DISSOLVE begins.
SHOT of moving 1865 train
SHOT of small, shabby Negro church
1st SOLO
Just a pulpit and some wooden benches
And Mr. Lincoln sitting in back,
Listening to the sermon,
Listening to the singing.
9
Yoknapatawpha Comes to Hollywood
January–August 1943
The Wax Works
By mid-January, Faulkner had returned to Hollywood. “I had a pleasant time at home, hated like hell to come back,” he wrote his agent Harold Ober.1 He tried to avoid the writers’ table at the Warner Studio restaurant, divided down the middle between left and right. He called the place “The Wax Works.” On a visit there to pick up his lunch, Faulkner encountered Alvah Bessie, a Communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Bessie spotted Faulkner’s watch, saying the Russians would find it useful. “Yes, they would,” Faulkner said and left without picking up his lunch.2 John Crown remembered some political discussions but could not say much about Faulkner’s views. It was “very difficult to know . . . what he thought and felt” because he “could not be snared easily into getting involved in such discussions.” Crown called Meta a “bleeding heart . . . in the finest sense of the word” and thought Faulkner “might have hurt Meta a little by not being willing to get too involved with social matters which seemed to her to cry out for reform.”3 She represented to him not Hollywood but “a way of going home,” Buzz Bezzerides said. “Bill was a very lonely man when he was here, very lonely.”4
Faulkner sometimes attended the long writers’ Saturday lunches at Musso & Frank’s, even showing the bartender how to make a mint julep.5 He was quiet, so quiet that waiters had to lean forward to take his order. With Meta he dined at the Knickerbocker Hotel, in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, on an open porch in days when traffic was not such a problem. A little later, at La Rue’s on Sunset Boulevard, they had a favorite table—the one at the second window from the end that curved around toward the east and the north. At Imperial Gardens in West Hollywood on a high hill they liked to sit at a table in an open garden. They would watch Charlie Chaplin with a sizable entourage come into Henry’s on Hollywood Boulevard, a restaurant the actor helped to finance. Faulkner liked to dine with William McKelvey Martin and his wife. Martin, who later became director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was “simple, direct, intelligent” and did not “bug” Faulkner about writing. The two pipe smokers talked about tobacconists and Faulkner’s favorite in Hollywood—Richardson’s—and about “when and how to light a pipe.”6 It is easy to see why the shop appealed to Faulkner, an establishment frequented by Clark Gable and other stars. Dudleigh Richardson, an English tobacconist, moved his business from London’s Bond Street to Hollywood in the 1920s and carried the Dunhill line that Faulkner favored—stamping his pipes with the label: “P. Dudleigh Richardson/Hollywood–Beverly Hills.”7
Faulkner took Meta on the rounds of bookstores—including the Satyr, where Stanley Rose got his start and also ran into trouble for peddling pornography. A shop clerk there remembered the couple happily going through the shelves and making purchases.8 The Pickwick on Hollywood Boulevard was another favorite, and of course Stanley Rose’s, next door to Musso & Frank’s—perhaps the inspiration for the bookshop in The Big Sleep. Rose, a fabled raconteur, often showed up at the restaurant, establishing a creative synergy between the two establishments.9
On February 17, sounding almost jaunty, Faulkner wrote to Robert Haas, “I am well and quite busy, surrounded by snow, dogs, Indians, Red Coats, and Nazi spies.”10 He was referring to a Mountie movie, Northern Pursuit, starring Errol Flynn—“an avalanche of adventure,” the trailer announces, “bigger than the Northwest.”11 Flynn, a Mountie of German descent, is charged with exposing Nazi infiltrators who have landed in Canada via a submarine that surfaces through the Hudson Bay ice. It is hard to tell what Faulkner contributed to the script. He seems to have been used in his screen doctor role. Credit ultimately went to Frank Gruber and Alvah Bessie, the latter getting his name on the picture with the help of fellow Communists—much to Faulkner’s disgust.12
Deep Valley, which became a film starring Ida Lupino and Dane Clark, oscillated between a California farm and a convict camp somewhat in the mode of The Wild Palms. A convict petitions to be released so that he can join the convoys in the hazardous North Atlantic, confronting German submarines, ice fields, and mines, ferrying materiel to the Soviet Union and Britain. Although the film became a conventional love story that did not include Faulkner’s work, Deep Valley addressed Faulkner’s wish to volunteer: “When I finish this job [on Northern Pursuit] I want to try for the Ferry Command,” Faulkner wrote to Haas.13 The RAF had established the Ferry Command in July 1941 to transport aircraft and pilots by ship at a time when transatlantic flights were problematic.14 Work on Northern Pursuit and Deep Valley meant more than perhaps Faulkner could say. He wanted to put himself in harm’s way, although all his efforts to do so floundered. He was too old and unqualified for active service. His aborted work on Northern Pursuit and Deep Valley parallels his thwarted efforts to charge into the thick of a military mission. But then two projects, “Country Lawyer” and “Battle Cry,” provided the challenge and scope that only “The De Gaulle Story” had promised.
