FIGURE 8 The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)
Although the Old South had been represented in bold Technicolor in Victor Fleming’s 1939 epic of the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, many of the structural remnants of antebellum America were by this point receding into the landscape. In the years following the release of that film, Faulkner likewise reckoned with the changing face of his region, both in literature and in cinema, two media that did not always express the same ideas about the South. While he did not publish much in the way of prose fiction during his years at Warner Brothers, Faulkner completed some interesting work in the second half of the decade—“Appendix: Compson, 1699–1945” (1946), his new preface for The Sound and the Fury, was followed by Intruder in the Dust (1948), and the collated mystery stories of Knight’s Gambit (1949). A prolific output for Warner Brothers over the 1940s was inversely matched by a very low yield—compared with the decade before—of novels and short stories. When he returned to writing prose full-time after the war had ended, Faulkner saw his fictional county anew: Yoknapatawpha, just like the South, a place that had changed forever. With the onset of the “second Civil War,” the region fended off the various socioeconomic encroachments of the federal government, witnessed the migration of much of its black population to metropolitan areas, and felt the slow decline of its agricultural dominance.1 The rest of the nation was changing, too, and a number of screenplays that Faulkner wrote responded both to his own region and to a set of shifting urban realities for white and black communities in Los Angeles.
As the Second World War drew to a close, Warner Brothers began to prepare for a different market and to produce films that imagined the various aspects of the postwar world. In a peacetime economy, there would be more latitude for the agonized psychologizing of film noir, and there would be more time for heroic male characters to reflect on the complexity of their individual existence. Freed from the stiff-upper-lip mentality of the war, noir protagonists were now fighting their battles on the urban frontier, uncertain of their surroundings and of the assortment of shady figures that populated them. The crisis of the postwar male subject emerges here, when men are no longer motivated by a desire to defeat a common enemy “over there” and so begin the quest for justice and truth at their own doorsteps instead. That said, there are also strong hints of what was to come even before the war ended: consider the continuities between The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not, such as the cynicism of Bogart and the self-assurance of Bacall that are in evidence in both films.
As noir put tormented masculinity on show, the woman’s film of this period represented a return to the autonomy of the female subject (and there were productive overlaps between the two genres, as can be seen in Faulkner’s work on Mildred Pierce [Michael Curtiz, 1945]). The possibility of there being more independent women on screen had already been suggested in films like Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937). And yet while the pre-code pictures of the early 1930s had afforded filmmakers the chance to explore women as pariahs or liberated characters not bound by the ties of family, the years after 1933 had otherwise largely suppressed female desire by returning women to normative, maternal roles.2 Temple Drake had not been sighted for some time!
The woman’s film of the 1940s seemed to release the female subject once more, featuring emancipated protagonists who would accurately reflect a generation of women increasingly ensconced in the workforce.3 This is clear in “The Damned Don’t Cry,” one of the screenplays Faulkner wrote in an effort to woo Warner Brothers in 1941. Here, the leading lady, Zelda, is a social climber from Georgia who manages a successful bordello, has dalliances with several different men, and is rejected by her estranged son. The expression of sexual desire combines with financial aspiration in Faulkner’s version of Mildred Pierce, too, in which the lead (played by Joan Crawford) leaves both her husband and her domestic confinement, becoming an upwardly mobile restaurateur and property magnate. Nevertheless, these films also promised the restoration of domestic order in the wake of such “transgressive” acts—ultimately, postwar commercial cinema sought to reinstate the status quo where women were concerned, even if it flirted momentarily with other possibilities.
The World War II era also witnessed some brief incremental gains for the nation’s black population. On the home front, African Americans had moved in large numbers to cities like Los Angeles for work in the blossoming service industry and then soon after in munitions production. “It used to be that a Negro waiter in the hotel here brought my breakfast up to my room,” Faulkner wrote his daughter from the West Coast. “But since rationing started, and men got good jobs in aircraft plants, they have closed the dining-room” (SL, 173). Whatever type of work African Americans were engaged in, it was not the traditional agricultural labor associated with the South. The overproduction of cotton in the 1930s and the subsequent introduction of new agricultural machinery had effectively brought an end to the age-old system of sharecrop-ping, energizing the great migration of blacks from the South that had begun at the turn of the century. The postwar surge belatedly ushered in modernity and dealt a lasting blow to the culture of white paternalism in the region.
While these circumstances were not immediately registered in the films of the period, the early roots of civil rights activism in the military had made possible a number of important black film roles—Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli, 1943), Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone, 1943), and The Negro Soldier (Frank Capra, 1943) were all released in the same year.4 And in Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943), a black soldier inexplicably fights side by side with white soldiers, even though the armed forces were segregated at the time.5 But less progress was made after the war was over. Although the later years of the decade saw a few “liberal race pictures” like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Pinky (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), and the MGM adaptation of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), the studios in general retreated from such concerns. And, as Ralph Ellison observed of this “Negro cycle” of films, they were not “about Negroes at all” but rather about “what whites think and feel about Negroes.”6 And so, even as blacks were vacating the South and migrating in great numbers to cities in the North and West, they were still by and large unrepresented on screen. Ultimately, then, although noir and the woman’s film were the two major nonwar genres of the 1940s, genres that responded to the changing postwar environment, African Americans formed film’s unseen remainder in the period.
Faulkner may have been aware of this inconsistency, as his work in Hollywood at times proved a minor exception to the rule. In “Country Lawyer,” he charted an ongoing “Romeo & Juliet” saga between two white families but remained attuned to the changing nature of race relations over the preceding half century. And for Mildred Pierce, his key contribution to James M. Cain’s narrative was Lottie, the black maid played by the (uncredited) Butterfly McQueen. As for Scarlett O’Hara, so too for Mildred: their respective successes depended on African American support. Faulkner’s involvement in The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945) and—in a less explicit way—Stallion Road (James V. Kern, 1947) also allowed him to engage with his revolutionized South in a new way.
The short stories and novels Faulkner wrote over the course of the decade also responded to changes in the region. Go Down, Moses suggested a more concerted turn toward narratives of African American life; the stories comprising Knight’s Gambit charted the new course of the South through the lens of detective fiction; and Intruder in the Dust layered its own criminal plot over a more far-reaching story of race relations, offering a comparatively future-oriented and progressive image of Mississippi. And while Faulkner was appropriating the tools of noir for his prose writing, so too was Hollywood taking the last vestiges of the Old South into the studios. On the one hand, the cinematic reproduction of antiquated Souths during the 1940s often obscured historical reality in favor of plantation nostalgia. On the other, Faulkner sought to preserve the relevance of his novels by keeping his vanishing region alive, even as he repudiated the less salubrious aspects of southern history.
With Hollywood and Yoknapatawpha jostling for possession of his pen, Faulkner wrote his first treatment for Warner Brothers just as he was finishing work on the final novel of his “matchless time.” In November and December 1941, he made several attempts to win the affections of the studios, writing off contract, at the suggestion of his Hollywood agent William Herndon, “5 20–25 page story lines for various studios or individuals, none of which came to anything” (SL, 159). One of these was “The Damned Don’t Cry,” a story of a poor white girl set in Georgia and based on the Harry C. Hervey novel from two years earlier. Warner Brothers had sent Faulkner a script that was unsatisfactory and asked him to revise it, a task to which he had become accustomed.
Faulkner was in the midst of completing Go Down, Moses when he received his new freelance screenwriting gig. The story that he had yet to finish was the book’s lengthiest and most enduring piece: “The Bear.” Although it had already been accepted by the Post for publication, Faulkner was now augmenting it by inserting the argument between Isaac McCaslin and Cass Edmonds in chapter 4, over their right to possess land worked on by slaves and originally inhabited by Native Americans, material that Faulkner considered to be the story’s most noteworthy. In the midst of a story originally concerned with the hunting of “Old Ben,” the legendary bear of the title, this section would ambush the narrative by recreating the idiosyncratic plantation ledgers of Buck and Buddy McCaslin, Isaac’s father and uncle, which contain a complicated history of the slaves who were bought and sold and died on their property. With this addition, Faulkner reported that there was “more meat” than he had first thought; it was “a section now that I am going to be proud of and which requires careful writing and rewriting to get it exactly right” (SL, 146).
Even as he turned with purpose to this last section of his novel, screenwriting diverted his focus. In fact, he had even sent his new editor, Saxe Commins, an “incomplete section, incomplete chapter, ending with half an incomplete word” from Go Down, Moses, because he “had to drop the whole thing for a week and take a shot at a treatment for a movie job” (SL, 147).7 The incomplete manuscript words in question relate to the way in which the ledgers represent “a whole land in miniature, which multiplied and compounded was the entire South.” Faulkner began a litany of objects that compose the South—“that slow trick-”—leaving off in the middle of the word to complete “The Damned Don’t Cry” before returning a week later to continue the sentence: “le of molasses and meal and meat” (WFM, 16.2:320–21). Because they were composed simultaneously, it is worth considering the two in tandem and thinking not only about their shared thematic concerns but also about how Faulkner’s concerns about characterization in “The Damned Don’t Cry” overlap in some interesting ways with Isaac McCaslin’s task as an interpreter of the ledgers.
Unlike his new novel, “The Damned Don’t Cry” was slender and would, he informed his Warner Brothers liaison, benefit from a little “beefing up” of “the dialog and incidents in the script as it is” (SL, 145). The problem with the existing script in his estimation was that Zelda, the protagonist at the heart of the tale, was too weak to carry the film: she keeps her child, born out of wedlock, although she doesn’t possess the temerity or selflessness to make the choice believable. She is a character who “wants a lot but she just sits and wants it until enough people rally around to attend to getting it for her” (SL, 145).
