10

Fables of Fascism

To Have and Have Not, August 1943–May 1944

Reigning at Rowan Oak

“I called Nannie [Maud Falkner] tonite and she told me Pappy arrived today. I know how happy the house is now,” Malcolm Franklin wrote to his mother, Estelle, on August 22. Malcolm, training in Oklahoma, missed the dove hunting with Pappy and told his mother: “I can hardly wait to hear about Pappy killing the deer. Write me all about it & ask him to.”1 As Malcolm’s later diaries reveal, his visits to Rowan Oak were not perfunctory. They were occasions to be noted and celebrated. “What I would have given to have been at Jilly’s Halloween party,” Malcolm wrote to his mother:

I know that an excellent time was had by all, as with all of our parties of the past—how I remember them. Granddaddy [Lem Oldham] wrote me a letter telling about the party: “Jill had her Halloween Party Sat. nite. Her costume was a beautiful one in spite of the fact that she played a ‘witch.’ Imagine a girl with her lovely face and girlish figure a ‘witch.’ ”2

Missing Christmas at Rowan Oak was worst of all, although Malcolm comforted himself on a trip to New York City by hearing “A negro basso-baritone who was very good and sang some of Pappy’s favorites—Water Boy—among them.”3

William Faulkner as patriarch still rankled the Oldhams, especially the status-conscious Lem—resentful that he now had to rely on the largesse of the son-in-law he had not wanted his daughter to marry. On his stationery, Lem continued to glory in better days, still designating himself in October 1943: “United States Attorney, Northern District of Mississippi, 1921–1925.” To Malcolm’s sister, Cho-Cho, Oldham wrote: “I am anxious that Cornell will view Malcolm through our spectacles with the result of seeing his first son developed into a refined, cultured gentleman, a reflection of his ancestors, and I might add to a marked degree, the Franklin side.” Cornell Franklin was still Lem Oldham’s ideal.4

“He made our childhood,” Vicki (Cho-Cho’s daughter) and Faulkner’s niece Dean said about life at Rowan Oak. Outdoors and on moonlight rides he predicted, “This is gonna be a good night for shooting stars.” They would stay up late, and he would spot the stars for them. He would turn to Estelle and say, “The fish are biting today Stelle, want to go & catch fish?” Just walking down the Old Taylor Road with him was fun. Nothing escaped his notice: “That shack has a new water faucet. See it?” By ten or eleven, you were expected to “know things, to know about a man if they brought him up in conversation.” Games included reciting the names of the twelve Caesars, the vice presidents, the Kentucky Derby winners, the six wives of Henry VIII. They became privy to confidential information: Anne Boleyn had a deformed finger and had sleeves especially designed to conceal it. They had a favorite parlor game, Twenty Questions, popularized in a 1940s radio program. How exactly they played it is not clear, but it usually involved an “answerer” who picked an object that the questioners had to guess—for example, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” The successful questioner then became the answerer. The point was for the answerer to stump the questioners, winning if twenty questions did not yield the correct answer.

When Vicki showed her first short story to Faulkner, he asked, “Why did the young man do that?” Vicki didn’t know. You have to know why, he told her. Then they worked on improving the story. He could be brutal, tearing up a story and making her rewrite it. They sometimes resented his discipline, but he was always there for their “emotional upheavals.” They learned how to comport themselves in an adult world. At Thanksgiving the children, served first, drank watered wine at their own card table. Pappy would come to them and show them how to toast. Then Norfleet would enter, humming to himself, holding a platter. When Broadus replaced Norfleet, he was permitted to wear his white jacket only if he had served well the night before. They all had to be “on their mettle” if Aunt Bama visited.5

For much of this period Faulkner continued to work on “a fable, an indictment of war perhaps, and for that reason may not be acceptable now,” he told Harold Ober. After all his schemes to get into military service, his account of a pacifist hero might seem odd, but this correspondence and certain stories revealed his anger over the desire to go to war, even when he joined in. By the end of October he had projected a ten- to fifteen-thousand-word “synopsis” he would send to Ober—adding, “if anyone wants it, I’ll rewrite and clean it up.” Three weeks later he had fifty-one pages for Ober, stipulating that screen rights were not for sale and that he was willing to rewrite the story as a play or “novelette-fable, either or both of which, under my leave of absence from Warner which reserved me the right to write anything but moving pictures while off salary.” He even proposed converting the synopsis into a magazine story.6

Faulkner’s letter to Robert Haas on January 15, 1944, contained a further elaboration of the fable:

in the middle of the war, Christ (some movement in mankind which wished to stop war forever) reappeared and was crucified again. We are repeating, we are in the midst of war again. Suppose Christ gives us one more chance, will we crucify him again, perhaps for the last time.