At Home and War
In March, assigned to adapt Bellamy Partridge’s best-selling Country Lawyer, a memoir about growing up in Phelps, New York, Faulkner transferred the story to Jefferson, Mississippi, beginning in 1890 and spanning both world wars. Lawyer Partridge (Faulkner soon changed the name to Sam Galloway) is an “outlander,” a type that would later get Faulkner’s full attention in Requiem for a Nun. The black people notice he is a “man without background of breeding, land, etc.” He is determined to marry Edith Bellamy, the daughter of a prominent family, even though she is engaged to the scion of another prominent Jefferson family. With locals not willing to engage his services, he works in a livery stable. When a “middle-aged Negro, a local character” vaguely reminiscent of the unflappable Lucas Beauchamp, is accused of setting fire to the Hoyt family’s stable, Galloway defends him, although the black man, who has “some of the snobbery of the white villagers,” says he “had almost rather be sent to jail by what he calls ‘folks’ than to be cleared by ‘trash.’ ” But Galloway wins the case and the respect of country people who “are of his own kind, who had quickly recognized his value to them, because of his honesty and the fact that he is not a blue-stocking aristocrat, and among Negroes to whom he has become a champion, seeing that they receive justice even when he will get no pay from them.” They call him “Judge,” a typical southern way of showing respect, although Galloway continues his solo practice. In short, he becomes a center of moral and legal authority that is otherwise absent in the community.
“Country Lawyer” reflects Faulkner’s increasing awareness that the South had to change. So Edith (she might as well be called a Compson) is drawn to Sam Galloway: “Some female instinct might have seen in Sam’s peasant blood that strength which was exhausted in her own blood.” Sam Galloway anticipates the liberal southern lawyer who would later capture popular attention in the figure of Atticus Finch, although Faulkner does not make his hero southern by birth or saddle him with the bloviations of Gavin Stevens, who would figure so largely in Intruder in the Dust, Knight’s Gambit, Requiem for a Nun, The Town, and The Mansion. Gregory Peck should have played Sam—not only because of his later celebrated performance in To Kill a Mockingbird but because of his key role in social-issue pictures like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), which “Country Lawyer” anticipates. As Faulkner says in his treatment: “We want to show a man who believes in the innate soundness of mankind, people, and in the simple verities of honor, dignity, justice, courage, etc.” The “we” helps to explain what happened to Faulkner in Hollywood. He no longer spoke only for himself or for Hollywood but for the collective voice of humanity, a voice that would makes its way especially into the dialogue and narratives of Requiem for a Nun and The Town.
Edith breaks her engagement with the Hoyt scion and chooses Sam, but neither she nor Sam can win the approval of haughty Hoyt senior. Sam, the consummate gentleman, does not retaliate when Hoyt senior strikes him with a whip. Instead, Sam marries Edith and resumes his practice: “The Hoyts and the town cannot beat him.” The Galloways’ son, Samuel Bellamy Galloway, grows up playing with the son of a black family servant, named Sam Galloway Moxey, nicknamed “Spoot.” Moxey’s mother, Rachel, and another black family servant, Caroline, who “fed the white baby at her breast along with her own,” roughly reflect the nurturing Faulkner received. The boys are treated equally—not at the insistence of Sam but of Rachel, who whips them both when they disobey and then feeds them cake afterward, wiping away their tears.
Sam junior follows the same trajectory as his father, falling in love with a Hoyt, but this time the enmity between Hoyt senior and Galloway senior is such that it breaks up this second-generation union of feuding families and results in Sam junior’s estrangement from his father. Sam senior nevertheless remains the sympathetic patriarch, driving downtown to a drugstore to buy a quart of strawberry ice cream for the ailing Rachel just like Faulkner did for Caroline Barr.
Sam junior and Spoot enlist in the army in 1918, with the former put in charge of black troops because he is a southerner and presumably understands them. Sam junior says to his commanding officer that he “didn’t know what there was he wanted understood about them; that maybe any human being was his own enigma which he would take with him to the grave, but I didn’t know how the color of his skin was going to make that any clearer or more obscure.” The color line in Faulkner’s work is not erased in this treatment so much as it made to seem irrelevant—no more than a societal or institutional construct. When Sam junior and Spoot are reunited during the war, they become “once more the two boys who fed at the same breast, who hunted the bird nest, and stole the pig and were whipped for it, who slept in the same bed until after they were both so big they would have to sleep together by stealth to keep old Rachel from catching them, who hunted together and had never been separated until Sam went to Yale.” Such scenes go beyond white boy–black boy scenes in The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses and beyond anything Faulkner would attempt to imagine in Intruder in the Dust. Only the Hollywood Faulkner writes this plainly about “two men of different races” and “how little the difference in race means to them when they are alone.” When Sam and Spoot come under German fire, Spoot “tries to cover Sam’s body with his own as the machine gun bullets seek them out and kill them both.” What would have happened, in terms of Hollywood and Yoknapatawpha history, if such a film had been released midwar? The coda to this death scene is the funeral for Rachel in Sam senior’s parlor with a black choir and Sam senior delivering the oration. “Will use one I delivered in like circumstances over an old Negro servant of my family,” Faulkner added parenthetically.
