12

Hollywood and Horror, Home and Horses

December 1944–September 1945

Businesswomen, Brothels, and Vampire Lesbians

Before securing a six-month reprieve from his Warner Brothers contract, Faulkner rewrote one of several screenplays for Jerry Wald’s production of Mildred Pierce. How seriously he took the project is in doubt. He introduced a new character, a black maid who soothes a distraught Mildred by singing “Steal Away.” In the margin, Faulkner wrote, “God damn! How’s that for a scene?” And yet he produced a sequence (never filmed) reminiscent of Thomas Sutpen’s rebuff at the white planter’s front door. A proud Mildred Pierce experiences a similar rebuff at the front door of a Beverly Hills mansion, and like Sutpen, she is galvanized into creating her own establishment, a successful restaurant—her all-consuming design—only to come to grief when her daughter, Veda, murders Mildred’s husband, who has been having an affair with Veda. The violence and quasi-incest, the flashbacks and retrospective point of view—all in the James M. Cain 1941 novel—have led to speculation that Cain had rewritten Faulkner who rewrote Cain for the screen.1

Mildred Pierce, only one of the women’s films of the 1940s that revived Joan Crawford’s career, is reminiscent of a treatment Faulkner wrote in 1941, an adaptation of a novel, The Damned Don’t Cry, that he worked on again in May and June of 1944. Not yet under contract to Warner in 1941 but hoping to secure one, he sent to the studio a commentary on a previous writer’s treatment as well as supplying one of his own that actually presaged the decade in film to come. His treatment rectified what he diagnosed as the main character’s problem: Zelda was passive, a victim of circumstance, and as such lacked any vital interest for moviegoers. He made her a poor white southern woman, bold enough to want more from life even when it seemed to make her conventionally immoral. As if to progress beyond Sanctuary, Faulkner not only put his heroine in a brothel, he made her the owner—once again portraying a strong woman, like Mildred Pierce, establishing her own business. Like Temple Drake, Zelda is involved with a southern aristocrat, Dan Carter, weak in the manner of Gowan Stevens, with a “lack of ambition,” a “willingness to condone injustice rather than struggle against it, his backward-looking toward the dead past and veneration of family merely because it is old. She sets out to buck him up, make him ambitious to improve himself and the world, too.” This turn in the plot anticipates both Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun and the social-justice pictures that Twentieth Century-Fox would produce after the war in that Zelda persuades Carter to “take without pay the case of a falsely accused, dissolute and penniless Negro,” a case that Carter wins. Faulkner included plenty of melodrama—several rapes and Zelda’s illegitimate child—that made his treatment unfilmable,2 although The Damned Don’t Cry, released in 1950, retained Faulkner’s basic conception of Zelda, now named Ethel, whose ambition and desire to surmount her poor white background bolsters the strong, if morally compromised heroine Joan Crawford personified. Faulkner’s treatment served his own purposes, part of a process that turned his fiction inside out, exploring in great detail the social and political implications of his characters’ private dramas.

In November 1944, Howard Hawks purchased the film rights to Irina Karlova’s Dreadful Hollow and turned the project over to William Faulkner. The surviving first-draft screenplay, all in Faulkner’s words, does not include a date, and it is not mentioned in his extant correspondence. On January 25, 1951, Hawks was trying to get Darryl Zanuck to approve production of the film. The producer declined, saying he had nothing against the picture, but it seemed formulaic. He had “ ‘seen it all before’ in one form or another.”3 What was he thinking? How could a lesbian vampire movie by William Faulkner seem prosaic? Three years later, Jack Warner also passed on the project.4 The Oxford American (Winter 2002) announced that “Dreadful Hollow” would be produced by Lee Caplin’s Picture Entertainment Corporation, although no film has so far appeared. Caplin assured me the “book is under development as a feature film.”5

Jillian Dare arrives at Rotherham Halt, 204 miles from London, to take up employment at the Grange (remember Wuthering Heights), a country estate inhabited by “two furriners and a loon,” as an old yokel calls them. That word, “furriners,” first used in The Sound and the Fury, evokes the anxieties about the alien that marks Absalom, Absalom! as well—only in this case it is not Sutpen or mixed-blood Bon who disturbs a homogeneous and xenophobic community but a countess from the continent. Zanuck saw only a formula and not the use to which Faulkner put it—the way he capitalizes on suspicions of “race and nationality that emerge in classic vampire cinema.”6

Dare’s family desperately needs her income, and the independent Jillian sets off to walk to work, refusing the offer of a lift from Larry Clyde, who motors by and tries to pick her up. “Nonsense, my dear child,” he says to her condescendingly. “Be sensible, Miss Muffet, and take advantage of providence.” His words conjure up the fairy-tale atmosphere of the movie and also the formulaic aspect that Zanuck spotted. Vampire movies often have young doctors as heroes and sometimes intrepid females like Jillian who dare. But here the formulaic is playful. After all, Clyde calls Rotherham Halt “Little Rotting-off-the map.” The persistent, jocular Clyde finally succeeds in driving her to the Grange and on their arrival says: “Here we are. Are you still sure this is where you want to go”—even after the “loon,” Jacob Lee, menaces her with gardening shears, saying: “Go way! Nobbut ain’t allowed here!” The redoubtable Jillian—she may have appealed to Hawks’s penchant for strong women—answers: “Nonsense. I’m expected. Go back to your work.”