Faulkner’s new vision for the script presents Zelda as a character with far more pluck and none of the histrionic shrieking and fainting that had marked her appearance in the earlier version. This “beefed up” Zelda is also less dependent on the three suitors in the script and is in fact instrumental in transforming her aristocratic admirer Carter, a complacent heir to a large fortune, into a socially minded advocate of the downtrodden: “Zelda sees in him the aristocrat, with background and gentility and grace, even though she sees his weaknesses: his lack of ambition, his willingness to condone injustice rather than struggle against it, his backward-looking toward the dead past and veneration of family merely because it is old. She sets out to buck him up, make him ambitious to improve himself and the world, too. To her, he was born with so much that he should try himself to attain all the rest: to become morally and mentally what he is by physical accident” (CL, 89–90).
Despite being encumbered by old money, Carter manages to “take without pay the case of a falsely accused, dissolute and penniless Negro,” and later becomes “engaged in civic work,” helping to weed out corruption in local government (CL, 90, 94). And his isn’t the only character arc that revolves around a renunciation—in a key narrative strand that Faulkner retains, Zelda has an illegitimate child but “loves it too much to repudiate it completely” (SL, 145). She sends the boy, Glynn, away to an orphanage in Atlanta. Zelda marries, and ten years later, after her husband dies, she inherits a Savannah mansion she has always coveted, which turns out to be a high-class brothel. Another seven years go by. Glynn by now has met his birth mother, and he frequently travels with her outside of Savannah. However, once he ventures back to her home-town and discovers her means of income, he is repulsed and refuses to see her again. Carter repudiates his inheritance; Zelda repudiates her son; Glynn repudiates his mother: in the first instance, the Old South gives way to the New, while in the latter two, what Faulkner referred to as “the world’s moral set-up” (SL, 145) prevents any escape from a Victorian hangover. In rewriting the script for Warner Brothers, Faulkner sold “The Damned Don’t Cry” both as a viable, au courant tale of a self-made woman and as a clash of Old and New Souths.
Chapter 4 of “The Bear”—and indeed, the balance of Go Down, Moses—concerns itself with repudiation, too: specifically, Isaac McCaslin’s “relinquishment” (N, 4:188) of land bequeathed to him on his twenty-first birthday. In making this decision, he must draw support from the patchy entries written by his father and uncle in the ledgers, thus validating his disavowal of his birthright to Carothers Edmonds. Although the details are sketchy at best, Isaac is able to cast his grandfather as an incestuous miscegenator who fathers a daughter, Tomasina, with his slave, Eunice, and then another daughter with Tomasina. The horror of all of this drives Eunice to drown herself and persuades Isaac to disown his heritage.
Because the evidence is scanty, however, Isaac must fashion a coherent narrative with adequately fleshed-out characters if he is to convince Carothers (and, by extension, the readers of Faulkner’s text) of the propriety of his relinquishment. This ultimately involves the transmuting of words into images, at once asserting the historical evidence of the ledgers and suggesting their ability to give rise to something almost tangible outside of the text. Isaac sees things in the documents that nobody else has borne witness to, enabling him to bring his forebears to life once more as robust characters through their otherwise thinly recorded outlines. Since he has been such an inveterate reader of the ledgers in the years leading up to his twenty-first birthday, Isaac has been able to deduce what he believes was the motivating factor of Eunice’s suicide. Indeed, he has dwelled so intently on it that the scene of death becomes a vivid image for him: “And looking down at the yellowed page spread beneath the yellow glow of the lantern smoking and stinking in that rank chill midnight room fifty years later, he seemed to see her actually walking into the icy creek on that Christmas day six months before her daughter’s and her lover’s . . . child was born, solitary, inflexible, griefless, ceremonial, in formal and succinct repudiation of grief and despair who had already had to repudiate belief and hope” (N, 4:200). For Isaac, the transformation of Eunice from words on a “yellowed page” to “actually walking into the icy creek” is absolutely crucial. More than anything, he needs her to appear because the entries in the ledger provide, at best, an elliptical account of what actually happened.
And yet after the description of Eunice’s drowning, Faulkner punctuates Isaac’s thoughts with the peremptory “that was all.” Following this decisive phrase, we are told that Isaac “would never need look at the ledgers again nor did he; the yellowed pages in their fading and implacable succession were as much a part of his consciousness and would remain so forever, as the fact of his own nativity” (N, 4:200). As Richard Godden and Noel Polk have perceptively observed, the image of Eunice that Isaac conjures relies simultaneously on the information available in the ledgers and on the way that the ledgers subsequently “recede from attention” in order that the image might appear before us. However, they add, this process of image making “must surely depend on an available and traced relation to the documented evidence.”8 Given that the complete and unabridged ledgers are not present to the reader, we must rely instead on Isaac’s gloss for our picture of his shameful family history, and it is one we might be justly suspicious of.
It is worth keeping in mind that Faulkner’s writing of “The Damned Don’t Cry” was equally premised on his ability to make the producers at Warner Brothers see the potential film leap off the page and on to the screen. His concern in his correspondence with the studio—that the “story is already in the script, and I just failed to see it” (SL, 145)—also speaks to his desire to ensure that Zelda, and by extension the plot of the treatment, can be imagined visually in the minds of the studio staff. The transition to a fuller screenplay never transpired, however. Two years later, Faulkner revisited the property for producer Jerry Wald, apparently forgetting his earlier treatment. Although he made some useful comparisons between “The Damned Don’t Cry” and his 1936 short story “The Brooch,” another “story of a southern girl born on wrong side of tracks, trying to raise herself” (SL, 183), the idea didn’t take.
In marked contrast to his regard for the treatment, Faulkner was highly protective of his latest work on “The Bear,” attaching a note for the printer that read “DO NOT CHANGE PUNCTUATION NOR CONSTRUCTION.”9 Indeed, he seemed to think that even a potential Hollywood adaptation would leave the work largely intact. A few months earlier, he had asked Robert Haas to send the manuscript of Go Down, Moses to William Herndon in Los Angeles, hoping for a quick sale. “I will have to make a few minor corrections in it before you print it,” Faulkner wrote, “but it wont be changed as far as a moom pitcher magnit is concerned” (SL, 142). While the studios failed to show interest in (or perhaps never even received) the manuscript, Faulkner would later write a fifty-two-page treatment that was in many ways “the complement of Go Down, Moses” and that would allow Faulkner to continue thinking about the past and future of Yoknapatawpha even as he was writing for the screen.10
The structure of the ledgers would have undoubtedly come to Faulkner’s mind once again when he sat down to write the treatment for “Country Lawyer” in March 1943, a property that Jack Warner had intended to mark the reunion of “the star, director and producer of ‘Mission to Moscow,’ Walter Huston, Michael Curtiz and Robert Buckner.”11 In Bellamy Partridge’s 1939 novel of the same name, the narrator explains that the story was gleaned from “a little black notebook in which my father had jotted down curious incidents of his practice, of which no other record was ever found. Some of the entries sketched the outline of an incident; others gave pages of dialogue and even bits of description.”12 Like Isaac McCaslin—albeit with greater reverence—Partridge writes the story of his father, pieced together from scraps and embellished where necessary. That piecing together becomes a crucial factor in Faulkner’s adaptation.
Faulkner was the sixth writer to work on the script (one Partridge himself had attempted to write and that later Alvah Bessie contributed to), and by that time, the country lawyer was a position that had virtually ceased to exist in many parts of the country.13 As Partridge recalls, “The first breach in the wall had been made by the telephone. Soon afterwards the motor-car began to bring in the strange people, and the cinema had furnished the new notions. At this point in the century the American country town began to lose its flavor, its individuality, its peculiarities of local custom and local idiom. It was no longer the product of its own environment. Outside influences were now directing its growth and development. The great god Regimentation was in the saddle and ready to go.”14 The influx of new transport and communications media (the cinema singled out here for the second time in the book) rendered the country lawyer superfluous. Although Partridge based his story on his own hometown, Phelps, New York, his hometown was, he pointed out, representative: “The setting could well have been duplicated in any of five thousand small towns scattered over the American landscape; and the country lawyer might as easily have sprung from Kansas or Kentucky origin as from a Vermont-born father and a mother of native New York stock.”15
Perhaps taking this as his point of departure, Faulkner relocated the narrative to his native Jefferson, treating the finished product as though it were another component of his ongoing Yoknapatawpha chronicle. “I can still invent a little something now and then that is photogenic” (SL, 169), he wrote at the time, and indeed, his task here was to bring a property that Warner Brothers had already owned for several years a little closer to the screen. In the space of about three weeks, between March 27 and April 16, 1943, Faulkner would transform Partridge’s work into a barely recognizable cross-generational saga structured on a “Romeo and Juliet” framework and would also incorporate the story of a black family (CL, 36). In order to effect this transformation, he would modify one of the key events in Country Lawyer, finding in the novel of New York State a southern narrative in hiding.
In the book, one of the major cases that Samuel Selden Partridge takes on is that of an arsonist, Jerry Billings, who stands accused of setting fire to a toolshed that then spreads to several nearby premises. While by all accounts Billings is innocent of the crime, he is nevertheless sent to jail, turned into a scapegoat for the spate of burnings that had recently occurred in the town. Long after Billings has been released and has passed away, Bellamy Partridge finds some suggestive information about the accused in his father’s black book. The narrative up to this point has been reconstructed in a seemingly unproblematic way, but now—in a passage that evokes the reading of the McCaslin ledgers—we are told about two pages of newspaper clippings pasted in the book, which give the sense that “there must be a story hidden between the lines.”16 Each of the clippings details an arson attack, and it soon becomes clear that the victims of these attacks, all perpetrated after Billings had served his time, were the very jurors who had found him guilty. The narrator concludes that Billings must therefore be guilty of twelve separate burnings, if not also for the one for which he was initially convicted, but he is never able to ask his father how he had uncovered this mystery, nor why he had kept quiet about it after Billings’s death, for his father dies soon after this discovery.
