Tarnished Angels

"One I did see recently was my Pylon (The Tarnished Angels generally shellacked by reviewers). Thought it was pretty good, quite honest. But I'll have to admit I didn't recognize anything I put into it." (The book, not the script).—William Faulkner

FAULKNER'S SHADOW:

HOLLYWOOD, HEMINGWAY AND PYLON

If Absalom proves to be about the sins of the father, lines of descent, a society’s decline, and the burden of the Southern past, Pylon takes up the irrelevance of sin (not to mention fathers), lines of ascent, a society’s transformation, and a weightless future.—John T. Matthews

In mid-February 1934, William Faulkner attended an air show at the newly dedicated Shushan Airport in New Orleans, named after Colonel A. L. Shushan, president of the Levee Board. This was the era of Governor Huey Long, whose administration promoted the construction of high visibility projects that enhanced the profile of Louisiana and his own reputation as a politician who put people to work during the Depression while contributing to the progress that made modern life comfortable. Faulkner had little interest in Long. The governor's life could not be the basis of a great novel. But the consequences of a regime that conjoined commerce and politics and cut corrupt deals, afterwards staging celebrations purported to be for the public good, agitated an author who had become part of a Hollywood no less self-promoting and venal than Long's Louisiana.

The Shushan layout may have reminded Faulkner of a movie set. The airport had two large hangars not so different from sound stages, and a tower with murals commemorating the history of flight in high relief depictions of airplanes and their daring pilots. And like a Hollywood studio emblazoning its logo, the airport had Shushan's name or his initials inserted in every available spot. In short, if you wanted to see the show, you had to put up with the advertising. And Faulkner was there for the show, indulging his keen interest in barnstorming pilots who had already appeared in two of his stories, "Death Drag" and "Honor." He had organized his own local air shows, and flying was a Faulkner business, taken up by his brothers Murry, John, and Dean. The very idea of flight had captivated all of them since that day Faulkner had convinced them they could make their own air machine. That their dreams had crashed into a ditch did not dissuade them from pursuing the lift that flying always offered. And crashing, after all, was part of the excitement.

The Shushan show did not disappoint. Milo Burcham, defied the rainy weather and demonstrated why he was the world champion at upside down flying, The famous Michel de Troyat, on a calmer day, performed his air acrobatics, as did Clem Sohn, jumping from ten thousand feet with a flour sack he emptied to mark his descent. After some near miss collisions and a forced landing, a pilot and parachute jumper plunged to their deaths in Lake Ponchartrain. In one case, the body could not be found; in another, no relatives could be located for the nomadic airman.

Faulkner first thought the show could be the basis for a popular story, "This Kind of Courage," which his agent, Morton Goldman, submitted to Scribner's on May 10,1934. But by mid-October, Faulkner asked Goldman to send the story back to him because "I'm now writing a novel out of it." Why not publish the story and write the novel? Faulkner did not say. It never troubled him to re-use and adapt published material, but perhaps he had no other copy to work with. At any rate, he had discovered more in the story and wrote it just about as quickly—in about two months—as As I Lay Dying. Why the urgency? Especially since he was already hard at work on Absalom, Absalom!

Faulkner's own explanation is that Absalom, Absalom! had stalled, and he needed the relief that writing a different kind of novel provided. With Pylon, he could dispense with the genealogy of his characters fraught with the intricacies of a narrative overwhelmed by the eruption of the past in the present. Faulkner's flyers—Roger, Laverne, and Jack—have, for most of the novel, no past. Their lives seem the work of happenstance. Their mechanic, Jiggs, is an unreliable alcoholic who is nevertheless devoted to them, which is all they seem to require.

The novel's center of consciousness—always referred to as "the Reporter"—is not even given a name. He is drawn to the aviators because they are so alive in the air. On the ground, their lives seem rootless and sordid. Roger and Jack share Laverne, who is married to Roger because he won the roll of the dice with Jack. Laverne is not troubled that she does not know which man fathered her child. She is, as Dardis observes, like the tough talking women — Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday and "Feathers" in Rio Bravo— that populate Hawks's later films.

