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Home , Shingles for the Lord, Silent comedy

SILENT , HOLLYWOOD , AND

-Somdatta Mandal

Much of the research concerning William Faulkner’s relationship to focuses on the writer’s experience as a scriptwriter during the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps assuming that Faulkner’s serious interest in film began only with his arrival in Hollywood in 1932. But as Jeffrey J. Folks1 has pointed out, had comprised a significant part of available popular entertainment in Oxford during Faulkner’s youth and according to Murray Falkner, Faulkner is said to have attended silent films regularly, as often as twice a week. John Faulkner says that after movies came to Oxford, which would have been about 1913, he and ‘Bill’ went every Friday - and would have gone oftener had they been allowed to.2 Though it is not possible to determine exactly what films Faulkner might have seen in the first years of film showings, the standard features certainly consisted, to a large extent of Westerns, and . One may assume that among performers featured were Mary Pickford, Lilian Gish, Charles Chaplin, , and Fatty Arbuckle. The many Westerns that Murray Falkner recalled having seen with his brother William, may well have featured Tom Mix, William S. Hart, and Broncho Billy (G.M.Anderson) as well as many lesser known performers. Faulkner seems to have had the normal introduction to this aspect of American culture, though as an adult he may have had less contact with it.

As mentioned earlier, Faulkner’s extensive knowledge of the silent film is evident from the many references to it in his fiction. As D. M. Murray3 informs us, certain conventions of visual humor found in the Southwestern tradition were carried on, with distinct stylization and acceleration, in the arts of the silent film and the animated cartoon, arts that were being developed during the time that Faulkner was writing some of his greatest humorous stories. The way Faulkner uses these conventions often seems to have more affinity with the films than with literary antecedents. Though there is no evidence that the novelist was consciously influenced by comic films, or that, conversely, his farcical humor influenced them, but “recognition of the similarities between his humor and that of Sennett and Disney should add another dimension to our appreciation of his great art. His early novels contain some shrewd criticism, much of it centering on the story treatments of contemporary film. In Jenny makes a wry comment that likens the rich, idle passengers of the Nausikaa to the characters in a film: “This is kind of funny, ain’t it? They are not going anywhere, and they don’t do anything….. kind of like a movie or something.”4 This comment indicates Faulkner’s awareness of film as a narrative medium, but also reveals his consistent practice of comparing film to literary methods and standards. This practice of examining film for narrative structures did, in fact, leave its mark on his fiction. Also, the distinctive characteristics of several individuals in Mosquitoes almost certainly derive from particular traits popularized by film comics. In fact, the very mode of comedy that Faulkner attempts in his second novel owes much to the structure of silent film, as Jenny suggested in the above comment. Even the character or Popeye, in Sanctuary, antedates the appearance of that comic-strip personage in Max Fleisher’s animated cartoon. Sanctuary is not only Hollywood material in its cinematographic technique and in its contents - that mixture of lurid sex and hopped-up physical violence that has always been the staple of the Hollywood film ever since the days of the nickelodeon – but in its very mode of expression: melodramatic, typological, hyperbolic, a bold and brilliant way in which both formula and abstraction were depicted. These elements, of course, not only constitute the mode of expression of the basic Hollywood film – the gangster, the , the – but they also appear in many forms of popular art and entertainment, all of which the contemporary American Gothic has adopted and transformed in developing its own special world view; for instance, the comic strip (Miss Lonelyhearts, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), the ( Malcolm, Catch 22), and the pulp novel ( A Cool Million).

During the early and middle twenties, Faulkner frequently spoke of his characters and of himself as “the little man” or “the tramp,” a reference to the persona made famous in Chaplin’s films. In Mosquitoes, the aesthetic discussion criticizes art which is “too engrossed in trying to create great living characters….and overlooked the possibilities of the little man.”5 Earlier, in “Out of Nazareth,” Faulkner had used the word “tramp” to refer to his character David, a young vagabond whom Faulkner and Spratling admire.6 Furthermore, Dorothy Oldham recalls that, predicting his future success, Faulkner told her around 1920: “Who knows, someday you may see a headline in the newspapers, ‘Tramp Becomes Famous.’”7 Faulkner also referred to himself as a “tramp” in the semi- autobiographical essay “Mississippi,” which he wrote in the early fifties, describing “the young man’s attitude of mind” in April 1917 as adopting “the avocation he was coming more and more to know would be forever his true one: to be a tramp, a harmless possessionless vagabond.”8

In Mosquitoes, Pete seems also to refer to Buster Keaton. He wears a stiff straw hat with which he refuses to part. Julius and Fairchild remark the appropriateness of the hat to Pete’s face. Fairchild says: Pete has a kind of humorless reckless face that a stiff straw hat just suits. A man with a humorless face should never wear a stiff straw hat. But then, only a humorless man would dare buy one.”9 Likewise, Buster Keaton wore a stiff straw hat as a mark of identification in his films, and Keaton’s humorless, nearly expressionless attitude earned him the name “the Great Stone Face.” The word ‘reckless’ could also be identified with Keaton’s acting, as the numerous injuries he suffered in performing would attest to.