Jillian rings an “old fashioned bell. It BOOMS hollowly in the depths of the house—a deep portentous sound in keeping with the grim exterior.” The quite slow buildup to the occult is reminiscent of Curse of the Demon, which director Jacques Tourneur would turn into a classic a little more than a decade later. The lady-in-waiting to the countess has the manner of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. Jillian stands at the door: “A face is looking out at her from around a parted curtain in a window—a grim, harsh woman’s face. The curtain falls back, after a moment the door opens with a slow grinding of heavy bolts and the same woman stands in it. She is SARI. She is gaunt, spare, forbidding, in severe black with a maid’s cap and apron. She has a harsh, yellow face. She gives Jillian a swift up-and-down examination but says nothing.” Jillian is standing in a hall that has “an air of wealth and decayed splendor with a faint foreign flavor. Jillian, still carrying the suitcase, looks about curiously. Then she hears the heavy bolts grinding again and looks around to see Sari holding the door again as if the house were a fortress with an enemy just outside.” Jillian is the outside world. She is us, come to call—except that she shows no fear and, unlike us, is equal to the situation. Or so it seems. The decayed splendor is not all that different from the house haunted by memories in Flags in the Dust or the house disquieted by an idiot in The Sound and the Fury. As in a Faulkner novel or in The Big Sleep, Jillian enters a degenerated world in need of new blood.

Jillian now meets her employer, the countess. Jillian feels a sudden inexplicable reluctance as the Countess Czerner with “clawlike hands” caresses Jillian’s hand. Sari intervenes: “If my lady begins to fondle and make a fuss over you, you must let me know at once. AT ONCE, do you hear?” Sari’s concern seems genuine, but Jillian as the younger woman also seems to excite Sari’s jealousy, suggesting that Sari sees a sexual rival that will consume the countess’s attention. Is Jillian also a reminder of Sari’s earlier, uncorrupted self? Hard to say, but it is a possibility, one that a director and actress might exploit. Sari and the countess are not sisters, but they act like the Sternwood sisters in The Big Sleep, seemingly devoted to one another but also pursuing their passions.

Rejuvenation, as in The Big Sleep, becomes a major theme, with the countess, like General Sternwood fixing on Marlowe, seeking a substitute in Jillian for her own failing powers. Like Sternwood, the countess cannot get warm enough. She sits “in a high-backed chair almost like a throne, close to the hearth on which a fire burns even though it is June.” Death is the big sleep the countess has tried to delay, and her saying “no to death” is the phrase that comes to haunt Requiem for a Nun. The countess and Sari seek to freeze time and remain in the kind of stasis that is familiar to readers of A Rose for Emily and of Miss Rosa’s time-stopping narrative in Absalom, Absalom!7

It is tempting to see in the countess the southern lady defined in Absalom, Absalom! in the figure of Miss Rosa, feeding off her family: “it is as though she were living on the actual blood itself like a vampire, not with insatiability, certainly not with voracity, but with that serene and idle splendor of flowers arrogating to herself, because it fills her veins also, nourishment from the old blood that crossed uncharted seas and continents.” Miss Rosa, remember, has Quentin in her clutches in the expectancy that he will perpetuate her story, which is her will to dominate, which is what the “Southern woman, gentlewoman” arrogated to herself, taking over the household, dispossessing the cook and seasoning the food, and taking “command of the servants” as a blood rite, so to speak. She will live through Quentin, as the countess, both aged and almost childlike—like Miss Rosa—will renew herself through Jillian.8

The countess is perched between youth and age in a strange way: “At first glance, she appears to be an old woman. But something is wrong and strange. She was beautiful once. She looks frail and wrinkled, her face is lined and the hand which she holds out to the fire looks like a claw. Yet her hair is raven black, her eyes and teeth are those of a young woman. Even her voice is young in pitch, with only a slight crack in it.” She explains that she is a Transylvanian blue blood, saying it all in the passive voice, which emphasizes her debility, admitting that, as with Faulkner’s blue bloods, there is a taint, a “tiny drop of black gypsy blood,” a drop that is “all the fire and fury of a volcano.” In short, the edifice of superiority is corrupt, and only the outsider can reverse the rot that subdues the Sternwoods in the Big Sleep and the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury. The “tiny drop” of black blood is of course what makes someone black in southern white mythology, the drop that the white Falkners never acknowledged—a horror to them that could be explored only in fiction and in the form of a vampire film.