Faulkner's treatment of the Reporter is original and yet probably based on Hermann Deutsch, a thin, tall journalist with a shambling gait that Faulkner transformed into his shambolic, skeletal character. The novelist spent a good deal of time in Deutsch's company, watching the journalist carry around on his shoulders a little boy who belonged to one of the aviators. Out of this meager material, Faulkner conceived of the Reporter who becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the flyers he comes almost to worship because they seem solely intent on their air missions, so to speak. They are, in Cleanth Brooks's words, "hooked on speed." The are adventurers and likened to "immigrants walking down the steerage gangplank of a ship." They are refugees hazarding a trip into what was still then the new world of flight. They no longer have a secure place, a home to which they could return "even if it's just only to hate the damn place good and comfortable for a day or two"—as Faulkner seemed to do when he arrived in Oxford after his days in Hollywood.

The Reporter appears like an allegorical figure, almost like a ghost in a medieval mystery play. In the popular imagination, especially as it was fed by movies like I Cover the Waterfront (1931), the journalist is usually self-sufficient and cynical, manipulating the woman he loves and willing to do whatever it takes to get the story, which often involves corruption and solving a crime or a criminal conspiracy. The journalist is like H. Joseph Miller (Ben Lyon) in I Cover the Waterfront or Hildy Johnson (Pat O'Brien) in The Front Page. Both journalists are humanized and redeemed by beautiful women, who bring out the reporter' qualms about newspaper work. In fact, in Miller's case, he is a budding novelist—a sure sign that morally he is better than most crass reporters.

Faulkner forgoes the Hollywood sin and redemption scenario with characters who never do follow a conventional moral compass and are not bound by any community's standards of propriety. This air crew belongs nowhere and everywhere. It does not matter where they go so long as they can perform their show. By one definition, these are free spirits, not bound by any rules except those of the air races funded by capitalists like Colonel H. I. Feinman, Faulkner's version of Colonel A. L. Shushan. To emphasize the impurity of Feinman's power, he is identified as chairman of the Sewage Board. He is, in effect, the lord of a landfill, since the airport rests on reclaimed lake bottom. Ironically, the press treat Roger, Laverne, and Jack with fascination and scorn while spending not a moment inquiring into how the airport got built or what purpose the air race show fulfills in Feinman's master plan that includes stamping F all over his property.

Only the Reporter believes the story is the air crew itself, not just their antics in the air. He is fascinated with how they live apart from the society they entertain. They seem to find it enough to be with one another. They work together as one unit, although Jack has a temper he expresses by kicking Jiggs, and Roger—even more than the others—lives to fly. Even as he expects to survive, he never discounts the risks of death. The Reporter alone sees these characters as admirable—in part because he is a Prufrock, afraid to bring the moment to its crisis, to confess his love for Laverne and for what the flyers represent to him. As the Reporter, he is a passive observer. He is repeatedly described as a scarecrow and a cadaver, one of the walking dead in T. S. Eliot's unreal wasteland city, one of the poet's impotent hollow men.

Faulkner is careful to provide almost no details about the Reporter's life save for the mention of a thrice married mother who does not care for her son. He is, in short, as deracinated as the flyers. But lurid newspaper ink circumscribes his world: "In the driver’s seat there lay folded a paper: one of the colored ones, the pink or the green editions of the diurnal dogwatches, with a thick heavy typesplattered front page filled with ejaculations and pictures." This is the mediated world of print culture, one that Faulkner had absorbed while hanging around newspaper offices in New Orleans writing his sketches of the city, transmogrified in the novel into New Valois, the name of a French royal line, and a fitting irony for the tawdry city's aggrandizement of itself. Using journalistic jargon like "dogwatches" evokes the environs of journalism, but the novelist's compounded neologisms like "typesplattered" create a vocabulary that vitiates the Reporter's profession. The stories journalists tell are a sensationalistic mess.

