Conan the Literarian

I’ve "Quixoted" you to death this week, so today, a “did you know” celebrity fun-fact for a change of pace.

Fact #1: Conan O’Brien is in Atlanta shooting sketches for a series of Atlanta-based shows to be aired during Final Four week (The Final Four is in Atlanta this year).

Fact #2: The company I work for sponsors Conan’s show, and by the fortuitous whim of some corporate sponsorship genius, he was scheduled to drop by for a townhall meeting Wednesday.

Fact #3: I was among the lucky attendees at said townhall (lightning fast email responses pay dividends)

Fact #4: Conan is hilarious. Some of you may not like that fact, but it’s true.

Fact#5, revealed at the townhall, also known as the Celebrity Fun-Fact: While at Harvard Mr. O’Brien authored a thesis titled “Literary Progeria in the Works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.” Here are a couple excerpts:

“The American South has undergone such a period of self-examination in the early and mid-20th century known as the Southern Literary Renaissance. During the Renaissance, historians, fiction writers, and sociologists began to search for a sense of regional character by sorting through the stories, ideals, legalisms and codes of the Southern experience. The search invariably forced these intellectuals to decide which visions of the Old South to keep, which to abandon, and which to re-write. The answers have varied widely but the essential question has remained the same: How should the South's notion of what it was determine its new identity? The purpose of this thesis is not to find the answer but to examine the power and prevalence of the question.

“W.J. Cash argues that the South is a child, indulging itself with comfortable myths of innocence, while C. Van Woodward maintains the South is a pre-maturely aged region, stripped of its childhood legends by a series of bitter, awakening defeats. Although they disagree, both men associate the South's old myths with the metaphor of childhood. This image seems appropriate because children need to forge a sense of self and they rely heavily on myths for spiritual sustenance. In their years of rapid growth children thirst for beliefs and ideals as a foundation for their newly-forming identity.… “I have found that several Southern Renaissance writers have articulated their regional sense of contradiction through what I have termed literary progeria. Progeria is an often fatal disease that strikes children and ages them pre-maturely. In the works of several Southern writers the child protagonist becomes "old" long before his time because he is tormented by the same anxiety over myth which troubles Cash and Woodward. In an effort to construct an identity the child is drawn to past myths and builds the foundation of his character on archaic beliefs. The result is that this child caries the vast experience of these myths as burden; he or she becomes an "old child" who tries unsuccessfully to reconcile his elderly identity with the modern world. I have found variations of the "old child" who tries unsuccessfully (sic) to reconcile his elderly identity with the modern world. I have found variations of the "old child" symbol in Katherine Anne Porter's _Pale Horse, Pale Rider _ as well as in Caron McCuller's _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ and _A Member of the Wedding_, but these authors do not explore the symbol extensively enough to establish its characteristics and thematic significance. Both William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor do develop the "old child" symbol extensively, however, and although they differ in their specific fictional concerns it is clear that the image emanates from similar regional instinct. Each author places the "old child" in the center of generational argument over the value of past myths and the child, unable to reconcile opposing views, represents experience and thus an anguished state of conflicting loyalties. The extreme generational attitudes towards myth resemble the same extremes Cash and Woodward delineate in their argument over the South's relation to the past. The myth Faulkner's children turn to is the myth of the Old South and his "old children" suffer from a spiritual progeria. O'Connor adds a second layer of significance to the symbol by incorporating the myth of Christian redemption and this increased complexity produces in her children both a spiritual _and_ a physical progeria which borders on the freakish.”

A Few More Flicks for Oscar Week

Some other book-to-film quick hits:

The Sound and the Fury, 1959

Starring Yule Brynner and Joanne Woodward, this may be one of the worst adaptations known to man. It’s been a long, long time since I waded through Faulkner’s masterpiece, but even after almost twenty years I could immediately see that the film version bears little resemblance to the book. Remember that Stream of Consciousness section told from the perspective of Benjy that you hated in high school? Good news! None of it made it onto the silver screen. The section about Quentin away at school? That’s not there either. The section about Dilsey, the black servant? Nope. The only portion of the book they even tried to cover was the drama between Jason and Quentin (Caddy’s daughter, not her brother.) And it’s a pretty boring movie to boot.

