15

New Audiences

Intruder in the Dust, January 1948–October 1949

Off the Cuff

On January 15, Faulkner put his fable aside and turned to a short novel, one that had been percolating in his imagination for more than a decade as he avidly read mysteries. Eric Devine remembered a visit to Rowan Oak in 1937 when Faulkner talked about a mystery novel he was reading. Faulkner had laughed out loud at the digging up of a body—the only time Devine had ever heard his friend do so.1 Now Faulkner wrote his own murder mystery probing the “relationship between Negro and white, specifically or rather the premise being that the white people in the south, before the North or the govt, or anyone else, owe and must pay a responsibility to the Negro. But it’s a story; nobody preaches in it. I may have told you the idea,” he wrote Harold Ober, “which I have had for some time—a Negro in jail accused of murder and waiting for the white folks to drag him out and pour gasoline over him and set him on fire, is the detective, solves the crime because he goddamn has to to keep from being lynched, by asking people to go somewhere and look at something and then come back and tell him what they found.”2 The black man in question is the independent Lucas Beauchamp, featured earlier in Go Down, Moses, a black aristocrat of sorts because of his descent from white masters whom he regards as his coevals. In effect, Beauchamp is Faulkner’s innovative variation of the gentleman-hero armchair detective, an Auguste Dupin in black, forcing white people to detect a white criminal hiding in plain sight.

Lucas Beauchamp exerts a tremendous sense of authority, like Uncle Ned Barnett, who had served the old Colonel and could, in effect, pull rank on the old Colonel’s great-grandson. After all, Faulkner had deferred to Ned as the authority on the old Colonel when Robert Cantwell came calling. Like Callie Barr, Ned knew things, had seen things, before William Faulkner was born. Ned served without being servile and had experienced the history that Faulkner sought to master in his fiction. And rather than staying on Faulkner’s farm, he had returned to Ripley, remaining his own man.

In about six weeks Faulkner had a first draft, which he began to revise and expand in late February. By April 20, he had finished the novel in time for the fall list. It had now become as much about Chick Mallison, “a 16 year old boy who overnight became a man,”3 as about his black detective. In fiction, Chick would prevent the Nelse Patton lynching that Billy Falkner, as witness or not, had nevertheless lived with for forty years. He was always a Falkner, part of that family, even when he declared his independence and added that u to his name. Estelle called him Billy even into their adult years. He was always that boy she fell in love with; he was always that boy who identified with other boys having to reckon with their fraught heritage.

This new novel came as a tremendous relief. “Please tell Bob [Robert Haas] about it,” Faulkner instructed Ober; “it might make him feel better about me. . . . I’ve been on Random H’s cuff a long time now.”4 The wording is significant, as though Faulkner had to prove his worth to his publisher just as, in the company of Uncle Ned, the great-grandson had to pay his respects to Falkner family history. Writing Intruder in the Dust became in both personal and professional terms a work of redemption. On July 11, MGM bought the motion picture rights for fifty thousand dollars, 20 percent of which went to Random House, which had continued to provide Faulkner with a monthly stipend.

At the same time, The Portable Faulkner had done its work. “When you get North,” Malcolm Cowley wrote, “you’ll find that you’re not a neglected author any longer, that they’re studying you in the colleges, including Yale, where lots of the kids think that ‘The Bear’ is the greatest story ever written.”5 Carvel Collins came to Oxford that summer as part of his planning to teach the first graduate seminar on Faulkner at Harvard. There he met Peggy Park, on the faculty at Ole Miss, and learned that she had invited a reluctant Faulkner to her classroom, telling him her students did not understand his work very well. Half of them were Naval Reserve trainees. Although Faulkner doubted he could say much, perhaps he agreed to come because of the military connection and because she promised that no other faculty would be present. Faulkner had grumbled he did not want to be exhibited like a “two-headed calf.” He consented to appear for about fifteen minutes but stayed an hour.

Park followed up with several visits to Rowan Oak, even getting him to appraise the writing of a pharmacist friend of hers. She called Faulkner’s comments “gentle, compassionate, and very nearly clairvoyant.” In her company, Collins met and interviewed a “gracious and polite” author who showed him Jill’s new horse. Collins left elated.6 “I have seen Bill several times lately and he seemed to like you because he strained himself enough to volunteer some oral remark as about you,” Phil Stone wrote to Collins.7 Stone’s disaffection is apparent, although Faulkner continued to see him. Sometimes Faulkner would show up at Stone’s law office, and Stone would not come out to see him, irked that in his view he had not been given enough credit for Faulkner’s success and that Faulkner had not turned out to be quite the writer Stone had hoped for. That more callers like Collins began to talk to Stone did not, it seems, gratify Stone so much as it showed him that he had lost Faulkner to the world, which could not possibly understand Bill the way Phil did.

That summer Faulkner sailed on Sardis Reservoir, created by a government flood-control dam. Retired colonel Hugh Evans, local doctor Ashford Little, and Ross Brown, a Faulkner friend and fellow hunter, had built a houseboat under Faulkner’s supervision. Working on this barge, more than forty feet long, became a sort of community event, and Faulkner’s own description of the work recalls the hauling of Ikkemotubbe’s steamboat: “Out of Confusion by Boundless Hope: Conceived in a Canadian Club bottle She was born A.D. 15th August 1947 by uproarious Caesarian Section in prone position with her bottom upward in Evans’s back yard eleven miles from the nearest water deeper than a half inch kitchen tap and waxed and grew daily there beneath the whole town’s enrapt cynosure.” The boat, towed by truck, made a circuit around the courthouse square. It was called the Minmagary after the wives of its builders: Minnie Ruth Little, Maggie Brown, and Mary Evans. Pappy drew up papers for the ship, his niece Dean recalled, invoking “whatever authority I may have inherited from my Great Grandfather William C. Falkner Colonel (paroled) Second Mississippi Infantry Provisional Army Confederate States of America.” He commissioned the Minmagary as a “Ship of the Line in the Confederate Navy given under my Great Grandfather’s sword this Twenty Fourth July 1948 at Oxford Mississippi. William C. Falkner II.” At a party he hosted aboard ship, Faulkner “presided in captain’s cap, bathing suit, deck shoes, and blue work shirt with sleeves rolled up.” Ole Miss dean Estella Hefley showed up, protesting the presence of coeds, who were not supposed to be near Sardis Reservoir let alone aboard a ship during the school term. Faulkner greeted Hefley, one of his mother’s friends: “Estella, what a pleasant surprise, please join us.” He could “charm a cobra out of a basket” when he chose to, his niece said. On this occasion, with the coeds hiding in the cabin, pleasantries were exchanged about Maud before the dean expressed her concerns, which Faulkner listened to sympathetically, lamenting how standards had fallen since the war. But several students aboard were veterans and gentlemen, he pointed out, and so he and Dean Hefley parted on amicable terms, with rebel yells coming from the cabin only after she had left the boat.8