In any case, the fear of a serial arsonist governs both the beginning and the end of Country Lawyer, suggesting the possibility of miscarried justice. Arson is also crucial to Faulkner’s relocation of the story to the South, where the burning of a barn carries a different kind of weight. Although readers of Faulkner will perhaps most readily associate the poor whites Ab Snopes and Darl Bundren with the crime, acts of arson during Reconstruction were more often than not committed by blacks on white property and are today considered to have been acts both of class and racial warfare.17 Transported from New York State to Mississippi, the incendiary acts in Partridge’s book are recoded as the assumed actions of a poor and shiftless black man, who is out of place in his own town.
The black tramp Tobe in Faulkner’s treatment is suspected of burning a banker’s stable because he “sleeps around in people’s barns, works only when he has to, without ambition, etc” (CL, 18). After a lawyer, Galloway, takes up his case, Tobe is found innocent, and he repays the favor by moving his wife, Rachel, and daughter, Caroline, into the lawyer’s house, becoming his lifelong servants. Although the lawyer refuses them several times, saying that “he can’t afford servants,” the family stays, and what develops is “a relationship established upon mutual respect between the white man and the two Negro women which will endure” (CL, 19, 20). The blackening of the arsonist in “Country Lawyer” reconfigures the book’s narrative completely, as Tobe’s racial difference, more than his alleged criminality, attracts the lawyer’s attention. Even so, with “Country Lawyer,” Faulkner appeared to return to a past he had already done away with. In the Reconstruction South, the idea that Tobe and his family would be willing to work for Galloway for free may be plausible to an extent, and yet Tobe’s wife and their descendants remain with the lawyer and grow together harmoniously with his own offspring well into the 1940s. In Yoknapatawpha County, the bonds between black and white had already begun to loosen, so the specific way in which Faulkner revisits them here seems at odds with the direction of his fiction in the same period.
This is most obvious in the different permutations of one particular scene throughout his oeuvre. In The Unvanquished, Faulkner develops the relationship between Bayard and Ringo over a number of short narratives. Where there is originally a clear hierarchy between the two boys, with white Bayard sleeping in a bed and black Ringo sleeping on a pallet, the two are soon quite happily sleeping alongside one another on the floor. However, in “The Fire and the Hearth” from Go Down, Moses, a similar alliance is overturned. That story depicts the seven-year-old Roth Edmonds peaceably sharing a pallet with Henry Beauchamp, but once he becomes aware of his own whiteness, Roth refuses his companion a place in his bed. In this revision of the Bayard-Ringo scenario, it is Roth’s “old haught ancestral pride” (N, 4:86) that will forever separate the pair, who “never slept in the same room again and never again ate at the same table” (N, 4:87).
Likewise, “Country Lawyer” contains a particular sequence involving the lawyer’s son Sam, and Tobe and Rachel’s grandson Spoot, which owes an obvious debt to both of these primal pallet scenes:
The white boy gets into the bed; the Negro takes the pallet. Rachel says goodnight, tells them to be quiet, puts out the lamp and leaves. The lightning glares, thunder rolls. The white boy rises on his elbow, looks down at the Negro.
WHITE BOY
Come up here with me.
NEGRO BOY
And have Mammy come in here and whup the tar outen both of us? Naw.
WHITE BOY
Then I’m coming down there.
NEGRO BOY
All right. Come on. Then see if you can’t shut up and lemme go to sleep.
The white boy gets onto the pallet with the Negro. (CL, 32)
Faulkner clearly models this episode from “Country Lawyer” on the exchanges between Bayard and Ringo in The Unvanquished and not on the more recent rejection of Henry by Roth in Go Down, Moses. To all intents and purposes, then, the return to the earlier romantic novel seems a historically evasive one, calculated to appease a studio system still enamored of the equally fanciful Gone with the Wind. This was tantamount to the kind of escape that Faulkner had written of elsewhere, “into a makebelieve region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds which perhaps never existed anywhere” (ESPL, 292).
And yet Faulkner’s “Country Lawyer” script does not remain stuck in the past but instead acquits itself well by testing the relationship between black and white right up to the present moment. Perhaps casting his mind back to his early treatments for Gunga Din, Faulkner has Spoot and Sam later fight together in the trenches during the Great War, and their camaraderie, which ends with the two dying together under German gunfire, shows “how little the difference in race means to them when they are alone” (CL, 47). Far from their homes, the treatment suggests, there is greater scope for the reconciliation of the two races. But the South itself also changes. As the script moves forward to 1942, the lawyer’s great-granddaughter Lally delivers a fierce diatribe to the family patriarch about the new global conflict and the way in which it originated in the shortcomings of previous generations: “She tells him calmly how it was the old people like him, with their greed and blundering and cowardice and folly, who brought on this war, brought about this situation in which Carter [Lally’s beloved] and Spoot, Junior, will have to risk their lives and perhaps lose them, as her Uncle Sam and Spoot, Junior’s, father did in the last war” (CL, 56).
Faulkner transports Bellamy Partridge’s Country Lawyer from New York State to the South. But he also refuses to embrace that work’s antimodern reaction to a changed and changing world. Although the return to Jefferson, Mississippi, and the return to the romance of The Unvanquished, may seem like conservative maneuvers, Faulkner’s rerouting of the narrative through the Reconstruction South paradoxically allows it to move forward. The transposition is crucial, because modernity came belatedly (and was still coming) to the southern states, meaning that Faulkner could extend the scope of his treatment by a further three decades. Where the country lawyer in Phelps, New York, might have been out of a job by the turn of the century, the particular socioeconomic arrangements in towns below the Mason-Dixon line would allow the figure to survive for some time longer (indeed, Faulkner’s own country lawyer, Gavin Stevens, would offer him enough material to take him almost to the end of his career). As an adaptation, Faulkner’s “Country Lawyer” treatment dislocates an existing narrative, geographically and temporally, in order to make it serve his renewed vision of the South, one that is more progressive than that which Hollywood had to offer.
In the summer of 1944, there was a third opportunity for Faulkner to imagine the South on screen. While in the thick of his Warner Brothers stint, he found time to moonlight on another project closely aligned with his interests: Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945). This was an independent venture, and one on which the contractually tied Faulkner was not supposed to be working. The script was written by Nunnally Johnson, Renoir, and Hugo Butler (who would receive the credit); Faulkner served as advisor. It was adapted from the National Book Award–winning novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand (1941) by George Sessions Perry. The title, in the words of Renoir himself, “means you must preserve and store the vegetables that grow in autumn. The truth is it’s a book intended mostly to convince American farmers not to eat only canned food in the winter, . . . canned meat, salted food, but to try to eat green beans, and vegetables and fruits, in order to fight against an illness known as pellegra [sic] that was . . . at that time rather widespread in certain southern states.”18
From novel to screenplay to film, the didactic kernel of the story survived. But the finished version of The Southerner seems interested in the idea of preservation in more ways than one. Indeed, it offers a quite nostalgic picture of the region, trumpeting the anachronistic virtues of farming over the more secure option of urban wage labor, occluding black characters from the landscape completely, and holding fast to the image of the rural nuclear family, in this case the Tuckers. Although beset by tragedy and the hardship of the land, the Tucker patriarch, Sam, remains steadfast in his ways, rejecting available factory work and the security of a work camp and resorting to sharecropping so as to grow his own produce. A proud archaism, to be sure, and perfect material for an author who was himself witnessing the slow erosion of the South’s agricultural traditions.
As Faulkner contributed to a script that had already been written, one might labor in vain trying to definitively locate his authorial voice. However, Zachary Scott, the star of the film, recalled Faulkner’s input in what was the novel’s climactic sequence—the scene in which Scott’s character, Sam Tucker, finally catches Lead-Pencil, the legendary catfish, only to give it up to his rival neighbor in exchange for the fresh vegetables his family needs.19
FIGURE 8 The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)
Faulkner takes the sequence from Perry’s novel and injects it with tension, dragging out the big catch in a way the book does not. In Hold Autumn in Your Hand, Sam Tucker has resolved to beat his neighbor, Henry Devers, who had earlier denied the family the milk and vegetables they need to cure their son’s pellagra. On his way to see Devers, he realizes that Lead-Pencil is caught on his towline in the river, but he is so consumed with feelings of revenge that he only catches the fish “mechanically” and “without joy.”20 In the screenplay, however, the process is far more exciting. By the time this scene occurs, Sam has been begun to see success as a farmer owing to a gift of a cow, and Devers now wants the land that the Tuckers are leasing; the two have just had a fight, and Devers is returning with his shotgun, intending to kill Sam, when he sees the fish. As it turns out, he is far more interested in the fish than in murder; he himself has been pursuing Lead-Pencil for two years and so ends up helping to pull the fish from the water:
SAM is now seen pulling on the cable. Then we see a BIG FISH, in the middle of the river, leaping around, trying to free himself from the hook, as the scene cuts to a close view of DEVERS and SAM: Fascinated by this spectacle, Devers looks on, all attention. He has forgotten everything, his idea of murder, his fury—Only one thing interests him now—the big fish.
FIGURE 9 The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)
DEVERS.
Holy Smoke!—It’s Lead Pencil!21
The catch here is crucial, since it forges an uneasy truce between the neighbors and allows Tucker (in the version of the story as it unfolds in the screenplay rather than as it was ultimately shot) to trade the fish for a promise that he can use the vegetables from Devers’s garden without any trouble.