Tender is the Night, 1962

Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones play Dick and Nicole Diver in this so-so adaptation of Fitzgerald’s famous novel. The film gets kudos for following the main arc of the story, from meeting Rosemary Hoyt on the beach and the Divers’ many parties to the couple’s eventual break-up and the slow doling out of their backstory. But there was so much left out, that will really bother readers who wanted a faithful adaptation. And you don’t get a full sense of the “fall” of Dick Diver as his wife gains mental health and independence. That dynamic is what makes the story so interesting in the first place. Psychiatrist saves/marries his patient, then descends into a kind of madness himself.

Atlas Shrugged (Part I), 2011

I’ll say up front that I liked the idea of bringing this story into the modern day (as a reader I was always a little thrown by clunky terms like “inter-office communicator” that hadn’t yet been shortened to “intercom” when Ayn Rand wrote her book. But the fact railroads still remain the focus of Dagny’s struggle kind of defeats the purpose of modernizing it. I generally liked the casting of Taylor Schilling as Dagny and Grant Bowler as Hank Reardon (pictured above), but this thing is low-budget, and you can tell. It got slammed by critics, though I think that was bound to happen even if Martin Scorsese had been behind the project. It was generally pretty true to the first part of the book, and I’d probably check out parts II and III if I ever got the chance.

What They Were Reading: William Faulkner

INTERVIEWER

Do you read your contemporaries?

FAULKNER

No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don Quixote—I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac—he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so often that I don't always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.

-from the Art of Fiction No. 12

The Writer's Voice: Bill "Pappy" Faulkner

Few literary voices are as hard for me to reconcile with the author’s actual speaking voice as William Faulkner’s. 

How could the man who penned lines like these, sound like a character right out of the Andy Griffith show? His readers may call him William, and his friends may have called him Bill, but after listening to that folksy, high-pitched twang,  I feel like we should all just call him “Pappy.”

H.L. Mencken Steps In It

In 1917, H.L.  Mencken published an essay about what he saw as the abject, cultural wasteland of the American South, titled “The Sahara of the Bozart-” Bozart being a low-brow play on the term ‘beaux-arts.’ You can read the whole thing here. Now, there are a whole host of things one could say about his wacky racial theories (Anglo-Saxon blood is apparently best, Celtic blood the worst, with Blacks and Frenchmen somewhere in the middle), but I’ll just pick out a few choice lines from the essay to give you the gist of his argument:

“Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.”

“There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac;”

“Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancient regime: a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.”

“There is a state (Georgia) with more than half the area of Italy and more population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.”

He sure doesn’t pull any punches. But one of the chief risks of being an arrogant, condescending blowhard, is the possibility that the object of your scorn might just turn around and prove you to be an idiot.

As it turned out, the timing of Mencken’s essay coincided with a Southern literary renaissance that would make any region of the world envious. Writers like William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Kathryn Anne Porter were already hard at work and would come to share 6 Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize between them. The “Fugitive” poets at Vanderbilt University were emerging at the same time. And this early group would inspire a follow-on generation of southern writers like Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, William Styron, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Kennedy Toole. (Not too shabby, South!)

But speaking of tools, Mencken was no dummy. Rather than claiming he had been wrong when reprinting his famous essay, he simply prefaced it with this audacious claim: “there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do with that revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920 's.”

I’m  not buying it, but well-played Mr. Mencken. Well-played.

The Writer's Gene

Yesterday’s post got us thinking about literary lineage. Not influence, mind you, but writers who actually beget other writers. In my five minutes of looking around, it appears to be more common than you’d think. Perhaps there’s a “writer’s gene” waiting to be isolated in the human genome project.

Take William Falkner. No, that’s not a typo. I’m talking about the author of The White Rose of Memphis , great-grandfather of the William Faulkner we all know- the one born before the family added a “u” to their name.