The film jumps from World War I to World War II. Sam senior is now seventy, and yet another Galloway is romantically involved with a Hoyt—“the old, old story of Montague and Capulet. But this time” the older generation will not have its way. Spoot junior is thinking of enlisting: “He says there is a squadron of Negroes being trained to fly at Tuskegee. That’s what he would like to do, believes he can do.” Lally, Edith’s daughter, offers to help Spoot junior with his exams. She also tells Sam senior, still feuding with the Hoyts, “a few truths. He gets a new picture of young people of 1942, who have the courage of their mistakes and . . . an ability to face truth which old Sam begins to realize that perhaps he has not.” She then delivers a speech similar to one given in Lillian Hellman’s play The Searching Wind (1944; film, 1946)15 that really leads to the suspicion that Hellman and Faulkner had some important discussions at Musso & Frank’s bar. Lally tells Sam “calmly how it was the old people like him, with their greed and blundering and cowardice and folly, who brought on this war, brought about this situation in which Carter [Hoyt] and Spoot, Junior, will have to risk their lives and perhaps lose them, as her Uncle Sam and Spoot, Junior’s, father did in the last war.” Old Sam, for the first time in the film, is “speechless with amazement, is convinced by her very calmness and courage that perhaps young people do know what they are doing.” Faulkner was well on the way to creating another outspoken younger person, Chick Mallison, and his black companion, Aleck Sander, important counterweights to Gavin Stevens, the retrograde progressive in Intruder in the Dust. This generational story forecasting what it would be like after the war anticipated films like The Best Years of Our Lives, in which the old ways of doing business would be severely challenged. As old Sam tells old Hoyt: “How can two outdated stupid old men like them save the good name of people who are already braver and stronger than they have ever been? What is there that such old men can do, that these young people can need?” Carter Hoyt and Lally Calloway marry, and the films ends, as it might in a Lillian Hellman play, with Caroline dismissing the two white patriarchs and telling Lally: “Come on, honey. Don’t nobody care whether them two eats or not, but you got to eat. Come, on, now.”
“I have come to like this picture, am trying to make a good job of it,” Faulkner wrote to his mother.16 But his script remained unproduced—nobody seems to know exactly why. Had it been otherwise, perhaps the “sympathetic, compassionate, and deferential respect of white toward black, black toward white, would have been sacrificed. In 1943, American audiences would have been disquieted, some outraged; all would have found the premise unrealistic, not ‘true to life.’ ”17 And yet it was what William Faulkner could imagine to be true, and what he would spend much of his remaining life insisting could be actually true.
Near the end of writing “Country Lawyer,” Faulkner wrote an unusually long letter to his nephew Jimmy about war and their part in it, and about the next generation that had taken over in Faulkner’s most recent screenplay. He wanted Jimmy, serving as a combat pilot, to have the lieutenant’s pips from his RAF uniform as a “luck piece.” Apparently still not able to get over missing the action, Faulkner perpetuated the myth about his own wartime derring-do “crack-up in ’18”: “I think the Gestapo has it [his dog tag]; I am very likely on their records right now as a dead British flying officer-spy.” He could have put that story in an Errol Flynn Hollywood scenario. He warned Jimmy against “foolhardiness”: “A lot of pilots dont get past that. Uncle Dean didn’t.” Foolhardiness was often a response to fear. “The brave man is not he who does not know fear; the brave man is he who says to himself, ‘I am afraid. I will decide quickly what to do, and then I will do it.’ ” Jimmy just had to keep at it, with “trained reflexes” and “natural good sense.” This was a preachifying letter, Faulkner admitted, but he gave advice based on his own meticulous studies: “Learn all you can about the aeroplane: how to check it over on the ground. Aeroplanes very seldom let you down; the trouble is inside cockpits.”18
Cho-Cho’s husband, Bill Fielden, wrote Faulkner about home. “Your letter moved me very much,” Faulkner replied. “I too like my town, my land, my people, my life, am unhappy away from it even though I must quit it to earn money to keep it going to come back to.” He admitted that “Big Miss” (Estelle) had “done fine” without him. He expected he would have to write another “good picture” before he would get home in July.
That “good picture,” “Battle Cry,” a Howard Hawks project, appeared in the spring of 1943. Meta remembered Faulkner “in a state of contained excitement”: “His step was jaunty. He was not drinking to excess. Never one to talk shop . . . [h]e did tell me that his screen treatment, with pages and pages of dialogue, was coming along with only minor hitches.” He even began speaking of actors who could play various roles. He wrote home to Jill about the “big picture” that would run three hours, cost between three and four million dollars, and feature several big stars. Unlike so many letters home, this one did not strike the mournful, yearning note of homesickness, although Faulkner did spend a paragraph mooning over Jill’s hair that was about to be cut for the first time, apparently: “your hair can be cut like you want it, and it can still be like Pappy wants to think of it, at the same time. . . . I want you to enjoy it and write me about it.” He wanted her to realize that she remained always in his thoughts even if he had to leave her: “Pappy knows and can remember and can see in his mind whenever he wants to every single day you ever lived, whether he was there to look at you or not, why any time he wants to he sees in his mind and in his sight too every single one of those days, and how you looked then.” Then he told her more about what it was like in Hollywood, having to get his own breakfast now that the black man who served him had left for a better job in an aircraft factory. Faulkner took his breakfast at Musso & Frank’s—orange juice, toast, marmalade, and sometimes “little fellows” (sausages)—and then waited on a corner for “Mr. Bezzerides and Mr. Job to come along in a car, and I go to the studio and walk into my office, and there on my desk is a letter from Mama and my Jill. That makes me feel just fine.” Such letters gave a strong visual sense of his world and how much he wanted her to be part of it. He promised to write her more about the “big picture” later.19
This was a heady time for Faulkner and Hollywood, with Harry Warner, now a colonel, calling his studio a war industry: “Hollywood was alive with the pulsations of war, and something in him needed to be in the dead center of it.” Everywhere he looked, men and women in uniform were all over Sunset Boulevard. He read the newspapers, visited an aircraft factory on assignment, and during pauses in writing the script listened to Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer on the radio reporting on their experiences in London and Berlin. Meta remembered that the “tensions and turbulence of wartime Los Angeles stretched Faulkner like a fine wire.” Planes roared over Burbank. During blackouts huge blankets and tarpaulins covered sound stages. Everyone was fingerprinted and issued ID cards. By 1943, Warner Brothers had lost something like a thousand employees, and anyone with a foreign accent excited suspicion: “There was talk of a fifth column.” These were times of “tribal identification,”20 but also of an expansive sense of the world struggling to be free that Faulkner labored to put into his panoramic screenplay.