The factitious Feinman Airport opening is presided over by a disembodied amplified voice, "apocryphal, sourceless, inhuman." The newspaper office is similarly disquieting, a room right out of a film noir, with "down funneled light" from the editor's desk lamp. Journalism would not be depicted in such dim surroundings until the release of Citizen Kane (1941). In the hermetic "dusty gloom," the editor expresses a frustration with the Reporter that many readers of the novel have also experienced:

You have an instinct for events . . . If you were turned into a room with a hundred people you never saw before and two of them were destined to enact a homicide, you would go straight to them as crow to carrion; you would be there from the very first: you would be the one to run out and borrow a pistol from the nearest policeman for them to use. Yet you never seem to bring back anything but information. Oh you have that, all right, because we seem to get everything that the other papers do and we haven’t been sued yet and so doubtless it’s all that anyone should expect for five cents and doubtless more than they deserve. But it’s not the living breath of news. It’s just information. It’s dead before you even get back here with it.

Like the new journalists Tom Wolfe first touted in the 1960s, the Reporter becomes part of the events and people he covers, latching on to just those characters that appeal to newspaper readers. But then he is unable to go beyond recording what they say to him. He cannot, in other words, turn his reports into stories, the "living breath of the news." But what the Reporter wants to do cannot be contained within a newspaper article, any more than Faulkner felt his talent could be fully articulated in movie scripts or stories for popular magazines. As Jay Parini points out, Faulkner's "anxieties about his place in the world—as an artist and Reporter on life, as a man subjected to the wiles of larger economic forces, as a frustrated novelist unable to focus entirely on his major vision—seem reflected in the figure of the Reporter, who tellingly has no name. He is, in a sense, Faulkner’s shadow . . . " In his psychological reading of the novel, Frederick Karl detects an inner disturbance: "The entire fantasy world Faulkner had created about himself from the war divides him here."

Faulkner's anomie is akin to the flyers who are confined to stunts and have neither the equipment nor the venue to show just how good they are. Journalism is a dead end for the Reporter, and the editor explains, "patiently, almost kindly," why:

The people who own this paper or who direct its policies or anyway who pay the salaries, fortunately or unfortunately I shant attempt to say, have no Lewises or Hemingways or even Tchekovs on the staff: one very good reason doubtless being that they do not want them, since what they want is not fiction, not even Nobel Prize fiction, but news.

Hemingway, like the other writers the editor names, ultimately worked for himself, for the cause of literature alone, which can never be the province of newspapers. As Joseph Fruscione observes, both Faulkner and Hemingway wanted to be "the author of their milieu." The Reporter, on the other hand, can never own his story, or root himself, as Hemingway and Faulkner did, in their work. The flyers, in other words, seek fulfillment only in flight, but are bound, nevertheless, to paymasters who determine when they can fly. Hemingway, fully established as a novelist by 1935, when Pylon was published, might continue to write for the newspapers but only as their special correspondent, hired precisely because of his name. And of course he never did have to work a day in Hollywood.

In the popular imagination, as depicted in The Front Page and I Cover the Waterfront , the conflict is between the wayward reporter and his disciplinarian editor. Seldom, until Meet John Doe (1941) did Hollywood take on newspaper owners. But in Pylon, the editor could just as well be a Hollywood producer advising Faulkner to stay within the conventional boundaries of a script. And the Reporter's reaction, like Faulkner's, is to drink and subside into silence rather than engage any more deeply in the corporate culture that enmeshes him. The editor is like Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon lecturing the recalcitrant writer about how to make movies. News, the editor implies, is not a narrative of lives and events per se but an account of a certain set of circumstances:

[W]hat I am paying you to bring back here is not what you think about somebody out there nor what you heard about somebody out there nor even what you saw: I expect you to come in here tomorrow night with an accurate account of everything that occurs out there tomorrow that creates any reaction excitement or irritation on any human retina; if you have to be twins or triplets or even a regiment to do this, be so.