In September, Random House planned to publish a collection of Faulkner’s short stories, and Bennett Cerf invited him for a New York stay. He looked forward to time with the Cerfs, but he preferred a hotel since “my expedition is vacation from the nest-and-hearth business.”9 To Hamilton Basso’s query about doing a profile, Faulkner wrote on September 23: “Oh hell no. Come down and visit whenever you can, but no piece in any paper about me as I am working tooth and nail at my lifetime ambition to be the last private individual on earth & expect every success since apparently there is no competition for the place.”10

Faulkner arrived in New York on Monday, October 18, a few days after he finished with squirrel and dove hunting. The next day Malcolm Cowley got his first close-up look at Robert Haas’s Park Avenue apartment during a dinner with two hired butlers and lots of cognac. Cowley observed a short, “neatly put together, slim and muscular” figure with “beautifully shaped hands,” a low forehead, deeply set eyes, a Roman nose, and gray hair around his head like a wreath. The drooping mustache reminded him of the melancholy Poe. Cowley took notes for his editor at Life, Robert Coughlan, who wanted Cowley to write a profile, which the critic would not do without Faulkner’s consent. Present also—as they almost always were on such occasions—were Hal Smith and Eric Devine, who left with Faulkner at two in the morning for Smith’s apartment.

The next day, Wednesday, Faulkner gave two interviews, saying to John K. Hutchins of the New York Herald Tribune, “I think of myself as a farmer, not a writer.” But he did relent insofar as he mentioned his fable, “based on the story of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.” Referring to the presidential election, in which the Democrats split, with the “Dixiecrats” opting for their own segregationist candidate, Strom Thurmond, Faulkner said: “I’d be a Dixiecrat myself if they hadn’t hollered ‘nigger.’ I’m a States’ Rights man. Hodding Carter’s a good man, and he’s right when he says the solution of the Negro problem belongs to the South.” Such statements would inevitably have an impact on the reviews of Intruder in the Dust. Hutchins wrote that Faulkner then paused and “added, with mild irony: ‘There isn’t a Southerner alive who doesn’t curse the day the first Northern ship captain landed a Negro slave in this country.’ ” It was a telling remark, and one that southerners often made about the northern complicity in the slave trade that had propelled the country’s economy.

Like Hutchins, Ralph Thompson of the New York Times described Faulkner as shy. Asked about the increasing academic interest in his work, Faulkner remained silent. Apparently the pressure began to build. In such situations, he felt cornered. “Look,” he finally said, “I’m just a writer. Not a literary man.” The reporter watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. He did not deny the symbols and patterns others found in his work, but he was like a “good carpenter,” putting the nails “where they belong.” Uncharacteristically, he revealed some of what he felt about his place in Oxford. Most people did not care much about his books or that his picture appeared in a New York newspaper, except to ask him for a loan, “figuring I’ve made a million dollars. Or else they look twice and figure I couldn’t make a thousand.” He just did not want to talk about his writing career, making out that it had all been an accident, a lark that only turned serious when Sherwood Anderson encouraged him.11

These two interviews, done presumably to promote Intruder in the Dust and to fulfill his deep regard for all Random House had done for him—this author who had made very little money for them—drove Faulkner to continue the drinking that had begun at the Haas party and the late night with Smith and Devine. After the interviews, he went off by himself to the Algonquin. A worried Malcolm Cowley, whose lunch appointment had been canceled because Faulkner was too drunk, showed up at the Algonquin on Friday, October 22. In Faulkner’s room, Cowley observed the whiskey and beer bottles on the dresser, and the writer on his back “naked and uncovered except for a silk pajama top.” Faulkner, grunting and muttering, couldn’t seem to say an audible word. “Can’t I do something for you,” Cowley asked. “What’n you do?,” Faulkner managed to ask. “I could cover you. I could get you a drink.” “Drink,” Faulkner said. Cowley poured one and had to hold Faulkner while he got it down. The critic sat by the bed but could think of nothing else to do. Later Cowley kept seeing the scene: “on the hotel twin bed, his very small penis exposed unless he covered it with his hands. Sometimes he moaned in his alcoholic sleep.”

Blotner did not include this scene in his biography, but spoke to Bill Fielden, who said: “He would trick you, bargain with you, humiliate you, anything to get a drink when you were trying to get him to quit, nursing him. It would be hard to keep him upstairs.” Fielden would hear him come “stumbling, falling, downstairs.” Once Fielden grabbed him and actually got into a cold shower with Faulkner, who said that was “no way to treat kinfolks.” Other family members, like Faulkner’s brother John, sometimes would watch over him during these bouts, but then John, too, would sometimes get drunk. Weak and debilitated, Faulkner would taper off with beer.12

In New York, Cowley and others had Faulkner put into the Fieldstone Sanitarium, where he spent only a day, showing, once again, extraordinary recuperative powers. The next day, Cowley took Faulkner home to Sherman, Connecticut. Cowley’s vigilant wife, Muriel, monitored Faulkner, feeding him and spacing out and watering down his drinks and coping with his withdrawal symptoms: the shakes and the sweats.13 Cowley listened to Faulkner talk about the projected collection of short stories. The critic suggested the work should appear in one big volume arranged by subject matter and with a foreword by Faulkner. “He promised to think about it,” Cowley noted as he listened to an account of the fable: “Christ in the French army, a corporal with a squad of 12 men—and a general who is Antichrist and takes him up on a hill and offers him the world. Symbolic and unreal, except for 300 wild pages about a three-legged racehorse in Tennessee. Mary Magdalen and the other two Marys. There is a strange mutiny in which the soldiers on both sides simply refuse to fight. The corporal’s body is chosen for that of the Unknown Soldier. Christ (or his disciple) lives again in the crowd.”