The second identifiable contribution from Faulkner (or, at least, one he reported to Alfred Bezzerides) was the scene in which the Tucker family gathered around on the hearth to light the stove for the first time, a minor episode when compared with the Lead Pencil catch.22 Although Faulkner’s two scenes may not seem to amount to much, Renoir later praised his work, recalling that the “influence of that man of genius had certainly a lot to do with the success of the film.”23 As a whole, The Southerner presents a South beleaguered on all sides, the damage effected as much by mechanized agriculture and wage labor as by an illness caused by poor education and a lack of understanding of basic nutritional standards.
But whatever its message, the film was famously banned in Memphis by Lloyd Binford, the notorious chairman of the Memphis Board of Motion Picture Censors, who remarked that “it represents southerners as illiterate mendicants.”24 There was far more to Renoir’s film than this criticism suggests, but in some ways Binford was right to be concerned that The Southerner did not offer an accurate representation of his region. Set in Texas—although actually filmed mostly in California—Perry’s novel, as well as the screenplay and film it gave rise to, are both devoid of African American characters, aside from a few brief instances where they figure as peripheral elements of the mise-en-scène. This perhaps contributed to André Bazin’s assessment of the finished film as “more surreal than dramatic” and to James Agee’s comment on the unlikely absence of any “racial friction.”25 The opening scene portrays black workers picking cotton and dumping it into a truck, but people of color are largely lacking in the remainder of the screenplay and film.26 Faulkner’s very minor contributions, then, would not make the South any more realistic than the story already suggested, but instead more dramatic. However, even though his next property was not set in the South, Faulkner would include a black southerner in the story, a move that would complicate issues of labor for both white and black alike.
On November 13, 1944, Faulkner was commissioned to work on Mildred Pierce and was ushered in as the fifth of seven writers authoring separate scripts. By the time of he came on board, producer Jerry Wald had already elected to rearrange James M. Cain’s source material around a crucial narrative flashback, introducing murder into the plot.27 The emphasis in Cain’s novel on the material conditions of the Depression apparently made the story less commercially viable than the unlawful events depicted in Double Indemnity, which had been released a couple of months earlier and had proved its worth as a successful Billy Wilder picture for Paramount. So Wald made Mildred Pierce into a woman’s picture via its flashback sequences and a noir in the form of its present-day murder scenes and Mildred’s interrogation. The two genres might appear as strange bedfellows, but the “female gothic” that would come of this union was crucial to the development of noir, with its mostly male- oriented features.28 Although it is not clear at first glance, there is also an oblique connection to Intruder in the Dust (the first novel that Faulkner wrote after his return from Hollywood) that emerges through a curious combination of generic and structural similarities and overlapping ideas about the treatment of African American characters (especially with respect to the changing population of the South).
Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce follows the fortunes of a single mother during the Depression after she leaves her husband, Bert, and establishes a successful pie business to support her two daughters, Veda and Ray (who later dies of pneumonia). Ever the entrepreneur, Mildred expands the business and eventually opens a chain of restaurants, finding a new boyfriend, Monty, in the process. Veda, now a budding opera singer, increasingly expects to enjoy the spoils as Mildred’s wealth grows, and later has an affair with Monty. Mildred is able to deal with a variety of money troubles and eventually reconciles with Bert, while Veda runs away to New York with Monty. The major variation in the film, as we discover at the end, is that Veda murders her new lover after he refuses to marry her, and although Mildred tries to protect her, Veda is jailed for the crime. As produced, the film casts Cain’s narrative as a flashback and frames it with Mildred’s revelation of the entire backstory to the police.
The introduction of a crime of passion into the narrative almost completely suppresses the material history of the Depression, which is far too complex and difficult to unravel in the space of ninety minutes. In a bid to eliminate what had become an unwieldy, seemingly extraneous amount of background material in the previous scripts, Faulkner suggested to Wald that “up to the time she [Mildred] meets Monte [her lover], all this finding a job, getting set in the drive-in business, should be almost Montage.”29 In this particular instance, “all this” meant the totality of detailed content in Cain’s novel that attempted to show the workaday toils facing a single woman during the Depression. While Faulkner was apparently interested in illuminating some of the film’s more intricate financial particulars—especially considering Mildred’s seemingly impossible success in a time of economic hardship—the murder story would come to occupy most of his attention in the screenplay, and his version of the story attained no more clarity than that of others on economic matters.30 In the end, as Karla Oeler has observed, the investment in “social injustice” was displaced by the unraveling of a “solvable and punishable crime.”31
The way Faulkner executed this generic juggling act was also in keeping with another narrative he had just begun to write. Before he commenced work on the adaptation of Mildred Pierce, Faulkner had worked on The Big Sleep for Howard Hawks and at the time was planning a novel that would also combine elements from different genres. “Bill,” the director asked him, “why don’t you do a detective story?” Faulkner replied: “I’ve been thinking of a nigger in his cell, trying to solve his crime.”32 He had actually thought of the plot for Intruder in the Dust (1948) a few years earlier, in 1940, and when it was finally published, the original germ of an idea would remain: “a mystery story, original in that the solver is a negro, himself in jail for the murder and is about to be lynched, solves murder in self defense” (SL, 128). The novel revolves around the fate of Lucas Beauchamp, who has been accused of murdering a white farmer, Vinson Gowrie. He sits in the town jail awaiting either his sentence or the lynch mob that gathers outside. Chick Mallison, believing that Lucas is innocent, helps to solve the case, and it is later revealed that Vinson’s brother, Crawford, was responsible for his death.
As the manuscript progressed, Faulkner was finding it ever more difficult to synthesize elements of a socially and racially conscious tract with the novel’s central murder plot, and he ended up turning to more lasting matters to tie the different strands together. In his own words, the novel “started out to be a simple 150 page whodunit but jumped the traces, strikes me as being a pretty good study of a 16 year old boy who overnight became a man” (SL, 266). In its depiction of the changing socioeconomic fortunes of the South, the major shift taking place—the Great Migration—registers in the allusions to the historical movement of African Americans out of the region, which suffuses the murder mystery with an overwhelming sense of melancholy, a mourning for a South that was inevitably slipping away. While there was a considerable amount of movement away from rural areas in the 1930s, the exodus of sharecroppers increased exponentially after the Depression and with the advent of World War II. The South’s farm population decreased by 20 percent between 1940 and 1945, with Mississippi alone losing twenty-eight thousand sharecroppers to the war industry.33 And because the farm population was predominantly black, this in turn meant that a disproportionate number of African Americans were relocating north and west; figures indicate that anywhere up to two million blacks may have vacated the South during the 1940s.34
Even as these massive changes were afoot, Faulkner began to concentrate on the black South in his fiction, beginning with a concerted turn to African American narratives in Go Down, Moses. In “Country Lawyer,” as we have seen, Faulkner revisited the Reconstruction South in order to chart the cross- generational harmony of black and white families, and now, with Intruder, he would try to continue this story of interracial coexistence in the present day. What he produced with these works, however, was a narrative that resisted history itself and one in which the characters remained plaintively attached to a fading memory of the Old South. Ward Miner was an early critic who pointed to historical misrepresentation in Faulkner’s novels after comparing the real census results of Lafayette County with those listed on the map of Faulkner’s fictional county. If the empirical data of the census listed “Negroes” in Mississippi being outnumbered by whites for the first time in 1940, at 49.2 percent, then why did Faulkner list their numbers at 59.6 percent when his Yoknapatawpha map was published for the first time just four years earlier? Miner concludes that for the inhabitants of the fictional county, the psychological awareness of the presence of African Americans makes it seem “as though there were more of them than there actually are.”35
Whatever one makes of Miner’s rather pedantic findings, Intruder does seem to bear the thesis out. For in the novel, none of the characters seems aware of the migration taking place, and it is only coded in a number of ephemeral passages, all centering on the young Chick Mallison: “And four years later he had been free almost eighteen months and he thought it was all: old Molly dead and her and Lucas’ married daughter moved with her husband to Detroit and he heard now at last by chance remote and belated hearsay that Lucas was living alone in the house, solitary kinless and intractable, apparently not only without friends even in his own race but proud of it” (N, 4:301). Here, the move to Detroit is quickly passed over, which makes it easy to overlook the fact that Lucas Beauchamp is not “solitary kinless” because he is “intractable” but rather in spite of it. His pride in separation notwithstanding, there are larger, more ineluctable forces operating to ensure the absence of people of “his own race.” As elsewhere in the novel, the Great Migration exists here only as a misjudged domestic issue of one individual’s making, but this glossing over of labor’s abandonment of the South also codes a latent recognition of what is taking place.
To be sure, Chick is clearly cognizant of the absence of African Americans in the county. As he rides out to the cemetery to meet Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham, for instance, Chick becomes aware that “he had not seen one Negro since leaving town, with whom at this hour on Sunday night in May the road should have been as constant as beads almost” (N, 4:355). Of course, blacks are in hiding because Lucas has been arrested, and they fear he will be lynched. The same climate of fear abounds here as did in the earlier short story “Dry September” (1931), in which we are told that after the lynching of Will Mayes there was “not a Negro on the square. Not one” (CS, 181). In this instance, however, Chick is also aware that “they were still there, they had not fled, you just didn’t see them—a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness” (N, 4:356). The disappearance of African Americans from the land here has a very particular cause—the threat of lynching—and yet it also gives way to the boy’s astute appreciation of the more vital migratory disappearance in the region. For that reason, perhaps, the sudden withdrawal for Chick yields “the deliberate turning as with one back of the whole dark people on which the very economy of the land itself was founded, not in heat or anger nor even regret but in one irremediable invincible inflexible repudiation, upon not a racial outrage but a human shame” (N, 4:356).