Or, there’s John Steinbeck… the Fourth- son of the John Steinbeck we all read in high school, journalist and posthumous memoirist. Or his brother Thomas, author of a few novels of his own, not to mention an upcoming memoir.

Hemingway’s first son, Jack, helped prepare A Moveable Feast  for posthumous publication, and himself published a memoir. Jack’s daughter Mariel has written three books of her own. Ernest's second son Patrick edited his father’s 800 manuscript pages from a trip to Africa into True at First Light , and has been good for an introduction or forward in many a Hemingway book ever since. Youngest son Greg (AKA Gloria) also authored a memoir, as have a couple of his children.

Then there's Thomas Mann, whose brother was also a writer, as were three of his children. Or the Bronte sisters for that matter. I’m sure there are tons of other examples I don’t have time to research, but it’s shockingly common. So maybe there’s something to this writing gene after all.

(That, or maybe there's a universal desire to capitalize on one’s family name when it happens to be a juicy one. I could be convinced of either.)

William Faulkner, Geneologist

INTERVIEWER

Can you say how you started as a writer?

FAULKNER

I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn't seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What's wrong? Are you mad at me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldier's Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and that's how I became a writer.

INTERVIEWER

You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but how do you regard him as a writer?

FAULKNER

He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 7

Last time we did this, some of you might have felt that my comparison of David Foster Wallace to the Karate Kid was a little forced. Well, just try to tell me I’m stretching with this one. Young DFW and a young Ben Affleck:

Dark hair, slim face, deep-set eyes, how about Joyce Carol Oates and "The Shining"-era Shelly Duvall?

Or Hermann Hesse and the Nazi from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? (Insert your own Arian race joke here):

And for an interesting twist, how about a writer that looks like another writer? I give you Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner (cross reference with William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett). The only discernible difference between them is that one uses mustache wax, and the other uses a Flowbee:

Finally, this will be seen as unkind, but I can only call them like I see them. I think an aging Isak Dinesen, AKA Karen Blixen, is a dead ringer for Margaret Hamilton, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West:

I’ll get you, my pretty... at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

Faulkner & Pronoun Ambiguity

I have all but given up on reading As I Lay Dying.  Faulkner called this novel his "tour-de-force," but I am willing to assert that it is a fundamentally flawed work.  Why?  Two words:

Pronoun Ambiguity.

Let me explain.  A pronoun is a substitute for a noun, such as using "she" after already introducing Addie Bundren.  The replaced noun (in this case, Addie Bundren) is the antecedent of the pronoun.  And here is where Faulkner fails.  Specifically, he uses pronouns with no antecedent.  Thus, "he" and "she" do certain things in certain paragraphs, but with no antecedent, the reader has no idea who the "he" or "she" is actually referring to.  This problem makes for a debilitatingly frustrating reading experience.

Now, you Faulkner fans will argue that Faulkner does this on purpose.  It's just his stream-of-consciousness thrown down on the page.  Right?  Well, perhaps.  But it leads to a flawed novel that is, in many passages, completely incomprehensible.

The following example is the first paragraph of chapter narrated by Darl:

"He has been to town this week: the back of his neck is trimmed close, with a white line between hair and sunburn like a joint of white bone.  He has not once looked back."

Who is Darl talking about?  Peabody? Jewel? Vardaman? I have no idea.  Just "he." This is my beef with Faulkner:  His damn pronoun ambiguity (to say nothing of the fact that we never completely understand who the characters are, and what relationship they have one to another).

It's a technically frustrating read.  And trust me, I'm trying.  But this is why I prefer Hemingway . . . so clear and concise and clean and beautiful.  Faulkner, on the other hand, is the literary world's equivalent of reading the tax code.  

And thus ends my unsuccessful journey with As I Lay Dying.

First Line Viernes

Alas, it's time to look at a first line from a reputable novel once again.  And this novel is very reputable.  Of course, it's none other than Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which commences as follows:

"Jewel and I came up from the field, following the path in single file."