Garlic wreaths adorn the doors of the Grange, which any horror-movie addict recognizes as a prophylactic measure against the intrusions and attacks of the undead. No odor of verbena—only the stalwart Jillian, who desperately needs the job and braves all without any outward sign of foreboding, even though as she watches from a window “a dark shape” runs out of a copse and Larry Clyde shows up to ask Jillian, “Little Muffet, are you all right?” His concern only annoys her—as does Sari, who, notwithstanding Jillian’s protests, locks her in for the night, supposedly to prevent an attack from the prowling loony Jacob Lee.

The next morning in the kitchen Jillian sees a large bowl “half filled with a dark liquid” that looks like blood. Clyde comes calling again (like her alter ego alerting her to the danger). He got a look at that dark shape: “big, black. It looked like it had wings and was about to fly.” Jillian says he is foolish: “I saw nothing. And I don’t think you did either.” Still she shivers when Clyde recites Tennyson’s Maud:

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Its lips in the field are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”

Although Clyde is a doctor, like his father, his aspiration has been to be a poet, and it is his imaginative perceptions that Jillian dares to deny at her own peril. She is a staunch British empiricist, not an unfamiliar figure in horror film, but here presented with a certain poignancy, given Clyde’s romantic inclinations. In effect, Jillian tells Clyde that she is being paid to overlook what might seem strange, and Clyde riles her up by treating her like a child afraid of spiders: “Leave this place of the dreadful hollow, Miss Muffet.”

Sari, who seems even more forbidding than the countess, locks her mistress in her room—as Jillian, outside, sees when looking through the room’s window. Even though the countess is in bed looking like a corpse, suddenly she rises and runs with “amazing agility and speed” to the windows, beseeching Jillian to unlock the door, which Jillian does as the countess draws blood: “It is my finger nail. Do forgive me, child,” the countess says. In effect, the countess has arisen out of her own past, as Jillian can see when she examines a photograph of the countess “with a wild strange look, slender, in the riding habit of a bygone day, posed, slim-waisted, in a full skirt and a hat with sweeping plumes.” Jillian is nineteen confronting the nineteenth century. When she finds a book with Tennyson’s lines about the dreadful hollow, she shivers and shuts it, and then sees a stuffed but lifelike wolf in a closet. She gives out a prolonged scream, as though the literature she reads has come to life. The power of words, of rhetoric, is so Faulknerian. No wonder Hawks wanted him to work on this film.

As Jillian begins to realize her harrowing plight, Larry Clyde searches through his father’s journal for an account of a trip to Transylvania that might reveal what is happening at the Grange. Vera, the countess’s niece, shows up, seeking the same revival of the “old past, when life was worth living.”9 She is accompanied by a doctor, Vostok—Clyde’s coeval—who tells her that the “beauty you believe you see is a mirage, the deceitful colors that merely tint and hide corruption.” The peasant blood that enlivened the Czerners has also crazed them, Vostok explains. When Clyde learns of Vostok’s presence, he notes that the doctor is “quite famous—in his way. Does things with corpses. . . . He’s trying to bring people back to life. He’s pulled it off once or twice, I understand. But they are sensible corpses and go back to sleep.” Clyde, like his father, is intrigued with this vampiric experience and even drawn to it when he hears Vera singing: “He looks at Jillian, sees her succumbing to it, as if it were to Jillian that Vera directed all its force, even while she struggles against it”—the “it” inherent in the power of the words, of literature to animate desire and a longing Faulkner was drawn to all his life in the language he created. Jillian’s susceptibility is reminiscent of vulnerable Miriam in “Revolt in the Earth,” a victim of the voodoo spell.

But the lust for young blood becomes a threat to the community when a young boy goes missing, with the clear implication that he has become the countess’s victim. The child is, in effect, Jillian herself, as the dialogue makes clear:

Clyde: You must leave here. Don’t you see you must?

Jillian: They will find the child.

Clyde: What makes you think something has happened to the child (as she stares at him staring, he grips her arm). Jillian have you seen or heard anything suspicious while you’ve been here?

Jillian: (almost violently) No! No!

Jillian begins to tremble and cannot stop. Clyde holds on to her, asking her to marry him, but she only wants him to let her go. This moment, one of the most powerful in the script, portrays a young woman who is youth and what everyone wants at the price of surrendering her own will, which she refuses to do no matter how much she is frightened. The lesbian vectors of the plot converge in a crescendo as Jillian reenters the house with Vera “singing in a triumphant peal.”