The newspaper reader has to get it all in one gulp, one documented day, in a you are there drama. Of course, the repressed Reporter romanticizes the flyers, who fascinate him because of their uninhibited sex lives, which the reporter as voyeur watches—but not with the journalist's practiced passivity. He yearns to be one of them, just as Faulkner coveted the role of war pilot, which his Hollywood buddy, Lawrence Stallings, accorded him in a review of Pylon. Hemingway liked this novel, probably because, as one reviewer put it, "these reckless nomads of the air are not essentially different from the graceful toreadors that court death so beautifully in the pages of Hemingway." Hemingway may also have been intrigued by one of the novel's closing scenes, in which we learn that Roger Schmann is the son of a small town Ohio doctor who lived the kind of predictable, risk-averse life that Hemingway's father pursued. The Reporter, emanating from that dim newspaper office and the grind of a reporter's routines, gravitates to the open spaces that the deracinated Roger, Laverne, and Jack navigate with aplomb. The air is their world elsewhere come to grief on the wasted ground of New Valois.

Like Hemingway's doomed heroes and heroines, the flyers forsake bourgeois values and live for their own sakes. They are willing to risk everything to pursue a society of their own. Faulkner, no less than Hemingway, realizes that such an uncompromising sense of self results in tragedy because of their human fallibility which is caught up modern mechanisms over which they cannot exert complete control. Even in the air this liberated trio is fixated on those pylons that enforce the boundaries of the racers' route. Roger flying first an inferior, then a dangerously experimental plane, bests his competitors but in the end crashes because the drunken Jiggs has not performed all of the necessary maintenance. Their flawed teamwork contributes to their fate as much as Feinman's machinations. Pylon is not a parable of economic determinism. Faulkner's characters are too implicated in their own destiny to attribute their actions to forces outside themselves. Faulkner might rail against Hollywood, but he never forgot he chose to be there to pick up the check.

In the novel's closing chapters, the journalists cluster together to chew over the crash story, just like they do in countless newspaper movies—most memorably in Citizen Kane, a film Pylon anticipates by layering together reporters, editors, and their corporate masters. Unlike the star reporters in Hollywood dramas, Faulkner's reporter is hardly a hero. What he discovers makes him I'll. "I could vomit too," one of the journalists says to the Reporter, "But what the hell? He aint our brother." The irony, of course, is that the Reporter wants to write about his brotherly feeling for Roger. When the Reporter says "you dont understand," he might as well quote Prufrock's lament that it is impossible to say just what he means.

The Reporter's final effort to tell the story ends up in fragments the copyboy picks out of a wastebasket. Like an embryonic editor or budding scholar experiencing his first joy in deciphering an unpublished manuscript, the copyboy—bright, ambitious, and with a literary sensibility—pastes together the fragments which "he believed to be not only news but the beginning of literature." After a bald summary of Roger's crash, the reporter observes that the pilot's "competitor was Death." Acknowledging Roger's honorable end—he deliberately steered his plummeting plane away from the people below—his two rivals circle the spot where he disappeared. "Two friends, yet two competitors too, whom he had met in fair contest and conquered it the lonely sky from which he fell, dropping a simple wreath to mark his Last Pylon." Less florid than the narrator of Flags in the Dust, the reporter nevertheless ennobles the aviators as knights of the air in a scene reminiscent of the romantic salute to war pilots in Wings (1927)—and also in the florid prose of Hermann Deutsch, who wrote about the dead aviator as "a gay cavalier of the skies " whose ashes are scattered from "scudding clouds," the remains of a man with "pulsing tissues" that had "once formed a living part" that had "49-43: clouded in the fine tingle of zestful living." It is not hard to imagine Faulkner's scorn for such bogus literary effects.

