad to give them twice the silver and mules just for taking that many niggers.” It is an accurate reflection of Sherman’s own belief that the liberated slaves were an encumbrance.

“Riposte in Tertio” (October–December 1864), a fencing term for a counterthrust that comes after parrying an opponent’s thrust, alludes to Granny’s final deal with outlaws so that she can recoup enough money for John Sartoris to start again after the war. “Southern men would not harm a woman,” she reckons wrongly. In “Vendée” (December 1864–February 1865), an allusion to the counterrevolutionary, royalist region of western France, Bayard and Ringo hunt down Grumby, the outlaw leader who has murdered Granny. They restore the family’s honor, and Bayard is hailed as his father’s worthy successor, scion of his noble line. But this revenge tragedy in “Skirmish at Sartoris” (spring 1865) seems, by the end of the novel, anachronistic, a holdover of old world values that no longer pertain now that the “men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States.” Only the women, like Drusilla, the Colonel’s consort, behave as though the war has not been lost, and that the ancien régime prevails.

Faulkner knew how much it had cost his family to pretend that the past was their future, perpetrated in titles like “Colonel” that the post–Civil War generation had not earned but simply assumed as they took power. How much had changed during Reconstruction is alluded to in John Sartoris’s desperation: “We were promised Federal troops; Lincoln himself promised to send us,” Bayard overhears his father say to Drusilla. “Then things will be all right.”36 Without those troops, from Sartoris’s point of view, he is at the mercy of carpetbaggers and abolitionists, the same ones who appear in Light in August: “two Burdens from Missouri, with a patent from Washington to organise the niggers into Republicans.” Bayard notes that “Father and the other men were trying to prevent it.” Lincoln’s death, a catastrophe for the South, meant that Reconstruction, from the southern point of view, would not be advanced as a unified Union project but rather as the opportunistic campaign of one political party. It is at this point that Sartoris murders the Burdens.

The cycle of violence finally ends twelve years later in “An Odor of Verbena” (October 1873). An unarmed Bayard, now twenty-four, studying law, confronts but refuses to shoot Redmond, his father’s murderer, who flees the scene, confirming that a new era has come. The past that Colonel Sartoris, Drusilla, and Ringo justify and celebrate is dead; Bayard destroys the pattern of a “succinct and formal violence” by a succinct and formal act of his own. After a confused moment, even his father’s lieutenant George Wyatt understands that “maybe you’re right, maybe there has been enough killing in your family.” In effect, Wyatt and later Drusilla, who leaves a sprig of verbena in tribute to Bayard’s courage before she leaves the house, ratify his deed as worthy of a gentleman, of a Sartoris.

At the end of The Unvanquished it appears that the direct sources of the Colonel’s peculiar power over the Sartorises are being revealed. The Colonel who sits before his “cold hearth” with a “dead cigar” is reminiscent of Bayard himself in Flags in the Dust, an old man who has not only inherited his father’s title but has also come to resemble him, especially in the scene between Bayard and his grandson, where his cold cigar is symbolic of his exhaustion, worn out by time and approaching death. In this same scene the continuity between generations of Sartorises is also emphasized by the “hawklike planes” of young Bayard’s face, which resemble the Colonel’s “hawklike face.” In The Unvanquished, the Colonel’s library includes a set of Dumas, who is Bayard’s favorite reading in Flags in the Dust. Even the Colonel’s habit of sitting with his muddy boots in the library is part of the aging Bayard’s routine. The old Bayard of Flags in the Dust and the young Bayard of The Unvanquished are consanguineous: “Bayard has not changed the Old Order and its ways, Bayard is the Old Order bereft of firebrand violence.”37

The gentlemanly code, the Sartoris/Faulkner noblesse oblige still obtained and would inform William Faulkner’s life and work right to the end of his days. This heritage was hard to square with Hollywood, where no gentleman need apply, even though its films were full of gentleman heroes impersonated by the likes of Warner Baxter and Ronald Colman and more raffish versions perfected by Clark Gable, Faulkner’s hunting companion. MGM bought the rights to The Unvanquished for twenty-five thousand dollars. Louella Parsons reported that screenwriter Frances Marion had been assigned to adapt the novel,38 but the film never went into production, even though Faulkner’s emphasis on individuals and skirmishes might have made for a good, low-budget B movie that would have stripped out Bayard’s musings. In the Nation (February 19, 1938), Louis Kronenberger called the book “high-romantic stuff, cinema stuff, though where Gone With the Wind is purely Hollywood, The Unvanquished is coated with the expressionism of the foreign studio.” Granville Hicks (New Masses, February 22) deplored an “enthusiasm for Confederate heroes almost as unadulterated as that of Margaret Mitchell or Stark Young.” To Clifton Fadiman (New Yorker, February 19), “these stories, despite their nervous brilliance or manner, are in a class with those hysterical and gushy lost-cause fictions that pudgy, middle-aged English ladies used to write about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites.” Such verdicts are overturned in a much later assessment of the novel’s “mood of feral desperation, a kind of wild determination to survive no matter what, which just pulverizes any pretense to genteel mannerliness.”39