When Jillian answers the plaintive call that the ailing countess is worse, she is accosted by a swooping bat-like creature that is only deterred by a garlic wreath she holds under her arm. Jillian wonders if she is going mad but is prevented from leaving the Grange because of the police investigation of the missing boy. In her next encounter with Vera, Jillian is amazed at how old she looks in her “dull black cloth” robe that “clings to her as if it were wet, folding about her like folded wings.” Vera, like the countess, moves swiftly toward Jillian, toward youth, become “brilliant, vital, eager.” Vera, like nearly everyone else, calls Jillian her “dear child” and tries to coax her to abandon the wreath.

Clyde, reading his father’s journal, gradually works out what is happening at the Grange. The count, a man of “contemptuous pride” like Colonel Sartoris, introduces Clyde’s father to his wife, “descendant of the gypsy Magda who lies at the crossroads with a stake through her heart. . . . She is a vampire, as Magda was. The curse has fallen upon her, she cannot escape nor be saved. Unless you do as I ask,” the count tells Dr. Clyde, “every child, every young creature in this district walks under the shadow of death. Without human blood she cannot live. Draw her vampire teeth—and let her die mercifully in peace.” If Clyde’s father refuses, “then the peasants will destroy her, as they did the gypsy Magda.” The teeth are extracted, and she fades away, but her progeny have survived.

In the denouement Larry Clyde and Inspector Gregory, informed of what is really happening at the Grange, combine to rescue Jillian as the Grange goes up in flames. There is a lot of running around involving Sari “heavily panting” and Jillian “stumbling up the drive, almost spent.” Faulkner, keenly aware of the ludicrous, put in a note to Hawks: “One modern woman running is ridiculous, comic; one chasing another doesn’t help it much. Am trying to tell this in more or less static shots.”

Sari prevents the countess from pursuing Jillian. Sari confronts the countess with “despairing grief” and kills her with an axe, chopping her head off, and then Sari dies of a heart attack. Vostok’s motivations, which have been occluded—he seems to want to save the countess and Vera but also realizes they cannot continue to murder for blood—are finally explained by Sari, before she dies, who reveals that the old count made a gentleman of Vostok and made Vostok’s medical fame possible. The very idea of a gentleman—so precious to Faulkner’s own sense of himself—becomes in “Dreadful Hollow” a source of fealty to the past but also a propelling force for change. The gentleman has a duty to revere tradition, especially one’s ancestors, and yet to change that tradition if it is to survive. Vostok has set fire to the Grange (it is hard not to think of Sutpen’s Hundred in flames) to “make a clean sweep,” Clyde surmises: “house, policemen, witnesses, body, evidence—all. Then he would take her [Vera] and clear off,” allowing Jillian to supply the countess’s needed blood.

A lesbian vampire film—what else can be made of the countess and Vera vying for Jillian?—would hardly seem a fitting subject for William Faulkner and Howard Hawks, and yet the brooding on doom and family disintegration, the hold of the past that must be acknowledged but also broken, the power of these female characters, their down-to-earth indomitability, and the role of the gentleman hero as exemplified in the two Clydes and Vostok reflect much of the ethic that the gentleman-director and his gentleman-screenwriter exemplified. And not to be discounted is the sheer brio of their encounter with a genre they sought to parody and to transform.10 Can’t you just hear Hawks say, “Bill, see what you can do with this”?

With the major effort on “Dreadful Hollow” resulting in no production, and Faulkner’s patience for rewriting scripts exhausted, he departed Hollywood. “We’ll think of you Bill,” Jerry Wald said. The producer thought he saw a twinkle in the writer’s eye, “I’ll think of you too,” Faulkner said in his characteristic slow drawl, “in the middle of the night.”11

Home

In mid-December, on his return home, Faulkner worked on his fable, which itself had been inspired in Hollywood. By January 24, he had completed sixty pages of the novel.12 He had established a rhythm: six months in Hollywood, six months off, staying home with “movie work locked off into another room.”13 But he also felt different now—no longer so young and full of rhetoric that gave him “personal pleasure. . . . I’m doing something different now, so different that I am writing and rewriting, weighing every word, which I never did before. I used to bang it on like an apprentice paper hanger and never look back.” Consequently, it was “going to take longer than I thought.” He had a “rough outline” in place and could go at it for another six months before heading back to the California salt mines—his own term for his indentured servitude.