As John Matthews has helpfully illuminated, the very real danger of violence motivated by Jim Crow began to dissipate in the wake of the changing labor regime in the New South. The movement of southern blacks to the North began to negate the utility of repressive racial policies, because blacks were no longer dependent on landowners for work.36 The sharecroppers who once lived on the farm now more than ever lived in towns, relying on welfare or the possibility of poorly paid, seasonally commissioned wage work. The days of subsisting and residing perennially on the same farm were all but over. In Intruder, as Chick and Stevens drive out to the church to dig up the Gowrie grave for a second time, they observe a solitary black laborer with his mule and plow in the otherwise “empty fields.” Stevens comments that “somebody’s got to stay home and work” (N, 4:395), although over the following decade, and especially with the advent of mechanized labor, this would become less of a necessity.
The African American labor force would instead find work outside the South, in the “Chicagoes and Detroits and Los Angeleses” (N, 4:446) that come under fire later in the novel and that offer the relative security of waged factory and domestic work. The black population of Los Angeles, for instance, doubled from 63,774 to 133,082 between 1940 and 1946. “By 1950,” Eric Avila writes, “that number reached 171,209, giving Los Angeles the West’s largest concentration of African Americans.” Eventually, over the early years of the next decade, it would creep above 200,000.37 Nevertheless, the sheer numerical changes weren’t reflected in lack of opportunities afforded to people of color in the metropolis. Although the munitions industry and the military seemed to pave the way for a more integrated workforce in the city, there were other areas that would prove more difficult to enter: one of these was Hollywood. As the writer Chester Himes would later attest, the Jim Crow practices in Los Angeles were just as bad as anywhere else: MGM, for example, instituted a segregated eating room on the set of Cabin in the Sky, a film with an all–African American cast. Himes also experienced racist treatment on the lot when on the verge of employment at Warner Brothers, he was revealed as a future screenwriter to Jack Warner, who promptly dismissed him: “I don’t want no niggers on this lot.”38
Despite the studio system’s mild flirtation with movies about African American life, Hollywood filmmaking hardly reflected the fact that Los Angeles now had a large black constituency. Indeed, popular cultural artifacts claiming to represent the city implied exactly the opposite: the wholesale invisibility of all nonwhite citizens. For Chick in Intruder, African American bodies are almost never seen and are felt only through their “constant presence and nearness” precisely because they are vanishing from the South. But curiously, this likewise seems to be the case in one of the metropolitan areas to which those African Americans ventured, where surely the opposite should have been true. While Himes’s crime novels proved a rare exception, most films of a noirish bent in postwar Los Angeles practiced the veritable whitening of the city.
This inclination was made all the more apparent in the adaptation process. Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940), for example, begins with the murder of a black man in an African American bar on Central Avenue, but, as James Naremore has written, “it is easy for most readers to forget the first death,” but as he suggests, “the neglect of the black man is precisely the point.” In the film version of Farewell, My Lovely, titled Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), however, the bar is full of working-class white men, even in spite of RKO’s commitment to social-realist filmmaking.39 The same is true of many noirs from the period, which, in their occlusion of black characters from the screen, appeared to deliberately ignore the major influx of African American citizens entering the city from the South during the 1940s.40
As Eric Lott asserts, the Great Migration was certainly a productive source of noir anxiety, with the films themselves taking the “social energy” associated with this renewed racial threat and “subsuming it into the untoward aspects of white selves.” While not dealing explicitly with the racial cause of this anxiety, he writes, film noir tended to sublimate the neurotically projected implications of impending black urbanization into “the criminal undertakings of abjected whites,” and in specifically visual terms.41 In Lott’s convincing argument, we are reminded that the postwar cinematic apparatus traded in technical innovations “such as the Norwood exposure meter (which for the first time could take a weighted average of light from all directions rather than a single direction), faster film stock, photoflood bulbs that permitted better location filming, [and] antireflective lens coatings,” all of which allowed the camera to locate “a world in the dark.”42 Film noir, then, was technologically predisposed to pit white against black, creating a chiaroscuro scheme that more effectively than ever before displaced the racial difference that was increasingly common in Los Angeles but barely depicted on screen.
With an understanding of noir that is more attuned to its covert stance on racial difference, we can see that at least one aspect of Mildred Pierce calls attention to historical reality otherwise ignored in postwar Hollywood cinema. And it was William Faulkner who was responsible for this, for his major contribution to the screenplay was to cast Mildred’s maid, Lottie, as a black woman, transformed in the script from the white maid, Letty, of Cain’s novel.43 The property is thus not completely bereft of African American characters, and the sole appearance of Lottie, at Faulkner’s behest, sets up an intriguing analogue to the similar impression of African American scarcity in Intruder in the Dust. The maid’s change in color is more than skin deep and has some subtle effects on the finished product. In novel, screenplay, and film versions of the story, Veda discovers a waitress’s uniform in her mother’s room. Assuming it is intended for the maid (and not for her mother), she gives it to Letty/Lottie to wear. In Cain’s novel, the irony of the situation is a source of shame for Mildred, who is unable to provide her exacting daughter with the wealth and status she desires. But in Faulkner’s screenplay and in the film, the anxiety of seeing her maid dressed in her own uniform stems from the fact that the maid is black. With this key shift in the adaptation process, Eric Lott contends that Lottie and Mildred become “versions of each other”: Lottie is “less the representative of the hard labor Mildred is perfectly willing to perform for her own interest than of the ‘nigger work’ this labor echoes.”44 Faulkner’s casting of Lottie as a black maid also gestures toward the (relatively) free conditions of wage work in Los Angeles that allowed citizens of the South to exercise their labor mobility for the first time. As she reprimands Veda for her attitude toward her mother, Lottie also reminds the girl of her ability to leave the Pierce house:
LOTTIE
What do you mean, scaring your mamma that way?
VEDA
Did it ever occur to you that you can be discharged?
I sure can, thank the Lord. That’s one privilege everybody going to need that works where you live. You come in the house now and go to bed. (she goes on) Come on, now.45
Lottie is more than a bit-part player here, as she also proves in her most profound scene, when she attempts to console Mildred after the death of her daughter Ray.
LOTTIE
(crying)
I’m going to sing to you. And that’s right; you try to let go and cry good. Then you’ll feel better.
She sings ‘Steal Away.’ Her voice is good, untrained, clear and simple and pure. She sings the burden, then a verse. As she begins to repeat the burden, the DISSOLVE BEGINS. She stops singing the words and hums, her voice dying away into the end.46
This vignette adds depth to an already heartbreaking point in the narrative. But there is more depth yet in Faulkner’s particular choice of song. Lottie is singing a spiritual whose thinly coded lyrics originally allude to the underground railroad of antebellum days, but in the Depression milieu of Mildred Pierce, they perhaps find their referent in the city-bound migratory activity, gathering speed at precisely this moment.47 Faulkner’s note in the margin reads “God damn! How’s that for a scene?”
Faulkner’s Lottie would need to be played by an actor with tremendous gravitas. Although Hattie McDaniel, who had won the best supporting actress award for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, might have been a likely choice, instead, Butterfly McQueen, who had played the flighty servant Prissy in the same film, was cast in the role.48 During filming, Jack Warner wrote Wald, expressing his concern at the casting decision, and in the end, McQueen was not credited for her work: “Dear Jerry: Reference my talk on the telephone today about Butterfly McQueen, no one can understand what she is saying or what it is all about. It is advisable that she opens her mouth when she talks so you can understand her. Also be sure that Mike gets wild lines of the important dialogue she says immediately. Jack Warner.”49 This difficulty probably played a part in the editing out of Faulkner’s lines, even if his idea to make the maid a black character was retained. In any case, it is surely no coincidence that the commonly occluded African American presence is given its due in Faulkner’s screenplay, the southern author more cognizant than most of the trajectory of black labor at midcentury. Faulkner, too, was a mobile worker, following a now-familiar path from Mississippi to California in search of secure work. His next project would bring home his role as a migratory writer all the more.
From August to October 1944 (and again in December that year), Faulkner worked on an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled 1939 novel with Leigh Brackett (who was many years later the screenwriter on another adaptation of a Philip Marlowe story, The Long Goodbye [Robert Altman, 1973]). The first screenplay for The Big Sleep roughly followed the same complex plot as the novel, with some notable exceptions, including a far more sadistic ending. General Sternwood, facing a blackmail threat involving his daughter, the reckless Carmen, hires Marlowe to defuse the situation. The case as it stands is fairly open and shut, but Marlowe suspects that Sternwood’s other daughter, Vivian, knows more than she is letting on. The fact that Shawn Regan, Sternwood’s former detective, is missing doesn’t help matters, and it is later discovered that Carmen, whose advances he rejected, has killed him. In the end, Marlowe sees off the threat of gangster Eddie Mars, protecting Vivian (who knew that Carmen was a murderer all along) and ruthlessly allowing Carmen to be killed in the crossfire so that she might pay for her crime (Marlowe merely says that he will have her institutionalized in the novel).
Faulkner and Brackett completed the first temporary screenplay for The Big Sleep within eight days in September, but it would be almost two months before they had come up with a second complete screenplay, at which point the Mississippian was reassigned to Mildred Pierce. Shuttling between the two films, Faulkner certainly would have noticed the ways in which each approached the domestic sphere and charted the changing roles of women in the postwar years. The working title for Faulkner’s Mildred Pierce screenplay had been “House on the Sand,” a reference to the biblical parable. Although it begins from the stability of the American home, the film also ironizes domesticity throughout and gestures toward restless and transient modes of working-class existence in the postwar years. “In noir,” as Vivian Sobchack observes, “a house is almost never a home,” and indeed—and even though the scenes of the home are not in a noir register—the more time that Mildred spends transforming the homely space of the kitchen into a place of business, the more the family unit disintegrates.50
In The Big Sleep, the last vestiges of the home as a site of familial harmony are put to rest: two stifled sisters share a mansion with their antiquated father, a lone detective roams the city with no family or home life of which to speak, and the remaining characters restively occupy transitory spaces like bookstores and casinos. Although excised from the final screenplay, one of Faulkner’s scenes demonstrated the absolute fragility of the home, depicting Philip Marlowe’s only moment of crisis inside his apartment. The private investigator has just thrown the young and unruly Carmen, who has salaciously sucked on one of his chess pieces, out of his place, but she stands outside knocking at his door. The scene ends on a tense note for Marlowe:
While the knocking still continues, he kneels at the hearth, lays the delicate chess-piece on it and with a heavy fire-dog hammers the chess-piece into dust, still beating even after the piece has vanished, his blows at last drowning out the sound of the knocking on the door.