That’s crudely put; I am not trying to preach at all. But that is the argument: We did this in 1918; in 1944 it not only MUST NOT happen again, it SHALL NOT HAPPEN again. i.e. ARE WE GOING TO LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN? now that we are in another war, where the third and final chance might be offered us to save him.

No reply from Haas is extant, and a month later work on the fable ceased as Faulkner returned to Hollywood and Hawks.

What Price Hollywood?

“Yes, I’m back again,” Faulkner wrote to Harold Ober. “I have done nothing with the story [A Fable].” Work on To Have and Have Not would continue until the middle of May. “I dont know when I shall get at it, maybe then,” Faulkner told his agent. “War is bad for writing.” War had “dragged back into daylight” all the “cave instincts.” Faulkner confessed he was still young enough to be attracted to the fanfare of war, and yet he was too old to do the fighting. He still believed in his “considerable talent, perhaps as good as any coeval.” But he was forty-six, so “what I will mean soon by ‘have’ is ‘had.’ ”7 The words echo the title of the film he was working on, featuring a hero, Harry Morgan, played by Humphrey Bogart, who was only a few years younger than Faulkner and would see action and get the girl—just the kind of Hollywood denouement that Faulkner despised and yet that he wished for himself.

A few weeks after beginning work on To Have and Have Not, Faulkner wrote Estelle an extraordinary letter describing an experience that never happened to him but that he wanted her to believe was true. As he had with his nephew Jimmy, Faulkner continued to act as though he had seen action in World War I:

A curious thing happened to me yesterday. When the aeroplane crashed in 1918, I didn’t feel anything. I just saw the ground getting closer, and then I woke up inside a house with a fearful headache. When I tried to stand up, my right leg just folded up but it never did hurt much. All of a sudden yesterday afternoon, with no warning, I felt all that I didn’t feel while it was happening. But the curious thing is, it’s my back and my left leg. I try to take a step, it feels all right, then too late I find that the leg is not going to hold me up and I have to grab something. So I bought myself a stick, a piece of malacca, a good piece. I dont have to limp on it, I just carry it handy to catch myself on. I just walk a little stiff, enough for people to ask me if rheumatism and old age have got me at last, to which I agree. I hope it will pass away soon. I imagine it will. It doesn’t bother me much, only now and then. The strange thing is, finding again 25 years later the moment that I thought I had lost out of my conscious life.

This complete fantasy, after so much work on war pictures, apparently remained necessary in order to project a complete image of himself as the wounded warrior, the veteran that Cadet Lowe in Soldiers’ Pay wanted to claim as his own experience even if it meant blindness and death.

Faulkner was living with Buzz Bezzerides, who had offered Faulkner a place to stay rent-free, although the subject of payment never came up. Faulkner would stay nearly six months. Bezzerides would sometimes hear the typewriter at three in the morning, working on his “new fable,” he said. Buzz, used to watching his friend’s slow-paced, erect, almost tilted backward walk, was startled by “an explosion of movement” as Faulkner darted across the room and grabbed the toppling high chair that baby Peter had pushed back from the table. “This man was so intense behind that seemingly quiet surface, almost seething,” Bezzerides said. Bill was friendly to the family, and yet was never quite there, even though he often ate dinner with them.8

Meta had been assigned as script girl (that was the term then) on To Have and Have Not. She wondered how much Hawks knew about her and Bill. “Hello Howard,” she said, “as breezy as the archetypal Hawks girl.” He had not changed: “The princely reserve was the same as Faulkner, as much a part of him as his erect carriage and clipped speech.” Hawks later said he had no intention of intruding on his friends’ affairs.

Hawks had Jules Furthman’s script for To Have and Have Not but “threw it away and asked for me,” Faulkner told Ober. Faulkner exaggerated. Furthman’s script served as a template that Faulkner took apart and reassembled in a more efficient piece of construction, limiting the action of the story to three intense days and simplifying locations—putting Harry and his love interest, Marie, in the same hotel, making her entrances and exits all the more enticing and intimate. “Rested, clear-eyed Bill knew what to do straight off,” Meta remembered. Hawks-to-Faulkner-to-Carpenter—it was a sort of reunion, although with a difference: word got around about Faulkner’s powerful performance, even though he worked for a pittance, compared to Furthman’s $2,500 weekly salary. Faulkner alternately enjoyed and deplored the newfound respect. He told her: “All this head bowing and foot scraping. . . . Nobody looked at me before this, and if it’s a flop, none of them will look my way again.” He understood the precarious studio regime, as he wrote home to Estelle: “Warner seems to be in some state of almost female vapors. He fired his main producer, Mr. Wallis, and all Wallis’ writers. Two other producers are about to quit. I think Warner has forgotten me. But someday he will look out his window and happen to see me pass, so I may be fired too. None of us know what’s going to happen. Half the writers are gone now, and the whole shebang might blow up at anytime.”9

Hawks had been in a jam because of U.S. government concerns about the film’s location, Cuba, and the possibility of embarrassing the Batista regime and thwarting President Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy. When Hawks told Faulkner the setting would be changed to Martinique, Faulkner suggested the “political interest would be the conflict between the Free French and the Vichy government.”10 Here, then, was yet another opportunity to get into production the antifascist critique that had been stymied in “The De Gaulle Story” and “Battle Cry.”