While some books had not required much revision, others went through long gestation periods and much reworking—but not paragraph by paragraph and page by page as Faulkner wrote his drafts of A Fable. What was different now is how much, all along the way, he returned to earlier drafts rather than moving ahead. He was writing retroactively, reading what he had done as if teaming up against himself, like Hollywood writers did with one another as Furthman had rewritten Faulkner and Faulkner had rewritten Cain in a collaborative chain reaction that made writing itself more of a back-and-forth process than Faulkner had experienced at home alone. Faulkner kept wanting to show what he had written of his fable to Random House, to his agent Harold Ober, and to Malcolm Cowley, who began writing him about an anthology that was to become The Portable Faulkner. Writing the fable seemed less of a private, personal matter and more of a testament he wanted to share. To be sure, part of his eagerness to send out his fable had to do with money—an advance from Random House, perhaps a magazine sale Ober could engineer, or an option payment for a treatment based on the novel.14

Early in the year, Joe C. Brown, a local African American schoolteacher, visited Rowan Oak to talk about his poetry. Three years earlier, on the street in front of Neilson’s Department Store on the square, they had talked about Brown’s writing. “I thought then,” Faulkner wrote to Brown on January 25, “you were going to let me see it, and when I didn’t hear from you anymore, I was disappointed. The invitation I offered then still holds. . . . I will expect to hear from you soon. I will read the work, then we can have a talk about it.” He even gave Brown his telephone number. Less than a week later Brown showed up, and Faulkner had not only read but also edited one of the poems. He had cut back on the rhetoric so that the passion came through cleanly, Faulkner explained. He called it sitting on the passion. Brown’s cry for freedom and opportunity had to come from the reader’s response: “make him say it to himself for you.”

Whatever Brown made of Faulkner’s encouragement and criticism, Faulkner did not forget him when he wrote to fellow Mississippian Richard Wright: “A friend of yours lives in my town, Joe Brown. . . . I have (I hope) helped him to learn what you learned yourself: that to feel and believe is not enough to write from.” Brown needed to read more (Keats, Shelley, and Whitman), Faulkner said, but Brown was improving, and Faulkner intended to see him again.15

Faulkner had written to Wright to say that his autobiography, Black Boy, “needed to be said, and you said it well.” But he thought nonfiction could not have the impact of Native Son, since “only they will be moved and grieved by it who already know and grieve over this situation.” The novel was “lasting stuff” because it came out of “one individual’s imagination and density to and comprehension of others suffering of Everyman, Anyman, not out of the memory of his own grief.” The novel, in short, did not focus on the writer but the story, which is why Faulkner rejected a proposal from a publisher to write about Mississippi—even though such a book appealed to him and would have yielded a much-needed advance. Doing a nonfiction book had never occurred to him, which meant he did not know where to begin and did not have the spark that would ignite his effort. He estimated he had another three books in him that he wanted to write: “I am like an aging mare, who has say three more gestations in her before her time is over, and doesn’t want to spend one of them breeding what she considers (wrongly perhaps) a mule.” If he took fire, he would reconsider, and he wanted Ober to hang on a month before letting go of the offer. To do anything less than his best would put him “morally and spiritually in Hollywood.”16 At home, he had to keep that Hollywood room locked. At home, he was still sovereign. About a hundred thousand words of the fable had been amassed by the middle of March—“my epic poem. Good story: the crucifixion and the resurrection,” Faulkner told Ober. And then it had all been rewritten down to fifteen thousand words: “I had my usual vague foundationless idea of getting enough money to live on out of it while I wrote and finished it. But I ought to know now I dont sell and never will earn enough outside of pictures to stay out of debt.”17

Such comments suggest a Faulkner bound to the studio regimen, which he wanted to modify to suit the rhythms of his own life. On March 8, he wrote to James Geller: “It’s been a wet winter here. I’ve got little done except cleaning ditches, fixing fences, repairing houses, etc. hope to start breaking ground this month to get some early corn planted. Dammit, I wish I could have a different system: be at the studio working Jan.-Feb.-March, be here farming April-May-June, at the studio July-Aug.-Sept., then back here for rest of the year to gather and sell crop.”18

Spring weather returned in late January, and a delighted Estelle wrote to Malcolm about how much she enjoyed her long walks with Billy. Jill—“my little Puritan sister,” as Malcolm called her—wrote to Malcolm about picnicking with friends on their mounts. With Jill singing in the choir, Faulkner even went to church. Estelle’s reports from the home front to “homesick” Malcolm, now stationed in Europe, brought back his “beautiful memories” of family outings.19 “Spring was a time of great beauty at Rowan Oak,” Malcolm remembered, with daffodils and iris appearing first in “violet and yellow patches along the driveway beneath the cedars.” Then came the pink and white peonies on the eastern edges of the lawn and yellow roses by Easter. Estelle made a celebration of the season on April 1 with a sumptuous dinner, sometimes including a huge chocolate pie, presenting Pappy with the largest piece. He had been known to remark, “Quite good ’Stelle—as you know, I never turn chocolate down.” He said it without letting on about the cotton wool laced through the chocolate.

