FIGURE 1. Today We Live (Howard Hawks, 1933)
This chapter focuses on a few key elements of Faulkner’s experience at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) between 1932 and 1933 and hypothesizes about their potential ramifications for his writing more broadly. First, Faulkner’s involvement at MGM would offer him a different perspective on the role of women in the culture industry, as authors, screenwriters, actors, and characters. His first foray in screenwriting would alert him to the fact that Hollywood was carving out a place for women that the South had hardly contemplated, and (at least for this brief moment) it would throw the gender politics of his region into sharp relief.
Second, Faulkner’s freshman attempt at screenwriting coincided with Hollywood’s turn to sound, the technological and industrial revolution that created a demand for capable screenwriters in the first place. Among the majors, MGM became the largest importer of writers and in 1932 had “sixty-eight writers under contract, with weekly salaries totaling $40,000.”1 Commercial sound cinema implied dialogue, necessitating the expertise of literary authors accustomed to writing convincing lines that could be spoken by the studio’s actors. Such work was customary for many of the playwrights who made the journey west, but novelists like Faulkner, whose dialogue was formerly spoken only by fictional characters on the page, would have to consider the way in which their writing would be delivered by living persons before the camera. Screenwriting had always functioned as a contingent art form, but the difficulty in maintaining authorial control became even greater with the talkies, which solicited carefully crafted lines of dialogue from writers only to hand them over to the actors, whose unpredictable interpretation of them could change the meaning the author had intended.
Actors had a lot of power at MGM, which prided itself on its wildly successful “star system,” built on the casting of particular recognizable male and female actors as leads again and again across many different films produced by the studio. As I explain, this aspect of the studio was absolutely crucial to the production process there, and as certain stars were earmarked (and contracted) for certain films before even the storyline had become clear, the star system made itself felt in the screenplay. Faulkner may have discovered some parallels between the star-driven films of MGM and his own burgeoning Yoknapatawpha County, which was from the beginning bound together by the repeat appearances of several staple characters.
By now, the story of Faulkner’s enigmatic arrival in Hollywood is a familiar one. He showed up in Culver City on May 7, 1932, reporting for duty under Sam Marx, head of the story department at MGM. Taking the initiative, Faulkner made some unexpected suggestions as to his possible assignments: “How about my writing newsreels?” he inquired. “Newsreels and Mickey Mouse, these are the only pictures I like.”2 Instead, he was assigned to work on Flesh (John Ford, 1932), a wrestling picture designed as a vehicle for Wallace Beery. Beery was seemingly unknown to Faulkner, who was shown some of the actor’s recent screen appearances in a projection room. But no sooner had the show reel begun than Faulkner started acting up, discussing dog ownership with the hapless projectionist, and asking that the film be stopped, at which point he left the backlot and apparently absconded to Death Valley. He returned under a shroud of mystery ten days later, during which time his contract had been canceled. He was welcomed back to the studio, however, and then began work on the first of his nine properties for MGM.
From this account, one that is often repeated and embellished, Faulkner appears as a parochial interloper, a troublesome novice in the film industry who had little idea of the world he had entered. But there is more to this false start (or “mild fiasco” [SL, 293] as he later called it) than meets the eye. Although his proposal of a Mickey Mouse picture, for instance, was met with incredulity, it was perhaps more prophetic than critics have allowed. Even though the cartoon character’s stories were then being written at Walt Disney Studios, Mickey would make a cameo alongside Jimmy Durante in MGM’s comedic anthology film Hollywood Party (1934). That odd picture played on the so-called Grand Hotel plot that had been consecrated a couple of years earlier, but the combination of animated characters with living actors was also symptomatic of the changing face of the studio’s fabled star system. Even in his seemingly wayward comments, Faulkner appeared to have more than a little knowledge of the studio’s operations.
His early antics also contrasted with his contributions as a screenwriter. Even his first effort, “Manservant,” reveals his canny awareness of some of the formal features of a screenplay. The treatment was adapted from Faulkner’s story “Love,” which he had been unable to sell to the magazines in 1921. Although on the reverse of one of the draft sheets for “Manservant,” Faulkner wrote, “I am not settled good yet. I have not got used to this work. But I am as well as anyone can be in this bedlam,” he had come equipped with a lexicon appropriate to his new craft, inscribing in the screenplay a “CLOSEUP” as well as several crane shots, indicated by “THE CAMERA FOLLOWS” and “WE FOLLOW” (FMS, 24, 8, 7).3 And, perhaps making good on his desire to write newsreels, Faulkner also deployed insert shots of newspapers to show the passing of time (FMS, 15, 16). At the treatment stage, he already had a good idea of how the film would look on screen. And more than this, he was familiar with the actor for whom he may have been writing. “Manservant” was possibly intended as a vehicle for John Gilbert, an ailing star of the silent screen who had failed to adjust to sound cinema and was in his final years at the studio.4 Although at one point, Gilbert had been “a very important element in MGM’s valuation of itself,” his image alone was no longer enough to sustain his popularity.5 While Faulkner’s description of Blynt, the character Gilbert would have played, is fairly vague—he is “about thirty. He wears several decorations” (FMS, 8)—he had already acknowledged Gilbert’s beauty in Sanctuary, Popeye being referred to at one point as “a right pretty little man, even if he ain’t no John Gilbert” (N, 2:336).
Dialogue was not only important for actors in 1932 but for screenwriters, too; the first stage in screenwriting was the treatment, in which the screen-writer outlined the story, and so if a screenwriter wrote dialogue, it meant that the studio had approved of the narrative and had authorized the writer to move on to the next stage. Dialogue also allowed for the fuller development of characters that previously only had form in narrative description. The first four properties that Faulkner worked on at MGM—“Manservant,” “The College Widow,” “Absolution,” and “Flying the Mail”—never made it past the treatment stage, and Faulkner was not asked to write extensive lines of dialogue for any of them. While there are a few lines of speech in “Manservant” and though “The College Widow” ends with a crucial barb uttered by its protagonist, for the most part Faulkner was imagining his screen characters solely through the descriptors he wrote in the scene text.
But this would change with a property that would also earn him his first screen credit. Faulkner’s adaptation of his short story “Turnabout,” which became Today We Live (Howard Hawks, 1933), not only saw him including a female character in a work that didn’t originally have one but also forced him to consider how a real, speaking actor would enunciate the words he wrote. This foreign method of writing for actual voices recalibrated Faulkner’s work and guided his changing approach to the idea of the New Woman, changes in evidence in a number of short fictions he produced immediately after his stint with MGM. In both “Two Dollar Wife” and “Elly,” stories that show a special interest in the grain of the female voice, he is particularly mindful that the sexual, moral, and economic liberation of women in the United States was not a universal phenomenon. Women in the rural South could not as easily lay claim to the benefits of New Womanhood as their urban counterparts in the North.
Over the course of a year, Faulkner’s screenwriting was subject to the peculiarities of MGM as a studio under the command of Irving Thalberg, head of production. Faulkner had to adjust to idiosyncrasies of a house style and to accept the focus on certain genres and, most importantly, the centrality of the star system that Thalberg had set in place. From the beginning, Faulkner became accustomed to preparing star vehicles for actors like Beery, Gilbert, and Crawford and was given to understand how the stars in question were to dictate the terms of his screenplays avant la lettre. But at the same time as he was creating different roles for the same stars—“sublimating the actual into the apocryphal” (LG, 255)—he would also begin to reuse his fictional characters in his screenplays, a practice of recycling he would engage in throughout his career. Here, at MGM, he had begun to think about how his newly minted fictional county, Yoknapatawpha, might itself constitute a star system, or, as he would put it, “a cosmos of my own” (LG, 255).
In a 1926 letter to Anita Loos, Faulkner admitted that he was “still rather Victorian in [his] prejudices regarding the intelligence of women, despite Elinor Wylie and Willa Cather and all the balance of them.” Faulkner wrote in admiration of Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), the novel in which Dorothy Shaw (the brunette) was constructed “through the intelligence of that elegant moron of a cornflower,” her blonde friend, Lorelei Lee. But his “envious congratulations” were not unqualified, and in the context of the letter, his closing note—“But I wish I had thought of Dorothy first”—contains more jealousy than goodwill. In Faye Hammill’s astute reading of the letter, Faulkner’s initial praise of Loos against what he saw as her obtuse readership is overshadowed by his suggestion that she may not have been fully aware of her own powers—“you have builded better than you knew” (SL, 32). “Initially,” Hammill writes, “Faulkner rightly associates Loos with the witty Dorothy, but subsequently he seems to consider her as another Lorelei—clumsy in her jokes but usually funny by accident rather than design.”6
Faulkner’s “Victorian” prejudices about Loos—who contributed far more as a scenarist in Hollywood than as a writer of fiction—would appear all the more outmoded by the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1932.7 At this time, the industry was affording opportunities to Loreleis and Dorothys both; female screenwriters were some of the most sought after by directors and female actors commanded the most auspicious roles. Indeed, under the watchful eye of Irving Thalberg, Loos would replace the unreliable F. Scott Fitzgerald on Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932), after he had tried and failed to write a screenplay for the picture.8 Its star, Jean Harlow, was one of MGM’s brightest lights during her short career, and a few years later made her way into Faulkner’s Pylon (1935), where Laverne Shumann is noted for her “Harlowcolored hair that they would pay her money for in Hollywood” (N, 2:804). The first footage that Faulkner watched in Hollywood probably included scenes from The Champ (King Vidor, 1932), written by one of the highest paid screenwriters of the era, Frances Marion. She would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Story for that film and was supposed to have been earning $7,500–$10,000 per week in the period of Faulkner’s first contract. Marion also enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with several female stars, including Marie Dressler, for whom she wrote often.9
The real success of women in the industry found its counterpart in a body of films depicting the so-called New Woman, who was regularly associated with economic independence, active participation in American political and civic life, and above all, a freedom to express sexual desire. Although women had entered the professions in greater numbers during the 1910s and had won suffrage in 1920, it was not until the early years of the Depression that the figure of the New Woman would truly gain representation in film. Cinema depicting women in the early sound period was initially torn between the new and the old-fashioned: between, for example, rural sweethearts like Lillian Gish and the liberated, boisterous “It” girl, Clara Bow, who was, as Molly Haskell observes in her classic account From Reverence to Rape, “the twentieth- century pitted against the nineteenth, urban against rural society, the liberated working girl against the Victorian valentine.”10 The liberation of cinematic women, whether vamp, flapper, or working girl, from the confines of domesticity and submissiveness is depicted as largely associated with urbanization, as the modern city offered a variety of occupations, chance encounters with members of the opposite sex, and changing modes of fashion rather than the stolidity of tradition.