They moved on to Faulkner’s account of his time in Hollywood and then to stories about Callie Barr. This was about as much as Cowley could get out of Faulkner, who resisted—but did not actually reject—the idea of an article with biographical material. And yet, on a beautiful autumn day with oaks that “wore an imperial purple,” as they drove across the foothills of the Taconic Range, Faulkner kept talking about his life—from the postwar period in New Orleans to travels in Europe, how his conception of Yoknapatawpha developed, his notion of the South as a frontier society, Falkner family lore, hunting, his farm, run by “three Negro tenant families,” and about writing, usually in the morning but sometimes afternoons and evenings too. Gavin Stevens, Faulkner insisted, was no mouthpiece. He stated what would soon become evident to readers of Intruder in the Dust: “If the race problems were just left to the children, they’d be solved soon enough. It’s the grown-ups and especially the women who keep the prejudice alive.” At the end of the day, still wanting to talk, he paced back and forth in Cowley’s living room, a combination, somehow, of humility and “something close to Napoleonic pride.” He had more yet to say about his “prodigious sentences” conveying a “sense of simultaneity, not only giving what happened in the shifting moment but suggesting everything that went before and made the quality of that moment.” Faulkner left Cowley with a copy of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, the famous story of an alcoholic writer played by Ray Milland in Billy Wilder’s film. On the way back to Oxford, Faulkner sent Mrs. Cowley a dozen long-stemmed roses.14

At home in early November, he wrote Cowley about the structure of Collected Stories that laid out a geographical Yoknapatawpha and the world beyond it—just as the critic had suggested. Faulkner followed Cowley in another matter too: He wanted a corduroy coat “like yours, white or nearwhite corduroy, bellows pockets and a loose belt and a vent in the back so I can ride a horse in it.” Brooks Brothers had nothing like that in stock, and so he asked Cowley if he could get them to “make me one like yours.”15

“An Event in American Literature”

In the Dallas Morning News (September 26), John Chapman observed that “it should not seem particularly strange that Faulkner, having dealt with the displacement of people from war and poverty, should finally come to deal explicitly with the most dispossessed and displaced of all, the Negro.”16 Horace Gregory in the New York Herald Tribune (September 26) called Lucas Beauchamp a new kind of black man in American fiction: “no mere ‘Uncle Tom,’ that Pantaloon of sentimental abolitionist literature, but one of the most convincing Negro characters in American fiction, a rare figure of unmarred dignity, and it is one of the marks of Faulkner’s genius that he can write of the Negro without false pity, without the usual haze of shallow sentiment in which so many ‘men of good will’ scatter patronage, and the sweet, slightly rotted fruits of ‘good intentions.’ ”

Between Edmund Wilson and Eudora Welty stretched the literary and political ground on which Faulkner’s novel was appraised. Wilson complained about “snarled-up,” tract-like prose.17 The critic presumed the novel derived from a response to the civil rights plank at the Democratic National Convention and to an antilynching bill in Congress, unaware that Faulkner had conceived the novel nearly a decade earlier and had been exploring the race issue in his wartime screenplays. When Wilson said that “it is difficult to reduce what is said to definite propositions,” he contradicted his own argument that Faulkner had written a tract. As Harvey Breit observed in the New York Times Book Review (September 26), Stevens’s speeches are “non-paraphrasable because they have not been conceived in political terms nor are they expressed in ready formulas. They are individual notions, expressed with utmost particularisation, and no camp or faction will find them readily usable.”

Eudora Welty read a different novel from Wilson’s. “Intruder is marvelously funny,” she wrote in the Hudson Review (Winter 1949). “The complicated intricate thing is that his stories are not decked out in humor, but the humor is born in them, as much their blood and bones as the passion and poetry.” Welty, a master of comic prose and scene setting, noticed sentences like this one: “Miss Habersham’s round hat on the exact top of her head such as few people had seen in fifty years and probably no one at any time looked up out of a halfway rifled grave.” This old lady is helping sixteen-year-old Chick Mallison to dig up a body as part of the proof that Lucas Beauchamp is innocent. A bullet will prove Lucas’s gun was not involved in the murder. Faulkner attends to the incongruity of the characters, the setting, and the time—the past (the old hat) impinging upon the present, the living upon the dead. A crime has been covered up, literally buried. Ultimately the novel is not simply a murder mystery—that is its casing, Welty noted—or a response to social issues (although those are there). “What goes on here?,” Welty began her review: “Grave digging. ‘Digging and undiggin.’ What’s in the grave? One body or maybe another, maybe nothing at all—except human shame, something we’ve done to ourselves.” Perhaps not wanting to give the ending away, Welty does not add that the solution of the crime leads to the discovery of fratricide, a family crime of a white man killing his twin brother, so that consciousness of race, so keenly a part of the community’s desire to punish a victim with death, becomes a blow against itself for wanting the proud Lucas to “be a nigger first,” like Charles Bon and Joe Christmas. “The concepts of justice and tolerance are themselves brought under examination,” wrote the reviewer in the Irish Times (October 1, 1949), in a novel that probes and evaluates the “dialectics of individual and communal responsibility.”

Several reviewers noted that Intruder in the Dust was Faulkner’s first novel in eight years (most did not count Go Down, Moses as a novel), and their enthusiasm suggests the pent-up demand that triggered sales and tributes. But they were also puzzled. In the New Statesman and Nation (October 15, 1949), Walter Allen called Faulkner’s novel “inspiring . . . scarcely the adjective one would have applied to his work in the past.” Lucas Beauchamp, unlike Joe Christmas, is not lynched but saved and emerges triumphant. As the anonymous reviewer put it in TLS (October 7, 1949), the novel had no “figure of doom comparable with Popeye or Joe Christmas.” Yet what had changed was more a matter of emphasis, since the elements of inspiration surely suffuse The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses in the persistence and even triumphs of Dilsey, Byron Bunch and Lena Grove, the French architect, Ratliff, and Lucas Beauchamp. The boy-man reckoning with his heritage in The Unvanquished reaches his fulfillment in Chick Mallison.