He was not writing from scratch—instead adapting several published stories and a radio play and at strategic points introducing Earl Robinson’s Lincoln cantata. Like Robinson, some of Faulkner’s collaborators were Communists. Faulkner was perforce assembling and modifying the dialectic of public discourse about war coming at him from different angles and attitudes, deploying the drama of different peoples and cultures in strategically built-up scenes, with Robinson’s choral commentary on the drive for liberty, beginning with the Civil War.
The work began on April 7, in consultations with Howard Hawks in June Lake, California. Faulkner reported home to “Big Miss and Little Miss” about this “dude resort,” with “mountains all around with snow on them, and hot noons and nights like fall, so that we sleep under blankets.” He worked in the mornings and fished for trout in lakes and creeks. He had taught Mrs. Hawks how to clean fish, which they cooked right beside a creek to eat—just as they did back home with Mamma and Missy and Buddy (Malcolm) hunting for rattlesnakes. Here, too, there were woods with deer and stripe-tailed chipmunks. The studio paid for this holiday for “only the price of turning out a few typewritten pages a day.”21
Meta remembered that Faulkner had resisted departing from her for two weeks, but she said it would not be wise to disappoint Hawks, who had let go the other writers working on “Battle Cry” and had placed all his hopes in Faulkner. When he returned to her, he complained about “story parlays” that went on from morning to midnight. Back with Meta, he enjoyed sitting on his terrace, relaxed and self-absorbed and barely hearing what she had to say, as he returned to his fiction, she supposed, putting it all into place.
It took Faulkner only two weeks to produce a 143-page treatment, with an expanded treatment completed on June 2, and a revised screenplay on August 15, “new in form, cycloramic, with jumps in time and place, and with the camera utilized beyond any previous attempt.”22 This film would have been the most ambitious war picture Hollywood ever produced, an epic covering virtually every theater of war. Warner Brothers had produced the first anti-Nazi film set in the United States, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). Fox released Four Sons (1940), about a Czech family split apart between fascist and antifascist brothers. In The Mortal Storm (1940) and Escape (1940), MGM exposed Hitler’s concentration camps. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) confronted Hitler directly, as did Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941). Studios like Paramount geared up to report on the American preparation for war (I Wanted Wings, 1941), followed by action pictures such as Dive Bomber (1941), A Yank in the RAF (1941, dramatizing Dunkirk), Wake Island (1942), Across the Pacific (1942), and, of course, Air Force (1943). But none of these feature films—or those made during the rest of the war—had the scope or the comprehensive ideology that Faulkner incorporated into “Battle Cry.”23 Just as Faulkner had incorporated and modified the forms of popular fiction in The Unvanquished, he assimilated Hollywood tropes and conventions while creating aural and visual montages that went well beyond what Hollywood expected and beyond his own previous treatments and screenplays.
Faulkner’s expanded story treatment began on a train platform in Springfield, Illinois, in early 1942. Soldiers are waiting for a train. A draftee, Fonda, has the “look of Lincoln as a young man.”24 Faulkner has in mind, of course, Henry Fonda, a war hero in Drums along the Mohawk and the star of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Fonda had also starred in Blockade (1938), about the Spanish Civil War, playing a pacifist farmer forced to defend his land. Naming Fonda is just the first instance of Faulkner’s deliberate effort to draw on Hollywood history, choosing an actor who exemplified the common man as noble figure—Fonda, for example, as Tom Joad, a Depression-era hero in John Ford’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).25 But like Gary Cooper’s Alvin York in Sergeant York (1941), another Warner Brothers–Hawks production, Fonda is a reluctant warrior, telling his gung-ho grandfather, reminiscent of the grandfather in “Shall Not Perish”: “I bet you wouldn’t feel so chipper if it was you that had to go.” But the old man announces the film’s message: “You’re going to fight for the folks that ain’t free, that have been enslaved.” He quotes Lincoln in a speech that also recalls the commissary books in Go Down, Moses. The old man invokes Lincoln’s half slave/half free speech that he wrote “across the page of America, across the whole ledger of human bondage, in his own blood, so that no folks anywhere can ever forget it.” Lincoln’s words, like Faulkner’s, are built to last. As writers, Lincoln and Faulkner coalesce, or dissolve into one another, in the montage of freedom.
Writing this film was William Faulkner’s reckoning with the Civil War as he wrote a new kind of history—this boy who had grown up in a southern classroom drawing a picture of Lincoln as ogre, listening to the tales about the tyrant, as he was commonly described in southern poetry during the war. When Fonda objects to the Civil War talk, saying, “But that was 1865,” he might as well be addressing audiences who went to see Gone with the Wind, who were able to set the Civil War aside as grim but also colorful and above all, over! Fonda says of that time: “The world was smaller, folks seemed to know then. At least, they never had to go to the end of the world to fight slavery.” To which his grandfather responds, “That’s jest where we want slavery: right at the ends of the earth!”