Such aspects of life were simply unavailable in the South, a region that by the dawn of sound cinema was synonymous with the shrinking violets of D. W. Griffith’s films, and it would be some time yet before Scarlett O’Hara could claim her precarious place as the “antebellum version of the flapper” in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939).11 Even so, New Womanhood in the South was in this case only discovered in a return to a bygone era, and in the case of Fleming’s film even seemed premised on the existence of the premodern institution of slavery. Michael Rogin has argued that Scarlett is allowed to be rebellious because “order has broken down in civil war” and there is no longer “any legitimate patriarchal authority” in the wake of the South’s resounding defeat at the hands of the North.12 In the ravaged landscape of Georgia, the social order must be reconstructed, and Scarlett must discover the limits of her freedom in this new age. Although much has changed during the war, at least part of Scarlett’s independence, Rogin suggests, is helped by the continuation of black servitude in the nation (even if Scarlett’s servants also prevent her from achieving complete independence): Scarlett’s rebellion is made possible because of her servants’ inability to rebel and is kept in check by their willingness to protect her.13 Even with the material conditions and power relations in place, in the final analysis Scarlett longs after the husband she has rejected.14
But this was a film set in the South of old—what about the region on the road to modernity? Of course there had been many dramatic changes that had accompanied the region’s passage through Reconstruction and into the twentieth century. And yet for women, in some respects it was much the same. Indeed, Faulkner wrote of the fact that the possibilities women were afforded in urban centers and in Hollywood cinema were perennially out of reach for women in his part of the nation. In an early draft of “Dry September” (1931), his story about the obvious lag between modern screen fantasy and the lived reality of the South, Faulkner describes the plight of the southern woman in towns like his fictional Jefferson: “Life in such places is terrible for women. Life in all places is terrible for women. But in such towns as this, bound by the old traditions of genteel idleness, to which the old defeated cling, and by the genteel poverty, which that engenders, they must see the boys and youths grow into men and depart and return not at all or with foreign city-bred wives while they, bound by the traditions, have in their bone and flesh the hot sun of the land and the stubborn feminine counterpart of that which bred a tradition and which could outlast victory or a defeat and which behind the doomed monotony of their day and nights lay like gunpowder in a flimsy vault” (WFM, 24:264).
A melancholic disparity had opened between the prospects of the urbanized New Woman—especially as she was depicted on the silver screen—and those of her southern equivalent. The latter wanted what the former had, but because of the persistence of hoary traditions and the geographical immobilization they entailed, such opportunities were not made available to her. Too much depended on keeping southern women in place to allow them to shake off their traditional roles. But by the 1930s, the tide was turning, and new possibilities for women were coming even to the South. Faulkner’s response to this was complex, as his fiction both reflected and reimagined the issue of the New Woman in the South. He had by this point created several important “stubborn feminine” characters: Caddy Compson, the lost object of desire in The Sound and the Fury, Addie Bundren, the void around which As I Lay Dying coheres, and Lena Grove, the symbol of pregnant possibility of narrative progress in Light in August.15
Each of these figures troubled the age-old patriarchy and the cavalier myth of the region by resisting or interrogating the sustainability of women as southern belles: virtuous, docile, obedient. And in Sanctuary, readers discovered a more openly defiant and worrying instance of the emancipated woman in the South. Here, Temple Drake’s refusal to remain “bound by the old traditions” signals her downfall, and the novel seems to come down particularly hard on her decision, punishing the protagonist for her actions. Temple comes painfully close to securing the rewards of New Womanhood, only to have them brutally snatched away from her at the hands of a criminal. The work is disconcerting in this apparent tendency toward misogyny, and Faulkner was widely disparaged in this instance for peddling the grotesque fictions of the South as a means of enticing northern readers. Its stance on the future of women in the South is far from unequivocal: while for Leslie Fiedler, Temple is “desecrated” at the hands of her author for her “betrayal of her traditionally submissive role,” there is also a sense in which the explicit condemnation of female desire in Sanctuary might actually appear as its tacit endorsement and thus a denunciation instead of the very society that suffocates such desire.16
But this is certainly far from evident, and the dominant reading at the time was quick to note the unsavory elements of the novel. In this way, Faulkner’s pulp modernist experiment had a negative effect on Hollywood and its representation of liberated women. Although Faulkner could not have known this would happen at the time, his sale of Sanctuary to Paramount Pictures and its appearance as The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933) helped to bring the full force of the Motion Picture Production Code to bear on the industry. Although the code was established in 1930, its more serious enforcement came in 1934, with the installation of Joseph Breen as its director. Faulkner’s novel and the film adapted from it was in part what incited this more serious enforcement. In 1933, the Screen Writers’ Guild and the Writers Branch of the Academy together voiced their concerns over “the production of stories based on perversion, or containing sequences showing it.” Although it would affect the type of work they were able to do for the next three decades, the writers were here taking it on themselves to prevent unsavory content from making it to the screen, declaring a “war on filth” at the level of the screenplay itself: “If you want a job today in pictures at big money, all you have to do is to write a dirty book. Look what has happened recently. One of the most revolting novels ever published is William Faulkner’s ‘Sanctuary,’ but Paramount is making it under the ‘The Shame [sic] of Temple Drake,’ and another major company has hired the author for its writing staff.”17 It was bad enough that screen sirens like Harlow were bringing Hollywood into disrepute. But to add insult to injury, here was a rural girl, Temple Drake, trying to emulate the independence reserved for her urban sisters. Worse still, Faulkner himself promised to bring more “filth” with him on his journey to MGM.
In a sense, the guild was right to be concerned, as Faulkner’s first thought for Hollywood was something firmly in the Sanctuary mold. On a trip to New York late in 1931, the author had met a fellow southerner, Tallulah Bankhead, and began writing a short play for the young actor. Bankhead, who had recently begun her Hollywood career at Paramount’s Astoria studios on Long Island, hoped that Faulkner could write her a screenplay once he had made his way westward, even if he had his reservations.18 “I’d like to help a Southern girl who’s climbin’ to the top,” he told her. “But you’re too pretty an’ nice a girl to play in anything I’d write” (a comment that suggests Faulkner’s lack of familiarity with her work).19 Rather inauspiciously, Variety magazine announced the Bankhead collaboration along with the publication of Faulkner’s “Idyll in the Desert.”20 That story follows a woman from the East through to Arizona, where, after being jilted and fruitlessly waiting eight years for her lover’s return, she contracts tuberculosis, makes her way to Los Angeles, and breathes her last after seeing her lover now married to another woman. But surely with Faulkner’s help Bankhead would have better luck out west than his character?
She had first properly arrived on the screen as Nancy Courtney in Paramount’s Tarnished Lady (George Cukor, 1931), making her a clear choice for Faulkner’s brief story outline, “Night Bird,” which he wrote before arriving at the studio. The narrative follows a young college girl who has been prevented from marrying the man she loves. She ends up dating a number of students at the local college (at which her father is a professor) and has an encounter with a strange older man who haunts her thereafter. Attempting to leave her past behind her, she marries her earlier sweetheart, but he kills her old pursuer in a struggle, after which he seeks a divorce. She returns to her dalliances with college boys and subsequently reencounters her ex-husband, now married with a child. As Faulkner explained in a letter to his wife, Estelle: “I am writing a movie for Tallulah Bankhead. How’s that for high? The contract is to be signed today, for about $10,000.00. Like this: yesterday I wrote the outline, the synopsis, for which I am to get $500.00. Next I will elaborate the outline and put the action in, and I get $2500.00. Then, I write the dialogue and get the rest of it. And then likely we will go out to the Coast, to Hollywood” (SL, 53).