Nathan Glick in Commentary (May 1949) provided a remarkable paragraph of biographical criticism:

It is as if Faulkner were trying to formulate his feeling toward a special branch of his family, with which his parents have had some vague but rankling quarrel, but whose individual members he has come to like. His book Go Down, Moses is dedicated to “Mammy” and indeed in much of his fiction the mother image is a black woman. His black and white boys hunt, sleep, and eat together as brothers (or cousins) until the adult’s race pride seeps down and destroys their ease, as it complicates the white boy’s feeling toward the Negro mother. A sense of his own complicity in this estrangement from one’s earliest companions motivates Faulkner’s attempt to project himself wholly into the Negro’s mind and feeling. Whatever we may think of the tribal, superstitious elements in his statement of the racial situation, Faulkner’s involved affection and respect for the Negro may indeed be a profounder sense of fraternity than the Northerner’s easy, and impersonal, liberalism.

This passage hits full force when it is remembered that the poor white Vincent Gowrie is murdered by his white brother, an event that surely reflects Faulkner’s understanding that in the effort to lynch Lucas white people have tried to revenge themselves on the wrong brother. When Gavin Stevens calls the South homogeneous, he is referring to black and white people alike and the brotherhood that lynchings have sought to deny. As to the “special branch of his family,” the reviewer came close to recognizing that Intruder in the Dust is a tribute to Uncle Ned.

In the Sewanee Review (Winter 1949), Andrew Lytle argued that no matter Faulkner’s motivations in addressing a contemporary issue, as an artist a literary truth, as in Dickens, had to prevail. For Lytle, Chick Mallison, troubled by his debt to Lucas Beauchamp, who had rescued him from drowning, and by the shame he feels about the effort to lynch Lucas, is the moral center of novel, making it dramatic, not didactic. He is, in the words of Morton Fineman (Philadelphia Inquirer, September 26, 1948), “all impassioned awareness” set against his uncle, the “oracular and patient” Gavin Stevens. It is Chick’s “moral destiny,” Lytle affirms, that is at stake as well as Lucas’s life. Chick cannot redeem himself without rescuing Lucas as well. But Chick cannot do it alone, which is why Miss Habersham is called up to direct the unearthing of the crime and the culprit. Curiously, Lytle does not mention Aleck Sander, Chick’s black counterpart, who performs, as Ringo does for Bayard in The Unvanquished, the role of sidekick and teammate, and without whom Chick, like Bayard, could not measure the degree of his commitment to moral action.

Like Bayard’s, only more so, Chick’s consciousness is part black: “Because he [Chick] knew Lucas Beauchamp too—as well that is as any white person knew him. Better than any maybe.” Chick has been inside Lucas’s home, eaten at his table, and been cared for by Lucas’s wife. He is like the barber in “Dry September,” knowing the black man to be lynched in ways that the rest of white community does not. Lucas, as much as Thomas Sutpen or his white ancestors, has his own domain, a ten-acre patch deeded to him by his white first cousin, McCaslin Edmonds. Lucas, Aleck Sander, and their black families are “a rich part of his heritage as a Southerner.” Faulkner never quite put it this way in previous novels—this explicit acknowledgment that southern white identity depends on its black counterpart, as it did for Faulkner himself. Lucas wears his “fine old hat” with a “swaggering rake,” reminiscent of a Sutpen-like flamboyance but also of Uncle Ned in the old Colonel’s clothing.

While Chick tries to work out the fate of Lucas Beauchamp, Gavin Stevens pontificates about the state of the South: “We are defending not actually our politics or beliefs or even our way of life, but simply our homogeneity from a federal government to which in simple desperation the rest of this country has had to surrender voluntarily more and more of its personal and private liberty in order to continue to afford the United States. And of course we will continue to defend it.” Faulkner said such speeches were characteristic of southern liberals, a term he never used for himself, but one that seemed to fit in a University of Virginia classroom: “no one can be saved by an outsider. He must be saved from inside himself. That is, the South must correct that evil, as it applies to the South, ourselves, that it can’t be done by—by laws or philosophical or political theories compelled on us from the outside.” But to Faulkner, at least, his sharing an opinion with Gavin Stevens did not mean the character was there to support Faulkner: “The writer is too busy writing about people struggling with their own hearts, with others, or with environment, that his own convictions and opinions about injustices come out, but he’s not, at that moment, concerned in telling the reader, ‘This is what I think about injustice or morality.’ ”18

The failure of Reconstruction and the subsequent efforts to redeem that failure through legislation seem evident to Stevens, as they seemed to Faulkner. The character can be separated from the author, to be sure, but nevertheless they share many of the same opinions, including a deep and abiding belief that changes of heart cannot be coerced by legislation. What could, then, produce a change of heart? Isn’t that one important reason why Faulkner wrote novels? The loquacious Stevens seems there in the novel to keep in play the argument between the South and the North that Faulkner stubbornly would not relinquish, for he believed that to capitulate to northern liberal opinion would be to abnegate the anguish and triumph that Chick is able to experience on his own terms. To accept the North as an intervening agent would mean to take away the story Faulkner felt compelled to tell.

Chick’s terms, Faulkner’s terms, included insisting on the hegemony of his own fiction. In the Partisan Review (October 1948), Elizabeth Hardwick declared: “There are probably very few novelists in America who have not in some depressed, sterile hour wished for Faulkner’s madness. He is authentically, romantically possessed by his genius; he can lose himself not only in the act of writing but in the world his imagination has created and populated.” She referred to his map of Yoknapatawpha and the “Compson Appendix,” which suggested a world intact, sufficient to itself: “And he is so beautifully our young writer’s image of the artist: he has done it by himself, in solitude, far from New York, in spite of critics, little magazines, fads, and professors—our natural genius, isolated, sure of himself, magnificently hallucinated as we feel the artist ought to be.” Perhaps not quite so isolated as she supposed, as she left Hollywood out of her myth of the solitary great American novelist, and she did not seem to realize that some of that inspired writing occurred in the offices of Random House. Having created this myth of the “possessed, legendary writer,” she was dismayed to find he had written a polemic, “even in its odd way a ‘novel of ideas,’ ” as if he “ran down from the hills to make a speech in the public square.” Her attitude reflects a desire to set Faulkner aside and immunize him from social and political pressures.