Reporters in Hollywood films—like H. Joseph Miller in I Cover the Waterfront—are often aspiring novelists, chafing at the constraints of journalism, or playwrights like Stu Smith in Platinum Blonde (1931) seeking to evade the daily grind of the news. That they overcome the limitations of the trade and also, of course, win their lady loves, is precisely what Faulkner's novel contradicts as it shows how deeply mired the Reporter is in events that he cannot surmount through literature. Thus the copyboy spots another draft on the editor's desk, a draft that is factual, detailed, specifying time, place, and outcome, but not the reporter's personal response: "At midnight last night the search for the body of Roger Shumann, racing pilot who plunged into the lake Saturday p.m. was finally abandoned by a threeplace biplane of about eighty horsepower which managed to fly out over the water and return without falling to pieces and dropping a wreath of flowers into the water approximately three quarters of a mile away from where Shumann's body is generally supposed to be since they were precision pilots and so did not miss the entire lake." Of this version, the reporter comments in a penciled note to the editor: "I guess this is what you want you bastard . . ." The reporter's last words are directions to where he will be getting drunk, and where the editor can come with cash to pay for the drinks. This disgust with the higher-ups is typical of movie journalists who delight in charging whatever they can to their bosses.

It is not surprising that Faulkner wanted to sell the novel to Howard Hawks. It contains crucial elements of their earlier collaborations: a love triangle in the fraught world of flyers. Tom Dardis goes far as to argue that Pylon is an homage to Hawks. It is action story resembling the director's Ceiling Zero and Only Angels Have Wings. Faulkner's characters exhibit, Dardis notes, "all of the typical Hawksian virtues of professional competence before danger, combined with stoical endurance, qualities equally esteemed by Faulkner." That the Reporter can only observe these taciturn figures from the outside is of course consonant with what the camera can capture. The Reporter is, so the speak, the camera eye.

Why Hawks did not buy Faulkner's pitch is not clear, but as producer Darryl Zanuck used to say, a movie had to develop a rooting interest for the hero, and neither the Reporter nor Roger Shumann invite that kind of empathy, or exude the kind of charm that would make them, or characters based on them, attractive. Of course, Hawks could have had the novel rewritten, but under the new production code that was coming into full force in 1935, the sexual innuendo in The Front Page (1931) was impermissible. By having Roger and Laverne copulate in mid air Faulkner goes well beyond anything the masterful Hawks could confect by way of bypassing the Breen office. In fact, just then Hawks was going through elaborate rewrites on Barbary Coast because the film linked prostitution and gambling. So the scene in Pylon after Roger Sherman's death could not be filmed without radical revision, which would also have needed the backing of a studio boss like Sam Goldwyn, willing to resist the kind of sanitization Breen demanded:

While you are supposing,” the fourth [reporter] said, “what do you suppose his wife was thinking about?” “That’s easy,” the first said. “She was thinking, ‘Thank God I carry a spare’.” They did not laugh; the reporter heard no sound of laughter, sitting quiet and immobile on his beer-case while the cigarette smoke lifted in the unwinded stale air and broke about his face, streaming on, and the voices spoke back and forth with a sort of brisk dead slap-slap-slap like that of the cards. “Do you suppose it’s a fact that they were both laying her?” the third said. “That’s not news,” the first said. “But how about the fact that Shumann knew it too? Some of these mechanics that have known them for some time say they dont even know who the kid belongs to.”

This portrayal of cynical journalist and their joking about sex, rampant in pre-code pictures, could not be shown—even with the chastising comment that followed:

“You bastards,” the second [reporter] said. “You dirtymouthed bastards. Why dont you let the guy rest? Let them all rest. They were trying to do what they had to do, with what they had to do it with, the same as all of us only maybe a little better than us. At least without squealing and bellyaching.”

The word bastard would never have made it to the screen. Malcolm Cowley thought Pylon was constructed like a play:

The characters are easy to recognize: every time they walk on the stage, the author identifies them by phrases that have the same function as the catch lines or gestures of actors doing character bits. Thus, the reporter is known by his flapping coat, Jiggs the mechanic by his bouncing walk, and Laverne by her "savage mealcolored hair."