On the Rowan Oak lawn the blooming jonquils, peonies, and Lady Banks roses, tall and thornless climbers flowering early in the spring, made perfect hiding places for the traditional Easter egg hunt. Faulkner gathered Vicki and Jill and their friends on the verandah, lined them up, gave the signal to start, and watched the laughing, chattering, and shoving—the girls stooping over and showing off their laced-edge petticoats. Afterward, as Malcolm remembered it, they let loose the hunting dogs, who found what the children had overlooked.20

Faulkner kept hoping Hollywood would tear up his contract, but instead it had granted leaves of absence and in May issued a June call-up with a salary of five hundred dollars per week.21

The Salt Mines

By the end of June, Faulkner wrote to Estelle’s mother, “Miss Lida,” about the wet spring in Hollywood that had been “good for blooming. . . . There is a hedge-plant here which looks like our laurel.” Much has been made of the tensions between the Oldhams and Faulkner, and yet this letter shows how important family was to him, as he described the plant’s “four-petaled white bloom about the size of a dollar” resembling an

enlarged Confederate jasmine. . . . I intend to see if it will transplant to Miss. Also a geranium which I never saw before, which blooms from scarlet through pink and on to pure white and then with a faint bluish tinge. I wish we had that too. Bougainvilleas everywhere as usual, much lantana, ranging from yellow through the normal orange with red center which I know at home, to solid deep maroon-magenta, and a lot of blue plumbago which I like. It all looks pretty fine, a lot of magnolia blooms but the magnolia leaves are a lighter shade of green, almost sickly, not like our strong deep green.

Everyone had a garden, but they looked “amateurish” to him: “Gardening people miss the Japanese, who used to do all that around private homes. They made a bad mistake in not watching their Japanese gardeners and learning something while they had a chance.” No mention of the detention camps, but Faulkner had a keen eye for what was missing and what made life worth living.

Faulkner still fretted about the Warner Brothers contract and about the agent, William Herndon, who would not let go of a client who no longer wanted his services. In an arrangement similar to the one he had with Bacher and Hathaway regarding his fable, Faulkner worked on the side, operating as an independent contractor, with neither agent nor studio involved. He had returned to living with Buzz Bezzerides, with whom he collaborated on a spec script, “Angel’s Flight,” which they were unable to sell to Howard Hawks, or anyone else. Vera Morgan holds out as the only juror who thinks the accused, Joe Trotter, is innocent of murder: “There is nothing in her background that would make her read social values and implications into the life of Joe Trotter . . . but for this strange, formless doubt.” Trotter had been found drunk in a room next to a man bludgeoned to death. He has no alibi except for drinking companions who have not turned up to defend him. Vera is coerced into voting guilty, having to admit all the evidence points to Trotter’s guilt. He is a “rugged, hard-looking young man,” but with “something introverted, vexed about him; the look of a man who is accustomed to abuse, has given up fighting it, but does not yield without an element of cynicism.” Vera, approached by another juror with doubts, is so upset she goes to the district attorney, who scornfully turns her away, saying justice was done. In church a rector tries to suggest it is her conscience that is troubling her. He tells Vera to visit the condemned man and take a good look at him: “This, together with the facts of the trial, might convince her of his guilt and her conscience could be eased.” Her doubt that Joe is guilty increases when she sees his face close up—that of a “whipped man and hopeless.” Joe is fascinated with Vera: “The guard laughs . . . a hell of a time for him to be getting a case on a dame.” The rector warns that her effort to exonerate Joe may invite an attack by the real murderer. She should go to the police. But Vera knows the police are not interested in Joe’s story. After much trouble, Vera is able to find the flophouse where the murdered man lived and the bag he left behind that has his name and address on it. But in fact it was a bag sold to the dead man, so again Vera is stymied, although the original owner of the bag remembers the murdered man had come from a mining camp. She discovers the identity of the dead man by playing the concertina in the camp. Two men recognize the instrument Fred Evans used to play and report that he had ten thousand dollars in a money belt around his waist (the motive Vera has been seeking that could exonerate Joe). Joe escapes while being transported to San Quentin, hitches a ride, and sees Vera, telling her he loves her but to stop trying to prove he is innocent. She confesses she has fallen in love with him. After almost being caught by the police, Joe surrenders voluntarily, and Vera tells her family she has married him. They are at first aghast, but then her father examines his own conscience and supports his daughter. Vera tracks down the killer, Lacer, who tries to throw her into traffic. But she escapes. The murderer turns out to be one of the miners she questioned earlier who knew about the ten thousand dollars. The murderer then kills the drunk who witnessed the murder, and so again Vera is stymied as she has been at every turn. After many more plot complications, Vera remembers the name of the woman (Gladys Fields) on the registration certificate for the jalopy parked outside the flophouse where the murdered man stayed. That name may be the key to someone who knew the murdered man and also knew he had that money belt, the new evidence Vera needs to convince the district attorney to reopen the case. It turns out that Gladys Fields is hiding in an abandoned oil-pumping station. Gladys shoots at Vera, thinking she is the man who tried to murder Gladys earlier that night. As Vera gets in her car to tell the police about Gladys, Lacer, the murderer, grabs her. He tells her she has figured it out, “how he and Jack Fields murdered Fred Evans in Trotter’s room.” She barely manages to escape the blow of Lacer’s wrench and runs away from her car onto the beach. In the struggle near a well, she manages to throw him off, and he perishes in the well. Gladys arrives in time to identify Lacer as her attempted murderer. The last scene shows Vera at Joe’s release from prison.22