FADE OUT51
Howard Hawks apparently redacted the encounter because he didn’t like it; Bruce Kawin asserts that Hawks refused to shift the focus from “male honor” to “female dishonor,” and not wanting to weaken his hero, he “dropped any indications of strain on Marlowe’s part.”52 However, it seems that there were more powerful forces at work, and that the ultimate decision to pull the scene came from outside the studio. As Faulkner and Brackett completed their pages, the script in progress was intermittently sent to the Hays office for inspection. Joseph Breen, responsible for enforcing the production code, had problems with several elements of “The Big Sleep” screenplay. These included “thumb sucking,” “the liquor and drinking” that were almost ever present, and the shocking original plan for the “cold-blooded murder” of Carmen, whom Marlowe would have dressed up in his clothes and sent unwittingly to be gunned down in his place.53 Faulkner’s proposed scene, which included liquor as well as the suggestive sucking of the chess piece, was unsurprisingly removed.
Breen also pointed to a series of “nude or lewd photographs” of Carmen, which he noted would have to be replaced with “some other prop” in order “to get away from the present objectionable flavor of depravity.”54 In Chandler’s novel the blackmail photos show “Carmen sitting in Geiger’s high-backed teakwood chair on the dais, in her earrings and her birthday suit,” but for the screenplay, “the suggestion that these photos are in the nude is unacceptable,” although despite Breen’s repeated objection, the images would eventually find their way into the finished film in a more sanitized form.55 It was put to Hawks that “it would be necessary to show the blackmail photograph of Carmen, in an insert, to make it perfectly clear that there was no unacceptable inference connected with this blackmail racket.”56 But all that was filmed in the end was Philip Marlowe’s shocked reaction upon seeing the photographs in question.
In Chandler’s novel, the nude photographs of Carmen were originally hidden inside classic literary works housed at Arthur Geiger’s bookstore: “A heavy book, well bound, handsomely printed in handset type on fine paper. Larded with full-page arty photographs. Photos and letterpress were alike of an indescribable filth. The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.”57 Where Faulkner was the author of high literature turned screen-writer, Chandler had always considered himself a modernist writer with a pulp exterior, who had taken a “cheap, shoddy, and utterly lost kind of writing” and “made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about.”58 In this scene, he showed that the inverse was also true: that at the heart of the most venerable, leather-bound tome the easy pleasures of pornography might hide.
The presence of the blackmail photos in the screenplay certainly seemed to stick with Faulkner even after he had finished work on The Big Sleep. Two years later, Faulkner published his “Appendix: Compson, 1699–1945,” as a new addition to round out The Portable Faulkner (1946). This work was written as a follow-up to The Sound and the Fury, which, as Faulkner explained, was like “the first moving picture projector—warped lens, poor light, undependable mechanism and even a bad screen—which had to wait until 1946 for the lens to clear, the light to steady, the gears to run smooth” (ESPL, 301). And indeed, in its appropriation of Chandler’s trope—scandalous photographs housed within novels—the appendix does seem to depend on cinema in a very literal way.
The piece recounts how Melissa Meek, the Jefferson librarian, “spent the rest of her life trying to keep Forever Amber, in its orderly overlapping avatars, and Jurgen and Tom Jones out of the hands of the highschool juniors and seniors who could reach them down” (SF, 1133). In the first of those apparently indecent works, she locates a “photograph in color clipped obviously from a slick magazine” (SN, 1:1134) of one who resembles Caddy Compson, “ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned,” with “a handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbon and tabs of a German staffgeneral” (SF, 1134). Caddy’s brother, Jason Compson, first accepts and then deceitfully denies that this is his sister in the photograph—“Don’t make me laugh. This bitch ain’t thirty yet. The other one’s fifty now.” (SN, 1:1135). The librarian then eagerly seeks out Dilsey’s confirmation—“ ‘It’s Caddy!’ the librarian said. ‘It is! Dilsey! Dilsey!’” (SN, 1:1136)—but is met with a less than enthusiastic response, Meek reasoning that Dilsey “didn’t want to see it know whether it was Caddy or not because she knows Caddy doesn’t want to be saved hasn’t anything anymore worth being saved for nothing worth being lost that she can lose” (SN, 1:1137).
The photograph of Caddy Compson offers itself as a proof of life, but it is just as quickly rejected as it is reclaimed, disavowed in part because of the guilty feelings it arouses in its viewers. The image also has ties to The Big Sleep in that it is just as scandalous as Carmen Sternwood’s photograph, albeit for different reasons. Earlier, in 1920, Caddy was married to “a minor movingpicture magnate” in “Hollywood, California” (SF, 1133), but now she is also implicated in nothing less than the rise of Nazism in Germany. Here and in The Big Sleep, the images in question fall under the category of what Garrett Stewart has called the “evidentiary photograph” in film noir, part of the impact of which “derives from its sending the private into circulation as the public.”59 For the Compson family, the private image (even if intended for public consumption in a magazine) becomes a problem only retroactively, given the changed relations between the United States and Germany. For the Sternwoods, the shots of Carmen are inherently shocking, taken in private with the threat of publication hovering over them ever after.
The collapsing of public and private is realized in the screenplay in the most obvious way, rendered as the fear of exposure. It is also reflected in the way that Marlowe conducts his work. In Chandler’s novel, as Fredric Jameson has remarked, the work of the detective is conducted all across the sprawling city of Los Angeles. In the course of a single day, Philip Marlowe finds himself in all manner of spaces: General Sternwood’s hothouse, the oilfields that are visible from his mansion, Geiger’s faux bookstore, the lavish Cypress Club, to the highest and lowest parts of the metropolis. All the while he is hard at work. For Chandler, as Jameson points out, the traditional understanding of “the office” encompassed a much wider variety of social activity than it was normally understood to do, making sense of a vast and disparate cityscape by rendering all of its locations as potential workspaces.60 Even Marlowe’s own apartment can become an extension of his office, as working life colonizes the entirety of the detective’s world. Private life is surrendered to the call of public duty, and the domestic sphere is invaded by clients, or at least by the problems they bring to the detective’s doorstep.
For Marlowe as for Faulkner, the office was everywhere. At this point in time, Faulkner was working mostly on the Warner Brothers lot. But even though he requested a three-month suspension of his contract in December 1944, he continued to work on the script, and his final contributions to The Big Sleep were actually penned, as he confirmed in a letter to the studio, when he was “on his way back to Mississippi.”61 Portions of the script were sent from Arizona, New Mexico, and Oxford, with those places typed at the top of the sheets so as to corroborate his story: “With grateful thanks to the studio for the cheerful and crowded day coach which alone saved him from wasting his time in dull and profitless sleep.”62 In the few scenes that Faulkner rewrote on his way back to Oxford, Marlowe returns to the Sternwood house after killing Canino (one of Eddie Mars’s henchmen), and demands to speak with the general. He has a tense exchange with Norris, the butler, before being granted entry and then says that although he knows the general does not want him to continue his search for Regan, he is planning to do so anyway. But the general surprises Marlowe by suggesting he should search for Regan. Marlowe then encounters Vivian, who tries to convince him that she killed Regan herself, but it’s a ruse he sees straight through.
Unbeknown to Faulkner, Leigh Brackett was rewriting the same scene on the same day, a duplication of labor that probably happened because Faulkner was away from the studio at the time.63 Although similar in many respects, Faulkner’s version of the episode is concerned less with the potential relationship between Marlowe and Vivian and instead privileges the relationship between Marlowe, the general, and Norris, whose conversation centers on the case. As the detective tells his employer:
MARLOWE
In my business, a man’s neck is his ordinary stock in trade—that’s what he sells.64
In the next scene, Vivian picks up on Marlowe’s keen work ethic, suggesting that if he were truly obsessed with his job alone, then he would follow her orders as his new employer:
You keep on telling me how all you’re doing is earning a living. All right. I’ll pay you to let it alone. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars—65
Vivian, more than anything, disrupts the triad of former soldiers, first obstructing and then lying to the detective. This was certainly in keeping with Chandler’s novel, where the detective knew better than to become involved with the elder Sternwood daughter. But at the studio, there were other matters to consider. Bogart and Bacall had worked well together in To Have and Have Not, and it was clear that Warner Brothers needed to capitalize on their dynamic. But in her next film, Bacall had taken a misstep, featuring poorly in Confidential Agent (Herman Shumlin, 1945). Now to make matters worse, Martha Vickers (who played Carmen) was threatening to steal the show from Bacall in The Big Sleep with her own edgy performance. When it was decided that Bacall’s career needed a boost, the release date was put back so that the balance between the two female actors might be righted. Principal photography on the film finished up in January 1945 and, while a version of The Big Sleep was screened to U.S. forces in the Pacific theater in April 1945, the final cut was only released in August 1946. This allowed for the shooting of “two new sultry sequences” featuring Bogart and Bacall (not Vickers) and saw more than ten minutes of extraneous footage cut out.66 While there are notable differences between the two versions of the film, the late push to jumpstart Bacall’s career may have also explained why Brackett’s and Faulkner’s revisions in late 1944 were not incorporated into the script.