A critic, D. M. Murray, finds that some of Faulkner’s works like “” (1931) and other narrative material used in (1940); “Mule in the Yard” (1934) “Was,” in Go Down Moses (1942); and “Shingles For the Lord”(1943)-- the years of their composition ranging between 1926 and 1943--coincide with the golden age of the silent comedies - the Keystone Kops, , as well as the most productive years of Disney humor.10 In The Hamlet, for instance, the scene where Ratliff, pants-less and sock in hand, suddenly finds a great banjo-faced horse in his bedroom, jumps out of the window, runs around the house and in through the front door again, reminds the reader instantly of a common comic episode in silent film comedy. Faulkner’s depiction of female characters often conformed to film stereotypes too. The presentation of antithetical women in film has, in fact, been examined by critics who note the tendency to stereotype women by setting the roles of all-American girl and mother against the femme fatale, vamp, and prostitute. Unlike the male actor who retained a creditable position as the kind-hearted, ordinary Joe, women were typed as entirely virginal and pure-hearted or immensely evil and corrupt. The public’s adulation of Mary Pickford in the role of ingenué (“the all-American golden girl,”) alongside the simultaneous popularity of Theda Bara’s vamp in A Fool There Was and Camille in the mid-teens attests to this cultural polarization in the presentation of women in film. The mother figure, who exemplified self-sacrifice, rectitude, and authority, was also widely popular. A survey of film history shows that in spite of such polar roles of women, a growing cultural change was also emerging. The drama of a mother deserting a family was not unheard of, too. The artistic tension resulting from such cultural ambivalence towards women comprises an interesting element in the depiction of women in Faulkner’s fiction. It is the underlying cultural motif behind the drama, often the , of several of his major novels. While no specific silent film “source” can be assigned as the “influence,” the significance of early films in defining the dramatic situation of women seems incontestable, since it could scarcely have arisen from the highly traditional culture of provincial Mississippi. Similar to the attitude towards women in the early films, Faulkner’s portrayal is neither traditional nor radically modern. Rather, it is dramatic. Women in traditional roles -- Miss Jenny in , Rosa Millard in , Dilsey in inspire respect and warmth, yet they act primarily as observers of the emerging future, into which they are incapable of projecting their stable sense of order and value. Faulkner’s modern heroines, like Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury, also inspire admiration and warmth, yet they are equally doomed by motion and time. Even in the small Southern town of Charlestown, Georgia, the locale for the novel, Soldier’s Pay, one community member after another is unmasked as flapper, social climber, gossip or lecher. In the novel The Wild Palms, Faulkner even makes a direct reference to Joan Crawford (who had starred in ).