But Cowley's description, including his mention of the "quick, sharp, condensed" action is as applicable to a shooting script. Critics have complained about the lack of character development in the novel, but that is to measure Pylon by standards Faulkner is not observing in a work that does not probe motivation. In the hands of deft actors bringing to life the faces, gestures, and movements of his characters, Pylon might well succeed better on the screen than on the page. Peter Lurie calls the novel's basic elements—"the courageous pilots, the love triangle, and the boldface 'headlines'" used in Faulkner's own screenplays—"Hollywood fodder." The absence of other salable features, however, argues for a more ambitious novel-cum-film. "Pylon evokes Weine's classic German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," Susie Paul Johnson observes: "As the reporter appears for the first time, the narrator describes the way the other characters 'were now looking at something which had apparently crept from a doctor's cupboard and, in the snatched garments of an etherized patient in a charity ward, escaped into the living world." Faulkner's anti-realism in such passages countermands the journalistic imperative to record and document. So often in Pylon journalists resort to their lurid imaginations when are stymied by what they cannot see when Roger, Laverne, and Jack are offscreen, so to speak. As Bruce Kawin concludes, the novel is "a story trying to tell a story," and such films are rare in Hollywood and evoke the kind of hostile reactions Orson Welles had to confront after the release of Citizen Kane. The Reporter himself pivots between elite and popular culture. He is the "sensitive go-between . . . alternately the tough, alert reporter of the American newspaper tradition or his more detached, urbane, Eliotic contemporary." That kind of oscillation has perplexed certain readers of a novel Hollywood would have been hard put to homogenize. Without a clear denouement, separating fact from fantasy, the novel-cum-film founders. Even the ambiguous Citizen Kane required an RKO resolution, a Rosebud. And yet in 1958, Universal International released The Tarnished Angels, a film directed by Douglas Sirk and starring Robert Stack as Roger Shumann, Jack Carson as Jiggs, Dorothy Malone as Laverne, and Rock Hudson as the Reporter. Bruce Kawin scorns the adaptation—as did most reviewers—calling it "sentimental garbage," although he observes that Hudson is "more complex and interesting than the part as written." He also praises Malone, but deplores Carson's role as an "impossible combination of Jiggs and Jack." Kawin does not argue that casting a movie star like Hudson destroys the very conception of Faulkner's frail Reporter, who has no name and looks nothing like the handsome Hudson. "Sirk has no choice," it has been argued, "but to glamorize Faulkner's pathetic trio, whereas in the novel, the glamour, invisible to all under the tawdry exterior, emerged only through the newspaperman's insight into the characters' lives. These limitations, however, are only the medium's limitations. They do not prevent the film from succeeding on its own terms, or, for that matter, from being by far the best screen version of a Faulkner novel." Robert Stack is so convincing as the tough—even menacing— Roger, who pushes around the hunky yet sensitive Jack Carson—that Hudson's yearning, tentative pursuit of Malone is persuasive. Hudson is grounded by doubts that never bother Shumann, and wisely the film does not allow Hudson to fly with Shumann, as he does in the novel. Carson's character is the perfect, economical solution to a film that cannot risk talking on extra scenes that would include Jack. Carson becomes, as he so often was in decades of film, the wise-cracking, worldly, but also, sometimes, the empathetic complement to the hero. Jiggs fixes airplanes and, broadly speaking, fixes things between Roger and Laverne. He is the their go-between, which is to say the film develops its own emotional logic and truth, even if Roger and Laverne talk too much about their feelings, as they never do in Pylon, and even if Laverne, at the Reporter's urging returns to her Midwest home with not a hint that she will relinquish her child to Roger's father. Kawin admits that in some respects the film is remarkably faithful to Faulkner's novel, yet the critic dismisses Laverne's reading of Willa Cather's My Antonia, as just a cheap ploy to signal her return to her "lost Midwestern innocence." The novel, one of Sirk's favorites, is, in fact, an inspired choice. Faulkner voiced his esteem for Cather many times, early and late in his career, and her work is more than a sentimental trope in the picture. Laverne is another one of Faulkner's displaced characters, lured away from the land in The Tarnished Angels by a poster of Roger Schumann, World War I ace. She has literally lost the ground on which she once walked and comes back to earth only in her parachute jumping. Faulkner probably read enough of Cather to recognize a kindred spirit, who understood his own dilemma—that of a man very much a part of the modern world, of show business, in a manner of speaking, yearning for home. Sirk could have had in mind passages like the one in which Jim Burden, My Antonia's narrator, longs for the bold and free-spirited Antonia and the prairie world he has left behind:

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

Reading My Antonia after watching The Tarnished Angels, and remembering how the beautifully coiffed golden blonde Malone descends in her Marilyn Monroe, Seven Year Itch white dress, blowing up around her white undergarments, is one of those moments when Faulkner and Hollywood coalesce. Monroe and Malone, Nike-like figures and cynosures, return to earth, I scratched and innocent, although in Malone's case, she is mimicking the narrator of My Antonia: "As I remember it, My Antonia is a novel about circularity; the hero comes back to the place that he started out from," Sirk told an interviewer. Although the circularity of Pylon is problematic, since Laverne leaves her son behind in Ohio while moving on to an uncertain future, it does not seem too much to say, as Glenn Kenny does, that the film honors the novel. Since its release The Tarnished Angels has steadily risen in the estimation of critics and has even been regarded as one of Sirk's "masterworks." Sirk himself called it "perhaps, after all . . . my best film." He had wanted to adapt Faulkner's novel since Sirk's early years in the German film industry. Sirk, born Hans Detlef Sierck just three years after Faulkner, arrived in the United States in 1939 and experienced the Depression firsthand, making it the subject of one of Stack's terse speeches when he upbraids Carson for buying an expensive pair of boots when they don't even have a place to stay. Hudson immediately offers his apartment to these refugees, whose homelessness obviously spoke directly to the deracinated Sirk. Faulkner's fiction is full of wanderers from Quentin Compson, Joe Christmas and Lena Grove to Lucius Priest and Ned McCaslin—all of whom experience disequilibrium and discomposure that so often dogged Faulkner away from home. They are his emigrés. James Harvey observes that The Tarnished Angels is the "closest thing to an art movie he [Sirk] ever got to make at Universal," a studio better known for its horror and science fiction films. Next to Howard Hawks, no director in Hollywood had a greater reverence for Faulkner's work or a sensibility receptive to what many of Faulkner's American critics consider one of his weakest works. Sirk does not seem to have consulted Faulkner, and there is no record of contact between them, but Faulkner sees to have recognized their affinity when he called The Tarnished Angels "pretty good, quite honest." Since he did not elaborate, a critic can only surmise what he meant. The film captures much of the novel's bleakness, especially in the way, it intercuts the gawdy—even sinister—Mardi Gras scenes, emphasizing a society besotted with masking and dumb shows that make the heroism of Roger Schumann into just another carnival appearance. His World War I exploits are revered but also made into a poster, so that he becomes a prop of fandom, so to speak. Not surprisingly, though, Faulkner drew a line between the film and his book, saying of the former "I'll have to admit I didn't recognize anything I put into it." Sirk would not have objected, admitting that he had to "unFaulknerize" the film. Presumably the director had in mind the requirement to make the characters explain themselves, so that even the taciturn Stack tells Malone he loves her just before taking off in the plane that will crash and end his life. In Pylon, Roger and Laverne are unable or unwilling to express themselves because they are the antithesis of the world the Reporter wants to put into words. They elude the explicit. After so many jobs of work in Hollywood, Faulkner understood the possibilities and limitations of popular cinema, just he had mastered the art of writing popular magazine stories, conflating, as David M. Earle puts it, "modernism and pulpism." Judging by Faulkner's response to The Tarnished Angels, he realized better than reviewers and academics how his work arose out of both elitist and popular sources. If he drew distinctions between his novels, screen work, and adaptations of his novels, he did not ignore their synchronicity. With Pylon, after all, he had Howard Hawks in mind. If the novel was not made to order for Hollywood, it had—as all critics agree—the basic elements, especially the love triangle he had worked out in earlier Hawks films. And Faulkner himself had done his share of Hollywood reductionism to suit the demands of the film medium, as he implied when mentioning, for example, his work on To Have and Have Not, which