Hardwick’s Faulkner is a segregationist in a different sense of the word:

The sickness of Intruder in the Dust, the fear and despair, are intimately connected with the future of Faulkner’s career, a career which demands that there be a South, not just a geographical section and an accent, but a reasonably autonomous unit, a kind of family ready, and even with a measure of geniality, to admit the existence of the people next door and to cooperate in the necessary civic responsibilities, such as the removal of garbage and the maintenance of highways, but beyond that unique and separate, not to be reproached, advised, or mourned for the goings on behind the door.

In short, the world had finally gotten to William Faulkner. Drenched in her thesis, Hardwick misread the novel, actually saying that Lucas wanted to be lynched, to “add his own blood to the South’s dishonor, as his last act of contempt for his oppressors.” But Lucas, notwithstanding Hardwick’s contention, does not want to become a martyr. He might seem passive by not professing his innocence, but he realizes that only through Chick, through a sensibility uncluttered with adult notions of “Negroes,” can he possibly be saved.

Lucas Beauchamp’s courage and intelligence have been insufficiently accounted for in many readings of the novel. In effect, he is the detective, not the white people. He tells them where to look for the evidence. He is the Dupin who solves a crime without leaving the confines of his own mind. It is not just that he does not act like a frightened “nigger.” He does not act as a frightened man at all. Lucas is proud of his aristocratic heritage, his descent from a plantation owner, but his superiority is not really race-based. He does not see white people as superior, and he does not identify with black people. He is that remarkable specimen in a racist society, one who is race neutral: “What makes Faulkner’s casting of the problem so original and astute in Intruder involves his refusal to represent the question of black enfranchisement as it was usually posed: what to do with the negro? Faulkner’s ultimate answer seems to be: abolish ‘negro.’ Also abolish ‘white,’ along with the entire figment of race.”19

Lucas trusts Chick because the boy has shown himself to be observant and self-reliant. He does not defer to adult authority, and he has shed many of the conceptions of race that hinder white people, even the liberal ones like those of his Uncle Gavin. Chick may be daunted by what Lucas asks him to do, but he does not think it impossible. He is not old enough to accept the limits of the possible. This faith in youth, this reverence for the honest reactions of children, is a very Faulknerian conceit. Lucas is not presented as “the Negro.” He does not believe he represents anyone other than himself, and that is how Chick also responds to him. If Lucas had accepted his status as “nigger,” then, certainly, he might become “the Negro.” Gavin Stevens, prone to palaver, transforms Lucas’s case into one of “Sambo,” the lawyer’s term that allows him to make sweeping generalizations about race and also to express a “self-consciously arrogant” attitude, since the term itself cannot be anodized simply because Stevens uses it.20 He is not equipped to understand Lucas’s motivations, and yet he is the one who has to champion Lucas’s right to a defense, just as he is there when Butch Beauchamp’s body returns to Yoknapatawpha.

Hardwick calls Stevens “absurd” and “strident,” and his speeches “written with frantic bad taste.” But is the bad taste Faulkner’s? Isn’t Stevens’s florid defensiveness risible? Faulkner disarmed the proponent of some of his own ideas by making him so hortatory. After all, this is the well-meaning but baffled character in the last story of Go Down, Moses who cannot really come to terms with the black community he wants to serve. And this is also the Gavin Stevens who bloviates on the white blood–black blood complex in Light in August, and the Stevens to come in Requiem for a Nun who behaves like a moralistic hound. He does plenty of good in Knight’s Gambit solving crimes, but there he is more concerned with the clues to human character and the logic of events. In Intruder in the Dust, Stevens “talks about everything but his own failure.” He cannot “see past the persiflage of his own words.”21 Stevens, after all, believed Lucas was guilty until Chick, Aleck Sander, and Miss Habersham proved otherwise. Stevens, prone to tangents, is often brought back into focus by Chick and Miss Habersham, both of whom speak in “short, simple declarative sentences.”22

Reviewers treated Intruder in the Dust all by itself and with no reference to Stevens’s other appearances in Yoknapatawpha. Fair enough. But a reader of the Faulkner canon can approach the good lawyer with some skepticism. Similarly, the biographer cannot help but see Phil Stone somewhere there in the background—not as a lawyer who professes Stevens’s views (in fact Stone was much more of a hard-line segregationist), but as a hapless, garrulous figure with some talent and generosity but without the wherewithal to do that much for himself or his family. Faulkner did not imitate Stone’s style, but reading through Stone’s letters results in an impression of a pontifical, ideological, and ineffectual person as frustrated as Stevens is in his inability to connect with others.

Suppressed Faulkner

Several reviewers complained about Faulkner’s lack of sentence structure—how his sentences went on and on—and presumed the “faults” were the result of laziness and lack of discipline. A study of his manuscripts and typescripts shows, however, that the famous Faulknerian sentences were the result of much revision that occurred six weeks after he wrote his initial short draft of the novel and went on for at least another six weeks. The published Faulkner, in other words, is rewritten Faulkner. The published Faulkner was also an act of suppression.

Although Faulkner told Harold Ober that “nobody preaches” in Intruder in the Dust,23 the novelist had to work hard to prohibit the preaching. In an omitted preface, he declared: “These characters and incidents are fictional, imaginative, and—some will say—impossible. In which case let them be accepted not as the puppet-play of a whodunit but as the protagonist-pattern of a belief that not government first but the white man of the South owes a responsibility to the Negro.” To say as much before the novel began allied the author to Gavin Stevens. Faulkner drafted and then discarded a reference to himself and Absalom, Absalom!: “so that in five hundred years all America can paraphrase the tag line of a book a novel of about twenty years ago by another Mississippian, a mild retiring little man over yonder at Oxford, in which a fictitious Canadian said to a fictitious self-lacerated Southerner in a dormitory room in a not too authentic Harvard: ‘I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.’ ” Faulkner had typed “self-lacerated Mississippian” and crossed out the word and wrote in “Southerner” to expand the import of his prophecy.24 Not since Mosquitoes had he dared to refer to himself in a work of fiction, which he would not do ever again, except for his later semi-fictional essay “Mississippi.”