A rewrite had to be produced by February 22, and the director started shooting March 1, with Faulkner on the set doing more rewrites and working with the actors. It was an amicable set. Faulkner enjoyed watching Bogart and Bacall fall in love and developed a scene that Hawks had trouble staging. In her screen test, Bacall had delivered her famous line to Bogart: “You don’t have to do anything. Not a thing . . . Oh, maybe just whistle . . . You do know how to whistle, Steve. You just put your lips together and blow.” Hawks remembered they had an “awful time” finding the right moment and setting. Faulkner said, “If we put those people in a hotel corridor where nobody else is around, then I think we can make that scene work.” In fact, Bacall delivers the lines as she heads toward the door of Harry’s room. She turns back as the door opens to the corridor and then launches the lines at the sitting Bogart, whose whistle just after she leaves shows how powerfully she has struck him. It is likely that the actors and Hawks worked up the business of the scene, but Faulkner provided the impetus. “I wrote the line,” Hawks said, “but he [Faulkner] wrote the stuff that led up to it.”11

Bogart’s no-nonsense manner appealed to Faulkner. Hoagy Carmichael’s earthy talk and piano playing were also entertaining. Carmichael often played character parts that made his music one of the romantic links between the male and female star. This time, his celebrated “Hong Kong Blues,” romantic and plaintive, spoke to the plight of displaced characters:

It’s the story of a very unfortunate colored man

Who got arrested down in old Hong Kong

He got twenty years privilege taken away from him

When he kicked old Buddha’s gong.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I need someone to love me.

I need somebody to carry me home.

Faulkner always seemed to be on set when Carmichael performed.12 Stephen Longstreet tried to get Carmichael to talk about his interactions with Faulkner, but Hoagy was as reserved about Bill as Bill was about himself. By design or by virtue of their very natures, both men created a mystique about their appearances in Hollywood, standing apart, and like Bogart, liking it that way.

Hawks, known for asking actors to suit dialogue to their way of speaking, also subordinated Faulkner to the same methods. When Bogart read over Faulkner’s dialogue, the actor asked, “I’m supposed to say all that?” Hawks intervened and cut down the scene, consulting with his star. Faulkner had to “keep ahead” of Hawks “with a day’s script.” In this respect, he had Meta’s invaluable help, since she had a meticulous sense of continuity that kept the director and writer straight on the changes made nearly every day. Furthman looked over Faulkner’s work, but the two writers did not collaborate as such.13

Bogart’s Harry is a supreme individualist as filtered through Hemingway to Faulkner. Harry is cold, says Helene de Bursac, the American wife of the Gaullist freedom fighter Harry is hired to rescue with his fishing boat. She even calls him unfeeling. Harry just wants to run his fishing boat for hire and rejects political engagements. He wants to be let alone. But he also wants to be free. To that extent he tells the saloon owner, Frenchy, that he is on Frenchy’s anti-Vichy side. But it is the money, Harry claims, that motivates the rescue mission.

Harry is wary of women, “dames,” who are a drag and get in the way, although Hawks toned down the misogyny in Faulkner’s script. Harry calls Marie, the pickpocketing femme fatale who pursues him, “Slim,” the nickname of Hawks’s wife, who had recommended Bacall for the role. Bacall is alluring and yet almost masculine in her descent into the lower registers of her voice, making her a perfect match for the skittish hero. Harry’s studied understatement hides (doesn’t it?) a certain suspicion, if not dread, of what women might do. After all, he is clearly attracted to Marie and yet buys her a plane ticket so he no longer has to deal with her, which is why, as she says, she decides to stay and even put herself in danger in a vicious Vichy stronghold. How could the romance between the older Harry (Bogart) and the younger Marie (Bacall) not make for an enticing project for the Meta-besotted Faulkner? During the making of the film, hard-drinking Bogart had to fend off his alcoholic wife’s physical attacks (she had also tried to commit suicide) as it became apparent that he was falling in love with Bacall.14 Did Faulkner know about this off-screen drama—one that paralleled what he had gone through with Estelle and Meta? Bogart and Faulkner drank together, but “there was no meeting of minds,” Stephen Longstreet asserted. “Bogart was just an actor who imagined he was a Hemingway character, and about as bright as any actor which doesn’t say much. Bill would drink with almost anyone at the studio, but hardly ever got to a personal level with them.”15 But Faulkner did write to Estelle: “Tell Missy [Jill] I am becoming good friends with Humphrey Bogart, the star.”16 How personal did you have to get with William Faulkner in order for him to read you?