Faulkner called Hemingway's worst novel. If Pylon has not been deemed Faulkner's worst novel, it has certainly been ranked well below his greatest achievements. A far more confident man and writer than Hemingway, Faulkner does not seem to have been bothered by those who treated his work as a property to be exploited, or that he might exploit himself—for, yes, the money, but also, I think, out of a never explicitly expressed desire to impress his themes on the world at large using many different media and platforms. He might appear to be shy in public and reticent, speaking in that hushed soft patter, if he spoke at all, and yet he served in the role of writer as ambassador that Hemingway, for all his cultivation of a public image, did not. Those later diplomatic junkets to Japan and Greece, Faulkner holding court at the University of Virginia and West Point, were part of his work and became a part of his persona. Surely he did not have to go to work for Howard Hawks on Land of the Pharaohs. By 1955, his income was assured. He could say he was doing a favor for an old friend, but Hawks could not have been desperate for Faulkner's services. Hemingway who never deigned to work for the Hollywood he disdained while cashing its checks, would surely have regarded working on a movie after the award of a Nobel Prize as demeaning. Howard Hawks said Hemingway told him "he didn't know whether he could be a good writer of movies." Although Hawks's testimony has been challenged, it seems reasonable to suppose that the highly competitive Hemingway would have been concerned about perceptions of him as a Hollywood hack—just one of those schmucks with typewriters that Jack Warner dismissed and humiliated as he did with Faulkner. In 1932, both writers were offered short term contracts to write for the movies. Only Faulkner accepted. He did worry about Hollywood stunting his style, but never, it seems, about how others might devalue his work because he wrote for Hollywood. Faulkner, it appears, could look on his stints in Hollywood as just that—stints that could not bring down the house of Faulkner that even early as 1932 had become impregnable. As Leonard Leff reminds us, Faulkner "threaded his way through the slicks," and even published in The Woman's Home Companion whereas Hemingway feared his appearance in such a magazine would be regarded as a sell out. Faulkner was very much a part of the commercial world that his flyers have to navigate in Pylon. He cared about great writing just as they devoted themselves to great flying. He deplored his periods of indenture to Hollywood, but even hack work became a modest point of pride and even pleasure. "I had me some fun," he told an interviewer, and even admitted to enjoying the "technical aspects of production." And he was not camera-shy, as is sometimes supposed when he is compared with the self-promoting Hemingway. Faulkner could tell his agent, "Don't tell the bastards anything," but such a comment reflected a writer who wanted to be in charge of when and where he became a public spectacle whereas the bragging Hemingway liked to take on all comers. Faulkner's seeming imperviousness to the corruption that Hollywood and the slicks were supposed to exert on a writer's reputation dogged Hemingway like his own shadow and perhaps even infuriated him, which is perhaps why Hemingway implied that Faulkner did not know what was good for him. I can imagine Howard Hawks saying, "Bill, I know you don't need the money now, but I'd appreciate your helping me out on this Land of the Pharaohs. And we might have us some fun." Was it for old time's sake? How could Faulkner resist making Pharaohs talk like Southern plantation owners? This was, after all, a world class novelist who said at MGM that he had an idea for a Mickey Mouse cartoon. That remark is sometimes brought up as a joke or to show how little Faulkner knew about who owned the rights to the rodent. But ignorance or naïveté seem doubtful to me, since Walt Disney was already a highly celebrated Hollywood figure, and Faulkner did go to the movies and had his favorites like Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and High Noon. Like the Reporter, Faulkner was fascinated by those ungrounded pilots who could seem like characters in a movie, unreal and yet palpably alive, figments of the imagination who remain, nevertheless, their own selves that neither the Reporter nor the novelist can quite fathom.

DMU Timestamp: August 05, 2016 15:53