Most reviewers liked The Unvanquished but did not take it too seriously: “This is not the hard-boiled Faulkner of old. This is a southerner and sentimentalist and, for all his pretense, he is a sentimentalist, writing sincerely and effectively about his home country,” concluded Charles C. Clayton in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (February 19). C. L. Sonnichsen (El Paso Herald-Post) hailed the novel as the first one that readers of Stark Young’s “magnolias and moonlight” work might enjoy because it does not include the usual “dirt and denigration.” Faulkner, after all, cherished a “deep feeling for a ruined country and defeated countrymen.” “Toned-down and brushed up Faulkner,” announced Ted Robinson in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (February 20). Only the killing of Grumby seemed “truly Faulknerian”—a comment that revealed a need to keep the novelist well within the boundaries of previous novels. In Canadian Forum (June), Earle Birney was almost alone in setting the mass exodus of the slaves against contemporary history, arguing that “Faulkner can see no real motive, no suffering negro race, behind the phenomenon. He looks at the black still through the dulled and provincial eyes of a slaveholder, ignorant of the humanity he surrounds himself with, ignorant of the essential anachronism of plantation feudalism, and ignorant of the real barbarousness of the equally outdated wage-slavery under which the contemporary black groans.” That it is Bayard whose consciousness Faulkner is rendering seems not to have impressed Birney.

Read in the context of his previous fiction, Bayard emerges as a new kind of Faulkner hero: self-aware and self-critical and not so prone to the self-defeating thoughts and actions that doom Quentin Compson and Henry Sutpen.40 Could it also be that Bayard’s understanding of his father’s plight became an easier subject for Faulkner to contemplate after his father’s death? Murry Falkner, needless to say, was nothing like John Sartoris, and yet his death brought on Faulkner’s own reckoning with his place as his family’s patriarch. Murry, for all his complaints against his eldest son, had been an indulgent father and set an example that Faulkner followed as well in his attempts to care for all of his family, no matter what he thought of them individually.

And what to make of Ringo? Reviewers by and large ignored him, although he is Bayard’s other self—the one that remains committed to the old Sartoris code, like a family retainer who does not follow Loosh into freedom. All around him, Faulkner had such characters, family servants with strong personalities who nevertheless subordinated themselves to their white-supremacist employers. Meta met one of them, Jack Oliver, in California on his first trip out of Mississippi, and she noted Faulkner’s cautioning her that Oliver had to acclimate to this new world. On arrival in Los Angeles, Faulkner said to Oliver, “Why don’t you park the car and walk around and see what you can see.” Jack answered: “Mr. Bill, I’ve got the weak trembles. It’s the first time I’ve ever set foot in a foreign country.” Estelle remembered how “the weak trembles” delighted her husband. Amusing, yes, but also reminiscent of the master in Estelle’s story “Dr. Wohlenski,” who delights in his slave’s sayings. As Oliver became more accustomed to his new surroundings, he became “uppity,” provoking in Faulkner an irritation not so different from old Bayard’s in Flags in the Dust. Estelle remembered Jack answering the phone, saying, “This is Mr. Oliver speaking,” not, “This is the Faulkner residence.” Faulkner shouted at Jack, who dropped the phone. Faulkner said that if Oliver answered a call that way, then he could find another employer.41 Jack Oliver remained in California after Faulkner returned to Mississippi.

For every Ringo remaining in the past, a Loosh, a Jack Oliver looked to the future. Bayard “carries within him the hope of another, new South, more peaceful, more civilized, if not more fraternal.”42 In The Unvanquished, Colonel Sartoris treats Bayard and Ringo as equals, suggesting, even, that Ringo might be smarter than Bayard. Are the boys, in fact, brothers? So some readers have concluded, based not so much on one novel but on a close reading of Flags in the Dust and “There Was a Queen.” Paradoxically, the abolition of slavery separates white and black brothers in spirit, and perhaps in blood.43 Ringo and Bayard part company as Bayard initiates a new kind of history Faulkner was beginning to imagine for the second half of his career. What he ultimately thought of The Unvanquished is not clear. When asked at the University of Virginia, twenty years after the novel’s publication, which of his books should be read first, he said, “maybe The Unvanquished” in a rising voice that sounds more like a question than an answer.