The Springfield scene segues to North Africa with Fonda (renamed Corporal Flynn) running with other soldiers in the desert in a shot that dissolves into the sound of tramping feet and the “sound of the Freedom Train,” first mentioned by the old man describing Lincoln’s cross-country funeral cortège. A voice announces the theme of Earl Robinson’s Lincoln cantata: “They were the people. He was their man. Sometimes you couldn’t even tell where the people left off and Abraham Lincoln began.” Robinson’s music suffuses the film, from beginning to end. He was a believer in the Popular Front that united all parties in the fight against fascism. For Faulkner, the war meant the restoration of brotherhood that had broken apart at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred. As Robinson’s music dissolves into a banjo “playing a rollicking bay tune, American and Negroid,” an American soldier, a white southerner, Akers, carries a wounded black soldier into a house to safety. Shot in the spine, the black man cannot move, and the “white boy” entertains them both on a dulcimer he has found in the house, “playing the rollicking merry tune.” Faulkner uses natural sound, emanating from the scene itself, rather than a soundtrack, similar to the methods of World War II documentary filmmakers like Humphrey Jennings. The music keeps the men in two worlds—the one they come from and the “waste of the African desert” that the southerner watches through a window as he plays.
The southerner—in effect a nurse—makes a bed for the wounded, immobilized black man, whose name, he insists, is America, a name that could not have been used in Yoknapatawpha and would have made moviegoers think “black” whenever the country is named. Not only is North Africa where Americans were first battle tested, but it is also where black and white men fought the enemy to save one another, a solidarity contrasted to a captured German who sneers at an Italian captive: “Did you ever know a member of his race who didn’t run from the sight of armed men?” Endemic racism still lingers in the southerner’s speech, as it did in Faulkner’s. Akers says, referring to the black man, “ain’t going nowhere,” and then adds, “Are you, nigger?” The question marks the very racial divide that the war is meant to overcome and that Akers himself is in the process of surmounting.
The North African scenes are counterpointed with the many voices of the Lincoln cantata telling the story of Lincoln’s assassination and the people’s fight to spread his legacy:
The slaves are free, the war is won
But the fight for freedom’s just begun
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Freedom’s a thing that has no ending
It needs to be cared for, it needs
defending.
This call includes all peoples and occupations: “A Kansas farmer, a Brooklyn sailor, / An Irish policeman, a Jewish tailor.” “Battle Cry” anticipates Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun (1945), a film that uses Robinson’s choral commentary on battle scenes, with songs like “The House I Live In,” famously sung by Frank Sinatra, extolling America’s democratic ethos.
The action shifts to a Russian village in February 1942 in a section titled “Diary of a Red Army Woman,” based on a radio script by Violet Akins and William Bacher. Tania becomes a pilot, like her beloved Semyon, who is engaged in trying to halt the German invasion on June 22, 1941. Her intrepid military career is followed in dissolves to other scenes of action in Moscow, Leningrad (August 1941), Sevastopol (December 1941 and February 12, 1942), Kuibyshev (June 1942), and Stalingrad (September 1942). Throughout it all, and even after Semyon’s death, Tania, having given birth to a son, declares: “It is not only for Russia we women are fighting, my baby—Beyond Russia, beyond Stalingrad—there is a world of suffering people I must try to help.” Her words meld into the cantata soundtrack, which itself serves as a transition to North Africa again. The sneering German might as well be Goering at Nuremberg, whose agile intellect troubled American prosecutor Robert Jackson (a Supreme Court justice). The German baffles the Americans, who conclude there is no way to answer the maniacal logic of fascists: “They are monsters. There is no hope for them, no place in the world for them and us too. We will have to destroy them to save ourselves.” As the Americans bury one of their officers, the sound of their shovels mimics the beat of the Freedom Train that, in turn, dissolves into shovels digging a grave in China.
The next scenes, briefly described in the treatment, deal with Mama Mosquito, a shape-shifting figure who miraculously avoids the Japanese invaders. She is an old woman, like Granny Millard in The Unvanquished, working by stealth, disguise, and dissembling, organizing the labor of a people “moving by hand . . . [a]n entire munitions factory, piecemeal back into the hills where the Japs can’t bomb it, on to where General Chiang decorates her.” Mama Mosquito, a Harriet Tubman figure, is one of several women in Faulkner’s script who become vital to the cause of freedom.
The interplay between the North Africa and China scenes is accomplished through musical montage, with the Italian prisoner of war learning to play an American tune and another soldier playing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Faulkner intended a “build-up to a definite lift: young men who may not even see tomorrow playing the old tune about when they will march triumphantly through the village streets of America.” That very scene would appear at the end of The Purple Heart (1944), when American prisoners of war march in sync to the stirring music that expresses their defiance of Japanese torture and execution. At the same time Akers remembers a night “in the woods, an old church—niggers” singing about the Freedom Train.
The next shot—the interior of the church—features a preacher and his congregation, as he cries out: “We got a new land! / Aint’t no riding boss with a whip . . . No high sheriff to bring us back!” The black church settings in Soldiers’ Pay, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses that had often shown the chasm between black and white people serve here as a kind of Whitmanian catalogue of union, a heterogeneous group gathered at Lincoln’s catafalque: “CLOSE SHOT of an old Negro woman decently dressed, but poor, in shawl and widow’s bonnet, at the coffin. Behind her a cotton speculator, a gambler type, in frock coat, etc.”
In Faulkner’s double-column screenplay, song set to words is accompanied by the democratic exchanges of the dance:
Lincoln was down in Kansas town A country barn dance, rustic, 1860–80,
Swinging his lady round and round! Two fiddlers, a triangle, a banjo; on crude platform, dressed in Sunday clothes, a caller. The dancers are farmers, young, middle-aged, the old people sitting in chairs, or on benches along the wall. Lincoln’s figure is superposed, or he is one of the dancers maybe.