Although the work didn’t quite unfold as planned (especially as concerned financial predictions), Faulkner was able to revisit “Night Bird” in May 1932. The single snippet of dialogue that Faulkner wrote for it was its final line, the sardonic toast: “To the mother of my child” (FMS, 33). When he converted the outline at MGM into the longer treatment, “The College Widow,” the protagonist’s final line was changed to the more emphatic “To the mother of my son!”21 The story had been altered somewhat, too; the protagonist, Mary, was given greater psychological depth and made a little more malicious than naive. In “Night Bird,” Faulkner originally had her undergo a miscarriage, which was a more believable motivation for her sudden divorce, but he had edited that out; in “The College Widow,” this key plot point was reinstated. Although she still only speaks the single capstone of dialogue, other suggested lines betray a conflicted mind. While publicly refusing to marry her college beau, “She says that perhaps later, when people have forgotten it, she will come to him. She does not know herself whether she means this nor not. She is too busy thinking about her disappointment” (FMS, 43).
At the treatment stage, Mary certainly has things to say, but more often than not she internalizes what she can’t express. She is attracted to a mysterious stranger who stalks her, but as she is unable to adequately communicate just why he is alluring, her actions don’t always comport with her thoughts. In this way, she bears a keen resemblance to Temple Drake, another difficult female character who struggles to articulate her thoughts. Indeed, as a reader at the studio would comment two years after the treatment had been handed in, the story that emerged suggested that “Faulkner would obviously develop another SANCTUARY.”22 For this very reason, “The College Widow” was never approved for the addition of dialogue, but the importance of the only dialogue in the treatment shouldn’t be understated, not least of all since Faulkner was clearly aware of its monetary value. The future of “The College Widow” depended on the power of its climactic, ironic, and tragic final words, which although inconclusive gestured toward the promised value of dialogue if the studio were to take up Faulkner’s script. The single line, as Bruce Kawin has put it, forms a “paradoxical site of coherence,” as it rounds out the treatment on an ironic note.23 The plot is unresolved, but so too is the screenplay itself, as its final words demand the addition of further dialogue.
Dialogue in screenwriting generally follows a story outline that has already been tentatively approved. And yet, even though the more detailed account of the actions of characters and events of the plot precede the words intended for actors later assigned to the roles, it is clear from Faulkner’s first efforts as a screenwriter that the real, material sounds of spoken dialogue are already present in the mind of the writer before the dialogue—and often before the treatment—is written. Before any ink was spilled, Faulkner had real stars, with real voices, in mind for the words that he would write. He knew their mannerisms, knew how they projected their lines on screen, understood the importance of their charisma; above all else, he knew who he was writing for. He was certainly asked to familiarize himself with Wallace Beery’s persona in The Champ before making an attempt at Flesh, and he had probably also seen Min and Bill (George W. Hill, 1930), featuring Beery and Marie Dressler, before he wrote “Flying the Mail” in late May 1932.
Tallulah Bankhead was new to the talkies, having entered into Hollywood from the London stage. Her voice in theaters, as in the Paramount studio, had a deep, husky quality. As she later observed, her voice was “likened to the mating call of the caribou, and to the haunting note of a Strad.”24 Not having quite achieved the success she had imagined in Hollywood, Bankhead returned to the stage in the adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain, playing the prostitute Sadie Thompson, a character whose best efforts to reform herself are frustrated by a zealous missionary susceptible to her charms. She had little success in that role (one for which she had unsuccessfully auditioned almost a decade earlier), with one reviewer implying that the detrimental effects of Hollywood had weakened her performance: she was better in the play’s “quieter scenes,” but when she spoke, she bellowed “with the disturbing rumble of a female baritone.”25 From stage to screen and back again was a long journey.
Although Bankhead never quite endeared herself to cinemagoers, women in Hollywood in the early 1930s who had the ability to speak like men were generally favored, since the recording apparatus often had difficulties with high pitch. One such talent was Joan Crawford, whose appearance in the film adaptation of Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932) three years before Bankhead’s on the stage had marked her voice as one worth listening to. It was not only low but sufficiently neutral, lacking a harsh accent that might run the risk of distracting viewers.26 As Kaja Silverman has written, such attributes of the voice allow it to “exceed the gender of the body from which it proceeds”—Crawford could resist being put in her place as a woman precisely because her voice had a masculine tone.27 One of the major female stars of the decade, she could at once appear as the seductive Sadie or as the magnetic stenographer Flaemmchen in Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) and—due in part to the power of her voice—hold her own with the best of her male leads. Her unexpected appearance in the adaptation of Faulkner’s “Turnabout” would confirm her as a star for whom MGM simply had to find a permanent place.
Written just before Faulkner had arrived in Hollywood and fortuitously recommended to Howard Hawks by Hawks’s brother, William, “Turnabout” was a fairly simple story. Captain Bogard, an American pilot, takes the drunk British naval officer Claude Hope on one of his bombing missions. Hope returns the favor, taking Bogard on a mission of his own to prove that life aboard his torpedo boat is nothing to be sneezed at. Bogard meets the midshipman Ronnie, and the trio takes a daring run at a German port, during which their misfiring torpedo endangers the audacious crew. Later, Ronnie and Claude are killed, and Captain Bogard, vitalized after his encounters with the navy men, mounts a successful yet unorthodox raid on an enemy chateau. The eponymous “turnabout” of the story lay in the back and forth between Bogard and Hope, American and British, air and navy.
But a more dramatic switch would take place as the story was put through its paces at MGM. Faulkner completed a full-length script for his story in July—“Turn About,” so spelled—which mostly followed the original narrative and also adhered to the MGM house style: the speakers’ names in lower case and centered on the page, scene numbers in the extreme left margin, and slug lines and scene text indented.28 As was custom, the “boy wonder” of the studio, Irving Thalberg, had read the script but had refrained from making any edits. Enthusiastically, he told Howard Hawks to “shoot it as is. I feel as if I’d make tracks all over it if I touched it.”29 Later in July, however, Thalberg’s tracks were well and truly there, as he foisted Crawford into the mix, asserting that the actor needed to star in the picture so as to satisfy her contract with the studio. “I don’t seem to remember a girl in the story,” a dismayed Faulkner told Hawks.30 Nevertheless, the author was obliged to find room for the female lead and was allowed to return home to Oxford later in the month in order to finish the second draft, complete with a new role for Crawford: she was to play Ann, Ronnie’s sister, who would later fall in love with Bogard, while her first love, Claude (a ward of Ann and Ronnie’s family) is later killed along with Ronnie.
As John Matthews has pointed out, Ann becomes the very focus of the screenplay. Beginning with a scene featuring three of the leads as young children playing in an English brook, Faulkner has Ronnie complaining about the presence of his sister, who protests that “I have just as much right here as you have.” Claude allows her to stay, “so long as she doesn’t muddy the water” (FMS, 129).31 Of course, as Matthews observes, this is precisely what she does, both in the content of the screenplay—where, as an object of desire, she comes between a male friendship—and in the adaptation process, which demands that Faulkner’s story, if it is to become a film, include a prominent female character. In this way, Matthews writes: “Joan Crawford is the movie.”32
This first scene, which did not make it to the screen, proves this point. It also bears an affinity to the scenes of childhood in The Sound and the Fury, which stage in miniature the tense dynamics of filial desire and resentment that characterize the relationship between Caddy Compson and her three brothers (although the lasting memory of Caddy’s “muddy drawers” is a far more potent version of Ann’s muddying of the waters in “Turn About”).33 These opening exchanges also manage to encapsulate neatly the shift from published short story to screenplay, and they foreground the effect of the production process on the narrative, as changes made in writing transmuted into tangible, embodied changes. Even more than the addition of a female character, this adaptation would insist on the addition of a female voice that would deliver so much more than the single line designed for Tallulah Bankhead. Sensing her “intrusion” into the all-male story, Crawford apologized to Hawks and asked that her dialogue be written in a clipped, British style that would lend itself to snappier delivery and requested a more robust character that would be on a par with that of her male counterparts. The speech patterns attributed to Claude’s character in Faulkner’s story were now also shared by Ann, who would prove her worth by pacing her speech like an Englishman. But the resistance from its author is there from the very beginning, as Faulkner opens his screenplay by characterizing the two boys while offering nothing specific in the way of Ann’s disposition:
Claude is lively, talkative, vivacious; Ronnie is sober, almost dour. He and Claude are quite busy when Ann comes up.
RONNIE
(Turns upon Ann)
Why do you have to tag along after me all the time?
ANN
I’m not tagging after you. I have just as much right here as you have.
CLAUDE
We’re busy. We can’t be bothered with girls. Go away.
ANN
I won’t. (FMS, 129)
Although the female voice offered Faulkner the prospect of being able to work further on “The College Widow,” this scene as written seems to suggest a certain reluctance to admit a woman into the adaptation of his own work. It was the problem of voice itself that would see the screenplay’s opening sequences culled from the final cut. Initially, Dorothy Gray, one of the highest paid child actors at the time, was selected to play Ann in part because of her “adeptness in acquiring a British accent.”34 But the first scenes were excised from later revisions to the screenplay, since the children hired (Gray included) were apparently unconvincing in their adopted nationality, with Hawks recalling that their accents “sounded terrible.”35 Faulkner altered the narrative to accommodate the addition of Crawford to the film only to have the additional scenes—written precisely in order to better contextualize her role—excised.