Apart from prominent film stars becoming the personae of Faulkner’s writing, more general cinematic conventions of plot and action were accepted and repeated. The episodic plots of his novels can easily be modified to fit the screen; his boldly drawn central characters are generally caught in an emotional crisis with which filmgoers can readily identify; and his stories are, more often than not, melodramatic enough to grip a movie audience’s attention. The elaborate and melodramatic romantic triangle was quite common in both motion pictures and magazine fiction. In Faulkner’s first novel, Soldier’s Pay, the romantic couple of Margaret Powers and Joe Gilligan suggest characters from magazine fiction and the cinema. In Hollywood, Jerry Wald had found in Faulkner’s abandoned desk a yellow legal pad bearing the familiar minuscule pen strokes. They formed a series of formulae: “Boy meets girl…..boy gets girl….Boy loses girl….Boy sues girl…” And so on, for pages.11 A survey of the endings of the silent films shows that whatever the content might be, most films ended with the imposition of one form or another of “happy ending,” whether it be a conventional romantic pairing or one in which ugliness is transformed into beauty, hatred into love, and so on. Hollywood was, as late as 1919, a largely rural community, and consequently the cinema sustained the attitudes of nineteenth century comedy, melodrama, and rural romance, of the kind that Griffith’s A Romance of Happy Valley displayed. In The Sound and the Fury, it was not mere casual selection that led to the middle stage in Caddie’s damnation and degradation – between her marriage to the banker and her liaison with the German general – being her marriage to “a minor moving picture magnate, Hollywood California.” One filmic convention - the working into the plot of the starchy, snobbish Englishman - is suggested in Faulkner’s early story “Love.” Joseph Blotner states that “Love,” an unpublished fragment from around 1921, combined different stereotypes of that image found in films and fiction of that time. According to him, “Though the major may have been American, his elegant appearance and clipped speech suggested a certain British stereotype. The batman-valet and the house-party situation both reinforced this effect.”12 In film versions, the snobbish Englishman acted as a foil to the democratic American hero, usually competing in a love triangle. Lord Rockingham in Fast and Loose (1930) is a later example of this type. The suave, socially conscious, Englishman or European was a highly familiar stock character, always presented as obnoxious or foolish, and always defeated by the home-town American male. In the films of the thirties, the suave aristocrat emerged as often from American backgrounds as from European, as did Dick Boulton in Night After Night ( Paramount, 1932) and Tod Newman in Dancing Lady (MGM,1933). Whether he be the product of American new wealth or European aristocracy, the social snob was presented so as to satisfy the democratic emotions of the mass film audience. The idiot, the amnesiac, the confused adolescent, the rural peasant, and the immigrant also receive important and psychologically convincing treatment in Faulkner’s fiction just as they were the central concern for more sensitive filmmakers of the teens and the early twenties.

Another area in which Faulkner uses the filmic situation is in the depiction of chase scenes so characteristic of popular literature too. Related to the pattern of farcical action, a comic chase is always frantic and usually futile. This is perhaps the staple of all , but it became the raison d’etre of silent film comedy ( is said to have staged chases first and written scripts for them afterwards) because it increased excitement. In The Sound and the Fury, for instance, one is reminded of the scene in which Jason pursues Quentin and her lover. In another instance, the Italian girl relentlessly pursues Quentin until the appearance of her brother Julio. According to D.M. Murray,13 several conventions of silent comedy are noted in Faulkner’s description of the scene: frantic action which typically involves violence that does not harm and which is often organized into the plot patterns of futile endeavor or comic chase; comic distortion in description and characterization, which often consists of comparing human beings to animals or machines, and sudden appearance of character. A fine example occurs in Faulkner’s story of the spotted horses in which the flashing hooves of one pony cut the vest right off the Texan’s back, without harming him (277) just the way Disney’s wolf snipped off the tail feather in Peter and the Wolf. Several times the ponies stampeded over little Wall Snopes (pp.287, 308, 314) without hurting him, as, in one of the Fun Factory comedies, racing cars successively ran over a road worker without harming him. Mrs. Littlejohn breaks a washboard over a pony’s face as is proper in comic strip or animated cartoon, without hurting him. The violence of The Hamlet is closely related in type to Houston’s faithful dog, which, before it is finally killed, survives blows of Mink’s club and even returns to the fray after being shot. Mink’s perverse and grotesque suicide attempt, not always satisfactorily explained by interpreters, seems to be in the same category of non-fatal violence he thrust his body into a neck-breaking position but is not killed. He revives quickly when they slosh water over him, and pursues his minkish destiny as undamaged as if he were one of the human-animal characters of the animated cartoons.

The extent to which Faulkner turned to the portrayal of grotesques may well have been influenced by the contemporary growth of popular taste for the horror and . The grotesque had been popularized in such Lon Chaney films of the twenties as The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Monster, and London at Midnight. The same period saw several version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and culminated in the Tod Browning production of real-life freaks of the circus world. The impetus towards artistic depiction of grotesque material was also strengthened by such German horror films as F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Paul Wegener’s The Golem (1923), and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) (1922) and Metropolis (1926). The most widely admired of the German silent fantasies, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), (for which even Ernest Hemingway had a great admiration), combined an acclaimed artistic production with a chilling murder story told, as one learns at the end of the film, by a madman confined in a mental institution. The popular demand for grotesque tales of violence closely parallels Faulkner’s apprenticeship period, in which he experimented with a wide range of fictional subjects and techniques. It seems likely that his publication of Sanctuary in 1931 reflects both an awareness of the public’s taste for the grotesque and a fairly extensive knowledge of the as a genre. His short story, “”(1924) clearly foreshadows Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho(1960).