The script is reminiscent of Intruder in the Dust and the stories Faulkner would collect in Knight’s Gambit, in which a character sets out to rectify an injustice and exonerate a man accused of murder. Vera generates the evidence based on nothing but an inarticulate feeling about the accused. The power of the interpreter, as in so much of Faulkner’s work, is on display. The script occupied two weekends of Faulkner’s time, he told Estelle, so that he could “make enough money to get the hell out of this place and come back home and fix Missy’s room and paint the house and do the other things we need.” To make matters worse, he was spending three hours a day on busses going back and forth to work now that Buzz was without a car. “I try to write either to you or Missy at least once every week, no matter how ‘written-out’ I feel. I try to write to mother at least once a week ditto.”23

Somehow Faulkner also found time for some off-the-books work for Jean Renoir. At their first meeting, Faulkner spoke in French and moved the director to later say the writer had “la galanterie.” Their mutual respect resulted in Faulkner’s work on a few scenes in The Southerner, which became Renoir’s favorite American film. Zachary Scott, who later appeared in Requiem for a Nun with his wife, Ruth Ford, a Faulkner favorite, recalled the scene when he catches “Lead Pencil,” the big catfish, and also the scene when Scott’s wife lights the stove, reminiscent of the fire and the hearth in Go Down, Moses. But the film, as a whole, is Faulknerian in spirit, showing the indomitability of country folk, the power of nature as it inundates a cotton field with ruinous rain, the parties with corn liquor and the singing of songs like “Beulah-land,” which Faulkner could have written, although they owe their authenticity to fellow southerner Nunnally Johnson.24 It would be good to know if Faulkner contributed any dialogue to the film’s final scene, in which the merits of urban and rural life, farming and factory work are debated in a very Faulknerian way, showing both how important it is to remain close to the land and yet recognizing change, the exchange of mules for tractors, the making of the equipment that enhances the farmer’s desire to improve on nature. Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley that he was prouder of his work on The Southerner than on any other film.25

Stallion Road, an adaptation of Stephen Longstreet’s novel, took up much of the summer. By July 28, Faulkner had a complete screenplay, revised and turned in on September 1, jettisoning the novel’s focus on Henry Purcell, an eastern novelist who comes to California to write for the movies.26 In the novel, Purcell makes friends with Larry Hanrahan, a rancher and veterinarian, learns a lot about horse breeding, and gets involved in a romantic triangle with Larry and Fleece Teller, a handsome horsewoman. Learning so much about love and horses, Hanrahan decides to stay horse-bound. Experimenting with a cure for anthrax, he succumbs when he infects himself.

Judging by Faulkner’s adaptation, he loved the horses and did not much care for the characters. He makes Larry a drunk and a gambler who gets in fights with a rival, Rick Mallard, the casino owner, over the fetching Fleece. Larry strokes a mare’s hair as if it were Fleece’s. His idea of romance is grabbing and kissing her without warning. Fleece has a competitor, Daisy, and the two women come to blows over Larry. He strikes his Mexican hostler, Pelon, although he has the grace to apologize to Pelon, a fully realized, sensitive character in the script. Although Faulkner mentions in his character synopsis that Larry has returned from overseas service “moody,” this fact is never worked into the script, making his truculence mystifying. Larry does get the girl in the end—but only by way of melodramatic manipulation: Daisy, the femme fatale, stabs Larry with an anthrax-laden needle. He is saved with an application of his anthrax antidote. In the end, Larry proposes to Fleece as she sits atop a horse, so that standing by her side he has to draw her face toward his to propose.

Did Faulkner really think the studio would settle for such an aggravating set of characters who carry on quarreling in several scenes? If his plan was to wring out some of the sentiment in Longstreet’s novel, he succeeded. Disgust with doing this sort of adaptation may also have been a factor. Even after the Breen office objected to the adulterous affair between Daisy and Larry, Daisy remains an example of what Faulkner calls “nympholepsy” and flaunts her affair in public. Faulkner’s script, Longstreet commented, was “a little strong for then.”27

Eventually Longstreet himself was called in to write a movie that starred the anodyne Ronald Reagan (Hanrahan) and the suave Zachary Scott (Purcell) as friendly rivals. Longstreet restored the emphasis on Scott’s character as a cynical writer redeemed by his contacts with honest horse people. This time Rory (no longer Fleece) gives Hanrahan the anthrax antidote. Purcell knows enough not to pasture any longer on the range. He drives off, telling Hanrahan that he has enough material to write another novel.