FIGURE 1. Today We Live (Howard Hawks, 1933)
Faulkner followed instructions by carving out a role for Crawford in the screenplay, and it was one that allowed her to vocalize her thoughts in a “clipped” form, emphasized by the ubiquity of monosyllabic lines. When Ann first falls for Claude, the pair discuss how they will break the romance to Ronnie, trading lines in rapid succession, with Ann taking charge of the conversation:
ANN
Are you going to tell him we are in love?
CLAUDE
What? Love? O good gad.
ANN
Don’t lie to him any more. Claude.
No. But aren’t we?
ANN
Are we?
CLAUDE
Right. You know. I don’t. Are you?
ANN
I don’t know either.
CLAUDE
Right. I shan’t lie. (FMS, 194)
The capacity of such exchanges to place Ann on an equal footing with her male leads depended not only on the content and the staccato rhythm of the lines but also ultimately on the way in which Crawford delivered them. Faulkner’s intention with “Turn About” was to create the conditions of possibility for Crawford to come across as bold and self-assured. But what would eventually come out of Ann’s mouth in Today We Live would be far less predictable, for the basic reason that dialogue as written was never the sole determinant of how the dialogue was spoken. As Sarah Kozloff points out, on set and in postproduction, lines “are improvised, cut, repeated, stammered, swallowed, paraphrased; changes may be minor or major, but the results represent the unique alchemy of that script in the mouth, mind, and heart of that actor.”36 For the first time in his career, Faulkner had to relinquish control over the way in which his writing was expressed, with writing ultimately bowing to speech on this occasion. Of course, he had always had to deal with the revisions of his editors, but this was something qualitatively different from what Faulkner had experienced up to that point. With Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, Temple Drake in Sanctuary, and Lena Grove in Light in August, Faulkner had provided a space of interiority, of inner speech and thought (whether unmediated or by way of free indirect discourse), lending varying degrees of psychological weight to female characters who were otherwise sidelined in the South.37 But when writing for cinema, round characters would of necessity become flat, since on the screen it was far more difficult to suggest the complexities of mental processes or attitudes toward given situations. If any inner feeling articulated in the screenplay was to translate to the screen, it would need to register at a surface level.
In light of these constraints, Faulkner constructed Ann as a shallow character. She is built from visible actions and audible words alone and in certain places, Faulkner uses the commentary of others around her to make her seem more robust. Depth is not the priority here, and indeed, as is clear from the first scene, Ann is not even afforded a character profile. Most of what is depicted in the script and on screen is what Stanley Aronowitz has referred to as “the outer shell of social character” that leaves the core “unrepresented” in cinema.38 Aside from her gestures, expressions, appearance, and one private scene of letter writing, Joan Crawford would depend on the clipped British dialect that Faulkner had written for her and would speak in such a way that her audience might believe that she was not a Hollywood actor but a real Englishwoman.
In October, however, while working with the young screenwriter Dwight Taylor on a third draft of “Turn About,” Faulkner began to eliminate some of Ann’s more masculine dialogue, rendering many of her best lines melodramatic. He also softened the contours of her character: Ann’s antipathy toward Bogard blossoms into love, and her anger at his absence from the front line (after the deaths of her own father and mother) evaporates, as she is reduced to crying in her new lover’s arms. Ann’s trajectory—from self-assured female lead to a damsel-in-distress—is perhaps most clearly mapped in the difference between her thoughts and her words, a discrepancy that, as Kawin notes, Taylor targeted when he suggested that the changes Faulkner had made were “not an adequate substitute for the expression of a thought.”39 In their first meet cute, Ann is seething at the fact that Bogard will attend university instead of joining the war effort (FMS, 153–54). Her frustration over this is even more apparent in their next encounter, during which Ann becomes so incensed that she storms off and writes a letter to Claude in order to properly express herself:
Ann, looking back, sees Ronnie and Bogard enter the door. Her face is hard, almost contemptuous. Turns and walks fast. Returns home, sits at desk and writes furiously to Claude:
“. . . sickening. Beasts filthy strong and hale, going to school with fathers safe in New York, getting richer and richer because of the war. Why don’t you hurry and be eighteen so you and Ronnie can go out there and kill them and kill them.” (FMS, 157)
These are fighting words from Ann, and writing certainly confers power on Ann in the narrative, allowing her to articulate something that might otherwise go unsaid. But her speech here has been diverted into a written form because she has been discouraged from voicing her opinion in public. In her confrontations with Bogard, Ronnie tells her to “shut up” because “girls have no sense” (FMS, 154) and her brother also mentions to the American that Ann is a “silly girl. Child yet” (FMS, 157). Indeed, while Ann has moments of powerful self-representation on screen and at times lives up to her status as a “regular fire-eater” who wants to “kill all Germans out of hand,” her reputation precedes her, since it is discussed among and managed by the men who circulate around her (FMS, 155). Indeed, Bogard discovers the origins of Ann’s anger when he is told by a male companion, and with this knowledge he is ultimately able to seduce her:
BOGARD
I know why you hate me. I didn’t at first. But I do now.
ANN
Know what?
BOGARD
About your mother and fa . . .
ANN
Stop. Don’t you dare!
(She is breathing hard)
You’re so safe, you Americans. It can’t touch you. And we——I——Ronnie and me—
(She begins to cry hard not hiding her face, her fists clenched at her sides. Bogard goes to her; suddenly she is in his arms, crying hard.)
He was so damn fine! I liked him! I liked him! Things ought not to happen! They ought not to! God ought not to let them!
(She is crying uncontrollably, on the verge of hysteria. Bogard holds her.
Her hands wander about him, clutching him)
BOGARD
Now. Now. I’ll get you out of it. Away from it. We’ll go back to America, where——
ANN
(She springs free, looking at him)
What?
We’ll go back to America. I have been to school, enough.
ANN
(She slaps him hard, taut, furious)
You coward.
(She breathes hard.)
BOGARD
(Falls back, looking at her)
Coward, am I?
(He moves slowly toward her. She holds her ground, defiant, glaring at him. He takes her in his arms She resists. He kisses her by force. For a moment longer she resists. Then she succumbs, crying again. He holds her quietly now. From outside the window the tramp of soldiers begins and passes and dies away. He listens to the sound, turning his head as it passes.) (FMS, 163–64)
Although in previous scenes Ann makes damning, undiplomatic remarks about Bogard’s absence from the war, here Bogard breaks her down. Of course, although it is Bogard’s doing, the character is only acting at his author’s behest; it is Faulkner himself effectively silencing the fictional woman he had brought into being. Following Dwight Taylor’s criticisms of Faulkner’s changes to Ann’s dialogue, Marx assigned another writer to develop her character in more detail, although as Kawin asserts, the results of those revisions were “extremely sentimental.”40 Edith Fitzgerald, who had recently written additional dialogue for Crawford on Laughing Sinners (Harry Beaumont, 1931), then wrote some additional scenes for the actor, “focusing on her activities as a nurse and her friendships with other women.”41
It is unclear just why Faulkner made the changes to the script that he did, but his revisions of Crawford’s dialogue may have been part of an effort to regain control over his own work and to downplay the importance of the only female character in the story. In a letter he wrote to Ben Wasson, his Hollywood agent, while he was in Oxford working on the screenplay, Faulkner revealed how unhappy he was over Thalberg’s instruction that he include Crawford and explained how he had arranged with Sam Marx “to work on TURN ABOUT alone and no interference from any Jew in California” (SL, 68). Later, at the premiere of Today We Live in his hometown, Faulkner mentioned that “writing a play and dialogue for the screen was somewhat different from writing a book. As a novelist he has absolute say as to what appears therein, while writing the play was subject to changes by the scenario authorities and the picture director.”42 The major change here was the introduction of a female character, and a female actor who would give her a voice. In Faulkner’s first screen credit, it was ultimately the intervention of Ann and Joan Crawford that would highlight the differences between short story and screenplay in the adaptation process.
Once Faulkner had left MGM, Hollywood’s approach to women seemed to change overnight. Robert Sklar describes the shift after 1933 as one from an “age of turbulence”—in which pre-code licentiousness allowed for the foregrounding of bold, self-determining female characters—to an “age of order,” wherein women in cinema experienced a near reversal of fortunes, the more conservative nature of film in the middle years of the decade being less amenable to their social rise.43 In these more orderly films, as Veronica Pravadelli points out, “emancipatory plots often had a negative outcome, while the formation of the heterosexual couple became the new model of reference, the era’s dominant lifestyle.”44 On the one hand, there emerged a number of films in the 1930s that appeared to delight in punishing women who appeared to overreach their assigned societal roles. On the other, there was a tendency toward plots of integration, with the so-called comedy of remarriage normalizing stable relationships between men and women that seemed to stay safely within the bounds of what was socially acceptable.