Jules Furthman was asked to step in a fortnight later and trim some of the fat so as to accelerate the story. Brackett recalls the change: “Furthman came into it considerably later, because Hawks had a great habit of shooting off the cuff. He had a fairly long script to begin with and he had no final script. He went into production with a ‘temporary.’ He liked to get a scene going and let it run. He eventually wound up with far too much story left than he had time to do on film. Jules came in and I think he was on it for about three weeks, and he rewrote it, shortening the latter part of the script.”67 Included in these revisions was the scene between Vivian and Marlowe at the Sternwood mansion, to which Furthman added much of the dialogue between them that was included in the finished film. Contrary to Brackett’s and Faulkner’s approaches to the scene, Furthman removes Sternwood and Norris, manipulating the arrangement of characters to capitalize on the budding Bogart-Bacall dynamic. Furthman also changes the setting from the Sternwood house to the road, as Marlowe drives Vivian to Geiger’s house, which makes sense in the final cut. After all, as Kawin points out, Hawks would later forget the intricacies and fault lines of the quest in The Big Sleep, and instead focus on simply finishing his film, “directing the picture for speed.”68 Marlowe’s car is an abstract space in which he and Vivian can be alone and that, unlike his apartment, allows the narrative to progress at high velocity:
VIVIAN
Why are you driving so fast?
MARLOWE
I’ve got to get you somewhere pretty quick. Unless you think you can explain everything to Eddie.69
In a sense, Furthman’s revision suggests the ubiquity of the office all the more, since even the road could turn into a potential workspace. But at the same time, the car in the new scene demonstrates the potential to rapidly accelerate the plot and carves out a private space for romance. Above all else, here we can see the studio’s determination to bring Bogart and Bacall together on screen, a task that would require fewer professional discussions between Marlowe and his employer. In place of Faulkner’s revisions, written in the “crowded day coach” en route to Mississippi, Furthman’s rewrites allowed the narrative to unfold as the two leads drove on together in the intimacy of the automobile.
After sending off the final pages for The Big Sleep, Faulkner was back home in Oxford by the end of the year—even if he still felt that he was “morally and spiritually in Hollywood” (SL, 187).70 In March 1945, the studio extended the three-month suspension of his contract he had secured in December for a further three months.71 Back at Warner Brothers in June, Faulkner commenced solitary work on a screenplay for Stallion Road, Stephen Longstreet’s novel of life on a California ranch, which the studio had bought even before it was published.72 Longstreet, whom Faulkner had met years before in New York, had originally put him in touch with his problematic agent, William Herndon, and so it was a rather neat coincidence that the same author would give Faulkner the material for his final Warner Brothers assignment. But there was evidence that Faulkner was trying to make the most of his stay in Los Angeles, as he found time to write after his days at the studio. In a letter to Estelle, Faulkner wrote of his first complete screenplay for Stallion Road but also made mention of two other projects. One was a “50 page story” written together with Alfred Bezzerides over a couple of weekends, which they hoped to sell to Hawks. Faulkner had also spent “two weeks working at night and on weekends fixing up a picture for Ginger Rogers” (SL, 194)—although there is nothing in the studio records to confirm it, the dates suggest that he may have been working sub rosa over at RKO on Heartbeat (Sam Wood, 1946), which was the only film Rogers shot during Faulkner’s stay. In addition, he was still finding some spare time for A Fable. Bezzerides would later report that Faulkner would wake at four o’clock in the morning to work on his novel for four hours before reporting for duty at the studio in Burbank to work on Stallion Road for the remainder of the day.73
Although the novel was still almost a decade away from completion, this was certainly a productive period for screenwriting. By the beginning of September, Faulkner had completed a treatment and two full-length screenplays on his own. Longstreet’s Stallion Road is narrated by Henry Purcell, a writer loosely based on Longstreet himself, who has ventured to California from the East for screenwriting work and is about to begin work on what he believes will be “a very important novel.”74 Purcell stays with rancher and veterinarian Larry Hanrahan and becomes a part of the life of Stallion Road in a number of ways. The two soon find themselves infatuated with the same woman, Fleace Teller, and the romantic struggle plays out against a backdrop of horse breeding and ranch life, culminating in an outbreak of anthrax that threatens horse breeders across the Sierra Madres. Larry finds a cure for the disease, but refuses the advances of a U.S. Army officer who wishes to appropriate it for the exclusive use of the cavalry. In the process, Larry contracts anthrax himself and dies. Purcell honors his memory by staying on the ranch and writing the story of his life.
Faulkner also begins his first version of the story with Purcell’s character, although he removed him from the second complete screenplay, an interesting decision, especially since Purcell was a novelist and sometime screenwriter. Various stars had already been announced to play the role before the script was finished, and it was reinstated in the final cut. Initially, Errol Flynn was cast as Purcell alongside Ida Lupino (who would have played Fleace), and there were even rumors of a potential Bogart-Bacall reunion on set.75 Ultimately, the film starred Zachary Scott (husband of Faulkner’s friend Ruth Ford) and Alexis Smith as two points of the love triangle completed by none other than future president Ronald Reagan. Faulkner’s version of the script would have provided even more space for Reagan’s Larry, who rather than competing with a male interloper earns the affection of both Fleece Teller (so spelled) and the married Daisy Otis. Longstreet thought the adaptation of his novel was “a magnificent thing, wild, wonderful, mad. Utterly impossible to be made into the trite movie of the period. Bill had kept little but the names and some of the situations of my novel and had gone off on a Faulknerian tour of his own despairs, passions and story telling. Today it could be made as a New Wave film.”76
While these estimations of the screenplay overstate the case (there are certainly remnants of the original storyline, and the script is hardly similar to a New Wave film), perhaps the most interesting aspect of Faulkner’s involvement in the project lay in its equestrian focus. Faulkner had always been interested in horses; he had written about them a number of times and had prided himself on his riding ability on several occasions. He later professed to have written Sanctuary because he “wanted to buy a horse,” and he had purchased his daughter Jill a mare—“Lady Go-lightly”—when she and Estelle came to stay with him in East Hollywood in the summer of 1944.77 For Faulkner, as for the protagonist of Longstreet’s novel, there was a stubborn nostalgia for the horse, even if it had been superseded by the tractor and the automobile. In the novel, Larry Hanrahan is confronted with a major decision: whether to persist with the expensive practice of horse breeding on the ranch or to pursue his career as a veterinarian, potentially for the military. Larry remains uncertain, even as he faces the truth:
“Nobody wants stud stallions any more. Stallion Road isn’t the place it was when Pops or Gramp were alive. Nobody on the range is making money breeding horses.”
“Mrs. Major Alcott is.”
“That’s different. She breeds cheap horses for people who want to keep one horse for the family, on a ten-acre ranch designed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”
“Why don’t you sell out the whole stud, the mares and colts, and stick to veterinary?”
“Gramp would turn over in his grave. I’m tradition in these parts, Henry, and like all traditions I’ll go down with all flags flying.”78
Larry Hanrahan stubbornly sticks to tradition, but a tradition that is in some ways future oriented. In the changed and changing postwar world, he offers the continuation of a breed for posterity: unlike the mules that populate the Yoknapatawpha fiction and who are unable to breed, the purpose of the stallion is to prolong the existence of its species, even if only for the spectacle of cinema. In this discussion of the future of horse breeding, the reference to MGM here may not have been merely incidental. As Jerome Christensen points out, with reference to a number of films made by MGM during the war years, there was a near-obsession at the studio with “the bonded themes of breeding and grooming,” drawing connections between human reproduction and animal husbandry. In the movie Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (Alfred E. Green, 1937), for example, Christensen argues that there is more at stake than merely the future of the horse breed. The film is also concerned about the future of its own “stable” and the new child stars who had begun to populate it, as the presence of the young Mickey Rooney might suggest. Indeed, the eponymous thoroughbred here referred not to the horse but to its owner.79
Faulkner himself was interested in the relationship between breeding and grooming and explored that relationship in the budding attraction between Larry and Fleece. When one of Fleece’s mares seems close to death, Larry revives her. But in this early scene, he is clearly just as interested in the mare’s owner: “She exits. Larry looks after her. As though without knowing he is doing it, he stands stroking the mare’s neck. He gives the idea that he might be stroking Fleece’s hair. When Fleece is gone, he seems to recover, realize what he is doing, that he was actually stroking Fleece’s hair, reacts, turns takes up his bag and begins to open it.”80
Faulkner also took up the suggestive intersections between grooming and romantic love in “Knight’s Gambit,” his own story about horses that he had been working on intermittently since 1942 and one he revisited again just after he had finished on the screenplay for Stallion Road. It was “about a man who planned to commit a murder by means of an untameable stallion” (SL, 203). Both Stallion Road and “Knight’s Gambit” are concerned with the future of horses in the nation: with their breeding, their uses for leisure and labor, and their health. Both worry about the fate of the species, especially around wartime and make mention of the uses of horses in the military. And just like Longstreet’s novel, “Knight’s Gambit” briefly considers the difference between sites of honest rural labor and mere simulations of an agrarian past: at the beginning of the story we read of the improved property of the Harriss family, which has matured from “just another plantation” into “something a little smaller than a Before-the-War Hollywood set” (KG, 135).