Lincoln in this sequence, Faulkner notes, is Fonda. The reluctant warrior has become the national hero who is also a “nigger” named America.
In scenes reminiscent of Today We Live, Faulkner has Fonda (the name Flynn has been dropped) walking through English streets in 1941, exciting the “astonishment and annoyance and a little contempt” from Englishmen who feel America has come to the war too late. Then the action shifts again to The Hornet, an aircraft carrier ferrying a load of Spitfires to Malta. Faulkner, the RAF trainee who worked on meticulous drawings of aircraft, focuses on the new planes, some of which have to make incredibly short landings on carriers, and others like the “long-range-Focke-Wulf with four engines and a big range from shore.” Anyone can fly Hurricanes, says Ackroyd, who makes a miraculous Spitfire landing on a carrier, although he is told to jump and jettison the plane. Hurricanes were reliable, if less exciting than Spitfires. Such detail reveals the Faulkner who told his nephew Jimmy to learn about how his planes were put together. For Faulkner, this attention to mechanical detail, and to the ingenuity of pilots, was a crucial aspect of the fight for freedom. His suspenseful sequence in which a dinghy is rigged with explosives and has to be guided through a German minefield to blow up German warships anticipates the daring denouement of Crash Dive (1943), which concludes with an attack on a German submarine base.
In an alternative sequence, Fonda, stationed in England, visits a Sussex village, as Faulkner did in the fall of 1925. Fonda observes the women of all ages who have organized a factory. He also joins “one of the oldest hunts in England,” now run by women: “He realizes that this, this preservation of a sporting club, is a part of the ‘England’ which these people are fighting and suffering privation for, and that maybe this is one of the symptoms of what has made them tough, made them able, out of all Western Europe, to resist the Germans.” Did Faulkner remember such scenes when he went fox hunting in Virginia more than a decade later? Was the war, the idea of tradition itself, what kept him saddling up? He was quite aware, as is Fonda, of the differences between classes and hunts: “In Fonda’s country, when anybody went fox or coon hunting, anyone who wanted to or heard the dogs and horses went along.” The Willingham Hunt, on the other hand, is invitation only, although that too, he is told, will change. Fonda remains Fonda, incorrigibly American, sitting in “country fashion” on his horse, “slack-rumpled, his legs dangling practically, holding the reins in one hand as if he were holding a fishing pole.” Faulkner compares the performance here to Gary Cooper’s folksy Alvin York while working in yet another Hollywood staple, a cocksure American war correspondent—“John Garfield type”—in Malta wooing a British woman working in an air raid shelter and canteen.
Fonda, who has been to North Africa, to England, and back to North Africa, quotes heavyweight champion Joe Louis, “a man of America’s people”—a phrase referring to both the wounded black soldier, America, and the country: “There’s a heap wrong with this world, but Hitler can’t fix it.”26 Louis’s words provoke the Italian prisoner of war to tell the story of mountain villagers in Nazi-occupied Serbia hiding their ancient bell so that it will not be melted down for war materiel. Their refusal to collaborate results in their murder and the decimation of their town, which dissolves into a scene with the “cold contemptuous German officer” listening to the Italian prisoner of war, who has lived in America and seen “America’s people” herded into “tenements in Harlem and Chicago and Detroit,” refugees from the Jim Crow South in a country that has failed to live up to its Emancipation Proclamation. Americans have to “clean their own house a little,” he admits, although, as Faulkner well knew, “it is not that simple, not that easy to turn your back on the land, the earth where you were born and where the only work you know is and where your mother and father and sisters and brothers and children, too, are buried—even if it is only a tenement in Harlem or Chicago or Detroit or a farm in Jim Crow land.”
The forces of freedom and resistance are reasserted in a brief scene in Stevenson, an American village that adopts, in a town hall meeting, the name of an obliterated Serbian village, Cincovci, mispronounced as Sinkovski—perhaps Faulkner’s wry comment on how so much of world history is actually a part of the American experience, no matter how mangled that history becomes in American parlance. The soldiers who have heard the Italian’s Serbian village story vote against retreat as the Germans are closing in. This democratic solidarity is similar to that expressed in the scene in The Purple Heart (1944) when the American crew votes to continue its resistance to Japanese torture. Did Darryl Zanuck, who wrote the screenplay for The Purple Heart, and to whom the makers of “Battle Cry” reported, borrow from Faulkner’s work?
Several morally compromised characters, some of whom would not have passed Breen office censorship, become part of the Freedom Train music played on Ayer’s dulcimer, which dissolves in a street scene in Paris in 1938. Clemente, forced into prostitution to support herself and looking like a femme fatale to Albert Loughton, the Englishman who has befriended Fonda, ultimately becomes Loughton’s beloved, whom he has to leave during the evacuation at Dunkirk, shown in a quick montage that includes the arrival of De Gaulle in London “with nothing but a clean shirt and razor.” Just as Loughton supposes he has lost Clemente forever, a fade-out segues to a long sequence labeled “Mama Mosquito.” She helps direct the flow of Chinese refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion, pictured as a “swollen flood of people flowing toward the west” with the “whole screen . . . filled with people carrying bedding, bits of machinery, looms, spindles, household furniture.” This is a civilization on the move, broken up and yet surmounting the destruction of their ruined villages, led by this old woman “grim and implacable.” Her marching scenes evoke the spirit of the Freedom Train as she outwits and deflects the depredations of the Japanese. In her person she is like Granny Millard: “so little and frail looking” and yet “strong and capable and calm.”