Just as absorbing was the developing character of Eddie, the “rummy” (another Jiggs), played brilliantly by Walter Brennan with an extraordinary array of tics and staggers and frailties that the actor exploits and yet overcomes in a relentlessly cheerful performance.17 No matter how harshly Harry speaks to him, Eddie returns for more, knowing about Harry’s better self. For all Eddie’s failings, he believes that Harry needs him. Why? Because Eddie trusts in Harry’s goodness. To keep Eddie aboard Harry’s boat is a vindication of Harry’s own humanity. When Harry’s fascist-like client Mr. Johnson wonders why Harry keeps the feckless Eddie as a crew member, Harry responds that Eddie thinks he is taking care of Harry. And more than Harry is ever willing to acknowledge, Eddie does just that. Eddie is always there when Harry needs him. Eddie is, in the parlance of Faulkner’s South, Harry’s “nigger.” The role Eddie plays is the role black people played in Faulkner’s life. They were always there, loyal and reliable, no matter their foibles. In fact, their foibles were essential to a man who wanted to believe in himself as the master, the patriarch, the hero of his own domain. The paradoxical nature of Eddie’s appeal—he is a dependent who is not really subservient, insofar as he has his own personality to express, which is never suppressed in his service to Harry—is the same that obtained among the black people in the Faulkner household.

Fascists do not understand—such is the message of To Have and Have Not—that the world is not divided between the strong and the weak. There is an interdependency in human affairs that cannot be summed up in a survival-of-the-fittest ideology. The strong are strong only inasmuch as they take everyone on board—not just those who don’t drink or have no disabilities. Eddie helps Harry do the right thing. Even though Harry sends Eddie away, Eddie sneaks aboard the boat. And the same is true for Marie; she fails to take off, and Harry is the better for her decision. Meta never emphasized those aspects of Faulkner that were off-putting—not just his drinking but his desire, always, to have his own way. She did more than cope. She brought out his desire to help her and respect her rights, even as he knew he was bound to disappoint her. Like Eddie’s faith in Harry, she never gave up on Bill. Furthman’s Eddie dies; Faulkner not only keeps Eddie alive, but he softens Harry’s treatment of him. Making Eddie integral to the plot also fit right in with the director’s deployment of Brennan in supporting roles in several successful movies from Barbary Coast (1935) to Rio Bravo (1959).

Bruce Kawin succinctly describes the different Harrys that went into the making of To Have and Have Not: “Furthman’s was a tough adventurer, Faulkner’s a sometime misogynist on the verge of political commitment, and Hawks’s a witty and self-confident professional.” All were different from Hemingway’s hero: “a family man, an ex-cop, a desperate planner, an unsentimental killer, an individualist ground to death by giant forces, a loser.”18 Furthman’s Harry hits Eddie hard and slaps Marie, a brutality removed from the final screenplay since the distinction between Harry’s violence in the service of a good cause and that of the fascists cannot be diluted. In Harry, Faulkner had also found a character who suited his own fantasies about working with a bootlegger in New Orleans. Faulkner as “tough guy, one who was aware of evil in the world, even intimate with evil, and cynical—a semi-saint, semi-sinner who was somehow still a good man.”19 Robert Jordan, the antifascist, pro–Spanish Republic hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, also inspired Faulkner’s treatment of Harry. In “Battle Cry,” a French resistance fighter names “an American book written by a Mr. Hemingway” that is read aloud as a refusal to accept fascism.

Few reviewers understood the full import of the film, regarding it as a knockoff of Casablanca—primarily because Bogart as tough-guy reluctant hero seemed similar in both films, as did the anti-Vichy politics, although Hawks actually toned down some of Faulkner’s strident propaganda passages reminiscent of “Battle Cry.” Other reviewers thought the romance detracted from the serious politics. “To Have and Have Not has a healthy democratic flesh tone,” John T. McManus observed in PM (October 12, 1944), “and it is only skin deep.” In the New York Times Bosley Crowther remarked that Walter Brennan’s Eddie is “affecting” but “pointless.”20 The distinguished film critic Manny Farber did not care for the film, “even though one of its screen authors is William Faulkner.” Why? Because of the “unbelievable and irritating” effort to change the “most determined kind of asocial man into a French patriot.”21 Yet that is close to what happened to William Faulkner during his Hollywood war years.