That Faulkner’s sensibility tended to explore the boundaries of conventional society is evident from the early sketches which he contributed to the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1925, as it is in the list of psychological grotesques in his first novel Soldier’s Pay. In the creation of such characters as Donald Mahon, Margaret Powers, Cecily Saunders, and Januarius Jones, Faulkner was participating in the cultural rebellion of the ‘twenties against arbitrary restraints on artistic subject matter. Within the same period of cultural exploration, D.W. Griffith filmed Broken Blossoms as well as Intolerance, Mary Pickford acted the part of an orphan struggling for her freedom in Swallows, Erich Von Stroheim filmed Greed from Frank Norris’s novel McTeague, and Fritz Lang participated in German Expressionism’s revelation of aberrant psychology and behavior.

Closely connected with the grotesque and horror films was the genre of the detective or suspense thrillers. has a theme that could be and was exploited cinematically. As Faulkner wrote to his editor, the novel had “started out to be a simple quick 150 pages but jumped the traces,” and turned into “ a pretty good study of a sixteen year old boy who overnight became a man.”14 Though made into a successful film and though Faulkner agreed that Mr. Clarence Brown, the director, “knows his medium and he’s made a fine picture. I wish I had made it,”15 judging from these remarks we can assume that Faulkner found form and content inseparable. Yet, nine years after Intruder in the Dust was published, Faulkner described its inception thus: It began with the notion-- … man in jail just about to be hung would have to be his own detective, he couldn’t get anyone to help him. Then the next thought was, the man for that would be a Negro. Then the character of….Lucas Beauchamp came along…..he took charge of the story and the story was a good deal different from the idea….of the detective story that I had started with. 16

In saying that Lucas Beauchamp “took charge of the story,” Faulkner is more accurately describing the film. That he eventually read the 113-page scenario of the film and approved most of its scenes, changing a few others slightly, only revising the last scene considerably in an effort to make it less sentimental,17 also speaks of his faith in the genre. “Tomorrow,” one of the six stories in the collection Knight’s Gambit, all of which involves the detective figure Gavin Stevens, is told as a detective story. The narrator, Chick Mallison, Stevens’s nephew, begins by telling us that his lawyer uncle had only one case before he became Attorney twenty years ago. It was the Buck Thorpe murder case, and Stevens served as the counsel for the defense. When a mistral was declared, Chick accompanied his uncle into countryside to find out why Fentry refused to vote acquittal. Chick’s naivete serves as a foil to his uncle’s wisdom. That the story was adapted for the screen (in 1972, it was proclaimed as one of the year’s ten best films by WNBC18) as well as the stage speaks highly of Faulkner’s expertise in this genre.

Many critics have realized the sense in which Sanctuary is an anti-detective story. Some have recognized its indebtedness to the gangster novels and movies as well, which possessed the imagination of the mass audience in the era of Prohibition, bootlegging, and the Valentine Day Massacre. One clearly notices the affinities to that form; ending as it does with the expected, almost required death of the gangster-in-chief—and evoking along the way most of the stereotypes associated with the genre. From Popeye himself, to the standard crew who protect him and run his booze, to “the Jew lawyer from Memphis,” most of the criminal characters are stereotyped. According to Leslie Fiedler, few readers seem to realize that Sanctuary “includes a potpourri of almost all the popular genres of the late 1920s.” 19 Faulkner himself boasted in his introduction of having put into it everything that “a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends”— meaning probably not articles of high art but whatever was currently fashionable in well- paying slicks and pulp fiction. Notable among these was the tale of “Flaming Youth” or “Our Dancing Daughters,” immensely popular in a time when appalled parents stared across a widening generation gap at their jazz-age children - liberated by ‘coeducation,’ the automobile, and the sexual revolution. Certainly Temple Drake, whatever she finally becomes, enters the scene in the guise of a typical long-legged teenaged flapper, as played by Clara Bow or the young Joan Crawford. Similarly, Gowan Stevens is a standard college boy type, a callow youth who cannot hold his drinks and learns it the hard way.