Now, I have the same sentiments toward this first line as I do the rest of the novel; indifference.  This first line does nothing for me, although I find it acceptable.  Simply acceptable.  Not stellar, not intriguing, not even interesting.  I struggle with ol Faulkner (perhaps because I am a self-proclaimed Hemingway-phile).  Perhaps I have lost my mind and am just now exposing my literary merit as weak, but Faulkner, to me, is simply bleh.

If you are a Faulkner connoisseur, PLEASE help me!

Casting Call

One last movie-related post before I give it a rest: the obligatory author look-alike post.

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris  (winner of best original screenplay, set at least partially in 1920s Paris) got me thinking about who I would cast in the role of certain famous writers. Here are a few suggestions just for the heck of it. Let me know what you think. (And I will cross-post this in our Forum, in case you want to add any of your own.)

This first one’s not an exact match, but there’s something in the downward slope of the eyes, the highway patrolman moustache and the slight hint of a smirk that makes me think you could do a lot worse in casting a young William Faulkner than Edward Norton Jr.:

As you can see, this second one is a surprising and uncanny likeness. A young Ernest Hemingway could be played pretty convincingly by 80s-era Charlie Sheen:

As for a youthful Ezra Pound? How about a goateed Jim Caviezel?:

For crusty, old Steinbeck, I think the obvious answer is Vincent Price:

And this last one speaks for itself. Who could possibly make a better Gertrude Stein than Joe Pesci?

Add your own here!

Rewriting Hemingway

What if you took Hemingway’s worst book, handed it to William Faulkner, and asked him to rewrite the thing? Ever wonder how that might turn out? Well, wonder no more. It actually happened.

Kind of…

We continue our cinema-themed posts by looking at To Have and To Have Not, which Hemingway called “a bunch of junk” and his very worst book. Even so, the worst of Hemingway was still apparently good enough for Hollywood to come calling- which is what they did in 1944 when they hired none other than William Faulkner to work on the screenplay.

Let me say at the outset that I did not enjoy this book very much. And it kills me to say that because I absolutely loved parts of it. The Harry Morgan sections, written in the first person are, in my humble opinion, some of the best Hemingway excerpts out there. The fishing trip with the numbskull tourist, the contraband smuggling, and the tense action on Cuba are all fantastic- there’s no use even debating it. And in the ill-fated re-taking of his boat from Key West bank robbers he gives us some gripping, "Snows-of-Kilimanjaro"-esque deathbed ruminations. Classic, classic stuff.

But the meandering, third-person omniscient sections about random writers and wealthy yacht owners… what was that all about?! This book could have been so much cooler without all that crap. Focus, Hem!

Enter Faulkner and co-screenwriter Jules Furthman. They made the prudent call to center the film on Harry Morgan, and they held to the early sections of the book very faithfully. Harry, his rummy companion Eddie, and the town-skipping tourist who stiffs his fishing guide to the tune of thousands of dollars, all gave me hope for the movie version.

…And from there the adaptation kind of runs off the rails. Still a great movie, mind you, but not a great adaptation. Under political pressure from the Roosevelt Administration they moved the action from Cuba to Martinique. And maybe they were sidetracked by the casting of Humphrey Bogart, but with the subplot of an underground political figure who needed safe passage off the island, this thing turned into a cheap remake of Casablanca. That’s not an exaggeration, either. You’ve got the he hardscrabble anti-hero who doesn’t stick his neck out for anybody, but who ends up doing the right thing. The beautiful female lead, who may or may not end up with the hero. The whole thing playing out in a smoke-filled café, complete with a “Sam”-like piano player, under the constant menace of local authorities. It’s Casablanca Part Dieux- only with Lauren Bacall, so, who am I to complain?

The last line from that clip is ranked #34 on the AFI’s all-time top 100 movie quotes. And since Faulkner is credited with developing much of the drama that unfolds “upstairs,” it’s very likely that that line was his creation. Read it, watch it. You decide.

      

Two men walk into a Bar(d)...

