|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Aug 31, 2023 4:19:34 GMT
Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner, originally published in 1948
In Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner, delving into his personal perspective of the South, paints a region still deeply divided by race. While the races are, theoretically, legally equal, this division persists in the cultural norms, customs, traditions, and prejudices of the South.
It's fair to say Faulkner's is a white man's view, but keep distilling things that way and everyone's view, regardless of race, sex, et al., becomes one man's or woman's view. As Ayn Rand, a Faulkner contemporary said, "the smallest minority on earth is the individual."
In Faulkner views, the prejudices and separations of the races run so deep that even sincerely fair white men can't see certain truths staring them in the face. So much so, a black man accused of murder has to turn to a white child and an elderly white woman for help.
When Lucas Beauchamp, a black man, is accused of murdering a white man whose dead body he was found standing over with a discharged gun in his hand, the town prepares for a lynching as Lucas sits in jail.
Lucas asks a white teenager, Charles Mallison, who had met Lucas several years ago, to get his uncle, Gavin, a lawyer to come to the jail. Gavin comes, but he is already so sure of Lucas' guilt that only later does Lucas ask Charles to dig up the dead man's body.
Lucas wants the body dug up to show that it wasn't his gun that was used in the murder. From here, the novel follows two threads.
Charles, with a black teenager and an elderly white woman, a woman who believes in justice, goes out to covertly dig up the body at night. At the same time, the town sits on tenterhooks waiting for the white men to drag Lucas out of the jail to lynch him.
Faulkner uses this set up to show the very deep racism embedded in the South. Most of the whites see the blacks as poor, unclean and inferior, while ignoring that it is their racism that has put them in that state. It's racism justified by a tautology.
Faulkner shines at capturing the small details - clothes, walk, eye movements and other nuances - that expose the embedded racism. It's a very ugly picture of a Southern town in the middle of the twentieth century.
There is hope too, though, as some whites, like Charles and the elderly lady, are willing to stand up for equal justice. They are heroes, but not cardboard ones as they have absorbed so much racism that their attitudes will not please modern unforgiving ears.
Slowly the story unwinds as some initial assumptions are exposed as wrong, which leads to a few honest people facing their mistakes, while most just "forget" what happened and go back to their daily routines.
The movie version of Intruder in the Dust follows the same plot. Yet, by placing much more emphasis on Lucas, it subtly shifts the focus of the story from one of white racism to one of black character and integrity in the face of white racism.
That's not a modest shift as it changes the perspective of the narrative from something Faulkner directly experienced, whites' views of racism, to one that Faulkner has observed, a black man's response.
The movie also gives the viewer an easier narrative to follow than in the book, where Faulkner's penchant for paragraph-long sentences and page-long paragraphs, often with little punctuation to guide the reader, requires serious concentration to keep the tale straight.
It's been argued that Faulkner's stream-of-conscious style is part of his brilliance. Maybe, but it also can feel like hand-to-hand combat, sentence by sentence, between the author and the reader.
One also wonders if Faulkner has to use pronouns as a weapon against his reader, which often makes knowing who is speaking or being spoken about an exhausting tangle.
The movie's straight-forward storytelling approach pleasantly solves these "style" issues.
Intruder in the Dust is a powerful book that had the courage, in its time, to denounce Southern white racism both directly and through a painstaking reveal of how whites impose it through many small and not-small day-to-day actions.
Its resolution, no spoilers coming, is neither satisfying nor unsatisfying. It simply shows that the South, in the middle of the century, while not beyond hope, wasn't upholding the ideals of equality laid down in the Constitution almost two-hundred years earlier.
P.S. Comments on the movie here: "Intruder in the Dust" |
|
|
|
Post by I Love Melvin on Aug 31, 2023 12:42:03 GMT
Just out of curiosity, does Faulkner explain the source of the title, which I'm assuming is s quotation from a source I don't recognize?
|
|
|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Aug 31, 2023 16:47:42 GMT
Just out of curiosity, does Faulkner explain the source of the title, which I'm assuming is s quotation from a source I don't recognize? 
My personal take is that Lucas Beauchamp is the intruder as he doesn't play the humble part a black man was supposed to play in the South in that era and the "dust" he stirred up is the "established" relationship between the races. |
|
|
|
Post by I Love Melvin on Aug 31, 2023 18:17:03 GMT
Just out of curiosity, does Faulkner explain the source of the title, which I'm assuming is s quotation from a source I don't recognize?
My personal take is that Lucas Beauchamp is the intruder as he doesn't play the humble part a black man was supposed to play in the South in that era and the "dust" he stirred up is the "established" relationship between the races. That's a good take on it. I was assuming it was a quote from another source, but the title could have been entirely original to Faulkner, given your theory of how it fits. I admire you for tackling Faulkner; he's tough and very downbeat. |
|
|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Aug 31, 2023 19:04:19 GMT
Good question. I don't remember the title being specifically reference in the text - that usually catches my attention. That said, like all Faulkner books, this one is no stroll in the park, so I might have seen it an forgotten it in the middle of grappling with a page-long paragraph with a total of two commas and one semicolon tossed in somewhere.
My personal take is that Lucas Beauchamp is the intruder as he doesn't play the humble part a black man was supposed to play in the South in that era and the "dust" he stirred up is the "established" relationship between the races. That's a good take on it. I was assuming it was a quote from another source, but the title could have been entirely original to Faulkner, given your theory of how it fits. I admire you for tackling Faulkner; he's tough and very downbeat.