As a well-constructed screenplay, Stallion Road is serviceable and reflects several of Faulkner’s interests in the land, the horses, and country people. But if Larry Hanrahan is heroic in his efforts to rid his land and animals of anthrax, he nevertheless lacks the rooting interest in the hero that Hollywood expected—except for the final scenes where the scientist/vet’s life is at stake. A hero did not need to be as bland and likeable as Ronald Reagan, to be sure, but he did need to have some kind of mystique or romantic aura to succeed on studio terms. Longstreet called Faulkner’s screenplay “wild, wonderful, mad.”28

“The Plastic Asshole of the World”

Faulkner had still not been able to rid himself of his agent, William Herndon, who threatened legal action if Faulkner actually broke their contract. On July 31, Finlay McDermid, who had succeeded James Geller as head of the Warner Brothers story department, worried that Faulkner might be “contemplating the idea of taking a walk rather than face the general unpleasantness.” Did McDermid know about Faulkner’s legendary Death Valley walk? At any rate, he noted, “Will have to be a little careful handling him, I imagine, during the next few weeks.” McDermid correctly read the signs. On August 20, Faulkner told Harold Ober: “I think I have had about all of Hollywood I can stand. I feel black, depressed, dreadful sense of wasting time, I imagine most of the symptoms of some kind of blow-up or collapse. I may be able to come back later, but I think I will finish this present job [Stallion Road] and return home. Feeling as I do, I am actually becoming afraid to stay here much longer.” Even hack writing at home or editorial work seemed a better alternative than Hollywood. He had lost weight and did not feel well. To stay and run the risk of collapse might make it impossible for him to return.

Like Geller, McDermid seemed solicitous. He had gone out of his way to help arrange Faulkner’s travel from Oxford to the West Coast at the beginning of June when cross-country rail travel was still unpredictable because of the war. McDermid had introduced himself by letter: “you may remember me as the almost bald-headed guy who occasionally popped out of the Story Department door as you were on your way from the writers’ building to the commissary.”29

By the end of August, McDermid knew the “quietly unhappy” writer wanted OUT: “he asked me if there would be a chance of getting a release from his contract.” The relationship with Faulkner had been “pleasant,” McDermid reported, and Faulkner had been “uncomplainingly turning out scripts which nearly any Hollywood writer could have written.” McDermid proposed to his boss a liberalized contract giving Faulkner much more leeway: “I feel that if Faulkner could really cut loose on a story in which he was terrifically interested that we might get something pretty spectacular, but it seems a shame to waste one of the country’s top novelists on routine melodrama.” His boss simply noted on the letter, “Suspend & extend when returns.” In short, the indentured servitude would continue.30

McDermid’s assessment of Faulkner’s prowess was seconded by Stephen Longstreet: “By the time he left Hollywood in September, 1945, he had become capable of writing with the best of his lot, the few real talents who were here then.”31 He had produced significant treatments and scripts: “The De Gaulle Story,” “Battle Cry,” “Country Lawyer,” Stallion Road, “Dreadful Hollow,” To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep—not to mention many of the films he had doctored into life such as Air Force and The Southerner. But he told Longstreet, “Artistically, Southern California is the plastic asshole of the world.”32

On September 8, McDermid reported, “I have been informed by William Faulkner—in a very mild and friendly manner—that he will not this time sign the usual extension and suspension papers.” Faulkner said he only wanted to write fiction. He had no interest in writing for another studio. McDermid, for all his sensitivity to Faulkner’s concerns, did not quite get how disaffected the writer had become: “It is my feeling Bill will retire to his native haunts, come what may, unless we can hold out a more tempting bid to him than his present deal offers.”33 Certainly Faulkner hated his contract, but he did not want a better contract. The studio agreed to a six-month suspension, provided that it had the right of first refusal for any story material Faulkner produced during that period.

Meta realized that Faulkner was “unable to summon the purpose that had carried him through in Hollywood in past years. He rarely smiled or chuckled. He was downcast.” She sensed he would not remain in Hollywood until the end of year. He broke it to her that Stallion Road would be his last project for Warner Brothers. He had earlier promised to leave Estelle as soon as Jill turned twelve. Now that was forgotten, and Meta was angry. By her own account, she pushed him away. But afterward he wrote her a letter saying, “this bloke in question really means better than he does, how’s for seeing your face before I leave.” She forgave him, and he left her on his way to pick up the horse trailer that would bring home a horse for Jill.

Faulkner’s farewell to Stephen Longstreet occurred on a “wonderful sunny” September day. They were standing at the studio gate, which perhaps reinforced Faulkner’s feeling of incarceration. Longstreet remembered him scowling: “What a god damn place. One leaf falls in one of those god damn canyons, and they tell you it’s winter.” A week later Faulkner was gone.34