Although he did not experience the full force of the Hays Code in his first year as a screenwriter, Faulkner completed two pieces of work immediately following his time at MGM that offer intriguing parallels with Hollywood’s reaction against the New Woman. “Elly” is a haunting story of a young woman desperately trying to rebel against her parents and grandmother, principally through her relationship with a man who may be black. It continues the meditation on the entrapment of southern women that Faulkner had remarked on explicitly in “Dry September,” but it ends on an even more brutal note than that story. In “Two Dollar Wife,” on the other hand, Faulkner offers a bizarre tale of university romance, derived from his treatment for “The College Widow,” albeit far lighter in tone. This story, styled as a kind of comedy of remarriage, sees a young couple almost pulled apart by the intervention of a rival at a drunken dance. Although its faux-serious ending is quite jarring, the comical interplay between the male and female betrothed is in marked contrast to the interracial and incestuous couplings elsewhere in Faulkner’s work of the period.
Bearing some similarities with the types of films produced at MGM and elsewhere in the early 1930s, Faulkner’s two stories also interrogate the repression and standardization of women in Hollywood by subjecting the female characters to the equally stifling atmosphere of the South. Faulkner’s recent experiences with writing female voice for the screen proved useful here, since it is voice that is thematized most intriguingly in both “Elly” and “Two Dollar Wife.” Where the thoughts of women like Temple Drake and Addie Bundren are refracted through the narrative voice in Faulkner’s previous works, here, the prose is full of verbal articulation, important even if it falls on deaf ears (as in “Elly”) or is traded loudly between an engaged couple (as in “Two Dollar Wife”). While both stories were conceived before Faulkner’s MGM stay—“Elly” in 1929, as “Salvage” or “Selvage” and “Two Dollar Wife” as early as 1925 under the title “The Devil Beats His Wife” and then in 1927 as “Christmas Tree”—he revised both after that time, framing the first by a flashback and attempting to incorporate some of the material from “The College Widow” into the second (US, 701–2).45
In the manuscript of “Dry September,” Faulkner had suggested that women in the South had little hope of sharing in the progress of women in urban areas. In “Elly”—one of the stories written after what he called his “sojourn downriver” (SL, 72)—the protagonist herself expresses this hopelessness; the “little dead” (CS, 212) town of Jefferson holds nothing for her. Indeed, it does not even allow her to be “caught in sin” (CS, 211), as she attempts to seduce her (probably) black lover, Paul, in front of her grandmother under the shrubbery of the family lawn. So reduced are the opportunities for young women like Elly in the South that she is forced to concoct her own drama. “I don’t want to be idle,” she pleads. “Just find me a job—anything, anywhere, so that it’s so far away that I’ll never have to hear the word Jefferson again” (CS, 212). Elly’s attempts to escape her town are thwarted: she resigns herself to marrying a respectable assistant cashier, but after she is later rebuffed by her true object of desire, Paul, with no alternatives in sight, she forces the car she, Paul, and her grandmother are driving in over a precipice; although she survives, they die. In the final analysis, her actions seem desperately and psychotically selfish. But perhaps there is more here than the simple punishment of southern female desire? Indeed, as Alice Hall Petry has pointed out, “Elly” is not just an attack on the “flapper” type that appears grossly out of place in the region. Both the Old and the New South come under fire here, as the stubborn and traditional grandmother is also faulted for her domination of the childlike yet ambitious Elly.46
A flashback that Faulkner added to the revised manuscript just as he was leaving MGM in 1933 begins the story just before the fateful car crash, but it also places front and center the gaps between thought and speech that consistently plague Elly. If Faulkner’s original intention in “Selvage” had been, as Edmund Volpe argues, “to allow the story action to portray the heroine’s inner tensions and her psychological collapse,” the supplementary flashback reveals much more about her character.47 In the first version of the story Elly’s motivation was largely muddled, even though the clearest explanation of it came in the form of a direct thought, and so Faulkner now opted to enhance the character’s inner turmoil by way of a couple of externalized devices—the objective correlative of the winding road and Elly’s later use of writing as a means of communication. Having surveyed the limits of inner and outer character in “Turn About,” now Faulkner would put them to the test in the short story form.
Ominously beginning on the bend on which the tale also finishes, the flashback has Elly desperately asking for Paul’s commitment one last time, but there is something else, something “dreadful” and “terrible” (CS, 207) that is on her mind—her grandmother. Her desire for Paul, expressed openly and without reservation, is hampered by her silent thoughts of the woman who is the obstacle to that desire. The yearning to which Elly gives voice is also literally obstructed by the woman’s “dead hearing” (CS, 208). The grandmother has been deaf “almost fifteen years” (CS, 212), and Elly must scream in order to attract the matriarch’s attention, to make her desire to leave the South understood. Later, however, while trying to keep Paul from hearing, she manages a conversation with her grandmother by quieter means. Writing on the back of a dance program, Elly insists that Paul is not who he is rumored to be: “He is not a negro he went to Va. and Harvard and everywhere” (CS, 218). The exchange continues in this way, before Elly writes something she quickly regrets: “‘Wait,’ Elly cried thinly, whispering, tugging at the card, twisting it. ‘I made a mistake. I—’ With an astonishing movement, the grandmother bent the card up as Elly tried to snatch it free. ‘Ah,’ she said, then she read aloud: Tell him. What do you know. ‘So. You didn’t finish it, I see. What do I know?’” (CS, 218). Elly goads her grandmother in writing, since her most daring gesture of defiance would not be audible to the older woman. In “The College Widow,” as we have seen, Faulkner vocalizes the narrative’s most sardonic line, its protagonist voicing the cruel irony of her situation, which is left unresolved even as the line appears to resolve the treatment. There, the line heralds the potential for further dialogue, even though a dialogue continuity was not forthcoming. In “Turn About,” the written lines of dialogue are themselves turned about by Joan Crawford, pointing to the unpredictable power of the recorded voice that emanates from the contingent words of the screenplay. In the screenplay, writing yields to images and to speech but is itself left behind once the adaptation process has been completed.
Here, the tension between writing, voice, and thought plays itself out differently, since we are privy to Elly’s desires even if she can’t or won’t articulate them. In the forced translation of her thoughts into words, Elly is uncertain of what can and cannot be said, unsure what words will ultimately liberate her. Because Elly must transcribe her speech for her grandmother, the potential of her voice is diminished. Afterward, speaking to Paul furtively through the wall of his room, she is depicted “whimpering quietly to herself.” She speaks only by “cupping her voice into the angle” of the wall; she holds “her breath while the dying and urgent whisper” to her lover “fail[s] against the cold plaster” (CS, 219). In the final tableau, Elly sits by the side of the road; she has survived the crash but is likely doomed to remain in her hometown, more than ever unable to leverage her voice against her restrictive environment. Although she has radically thrown off the burden of her grandmother, Elly seems to have regressed to a childlike state. All she can muster now is a whimper, and indeed, that word is repeated in different forms five times in the story’s final paragraph: “she whimpered”; “She moaned a little, whimpering” (CS, 223); “She sat whimpering quietly”; “she said, whimpered”; “she whimpered” (CS, 224).48 For Faulkner’s New Woman, punished in her attempt to flee her place of birth, the “gunpowder” remains firmly inside the “flimsy vault” of the South and is more likely to produce a whimper than a bang.
The emancipatory plot of “Elly” has a decidedly negative outcome, ending with the failure of a woman’s voice to have any bearing on her situation. But Faulkner follows another, different trajectory for the voice in the South in “Two Dollar Wife,” the critically derided short story that has the embarrassing prestige of failing to place in a $500 short-story competition run by College Life in 1936. The magazine branded the piece as a tale of “madcap matrimony” and a “pungent panorama of reckless youth.” Such alliterative hype may have helped sell copies of the magazine, but James Ferguson’s opinion—that it “is without question one of the worst pieces of fiction ever produced by a major American writer”—likely represents the general consensus as to the literary quality of the story.49 The criticism of it largely stems from its lack of believability: Maxwell Johns and Doris Houston become engaged and then break up only to be farcically reunited by way of a drunken dance, the appearance of a rival from Princeton, and the use of a forged marriage license. Faulkner himself “forgot the characters’ names” (SL, 77) by the time he came to rewrite the story, and it is certainly not the most memorable example of his work.
But “Two Dollar Wife” has much more to offer if we read it with Hollywood in mind; indeed, this was a story that in part grew out of Faulkner’s treatment “The College Widow.” Before this, however, it started life as “The Devil Beats His Wife,” which Faulkner began writing when he returned from Europe in 1925. A fragmented story that opens with dialogue “in the fashion of a play script,” it features a young married couple, Doris and Harry. She taunts him, and he responds by hitting her, while their maid Della provides quiet commentary: “Hey, hey . . . devil beatin’ his wife.”50 The story was left unfinished, but at least some of its elements remained intact when Faulkner came to rewrite it soon after as “Christmas Tree” and attempted unsuccessfully to have it published in the Saturday Evening Post. Now, the newlyweds are Doris and Hubert, and their tribulations are watched over by Ruby, another maid figure who gently intervenes in the relationship. When it is discovered that Doris has faked a pregnancy, Hubert abandons her, until Ruby sends a telegram revealing that there really is a child on the way: “You come on home to your family.”51 After this point, the story also picks up the remnants of “The College Widow,” seeking to strike a balance between the tragic and the comic. Perhaps with some awareness of Hollywood’s newfound prudishness and distaste for the more immoral scenarios he had proposed, Faulkner turned to the past, reaching back to the early 1920s and the flapper-era characters of Fitzgerald for his inspiration.52 While “Elly” condemns the flapper ethos, “Two Dollar Wife” revels in it. Here is a story, then, that was initially written for the magazines and rejected by them, had taken a detour through the MGM backlot, where it was also rejected, and had come out the other side, emerging as something strange and new that stood in contradistinction to another piece written in the same year.