In his fiction, Faulkner suppressed something else: the reality of lynching in his own time and what it would have taken to stop it. By 1948, lynchings were rare, as Rebecca West noted in her famous reportage “Opera in Greenville.” In that piece, much admired in the South, she took essentially Faulkner’s approach, believing that southerners were on the way to eradicating lynching, that in fact the lynching trial she covered was an anomaly in a rapidly changing South.25 If so much else around him was changing so fast, it did not seem unreasonable to Faulkner to suppose that segregation, too, would seem outmoded as well as immoral. But he also knew that his fellow Mississippians would recognize, even in 1948, that his characters were Faulknerian—that, in fact, no one like Lucas Beauchamp could survive—not then anyway, as John Cullen said to his interviewer Floyd Watkins: “Lucas Beauchamp was more independent than he could actually get away with as a real person in Oxford.”26

What would it take to stop a lynch mob? It is as if Faulkner asked himself that question. In Intruder in the Dust, he supplied the answer: Miss Habersham. Without her, Lucas Beauchamp, Chick Mallison, Aleck Sander, and Gavin Stevens, who combine to see that justice is done, could not prevail. The film adaptation makes the point even more strongly, and while Faulkner did not write the script, he read Ben Maddow’s version and revised parts of it.27 He coached Juano Hernandez, who played Lucas, as well as giving every indication that he approved of the film, which is itself an interpretation of the novel that makes Miss Habersham even more crucial to the action. When Crawford Gowrie approaches the jail spilling gas from his can along the way and onto the floor where Miss Habersham sits, barring his way to Lucas Beauchamp, she does not flinch when he lights a match, which he has to extinguish when he realizes he cannot frighten her. As he retreats, she gets out of her chair and confronts the lynch mob, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves. They should go away. They do not. Instead they stand, with several of them bowing their heads or looking away. It is, in effect, a stalemate until the sheriff arrives with the real murderer and the mob disperses. That stalemated moment, by design or happenstance, revealed a South stuck in its old ways and yet unable to perpetuate the past without some encouragement. Instead the mob is witness to an old lady, who should herself be the embodiment of those women who erected monuments to the Confederate dead, telling them to move on.

There is no evidence that Faulkner wrote that scene, but he sure saw it before it was filmed. He knew nothing like it could happen except in Jefferson, not Oxford. But the world would have to change even as Jefferson was changing in the last decade of his work on the Yoknapatawpha fiction.

Hollywood Comes to Oxford

MGM chose Clarence Brown, educated in Georgia, and involved in filmmaking since 1920, to direct Intruder in the Dust at a time when only one other picture dealing with race issues, Lost Boundaries (1949), was in production. That film dealt with a light-skinned African American doctor who passed for white when he could not find employment in the South. Brown regarded filming Faulkner’s novel as a “payment of his conscience,” according to screenwriter Ben Maddow. The director had witnessed black people shot down during an Atlanta race riot.28 He wanted to adapt Faulkner’s novel even before it went into galleys.

Brown had a daring plan: to shoot on location in Oxford and use the local people in bit roles and in mob scenes. Studios were wary of location shoots, which often ran over budget. But Brown convinced MGM it would be cheaper to film on-site. He had the fortunate backing of Dore Schary, a liberal producer who believed in Brown’s mission. The director wanted to show the South how to see itself as Faulkner saw it: capable of resolving its own problems. “The thinking must come from within,” he argued. He turned the filming into a community event, recruiting college professors, bankers, barbers, truck drivers, and workers from a local creamery. The whole film, Brown said, was “shot within a radius of three blocks,” except for a cemetery scene, but that, too, was in Oxford. It took a week, Brown admitted, for the community to adjust to filming, but then they were enthusiastic supporters.29 More people came to church during the filming of scenes there than Emily Stone, Phil’s wife, had ever seen attend a service.30 Phil appeared briefly in the church scene.31

At first, many in Oxford were uneasy when they heard an MGM film crew of fifty would be coming to town. The “worst side would be presented and the community held up to shame and ridicule.” Many believed Faulkner only showed the “sordid” side of life. But others welcomed the business. At least one Mississippi paper deplored such mercenary motives.32 But Brown had the winning argument: making the film in Hollywood would mean Oxford would have no say in how it was depicted.33

Brown also had a certain cachet as the director of the popular National Velvet (1944), starring Elizabeth Taylor, and The Yearling (1946), set on a Florida farm and based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s celebrated bestseller. Claude Jarman Jr., who played Jody Baxter, the boy who adopts an orphaned fawn in The Yearling, now arrived in town to play Chick Mallison. Jarman and Elizabeth Patterson (Miss Habersham) were both southerners. Brown’s own southern background may have helped his case. So, too, did the excitement of making a motion picture that even had some suggesting to Brown ways to make the lynch mob more authentic, including those who argued that a knotted rope ought to be in the scene.34 Brown opted for a more subtle approach. Perhaps, also, he told the town some version of what he said to the press: “Our picture is merely a good whodunit. It concerns three people who save a man from a lynching. The man could be a Negro or he could be white. It makes no difference to the story.”35 Of course, race did make a difference, but MGM had done an earlier lynching film, Fury (1936), starring Spencer Tracy, whose character narrowly escapes a lynching in California, so Brown could have made the most of his studio’s bona fides. None of Stevens’s long speeches appeared in the film, much to Phil Stone’s dismay, because he wanted audiences to see what a “tolerant, educated white Southerner thinks about the race issue.”36

Faulkner kept watch over the director, or so Brown claimed, calling the author an “elusive little devil.” In a store window reflection, Brown saw Faulkner peering at him, but when the director turned around, Faulkner had vanished. He always seemed to be just gliding out of view. Robert Surtees, the cinematographer, described Faulkner as the most reticent man he had ever met, who did not repair the ruts in his driveway, hoping to discourage intruders. Occasionally, Surtees saw Faulkner slip in to watch the rushes, the printed results of a day’s shooting.37

Faulkner suggested shooting locations and rewrote certain scenes, Brown said: “He’s interested in motion picture technique.” What techniques Brown did not say. Faulkner later said he “liked the way Mr. Brown used bird calls and saddle squeaks and footsteps in place of a lot of loud music telling you what emotion you should be experiencing.”38 Did Faulkner also notice the film’s careful use of low-angle shots to depict Lucas Beauchamp? Such shots place the audience at ground level with Chick looking up at Lucas, making Beauchamp a towering figure next to the story of a boy’s dealings with the adult white world that tries to diminish Beauchamp’s humanity, separating him out from the community as the news reports had done to Nelse Patton. In the film adaptation, Stevens is never allowed to dilute the rapport between Chick and Lucas.