In the most obvious sense, the story revolves around the thwarted murder of Captain Gualdres, an Argentinian interloper who poses a new oedipal threat to Max Harriss after the death of his father by seducing first his sister and then his mother. The murder plot is contingent on Max placing a wild stallion in the Harriss stables, which Gualdres was intended to unwittingly rouse, leading to his brutal demise under its hooves. But that very plot also seems to depend, at least symbolically, on the presence of the horse on the plantation not as a draft animal but as a tool of leisure and murder, which in turn would seem to depend on the survival of the “modest cotton-plantation” (KG, 152) that the Harriss patriarch cared little for after it was bequeathed to him; he initially makes an agreement with “Negro tenants” to manage it (KG, 152) but later rents “all the farm-land in one lump to a man who didn’t even live in the county” (KG, 153). Finally, that man himself “brought his own Negro farm-hands, and so even the Negroes who had lived and dropped their sweat on the old place longer than she was old, were gone now” (KG, 153). At the same time, “horses and mules taken last night from the plow” pass by “gangs of strange men with enough machinery to have built a highway or a reservoir,” who have come to “disc and terrace the old fields once dedicated to simple profit-producing corn and cotton, and sow them to pasture grass costing more per pound than sugar” (KG, 154).
As mules and horses are slowly sent into retirement by the machines, a new class of leisure animal will come to replace them, mounted by polo players, those “who couldn’t ride a horse except in shiny boots and special pants” (KG, 157). The black farm hands must also be differently employed, lest they become useless in the county. Accordingly, “two Negro boys” now lay a “trail of torn paper” between each jump in a series, utilizing the practically outmoded equipment of the sharecropper—“two long cotton-pickers’ sacks”—for their task (KG, 157–58). The mules are now “spanned and tripled,” joined in the field by “five- and ten-ton trucks” and “tractors,” while the horses, though they still exist as sports equipment, have been shorn of their power on the battlefield by the machinery of modern warfare. Toward the end of the story, Captain Gualdres enlists in an utterly redundant “1942 United States Army cavalry regiment” and exits the story “going to war against Germans not because they had ruined a continent and were rendering a whole race into fertilizer and lubricating oil, but because they had abolished horses from civilised cavalry” (KG, 242–43).
The prospective murder weapon itself was “a stallion of first blood and pedigree but absolutely worthless” that had “a hatred for anything walking upright on two legs” (KG, 201). For anyone unaccustomed to its behavior—and even to a practiced equestrian like Gualdres—the horse would pose “a considerable worry” (KG, 211). Indeed, only the ingenuity of Gavin Stevens and his nephew Chick preserve the Argentinian’s life. When mules come to supplement the tractor in the process of sowing and harvesting cotton and horses suddenly disappear from the front lines of battle courtesy of the tank, the use value remaining to horses, the story suggests, is cashed out either in leisure pursuits or in schemes leading to death. The punishment for the intending murderer, Max Harriss, is also tied to this economy of obsolescence, as Stevens ensures that he will enlist, sending him off to fight in the global battle.
Although Faulkner had completed the story as early as 1942, “Knight’s Gambit” was initially rejected as a commercial piece of writing. When it was finally published in 1949, the story likewise appears to have renounced the market, with Faulkner’s revisions to it constituting what Michael Grimwood has called “a virtual repudiation of the commercial origins of the first five stories” in the collection of the same name.81 But in so doing, Faulkner in “Knight’s Gambit” is able to embrace the onset of modernity in the South, refusing to restrict himself to the more traditional, closed narratives of the five other detective stories that precede it in the collection. Part of this turn, at least, owes itself to Faulkner’s Stallion Road screenplay. In adapting Longstreet’s novel, Faulkner was working through nothing less than the decline of agriculture, the end to the isolation of the rural, and the separation of the old from the new. Horse breeding and grooming had been taken over by MGM, and the plantation now seemed like a Hollywood set. But it was a historical shift now impossible to resist. The South in Faulkner’s work, both for the page and for the screen, would never be the same, and although Hollywood might (still) stand accused of perpetuating myths of “magnolias and mockingbirds,” at least some of the screenwriting Faulkner completed at Warner Brothers would permit him to think in more contemporary ways about the advance of modernity in his region.
Although the “Stallion Road” screenplay is registered as Faulkner’s last formal contribution at Warner Brothers in the 1940s, it would be another few years until he was able to fully extricate himself from his contract with the studio. There were legal threats from his former agent, William Herndon, as well as concerns over unpaid income tax from 1944, and a letter from Faulkner to Jack Warner trying unsuccessfully to put an end to their relationship. “I feel that I have made a bust at moving picture writing,” he wrote, “and therefore have mis-spent and will continue to mis-spend time which at my age I cannot afford” (SL, 204). Although his request to be released from the studio was denied, Faulkner was at least given indefinite leave to complete work on A Fable before returning to California to see out the rest of his contract (an arrangement that would not pan out as planned).
Although not tethered to the studio in the latter half of the decade, Faulkner did contribute to a number of different properties. In 1946, he wrote a synopsis titled “Continuous Performance,” a farcical story about a married couple who are torn apart by the wife’s taste for extravagant purchases. In an astute piece of casting, Faulkner had suggested that either Cary Grant or Fred MacMurray play the part of the long-suffering husband, Henry, but ultimately nothing would come of it. “I am sending you today a 40 page synopsis, movie idea. A part of it belongs to another man, who will agree to whatever I do. He says it is rotten, has no chance of sale” (SL, 227). Indeed, Tom Reed, the author who had the initial idea for the story, was right, and the “shaggy dog” script failed to sell.82
With this screenplay it seemed as though Faulkner was planning to mount a covert assault on Hollywood, whereby he would “go back to the coast, stay away from Warner, and earn some money under the rose” (SL, 229). However, it appears that he only ever revisited Los Angeles in 1951, and it is more likely that he undertook some work for Warner Brothers at home in Mississippi. Earlier in March 1943, he had completed a thirty-eight-page treatment with the title “Deep Valley,” but he would not take it any further since he was moved over to “Country Lawyer” after that. However—and although there are no records to confirm it—according to Deep Valley director Jean Negulesco, Faulkner was hired again on the picture in 1947 to write some additional dialogue, just before it was released.83
In the same year, it seems that Faulkner also had a hand in an adaptation of Ben Hecht’s story “The Shadow.” This is a strange tale about a magician, the “marvelous Sarastro,” who seeks revenge on his brother for the mistreatment of his wife. An unproduced screenplay for “The Shadow” dated October 24, 1947, was written by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, who had together written the Broadway play Portrait in Black and would go on to write the screenplay for White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949).84 But there are also thirty-two manuscript pages written by Faulkner that feature characters from the story (although they are untitled). It is unclear whether all three writers collaborated on this property, and the pages that are available only represent perhaps one third of the entire script. In the Faulkner screenplay, Sarastro is married to Anna, who is blind. His fellow magician (and possibly brother) Rico is a malevolent figure, who for an unknown reason is resolved to murder Anna. Although there are some menacing scenes in which Rico lingers around Anna with a noose, it appears that she and Sarastro are safe in the end. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the fact that a number of pages of the screenplay are printed on the rectos of manuscript pages from A Fable (this is a practice that Faulkner would repeat with “The Left Hand of God” and Requiem for a Nun).85 Indeed, it was in 1947 that Faulkner had finally committed to writing A Fable as a novel rather than a screenplay, and he was constantly sending pages of his work to Robert Haas at Random House. At the same time, he was still concerned about his contract with Warner Brothers, from which he was “on leave only to write this particular book” (SL, 257), and he wondered if Jack Warner would allow him “to come out for one specific job, consultations if possible, a quick treatment” (SL, 253).
A two-page synopsis written for Howard Hawks in the following year shared some of A Fable’s concerns about unbridled technological advancement, although from comments that Faulkner made about the project, they would have formed the background to a romance plot. In “Morningstar,” adapted from a science fiction story by Robert Spencer Carr, a rocket falls to Earth, carrying a Venusian beauty.86 She meets a scientist named Zweistein (no doubt after the Nobel prizewinning physicist, Einstein), who desires to know more about the state of scientific progress on her home planet: “He is fatherly, wise, extracts information (some of which he has already divined) of her home: a place where war is not known, etc., where science is used for man’s happiness, etc. He describes as in a parable this world where science has built 100 storey houses, only for men to hate and starve and suffer in, 300 mph transport only for men to travel 1000 miles in 3 hours to trim each other in slick deals for money, atom bombs to destroy women and children with. Now he wants to explore the secrets of space not to fix just another collection of armed outposts against aggression, but to elevate man, improve the universe as you do horse strains” (n.p., WFFC). Writing in June 1948, Faulkner told Hawks that “we will bring into the story a character something like the one Cary Grant played in The Bishop’s Wife only ours is a human being.” He also mentioned a plot device Hawks had used in Ball of Fire (1941).87 Here, Faulkner showed a familiarity with contemporary cinema, and The Bishop’s Wife (Henry Koster, 1947), in which Grant plays an angel, might have proved a useful model for his own fish-out-of-water story in “Morningstar,” had it ever been produced.
Finally, a few months before Intruder in the Dust was published, Warner Brothers and Cagney Productions (an independent company started by James Cagney and his brother in 1942) both showed interest in purchasing the rights to the novel. However, it was sold to MGM in July 1948, and was made into a film directed by Clarence Brown in 1949. Shot in Oxford, Faulkner reported that there was “much excitement” in the town (SL, 286), and he later remarked that it was “a good picture, I think” (SL, 294). And although it is less than certain, he may have had some very little input on the screenplay by Ben Maddow, as Regina Fadiman has argued.88 In Faulkner’s mind, the release of the film also absolved him of his guilt for the way he had conducted himself at MGM back in 1932. He wrote Sam Marx at the studio, admitting that “I have felt that accounts between me and MGM were not at balance, and my conscience hurt me at times. But since seeing Clarence’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’ here last night, the qualms have abated some. I may still be on MGM’s cuff, but at least I am not quite so far up the sleeve” (SL, 293). Free from MGM, and effectively free from Warner Brothers, Faulkner’s screenwriting career was still not yet over.