Sending the story to Morton Goldman in 1934, Faulkner initially suggested it would “run about 20,000 words, maybe less,” and that he could also “send a kind of synopsis of the rest” for the purposes of selling the complete story to “some editor” (SL, 77). It is no coincidence that Faulkner used the term “synopsis” to describe his work in progress, and the similarities between showing “Christmas Tree” to a prospective buyer and showing “The College Widow” to the studio could hardly be any clearer. But the stories themselves are quite different, as Faulkner turned the potentially scandalous treatment with the single line of dialogue into a story filled with drunken witticisms and angry one-liners—the stuff of a comedy film. As Edmund Volpe has pointed out, the style of the writing suggests that the story “has the makings of a very weak B grade movie.”53 Perhaps this is true. But in another way, “Two Dollar Wife” loosely follows the plot of a “comedy of remarriage,” the genre most readily associated with Hollywood sound cinema, that focuses on the humorous entanglements of the romantic couple.
In his Pursuits of Happiness, Stanley Cavell dates the comedy of remarriage to 1934. Here, at this particular point in the Depression, the conditions were in place for a series of genre films that set the New Woman aside and substituted the mutual recognition of men and women for the more shocking narratives that had just preceded them. These films are generally about forgiveness and understanding, moments that are reached only after periods of intense soul searching and major conflict between the two principals and that more often than not necessitate flights into noncity spaces, pastoral landscapes that are removed from the real world.54 And importantly, they also contain some very witty dialogue. Integral to such films is the consolidation of sound in cinema, specifically the verbal battles husband and wife engage in in which they show themselves able “to bear up under [an] assault of words.”55
In “Two Dollar Wife,” the abundance of dialogue and action seem suited more to the screen than to the page, and the cartoonish similes incline naturally toward visualization: the backside of the “colored maid” is seen “billowing like a high wave under oil,” while Doris makes her grand entrance “like a pip squeezed from an orange” (US, 412). Furthermore, this revision of the original story has it end almost on a non sequitur: Maxwell, having sewed Doris into her dress, has carelessly left the needle in the seat cover of her chair. We think nothing of it until the story’s end and are just as surprised as Max to discover that a baby (introduced here for the first time!) has swallowed the needle, narrowly escaping death. While the story is comedic from the beginning, then, this climactic ending is perhaps unintentionally hilarious and makes almost no sense in the context of the narrative.
As the story begins, we are immediately made party to one of the exaggerated, tempestuous exchanges between Maxwell and his intended as he puts the finishing touches on her dress: “ ‘Here, Unconscious, sew me up!’ he interpreted her mumbled words. ‘Good God, I just sewed you into it night before last!’ Maxwell growled. ‘And I sewed you into it Christmas Eve, and I sewed—’ ‘Aw, dry up!’ said Doris. ‘You did your share of tearing it off of me! Sew it good this time, and let it stay sewed!’” (US, 413). While the first sounds she makes appear unflattering, Doris at least has the fortitude to stand up to the unreliable Maxwell, and her initial riposte—casting Maxwell as the “unconscious” to her subjectivity—affirms a dynamic partnership more at home in screwball features. There is certainly conflict between the two, and it is only in the excursion to a country club that this tension is finally resolved and the two are tentatively reunited. Although Doris does not feature very heavily in the narrative, when she does, it is dramatic. Disappearing with Maxwell’s rival, Jornstadt—who changes the names on the marriage license—before returning to reluctantly marry her original fiancé, Doris triumphantly announces that “from now on you’re taking orders from me—Mrs. Johns!” (US, 421). Unlike in Sanctuary, in which a night of drinking leads to tragedy for Temple Drake, and unlike in “Elly,” in which there is little hope on the horizon for young women in the South, here the female protagonist holds her own and for a time enjoys some of the sexual and social freedoms denied elsewhere to women in Faulkner’s oeuvre, although she is wedded in the end.
Movie stars, as Faulkner learned early on, were instrumental in the construction of film narratives. Directors, producers, and cinematographers would all help to transform a finished screenplay in their own way, as he well knew, but at MGM, the entire enterprise revolved around the star, and their fit within a greater star system. Screenwriting, especially its process of characterization, was often tempered by actors even before pen was put to paper, as is clear from Faulkner’s first few efforts. And, importantly, the experience of working in Hollywood over many years meant that a screenwriter like Faulkner could produce a number of treatments and dialogue continuities for the same stars.
Stars were often contractually attached to a particular studio and often became synonymous with the films of their principal employers, although they could go on loan to rivals. This strategy was designed to ensure that viewers in search of a Clark Gable film would invariably look to the roaring lion of MGM, too. “MGM became the studio of stars,” as Jerome Christensen has pointed out, “so that it might establish itself as the star studio—an intangible value that may not have shown up in the box office receipts for every MGM product but which accrued to the company’s earning power and long-term profitability.”56 Indeed, adopting an idea first conceived by Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, MGM under Irving Thalberg became a studio chiefly concerned with acquiring and maintaining its stable of star actors, often assigning their players to films before they were written. Grand Hotel, which premiered just before Faulkner’s arrival, was a case in point, which featured many of MGM’s best and brightest in its cast and integrated all of them within a larger whole.
But midway through Faulkner’s term at MGM, when Thalberg suddenly fell ill, the studio’s historical reliance on stars began to fade. The abandonment of the system wasn’t abrupt by any means—Faulkner’s “Louisiana Lou” script had parts that may have been destined for Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow—but as Thalberg was taking some time off, it slowly shifted away from it.57 Writing to studio president Nicholas Schenck from his sickbed in the first half of 1933, Thalberg noted that a successful Hollywood studio needed to retain its key players were it to continue to thrive during the Depression. “Without stars a company is in the position of starting over each year,” he implored. Schenck’s desire to churn out more pictures was causing the studio to lose hold of what had made it so prosperous: “The destruction of stars is a very subtle process,” Thalberg commented. “You scarcely notice that it is happening. . . . Sometimes what seems to be quite a good picture somehow tends to destroy the background of glamour and interest that has been built up in the star.”58 Although he was key to its survival in these years, Thalberg’s days at the studio after his illness were numbered, and the emphasis on star power was never quite as pronounced at the studio after he died in 1936.
Just as the star system was beginning to slide off the radar at MGM, Faulkner was starting to consolidate his own fictional universe in which the repeat appearances of characters in his novels and stories would lend weight to the apocrypha that was Yoknapatawpha County. Following in the footsteps of Balzac, one of his most admired predecessors, Faulkner would reuse a wide variety of his own characters—Gavin Stevens, Temple Drake, Flem Snopes—and slightly modify others—V. K. Suratt became V. K. Ratliff, Shreve MacKenzie turned into Shreve McCannon—cementing the connections between his works as he sought to provide the South with its own human comedy. And the two maps of his county that were published at the back of Absalom, Absalom! in 1936 and revised for the Portable Faulkner a decade later created the sense that the “postage stamp of native soil” was a real and living thing.
The reappearance and consolidation of Yoknapatawpha’s characters was propelled in part by Faulkner’s interactions with magazines. In 1931, an editor at Scribner’s rejected a war story and made it clear to Faulkner exactly what his readership expected—more stories about Flem Snopes, the malevolent interloper who rises from storekeeper to power plant superintendent and finally becomes vice president of the Sartoris bank, unconcerned about how his actions affect others in the county. After declaring a “proprietary interest” in the character, the editor proceeded to dictate his demands to Faulkner: “We are so keen on that character that you may have the idea that we are urging you to turn yourself into a Flem Snopes machine, whether it is good for you artistically or not. In a measure, that is true; we do want the Flem Snopes in which the old boy is the mean, cagy creature of ‘Wild Horses.’ . . . We want him triumphant to the point where everybody in America will hate him in unison. Then it will be time for his downfall.”59 Even before his first visit to Hollywood, then, Faulkner was becoming aware of the star power of his own characters and was considering how the development of a single character—however loathsome—in different stories over time might contribute to the author’s own success. But the mechanics of the studio were also now suggesting themselves to Faulkner, proposing the instantiation of stars as a factor as equally crucial as the molding of a plot or experiments with style and structure.
While the MGM star system and Yoknapatawpha County certainly bore similarities, it is important to note the differences between the repeat appearances of a fictional character in literature and the repeat appearances of a certain actor on film. Marked most obviously by iterations of a proper name, fictional characters are always of necessity composed of “words, of images, of imaginings, and are not real in the way that people are real.”60 We are always too aware of their unreality to mistake characters for persons, since their existences on the page, in traditional visual media, or as digitized combinations of pixels grant them immortality. Even though fictional characters take on many of the attributes of personhood, it is precisely because they outlive their creators that they can never properly pass for human beings.