Well, yesterday I intimated that Hemingway was a simpleton. A pox upon me. To make amends, I thought we’d stack him up against his flowery old nemesis, Faulkner, and measure them both against the greatest wordsmith of them all: William Shakespeare.

To do this, I’m pulling two passages from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, both describing "languor," - one by Faulkner, the other by Hemingway- and plugging them into the Oxford Dictionaries’ “How Shakespearean Are You?” tool. You may be surprised, as I was, by the results:

"He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in his well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 84 percent Shakespearean. The waters of the Avon almost lap at your feet.

"Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 92 percent Shakespearean. Do you live at the Rose Theatre?

Who'd have thunk it? My own first paragraph up above grades out at an 80. Type your own text into the tool and tell us how Shakespearean you are.

Ummm... What?

I've been very kind to Faulkner lately, so before I give him a well-deserved rest, I thought it might be a good time to thump him on the head just once. You tell me: What recreational drug was he abusing when he penned the following literary lemon:

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep, and before you are emptied for sleep, what are you? And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not, and when you are filled with sleep you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is, and he is what he is not… And since sleep is is not, and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addy Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addy bundren must be, and then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so, if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

From the Pen of William Faulkner

I’ve talked about what makes a line of prose really jump out at me here. But in my ongoing search for prose perfection I figured I’d start sharing some of the passages that have smacked me between the eyes like a transcendent two-by-four of late. Here’s a sampling from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. All emphasis is mine:

"They stand in rigid, terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse’s back. He flows upward in a swooping swirl, like the lash of a whip, his body in mid-air, shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands sprattled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leach-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again."

"Back-running, tunneled between the two sets of bobbing mule ears, the road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon, and the front axle were a spool."

"The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads. The light has turned copper, in the eye portentous, in the nose sulfurous, smelling of lightning."

"When I reach the front he is struggling with Gillespie, the one lean in underclothes, the other stark naked. They are like two figures in a Greek frieze, isolated out of all reality by the red glare."

How about you? What’s the best line you’ve come across in recent reading?

Re-reading Faulkner



The other day I did something I almost never do. I reread a book. Here’s how it happened.

I was coming to the close of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (an audiobook, on my way to work, so I had no idea when the book was going to end) when the final line absolutely punched me in the face. After sharing an exasperated “WHA?!” with the laptop bag sitting in the passenger seat, I immediately pulled up track #1 and started the whole thing again. It was the first time I’ve reread a book in years.

A little background for those who aren’t familiar with the book: Anse Bundren is an incompetent and lazy ne’erdowell of a character who constantly complains that he “wouldn’t be beholden to no man,” but who in reality is beholden to everyone around him. This is a man who not only drives his kids across a raging river in a quixotic quest to carry his wife’s coffin to her home town for burial, but who deals with the numerous setbacks along the journey by riding roughshod over every other member of his family.

He sells Jewel’s horse (his one prized possession), takes Cash’s money and sets his broken leg in cement to save a trip to the doctor, has Darl committed to a mental institution, and takes the money Dewey Dell has hidden away to end an unwanted pregnancy. Still, the reader is almost willing to excuse this obviously broken man of all his imperfections, because he is trying for once in his life to do the noble thing and carry out his late wife’s last request. That is, until the closing lines smack you over the head.

When he shows up for the journey home with his long-coveted set of false teeth and a brand new woman in tow (An old acquaintance? A relative of his wife’s?), one starts to question the whole premise of the story. And when Anse speaks the final words that bring the novel to a close, the reader realizes there never was a single shred of nobility anywhere in him:

 “Meet Mrs. Bundren,” he says.

Those final words cast a dark shadow over the entire novel. I had to go back immediately and reread the book through this new prism to see what I had missed.

I rarely reread anything, and can’t say that I’ll make it a practice. But with this book in particular, a stream-of-consciousness tale told from the heads of fifteen narrators with a slightly jumbled timeline, I was absolutely floored by the amount of color and texture and depth that had gone unnoticed on my first pass through the book. Maybe I agree with Nabokov on the subject of re-readings after all. 

What about you? Do you reread? And if so, what are the books that have made the second cut?