While Mama Mosquito has become the symbol of Chinese fortitude and resistance, Clemente in occupied Paris and then Holland is like the Caddy that Faulkner will write about in the “Compson Appendix,” who has become a German officer’s woman. Clemente is “now a symbol of France itself: conquered, debased, prone and dazed and for a time apathetic beneath the conqueror’s heel.” Yet she recovers her dignity even as an apolitical Dutch boatman becomes a saboteur—both, “in an original idea of mine,” Faulkner writes, will become effective enemies of fascism even as a fade-in returns to North Africa showing Akers tenderly moving the wounded America to a safer place. As the German tanks approach, the choruses of the Lincoln cantata merge into the firing, commemorating Lincoln’s death but also his voice saying, “How to make the war and the Word agree.” At this point Faulkner seemed to balk, perhaps concerned that “Battle Cry” had become unduly sentimental and pious and more propagandistic than he could tolerate. After Earl Robinson’s Lincoln says, “I think God must have loved the common people; He made so many of them,” Faulkner inserts a parenthesis: “If I remember correctly, Lincoln said, intent humorous, ‘God surely must love the poor people: He made so many of them.’ Am a little inclined to think the author stopped being a musician at this point in order to insert a little foreign matter.” The foreign matter, it seems, was Robinson’s collectivism, which annoyed the conservative and highly individualistic Faulkner. An aggrieved Robinson rejected Faulkner’s “insinuations,” saying Lincoln’s statements, as Robinson reported them, could be documented.27
In spite of this small kerfuffle, Robinson thought Faulkner was well on the way to an “honest-to-God great picture,” with “scenes that will really be new and startling but at the same time simple and true and embodying real people and believable characters and situations.” One of the producers, William Bacher, said of Faulkner’s work: “I think he’s a swell craftsman. Mr. Hawks and he’ll come through with a great job on it.”28 Nevertheless parts of the expanded story treatment were “spotty and confusing,” Robinson noted.
Whatever quarrels Faulkner had with Robinson seem minor compared to their agreement. To his stepson, Malcolm, in a letter postmarked July 4, Faulkner wrote about the Tuskegee airmen:
They are in Africa now, under their own negro . . . on the same day a mob of white men and white policemen killed 20 negroes in Detroit. Suppose you and me and a few others of us lived in the Congo, freed seventy-seven years ago by ukase; of course we can’t live in the same apartment hut with the black folks, nor always ride in the same car nor eat in the same restaurant, but we are free because the Great Black Father says so. Then the Congo is engaged in War with the Cameroon. At last we persuade the Great Black Father to let us fight too. You and Jim say are flyers. You have just spent the day trying to live long enough to learn how to do your part in saving the Congo. Then you come back and are told that 20 of your people have just been killed by a mixed mob of civilians and cops at Little Poo Poo. What would you think?
A change will come out of this war. If it doesn’t, if the politicians and the people who run this country are not forced to make good the shibboleth they glibly talk about freedom, liberty, human rights, then you young men who live through it will have wasted your precious time, and those who dont live through it will have died in vain.
Faulkner suffered thinking of the male members of his own family in peril. Robert Haas at Random House had just had a son killed in the war, and Faulkner told Malcolm about it and about Haas’s daughter flying planes in the Women’s Ferry Squadron: “All Jews. I just hope I dont run into some hundred percent American Legionnaire until I feel better.”29
In a second temporary screenplay, completed on July 5, Faulkner built up the role of the German prisoner of war and through him voiced a critique of a capitalist and consumer-oriented society, but also the doom of the Nazi Social Darwinist credo:
Timber! Mines! Electric power! Bank accounts! Radios, cars, ice cream and picture shows! Pay. Let me tell you what I see. Power: the sinew of strength, the reins to control the force which only the strong dare handle—not for the moiling worthless mass of mankind, but for the power and glory of that race which has the strength to declare its own godhead, and so becomes godhead. America. An empty continent waiting for its master as a woman waits for hers. No wonder your hold on it is so tenuous that you have had to come to this African desert to defend it. The wonder is that she suffered you at all.
At this point, an outraged American soldier is prevented by his fellow officers from shooting the German in a scene that reflects precisely the humanity the “Japs and Germans” have tried to extinguish. But that struggle for freedom and democracy is precarious. A quarrel breaks out between Fonda and Akers about the Civil War. When Akers is told to “forget it,” he responds: “Yeah. If I was a Yankee, I’d want to forget it, too.” Fonda stares at Akers and says: “We can afford to forget it. We won.” It takes another American officer, Corporal Battson, an orphan who does not see himself as either northerner or southerner, to say a new nation was born not in 1776 but in 1861–65, out of Lincoln’s own words: “the suffering, the agony, the blood and grief and travails out of which rose a nation which can become in reality the shape of man’s eternal hope and which, for that reason, must not and shall not perish from the earth.”