Nevertheless, as John Frow has reminded us, fictional characters nag at us; their quasi-ontological status means that we cannot separate them completely from ourselves. For every character that we follow through a narrative, whom we may at times identify with and whom we may at other times repudiate, there is a semblance of reality there that “moves us,” a haunting and seemingly humanoid excess that emerges through the textual material on which the character is borne.61 Bound up with this close proximity of fictional character to real person is the notion that we are always ourselves built on ideas of fictional character, that “the non-personal insists at the very heart of the personal.”62 This last point is brought home by the meeting of character and person in the cinema, where fictional roles are grafted on to the bodies of real actors, stars performing a double duty in playing themselves and another. Characters in fictional texts are not “real” of course, but in cinema, the stars that play them are made of flesh and bone and have lives that extend beyond their screen appearances.
This fit of star with character on film can operate in a number of different ways, as Richard Dyer has shown, with differing degrees of congruence between the two.63 Whether or not the star meshes with her character is often dictated by her prior screen roles; the identity of the star is never completely stable but rather is the aggregation of her turns in multiple feature films as well as of photographic and written representations in fan magazines and appearances at public events. As Dyer has argued, the “roles and/or the performance of a star in a film” often seem “as revealing the personality of the star,” a dynamic that has had the effect of flattening of the distinction between life and art in Hollywood.64 Although there was perhaps some “real” kernel of personality inside Wallace Beery, for example, who could really distinguish this from his countless performances as a lovable, dim-witted yet somehow charming slob?
Although the image and bearing of someone like Beery is easy to picture on screen, the task of the screenwriter is to plot, in words, the intersections of stars with their characters. In the screenplay, as Claudia Sternberg has written, characterization is achieved through a number of means before it is acted out in front of the camera. Initially, the character is introduced, either before the action begins (as in the dramatis personae of a stage play) or in the character’s first appearance, in what is known as an “integrated first character profile.”65 At the start of his continuity treatment for “Flying the Mail,” a story about daring aviators, Faulkner offers such a profile for the characters Wally and Min, who were in all likelihood based on characters played by Beery and Marie Dressler in Min and Bill.66
1. CLEVELAND 1912.
Wally and Min, they are nearing 40. Wally is a mixture of child and tramp and blackguard. He is a swaggerer, yet there is a warm and lovable quality in him. He and Min are not married, yet Min’s attitude toward him is that of a nagging wife. We learn that this relationship has continued for some time, during which time Min still hopes that Wally will some day marry her. Wally is always moving about, though probably without any intent of leaving her. A great deal of Min’s life consists of trying to keep up with him, in order to take care of him, or perhaps just to have him to nag at. (FMS, 84)
This opening statement would have allowed Irving Thalberg to picture both Wally’s and Min’s characters in action—he the independent journeyman, she the nagging romantic—and both Beery and Dressler in their prior film appearances. The treatment contains very little dialogue; Faulkner instead cements this mode of characterization in his depiction of Wally’s and Min’s nonverbal behavior, incorporating directions for what Sternberg would categorize as kinesics (facial expressions, eye contact), haptics (touch), and proxemics (spatial interrelationships) throughout.67 In the second scene, when he is about to make “a record non-stop flight of 300 miles to Chicago,” Wally displays elements of all three: “With his chest out and with an expression of majestic condescension on his face, he now stalks through the crowd” (FMS, 84). These were characteristics that one might reasonably associate with Beery, too, suggesting Faulkner’s intimate knowledge of the star’s appearance and mannerisms.
In “Flying the Mail,” Faulkner takes the characteristics of two MGM stars and transposes them on to the two main characters of the treatment. But in “War Birds,” a later MGM dialogue continuity, he introduces two of his own “stars,” the Sartoris brothers, Bayard and John, who had already achieved fame in a number of stories and were instrumental in inaugurating the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The twins had first appeared in Sartoris (1929), which Faulkner had originally written as Flags in the Dust (1927). At the beginning of the story, John is already a casualty of war, and Bayard later dies during peacetime. But Faulkner reinstated his dead heroes in the coming years, featuring the Sartoris brothers in the short stories “Ad Astra” (1931), “All the Dead Pilots” (1931), and the unpublished “With Caution and Dispatch” (1932). John and Bayard appear once again in the screenplay that incorporates elements of these narratives, although here Faulkner was rewriting and resuscitating his characters especially for the screen.
Film has been associated with the haunting return of the deceased ever since its inception. The very operations of the medium—which takes a series of still photographs and reanimates them at twenty-four frames per second—create the semblance of movement out of stasis, life out of dead matter. In addition, the cinema allows us to witness the return to life of actors who have long since passed, preserving not only the images of screen stars but their very gestures and mannerisms in the kinetic flow of still frames. As Laura Mulvey has written, the “inanimate images of the filmstrip not only come alive in projection, but are the ghostly images of the now-dead resurrected into the appearance of life.”68 The illusion of the screen reanimates dead bodies, which never properly pass away once they have been recorded and archived in motion. But even before the projector can summon the ghosts of the past, the screenplay must imagine their movements already taking place in words and must conceive of the possibility that the dead could be made to live once more.
Faulkner imagined such procedures both in terms of the medium’s specific capabilities and in more literal narrative terms. In late November, after he had finished with Today We Live, Faulkner began working on the property initially titled “War Story” but that would later become “War Birds” (or “A Ghost Story,” the title Howard Hawks preferred).69 He was still working on the script, supervised by Hawks, on February 7 in the next year.70 It drew on War Birds: The Diary of an Unknown Aviator (1926) by Elliot White Springs, a work that MGM had recently acquired, as well as on an unsuccessful treatment based on the diary. Faulkner may have already been familiar with the book, which had been adapted from the real wartime diary of John McGavock Grider, a young man from Memphis who had joined the Royal Flying Corps, trained in England, and later died in France.71 Much of Grider’s war record and family history resembled Faulkner’s own. Grider had a great-uncle who had fought in the Civil War, just as Faulkner’s own great-grandfather had done.
Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust charts a similar path to Grider’s diary. Set in the period immediately after the end of the Great War, it tells of the death of the reckless John Sartoris, shot down while flying behind German lines. John’s twin, Bayard, is burdened by the guilt of his brother’s death and lives out his days with an apparent death wish, first causing his grandfather (the Bayard of The Unvanquished) to die of a heart attack and then killing himself by crashing an unsafe test plane in Ohio. The boys descend from Colonel John Sartoris, who had led a guerilla struggle against Union troops in Mississippi, while his brother—yet another Bayard—was needlessly killed while mounting a raid for coffee and anchovies. If nominal determinism is anything to go by, the names “John” and “Bayard” are guarantors of dangerous and selfish behavior: like great-grandfather, like great-grandson. But the repetition of character traits is also part of a broader repetition of world events, with the new global conflict appearing to echo the fight between North and South.
Such repetitions were also apparent in the various Sartoris narratives published around this time, each of which approached the reappearance of the characters in a slightly different way. Faulkner included the brothers in what was originally Flags in the Dust, but after that manuscript had proved too unwieldy for a number of publishers, it was famously reduced in size and became Sartoris. As Theresa Towner has asserted, the ghostly return of the boys’ great-grandfather is represented in a far more literal, direct manner in the truncated version, as a revenant “spirit” rather than as the subject of an anecdote.72 The stories published after the release of the novel would offer further background. In “Ad Astra,” we return to Armistice Day. John has already died, but Bayard is still living, although his reckless behavior already seems to have marked him for death. “All the Dead Pilots” goes further back, back to the days leading up to John’s death, and intriguingly begins with the narrator looking at “snapshots” of the dead pilots from the war and reflecting on the impossibility of accurately depicting the “not exactly human” (CS, 511) men who gave their lives for their country. “That’s why this story is a composite,” he explains, “a series of brief glares in which, instantaneous and without depth or perspective, there stood into sight the portent and the threat of what the race could bear and become, in an instant between dark and dark” (CS, 512). And in “With Caution and Dispatch,” the story Faulkner commenced just before his move to MGM, John crashes his fighter plane three times while somehow surviving. These mishaps are a grim reminder of his death—imminent in the Sartoris narrative but already staged three times in Faulkner’s output. In the stories themselves, as in the chronology of their composition, John Sartoris hovers as a spirit: his author’s interest in repeating his death several times over redoubles the effect of his ghostly presence from Sartoris all the way through to “War Birds” and affirms the importance of such characters in the Yoknapatawpha universe.
When the Sartorises migrated to the MGM backlot, this revenant quality would become all the more apparent, since the “War Birds” screenplay was, according to Howard Hawks, inspired by Faulkner’s dissatisfaction with a recent “ghost story” he had seen at the theater: Smilin’ Through (Sidney Franklin, 1932), starring Norma Shearer.73 That film begins in 1868 with the wedding of a young couple, during which Shearer’s character, Moonyeen, is shot dead by a jealous spurned lover (Fredric March). Her fiancée John (Leslie Howard) lives on, as the action flashes forward half a century to 1915. He has looked after Moonyeen’s niece, Kathleen (also played by Shearer), who is now in love with the murderer’s son, Kenneth (also played by March). Although John attempts to prevent their matrimony, Kenneth’s commitment—both to his nation in the Great War and to Kathleen—shows him to be a better man than his father, and John gives the couple his blessing.