Faulkner watched, fascinated, even spellbound, as one of Jill’s classmates, a stand-in for Claude Jarman, fell into an icy stream created by pouring paraffin into the water. Lucas rescues Chick from the icy stream in an immersion/baptism scene that begins Chick’s rebirth and Lucas’s role as his savior. Faulkner even socialized with the crew to an extent that surprised Vicki Fielden, who said he adored Elizabeth Patterson (Miss Habersham), who had also played Aunt Jenny in The Story of Temple Drake. Faulkner was also very much “taken by Juano Hernandez who was a fine gentleman,” playing Lucas Beauchamp.39 Faulkner did not let on to his mother. On set, as they sat in canvas chairs next to the director, he turned to her during a series of retakes and said, “I told you it was boring.”40 Phil Stone showed up for the filming of a jail scene, and Claude Jarman Jr. signed an autograph for him.41 To Eric Devine, Faulkner wrote: “Much excitement here, since they are making a movie of my book in Oxford. It’s too bad I’m no longer young enough to cope with all the local girls who are ready and eager to glide into camera focus on their backs.”42 The filming stirred other memories, and he wrote to Meta a love letter, which she concealed from Wolfgang Rebner, whom she had remarried. “He wanted me to know that he dreamed of me often, even too often,” she wrote in her memoir, “but that now it was so ‘grievesome.’ ”

Faulkner also took Dean to watch the filming, and the Faulkners hosted a party for Claude Jarman Jr., who played Chick, and danced with Jill. Jarman remembered Faulkner as a “very quiet, quiet guy,” smoking his pipe and observing. He “never talked to you until you talked to him first.”43

Maud Falkner struck up a lasting friendship with Elizabeth Patterson, who bought one of Maud’s paintings. Rotary, the Chamber of Commerce, and Mayor Bob Williams organized festivities, a special invited luncheon, and other events over two days honoring the filmmakers. Estelle hosted a party, organized by seventy-six-year-old Aunt Bama, wearing her customary large hat and beads, an imperial presence (she had the Falkner Roman nose) who selected the vintage wine and catered the fish fry.44 Conspicuously absent from the party at Rowan Oak was Juano Hernandez. A highly respected stage actor, he had to stay with a local black undertaker. To invite Hernandez required the Faulkners to invite Hernandez’s black hosts as well. The Faulkners had wanted to invite Hernandez, but Mayor Williams “begged Pappy not to do it for the sake of peace in the town,” Dean said.45 A furious Faulkner acquiesced. Neither Brown nor Faulkner dared to break the racial barriers the film and novel exposed. Hernandez, observing the conventions of a segregated society, said “nothing goes on in Oxford that doesn’t go on in New York City. I didn’t have to play at being Lucas Beauchamp. I’ve been him too many times. When I tried to buy a home in Hempstead, Long Island, I was mobbed and so was my family.”46

On the square, on the film’s opening night, three marching bands and three floats paraded through the streets, taxis threaded through traffic arriving with celebrities stepping out into the congested streets and into an Oxford lit up with MGM klieg lights. “I mean everybody really put on the dog!,” Vicki Fielden remembered. “Grandmama made a dress for me with taffeta I’d brought back from Hong Kong.”47 Vicki and Dean wore hose for the first time.48 More than five hundred Oxford residents had been used in the movie production. Eight hundred moviegoers now showed up to see the result. Ticket prices were $2.60, a hike from the usual sixty cents, and as a result the theater was not completely full, with some theatergoers waiting until the price dropped.49

Phil Stone attended the premiere. A few weeks earlier, Faulkner had inscribed a copy of the novel “To Phil from Bill,” and Stone had dropped Faulkner a note, calling the book “a skillful job” but too tricky and too talky. Stone claimed the novel grew out of his suggestion that Faulkner write something for the slicks to make money.50 Stone grumbled that he had to pay for his own tickets. Faulkner had been offered some but did not want to bother handing them out. Bess Condon, Stone’s secretary, also expected tickets, but she didn’t have enough “pull.” She later said she should have talked to Bill and “reminded him that he owed me a big typing bill that he could pay off with two tickets.” But she had doubted Bill and Estelle would attend the premiere. Going to the show would be too much for them: “They are both alcoholics and the least thing out of the ordinary is sufficient for them to make them take up a bottle, so that they can brace themselves for the occasion.” She was amazed, she told her son, that the Faulkners had appeared and made it through the show.51 Mayor Williams had a batch of tickets but did not want to play favorites and just gave them out on a first-come, first-served basis.

Faulkner seemed unmoved by the moment when the worlds of Hollywood and home coalesced. He was not happy about the fuss and about who would sit where and what they would do.52 He was also still angry about the Hernandez incident.53 On the day of the premiere, he remained in pajamas in his room. The women, all dressed up, could not budge him. Then Aunt Bama arrived and said to him, “We need an escort, Billy, and you’re going to be it.” He had once joked to a cousin, “she owns us.”54 He could not refuse, and in fact, as Vicki Fielden put it, “he got all gussied up, like a peacock strutting around, almost.” The family drove over in two cars, and Faulkner made a grand entrance with the six women in his life: Estelle, Jill, Dean, Aunt Bama, his mother, and Vicki, as they entered what she called the “dingy, rat-ridden” Lyric Theater55—freshly painted, remodeled, and with a new screen.56 Faulkner rose to acknowledge audience applause. He bowed and then sat down. Dean remembered that the crowd kept applauding, forcing him to rise again: “I held my breath, hoping that he would say something, anything, so that people would keep looking at us in our new dresses.” But he only nodded and sat down again. Watching the film, Dean and Vicki cheered Miss Habersham, who reminded them of Maud.57

Faulkner spoke briefly at a press conference, along with Brown and the cast. According to a newspaper account, he did not “primp for the occasion,” showing up unshaven and wearing casual clothing, including a sport coat and a tee shirt. He answered some questions, said he liked the movie, but that his favorite was still Mickey Mouse. He took up writing when he got tired of hunting and fishing.58

In the New York Times (November 23, 1949), Bosley Crowther hailed Intruder in the Dust as “one of the great cinema dramas of our times.” Other reviewers offered similar superlatives, although the film had its critics who suggested it did not present a coherent attack on racism. Memphis censors approved the film for exhibition but said it didn’t “live up to Southern ideals” and that “No Southern Negro would act the way the one in the picture does.”59