Nathanael West, who incorporated many popular Hollywood elements into his work, is also known to have acknowledged the influence of Faulkner on his writing. Certain critics have pointed out the specific similarities between Sanctuary, Faulkner’s Hollywood novel, and The Day of the Locust (1939), West’s Hollywood novel, which significantly has Hollywood for its subject. In this novel, West describes the movie extra, Earle Shoop, thus:

Earle was a cowboy from a small town in Arizona. He worked occasionally in horse-operas and spent the rest of his time in front of a saddlery store on Sunset Boulevard….He had a two-dimensional face that a talented child might have drawn with a ruler and a compass. His chin was perfectly round and his eyes, which were wide apart, were also round. His thin mouth ran at right angles to his straight, perpendicular nose. His reddish tan complexion was the same color from hairline to throat, as though washed in by an expert, and it completed his resemblance to a mechanical drawing.20

In this description, West exaggerates a point of comparison between depthless portraiture in fiction and the geometric face of the Hollywood star. This geometry of Earle’s face is a comic abstraction of any number of American film types, such as those long gaunt oblongs of the protypical cowboy (from William S. Hart to Gary Cooper); or the face of the plump male comic (Harry Langdon, Oliver Hardy, W.C. Fields); or the wide-browed, sharp-jawed, inverted triangles of the gangster and the urban hard types ( James Cagney, Kirk Douglas); or the hourglass shapes of the dumb blondes and the femmes fatale (Jean Harlow, Mae West). Faulkner’s description of Popeye’s body, rigid and angular, with the “cigarette slanted from his chin,” his “slanted straw hat and his slightly akimbo arms,” seems part of the ritualized postures of the movie gangster. In this sense, I think it is important to realize that Sanctuary is Faulkner’s Hollywood novel, his first best-seller, the only one of his works to be filmed twice and the book that first brought him to the Hollywood studios where he worked on the screenplay that eventually became The Story of Temple Drake (1933), and was remade in 1961 as Sanctuary. The entire narrative surface of this novel seems to have been composed with a specifically American camera eye. Even the novel, The Wild Palms, written just after an extended stay in Hollywood by the author, is thick with allusions to both high and popular culture. The novel differs from Faulkner’s norms in its continual, almost obsessive references to artefacts of popular culture, from dance marathons to movies to popular fiction – romances, true confessions, westerns and detective stories.

During his stay at Hollywood, Faulkner worked with Howard Hawks a great deal and it is said that the director had discovered Faulkner’s talent as a “script doctor” and frequently called upon him to rework screenplays of other writers. As Bruce Kawin informs us, Hawks’ preoccupation with blindness, death, repetition, and the “two men and a girl” structure complemented Faulkner’s sense of history, love, glory, and sardonic humor in an uncanny and fortunate collaboration.21 Thus, though Faulkner might claim that he did not know the movie form and he did the hackwork of a scriptwriter to pay for his grocer, the relationship of William Faulkner and Hollywood is rather an intricate one. It must be also mentioned that though critics tend to neglect this area of his writing career as unimportant, it is necessary to understand his love/hate relationship with the cinematic medium to understand his complete oeuvre as a fiction writer.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Jeffrey J. Folks, “William Faulkner and the Silent Film,” Southern Quarterly 19: 3&4: Spr’ & Sum 1981: 171-82.

2 John Faulkner, My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence. New York: Trident, 1963. 93.

3 D. M. Murray, “Faulkner, Silent Comedies, and the Animated Cartoon,” Southern Humanities Review 9.3, Sum’75: 254.

4 William Faulkner, Mosquitoes. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. 75.

5 Kenneth W. Hepburn, “Faulkner’s Mosquitoes: A Poetic Turning Point,” Twentieth Century Literature 17, 1971: 22.

6 William Faulkner, New Orleans Sketches. Ed. Carvel Collins. New York: Random,1958. 101.

7 Joseph L. Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1974 I, 292.

8 William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether. New York: Random House, 1965. 21.

9 Mosquitoes, 253.

10 D.M. Murray. 242.

11 Blotner, “Faulkner in Hollywood.” 293.

12 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography. 323.

13 D.M.Murray. 243-5.

14 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography. 1252.

15 Interview given to Edwin Howard on 12 October, 1949 for Memphis Press-Scimitar. Quoted in Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust”: Novel Into Film. Regina K. Fadiman, Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P, 1978. 9.

16 William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-58. Eds. Gwynn & Blotner. 1959; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.141-42.

17 Regina Fadiman. 60.

18 Jack Barbera, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” Southern Culture 19: 3&4: Spr’ & Sum 1981:171-82.

19 Leslie Fiedler, “In Quest of Sanctuary”. Faulkner and Popular Culture .Tennessee: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 88-9. 1991.

20 Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust. The Complete Works of Nathanael West, New York, 1966.322-3.

21 Bruce Kawin, “William Faulkner,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Screenwriters (Second Series) 44 Ed. Randall Clark. Michigan, Gale Research Co. 125-26.