The narrative of Smilin’ Through has some obvious resonances both with Flags in the Dust and with Grider’s diary, including an emphasis on both the inevitability of warfare and continuities of certain undesirable family traits and a son who is able to avoid repeating the sins of his father. Importantly, this mixture of influences also led to Faulkner altering the characterizations and fates of John and Bayard in his screenplay. Most notably, Bayard dies in the earlier novel but survives in “War Birds,” where he functions as a more mature character who keeps alive the memory of his departed brother and resists the temptation to kill the interloping German character Dorn, who is responsible for John’s death. Faulkner was here both developing and preserving the characters he had already created and redeployed several times in the preceding few years, maintaining the Sartoris brothers as staples of his budding fictional universe but also allowing them to grow and develop for the screen. In addition to using profiles and nonverbal behaviors as methods of characterization in the screenplay, in “War Birds” Faulkner also put the effects of editing to good use in constructing his protagonists.
And indeed, the specificities of cinema would add to the sense of immortality all the more. While he experimented with a variety of different transitional effects—kaleidoscopic dissolves, cuts, double exposures—one of the most prominent devices Faulkner used was possibly inspired by the film he had apparently disliked. In Smilin’ Through, Moonyeen is able to communicate with John from beyond the grave, and Shearer’s ghostly image is projected in many scenes throughout even as she also portrays the flesh-and-blood Kathleen. Even after her on-screen death, Shearer—who was Thalberg’s wife and was earmarked for many important roles at the studio—would not really die but could live on as both a spirit and as a younger doppelganger, thanks to the magic of film. The double exposures in the film were commended for their technical accuracy in American Cinematographer.74 And as Maureen Turim has observed, this trick doubling of Shearer’s role also had much to do with expanding the possibility of the star vehicle—what could be better than one lead role for Norma Shearer but two?75
Faulkner would use double exposures and other similar effects in the same way as Sidney Franklin. Often, he uses dissolves to effect prosaic transitions between scenes, but he also uses them for the appearance of the ghost of John Sartoris, a gesture that allows the character to live on in the film even after he has died and to live on in Faulkner’s work, too. John’s ghost is visible on screen on a number of occasions, as when his hand is seen writing the diary from which his wife reads after he is gone or when his plane appears, still airborne after its destruction:
249. BAYARD CRUISING ALONE.
He approaches a cloud as though it were a rendezvous. As he reaches cloud, ghost of John’s ship resolves as though waiting for him. John lifts his hand. Bayard points forward. John nods, the two ships go on together, Bayard looking this way and that through binocular. Steadies glass, turns, waggles his wings. John waggles back. Bayard indicates a flight of ships in distance. John nods. They turn and fly toward ships, Bayard watching them through glass. (FMS, 383)
Such visualization of the dead was already suggested in Grider’s diary. Against the irreversibility of death, he wrote that “it’s hard for me to believe that a man ever becomes even a ghost. I have sort of a feeling that he stays just as he is and simply jumps behind a cloud or steps thru a mirror.”76 John’s ghost, complete with his ship, indeed does exist up in the clouds and remains present to Bayard as though it were real, even influencing his actions in the earthly realm.
When Dorn, the German responsible for John’s death, is captured, Bayard has the chance to shoot him. However, out of consideration for Antoinette—the Frenchwoman who loved John—and for John’s child, Johnny, he refuses. His actions in the following scene are completely at odds with the Bayard Sartoris known to readers of Faulkner’s prose fiction, changing our earlier picture of the character by suggesting that he is capable of a degree of selfless self-restraint:
Dorn
Well? Why do you wait? Your brother is slain, but my country is slain; fallen from a greater height than my Camel has ever reached. Shoot, Captain.
Antoinette watches Bayard, her hands to her face, poised as though to run. Bayard looks at Dorn, his face wrung, terrible. Slowly the pistol rises, covers Dorn’s chest, steadies. They look at one another. Tableau. Then Bayard flings pistol through window. The fractured glass is in the shape of a star. Antoinette runs forward, falls at Bayard’s feet, clutching his knees.
Thank God! Thank God!
Bayard stands, his head bent. As DISSOLVE begins, the star shaped fracture in the glass begins to glow faintly as daylight begins behind it. It is brightest at the instant of complete dissolve, then it begins also to fade. (FMS, 409)
Bayard’s radical decision to lay his weapon aside rather than seeking revenge elevates his character. It is an action helped along, too, by the expressionistic effect that Faulkner suggests: after Bayard throws his gun, the glass shatters in the shape of a star, which allows the light to pierce through it even as the image dissolves. The particular shape of the broken glass allegorizes the resting place of John Sartoris in the celestial realm but also suggests the waxing and waning of the star characters that Faulkner had here attempted to introduce to Hollywood: Bayard and John would never make it to the screen, but in this, their final appearances in Faulkner’s work, they would certainly develop in new, exciting directions. And this story comes to an end in a markedly different manner than the other stories they appear in:
323 IN DISSOLVE there passes behind Bayard the ghost of John’s ship, John looking down at them, his face bright, peaceful. The ship goes on in dissolve; sound of an engine dies away.
THE END (FMS, 420)
Faulkner creates his Sartoris twins anew in their single screenplay appearance, giving them traits they did not possess in his fiction and enabling them in different ways to experience life after death: Bayard lives on instead of dying as he does in the fiction, while John’s ghost pervades the script in a more vivid, palpable way than in the fiction, projected as a visual effect that could be realized only on the screen.
Midway through his time at MGM, Faulkner was writing with one eye on the studio’s fabled star system and the other turned to his own newly networked narrative system that he was developing to ground his own region in a fictional register, a system whose reiterated characters and stories were key to its continued well-being. While a great economic, industrial, and artistic gulf lay between the studio’s vision and Faulkner’s own, what we might prise from the author’s work on “Turn About” and “War Birds” is the a priori influence of stars and characters alike on the stories they would come to inhabit; in both cases, before pen was put to paper, the proper names, voices, and personality traits of studio actors and fictional men and women were bringing new narrative worlds into being and solidifying those that had already been set in motion.
The final three properties to which Faulkner was attached at MGM—“Honor,” “Mythical Latin-American Kingdom Story,” and “Louisiana Lou/Lazy River”—emerged during a strange period for the studio. Sam Marx records that Thalberg had been “ill and away almost the entire first half of 1933” and that during this time vice president Louis B. Mayer, operating in his stead, “never read a script.”77 What Mayer did do was to deliver a bracing diatribe to his staff in Culver City, informing them that under his regime he expected them to “try and accomplish things” on a daily basis and indicating that the writers specifically were to be “pinned down to story material” and “were not to be allowed to play around with hazy and fantastic ideas.”78 And it was at this confusing time, when Faulkner had finished one contract with the Joyce-Selznick agency and was about to start another through William Hawks, that he reflected on his conditions of employment: “The arrangement is like that of a field hand; either of us (me or M.G.M.) to call it off without notice, they to pay me by the week, and to pay a bonus on each original story” (SL, 71). MGM was feeling the pinch of the Great Depression, and a staff-wide 50 percent pay cut was introduced in March of that year:79 Faulkner himself would see his salary reduced from $600 to $300 per week.80
“Honor” was based on Faulkner’s short story of the same name, although he told Marx that he “did not change it or do any work on it at all, being at the time engaged on the WAR STORY” (SL, 73). In March 1933, he began to write an untitled full-length dialogue continuity that was later referred to as “Mythical Latin-American Kingdom Story,” an adventure narrative featuring American characters in an unnamed nation caught up in a revolution. As Kawin observes, the script recalls Faulkner’s earlier short stories “Black Music” and “Carcassonne,” and also looks forward to Pylon in its characterization of the aircraft mechanic Otto Birdsong—a prototype, perhaps, for Jiggs.81 This screenplay was apparently made possible because of Thalberg’s absence, too, since it “had not been cleared in advance with Marx or Hawks.”82 In Oxford after the birth of his daughter, Jill, he completed work on the piece, attempting to make something more of it, perhaps even to turn it into a novel. Although Marx had found the script to be “very unsatisfactory,” Faulkner was granted permission to rewrite the narrative as a novel, with some faint hope on Marx’s part that from it would emerge “a better basis for a motion picture.”83 It was never to be.
Faulkner’s final project for MGM, Tod Browning’s ill-fated “Louisiana Lou”—which became Lazy River (George Seitz, 1934)—must have initially seemed like the perfect material for the Mississippian.84 It followed the travails of a group of convicts who choose not to participate in a prison break and are rewarded with pardons for honorable behavior and who subsequently make their way to a Louisiana shrimping village (a plot that Faulkner may have recalled while writing his “Old Man” section of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem). Faulkner later recounted some absurd facets of the project; for example, the crew built an artificial shrimp village instead of buying one already constructed. In part owing to the need to tighten the budget after the expense of shooting on location in Louisiana but also to the studio’s dissatisfaction with the work in progress, Browning was soon fired, and Faulkner dismissed along with him (LG, 243). His last contribution at MGM, although firmly in the southern tradition, was cut short, and Faulkner returned home to Oxford.