Walter White of the NAACP called the film “magnificent,” noting it did not repeat Faulkner’s argument against outside intervention or his “claptrap about distinctive Negro odor.”60 That odor, however, is, as Chick realizes, “an idea”—part of a mental process, not just a physical one.61 Blacks in an integrated audience in Detroit laughed at the film, puzzling a white reporter, who was unable to determine why, except for a scene with Aleck Sander (Elzie Emmanuel), who came close to the stereotypical eye-rolling black man of Hollywood films.62 Emmanuel had protested but was forced to play the scene.63 Perhaps the very idea of a white boy and an old white lady working for, so to speak, an incarcerated black man amused them. Wasn’t the humor, the very comicality of the plot, bred into the novel, as Eudora Welty contended? Novelist Ralph Ellison said it was the only film dealing with the race issue that could be exhibited in Harlem “without arousing unintentional laughter.” His comments were generally in line with the positive comments in the black press.64

What Faulkner thought of the movie can be surmised from his short note to Sam Marx, the story editor who had supervised him at MGM. Referring to their “mild fiasco of twenty years ago,” Faulkner said his conscience had troubled him at times. But the MGM production of Intruder in the Dust had allayed his qualms “some. I may still be on MGM’s cuff, but at least I am not quite so far up the sleeve.”65

Pulping Faulkner

None of the reviewers quite said it, but with Intruder in the Dust, novel and movie, Faulkner entered the mainstream of American culture. The novel sold fifteen thousand copies in the trade edition, better than any other title heretofore. The well-received movie, if not a huge hit and excoriated by some southern newspapers, remains the high point of films adapted from his work.

Two signs of his emerging popularity are apparent in Bernadine Kielty’s review in the Ladies’ Home Journal (October 1948) and in the paperback reprints of his work. Kielty compared Faulkner, “our foremost living novelist,” to Balzac. Faulkner focused on a small southern town, but his canvas of human character rivaled the French author’s and the “emotions run if anything deeper.” Mississippi, a state whose economy bloomed with slavery, suffered a tragic downfall. Stories of mixed blood and miscegenation made for melodrama. If Kielty said nothing new, she nevertheless emphasized, for a broad audience, Faulkner’s varied work, including stories where “people talk straight.” Certain reviewers still deplored the violence and so-called sordid aspects of his work, as well as his convoluted style, but Kielty finessed those issues in prose that counseled a measure of patience and appreciation: “Sentences are sometimes two pages long with practically no punctuation. At first the unbroken vista of words seems insurmountable. But then as you read on, you get used to it, and in retrospect you see that the style serves its purpose.” Absent is the usual querulous attack, the plaintive regrets about his faulty grammar, and his refusal to square himself with conventional storytelling. This was a new kind of tone in the mainstream press, portraying Faulkner without any special pleading, taking him on his own terms, and showing why he mattered.

Paperbacks—starting with the Avon Pocket Size edition of Mosquitoes (1941); the Armed Forces collection A Rose for Emily And Other Stories (1945), not much bigger in dimensions than a three-by-five index card; and then cheap Signet Book editions of Sanctuary (1947), Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Wild Palms (1950), and Pylon (1950)—put Faulkner in the hands of three million readers at approximately one hundred thousand outlets—newsstands and drugstores,66 and wherever a shop, bus depot, and train station had a revolving rack of paperbacks. Readers could pick up a Faulkner novel and put it into their pockets and purses next to their favorite romance, mystery, or science fiction authors. They did not have to walk into the nine hundred bookstores to find him in hard cover, which is where critics like Malcolm Cowley went looking.

Cheap paperbacks, the province of pulp fiction, now also featured classic authors. Later Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1956) made fun of this paperback revolution that could even tout Freudian books as long as they had lurid, bodice-ripping cover illustrations. No matter. Faulkner could hardly be deemed abnormal where the ladies bought their cosmetics and the gentlemen their papers and cigarettes. If such unprestigious paperbacks stayed at the bottom of the pecking order in publishing, Faulkner’s characters had long appreciated them, including Dr. Peabody’s taste for “lurid, paper-covered nickel novels,” and Miss Jenny’s partiality for the tabloids. Joe Christmas reads pulp fiction “of the type whose covers bear either pictures of young women in underclothes or pictures of men in the act of shooting one another with pistols.”67 The Gathright-Reed Drugstore would have provided Faulkner with the expertise to assess paperbacks published as he scanned the racks for mysteries to read. One of his own stories, soon to be included in Knight’s Gambit, had been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. By May 1948, the Signet Sanctuary and The Wild Palms had sold close to a half million copies, earning Faulkner more than twelve thousand dollars.68 Signet publisher Victor Weybright not only touted Faulkner titles, but he also defended the author when distributors complained about what they considered his sensationalistic fiction and treatments of race and sex.

Like Clarence Brown, and before him Howard Hawks, Signet’s cover artist James Avati became an important mediating force that helped to sell Faulkner to a broader audience. The artist’s first Faulkner cover not only dramatized the central dynamic of the novel—Lucas Beauchamp’s word against a white mob—it also created an air of menace and anticipation: the black man is identified as such by his black head bent downward as he picks up his hat.69 His back is to the crowd, which, by synecdoche, is reduced to seven representative figures (farmers and workmen) turned toward Lucas and one another as if to reinforce their common hostility against him, emphasized by the sheriff, who holds on to Lucas as he eyes the assemblage. All are wearing hats or caps—they retain their dignity even as Lucas has temporarily lost his. The scene, in its own way, is as effective as Brown’s tracking shot of the mob’s faces as they watch Lucas emerge from the sheriff’s car, bending over to pick up his hat, which has fallen in the street. Both film and paperback cover create a man-against-the-crowd tension, abetted by placing the sheriff’s car on the diagonal, between Lucas and the swarming white throng. Avati did not simply design four-color covers as promotional pieces. The artist’s work served as commentary that led readers directly into the book.70

Pulping Faulkner brought him out of a literary isolation that neither Hollywood nor Random House had overcome, and provided him with a widespread impact on American sensitivities. Faulkner’s decision to follow up Intruder in the Dust, which had brought in an unprecedented ten thousand dollars in royalties, with a collection of detective stories, Knight’s Gambit, reveals a desire to capitalize on popular taste.