Faulkner saw the war as a way of bridging the North/South divide, as he revealed in a letter to Robert Haas about the loss of his son, a carrier-based bomber pilot like Ackroyd. To the New York–born and Yale-educated Haas, Faulkner mentioned that his nephew Jimmy, an eighteen-year-old pilot, had just been posted to carrier training. Jimmy had captured his uncle’s attention the same way, say, Ronald Reagan as the second lead in a war movie might.30 Jimmy had the dash that brought Faulkner back to his dreams of glory, as he consoled Haas: “Then who knows? the blood of your fathers and the blood of mine side by side at the same long table in Valhalla, talking of glory and heroes, draining the cup and banging the empty pewter on the long board to fill again, holding two places for us maybe, not because we were heroes or not heroes, but because we loved them.”31
Faulkner simplified his expanded story treatment and began the film much more simply and swiftly with a shot of a troop train, smoking and steaming ahead, accompanied by music from the Lincoln cantata and a voice-over: “Battle cry is that which rises out of man’s spirit when those things are treated which he has lived by and held above price and which have made his life worth the having and the holding: the integrity of his land, the dignity of his home, the honor of his women and the happiness of his children:—that he and they be not cast into slavery which to a man who has once known freedom is worse than death.” Instead of a chorus, the figure of Paul Robeson dominates the screen, using his bass baritone to shout the word “freedom,” and then, in a close-up, he sings:
A lonesome train on a lonesome track,
Seven coaches painted black;
Carrying Mr. Lincoln home again,
—Only Mr. Lincoln wasn’t on that train.
He is wherever the story of freedom needs defending, a “great long job” for which there is no ending.
The compacted story treatment was in part in response to the studio estimate, delivered at the end of July, that the film would cost over $4 million. Sergeant York had cost $1.4 million and had come in over budget, with delays attributed to Hawks. On August 1, Faulkner moved into Hawks’s plush house on the studio lot so that they could work undisturbed, readying the film for shooting on September 15. They had big plans for afterward: to create an independent production unit, selling their product to the highest bidder. “I am to be his writer,” Faulkner announced to “Big Miss” (Estelle). “He says he and I together as a team will always be worth two million dollars at least.” Faulkner told her he would not come home until Hawks was “completely satisfied with his job. . . . This is my chance.” Faulkner had not been so excited about his prospects since he had first been asked to write a treatment for Tallulah Bankhead. Although Bacher had a hand in the new opening of “Battle Cry,” and another writer contributed a new section set in England, everything else remained Faulkner’s adaptation, his masterwork for the screen.
Even so, he told Estelle: “I’m so impatient to get home, I am about to bust. Thank the Lord, I have work to do, something I believe in.”32 Estelle replied on August 4:
Your letter sounded so cheerful that it made us all feel good. I’ve a notion that Mr. Hawks must have his old secretary back and that once again you’re finding California worthwhile—Don’t misunderstand this, and write back that I begrudge you pleasure—I truly I do not.
Suppose I’ve lived so long now with the knowledge that it has become a familiar and doesn’t frighten me as it did.
With lots of love
Big and Little Miss
This was not the wife who had gone at him with a croquet mallet, and what Faulkner made of such a letter, it is impossible to say.33 Was it enough for her to attend to Rowan Oak and her family, certain that her husband would return?
Estelle’s letter seems of a piece with her chatty and warm letters to her son, Malcolm, away from home on military service. She told him about enjoying Dixie with Bing Crosby, who played the author of the famous southern anthem, and about Jill’s doings—making sure all the dogs had collars when she heard of a campaign to pick up stray pets. “My letter seems to be made up of exclamations, which Billy thinks a serious fault, but I do love to emphasise,” Estelle wrote on August 12.34 Like so many women during the war, Estelle did everything she could make the men in her life happy. Faulkner, in his better moods, appreciated it, and Malcolm adored her for it: “Mamma, your letters & faith in me during the last three months made all of my training seem easy for I love you so very much.”35
On August 13, shortly after Faulkner moved into Hawks’s studio lot house, Warner canceled “Battle Cry,” and according to Faulkner’s contract, he was “suspended for approximately 4 months.”36 If it was devastating to see so much work abruptly dismissed, it was wonderful to go home—although not before one more project suddenly materialized. William Bacher, no longer involved with “Battle Cry,” pitched to Faulkner a story idea that been talked about in Hollywood since the early 1930s: What if the unknown soldier was Christ on his second coming? Had Faulkner mentioned to Bacher that he had been to the Pantheon and visited the unknown soldier?
Bacher “fired up” director Henry Hathaway, saying Faulkner was “the only man to write it.”37 Hathaway remembered that Bacher had talked for two or three hours to Faulkner. “I’d love to do it. I think that’s a great idea,” Hathaway remembers Faulkner saying. “But I don’t really write screenplays.” Hathaway said: “Well, don’t write a script. Just write a treatment. 90 to 120 pages of something and just block it out for us and scripting is the easiest part of it if you’ve got the meat.” Faulkner said, “Fine.” He would go home and do it.38 Bacher advanced him a thousand dollars, proposing they work on the picture “independently, and own it between us, share and share alike.” Faulkner decided the story could be both a film and a novel. Elements of the Christ story appear, of course, in Faulkner’s earlier fiction and screenplays, but why, exactly, a Hollywood pitchman and a director other than Hawks would have such an impact on a writer who would eventually, after a decade, produce the project as A Fable requires some explanation. According to Stephen Longstreet, Bacher, with his “wild, piercing eyes and wild red hair,” was “a combination of General Patton and Harpo Marx.” “Short, continually pulling up his pants,” he never stopped talking. “He was a remarkable salesman, the world’s greatest salesman. . . . Bacher had probably convinced WF that this was the greatest story since the gospels. . . . Bacher made the thing jell in WF’s mind.”39 Maybe, although Hathaway, a veteran director, probably had as much influence as Bacher.
Even so, it seems improbable that a writer like Faulkner could be sold by force of personality or even the promise of profit on a shopworn subject. Perhaps in his work on “Battle Cry,” which pictured the war effort in universalist terms not connected to a specific locality and reflected on freedom, which had no geographical limitation, he believed he had found a way to portray a new kind of history of a world he had not mapped before.