I just Googled the title in a few different ways, but it doesn't show up as sourced from anything. I also asked Chat-GPT, but that system didn't have a reference for it either. I thought you'd be right. Doesn't mean you aren't, but I couldn't find a source referenced. Still, it sounds like a line from a poem or play or something. |
|
|
|
Post by BunnyWhit on Sept 3, 2023 17:42:22 GMT
Good question. I don't remember the title being specifically reference in the text - that usually catches my attention. That said, like all Faulkner books, this one is no stroll in the park, so I might have seen it an forgotten it in the middle of grappling with a page-long paragraph with a total of two commas and one semicolon tossed in somewhere.
My personal take is that Lucas Beauchamp is the intruder as he doesn't play the humble part a black man was supposed to play in the South in that era and the "dust" he stirred up is the "established" relationship between the races. That's a good take on it. I was assuming it was a quote from another source, but the title could have been entirely original to Faulkner, given your theory of how it fits. I admire you for tackling Faulkner; he's tough and very downbeat.
Good remarks by both of you. Thank you. And you are right -- Faulkner is not easy.
Here's a little something interesting about the question of where the title Intruder in the Dust came from.
I read some of Faulkner's letters many years ago, and I recall that there is a span of a few months while Faulkner was writing the novel during which he wrote several letters to his agent/editor/publisher/someone about how concerned he was that for the first time he was having difficulty landing on a title. He knew he wanted to use the "in the dust" part, but he couldn't decide on the right word to precede the phrase. He wrote that he wanted a more sophisticated or elegant word to stand in place of shenanigan, and thought perhaps he'd use skulduggery.
After all these years, I am happy to say I remember this because I use the word shenanigan regularly, and I believe the word skulduggery is glorious and woefully underutilized. Then I went to my bookshelf to find a copy of the Selected Letters of William Faulkner (Blotner, Joseph; Vintage, 1978) to flesh out the story.
***************************************************
Faulkner writes to Robert K. Haas, his literary agent, several times between March and May of 1948 regarding his irritation, then growing concern, about his difficulty in assigning a title to the novel. He knew he wanted to use "in the dust". He writes that he wants a word synonymous with "substitution by sharp practice." (264-5) The word he thought most closely expressed the meaning he desired was jugglery, but he rejected it because it is a harsh, unattractive sounding word. He auditioned numerous words for the lead, including: Imposter, Malfeasance, and Malaprop. When he came upon "Intruder", he did not feel it completely satisfied the meaning he desired, but he very much liked the sound. Later, Faulkner wrote to Bennett Cerf (friend, writer and founder of Random House) that "lacking any short word for substitution, swap, exchange, sleight-of-hand, I think INTRUDER IN THE DUST is best." (268)
Faulkner uses "dust" and various forms of earth, dirt, soil, etc. throughout the novel. "Mud", "dust", "graveyard", "quicksand", "dusty", etc. all make an appearance, and Faulkner makes a particular effort to employ "dust" in his discussion of the jail. He tells us that it is the jail of a community that truly marks its history, trials, failures, and sentiments. It is "the agonies and shames and griefs with which hearts long since unmarked and unremembered dust had strained and perhaps burst" (Intruder) that demonstrate the collective past of the community. Faulkner's complex construction equates "dust" with communal strife and employs the jail to symbolize it. It is this shared communal history, the "dust", from which a community like Jefferson is built. The jail symbolizes everything a citizenry will go through to maintain its founding ideology. The jail is a monument, and it is central to the story. Intruding on the dust is Chick on the one hand and Lucas on the other. It's a story not of a stranger in town, but rather an intruder on the way things have always been.
Additionally, one can view Faulkner's notion of "intruder in the dust" in the much broader sense that the dust is the Earth, and the intruder is man. This more general view would apply to much of Faulkner's work, and he especially leans toward this in some of his poetry.
It's been many years since I read Intruder in the Dust, or any Faulkner for that matter, but this is what I remember about my youthful ponderings.
|
|
|
|
Post by I Love Melvin on Sept 3, 2023 18:26:10 GMT
That was all so beautifully remembered and expressed. Why, if I had a nickel for every youthful pondering I've remembered so clearly, I'd have.....Actually, I'd be lucky to still have a nickel, so good job jogging your memory. I'm fascinated that he was going for a word for "substitution by sharp practice", intended to carry the meaning of "substitution, swap, exchange, sleight of hand", that the intention was so clear to him even though the exact word escaped him. In those terms "Intruder" doesn't really cover it, but I agree that it sounds the best. It also sounds the least pretentious, so he was right to use it. I can't imagine what I would have thought finding Malfeasance in the Dust on my high school reading list. Anyway, I like the meaning Fading Fast intuited from the text and, anyway, by now Intruder is so ingrained in our collective consciousness that anything else automatically sounds odd. Good detective work, Nancy Drew.
|
|
|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Sept 3, 2023 21:13:46 GMT
That's a good take on it. I was assuming it was a quote from another source, but the title could have been entirely original to Faulkner, given your theory of how it fits. I admire you for tackling Faulkner; he's tough and very downbeat.
Good remarks by both of you. Thank you. And you are right -- Faulkner is not easy.
Here's a little something interesting about the question of where the title Intruder in the Dust came from.
I read some of Faulkner's letters many years ago, and I recall that there is a span of a few months while Faulkner was writing the novel during which he wrote several letters to his agent/editor/publisher/someone about how concerned he was that for the first time he was having difficulty landing on a title. He knew he wanted to use the "in the dust" part, but he couldn't decide on the right word to precede the phrase. He wrote that he wanted a more sophisticated or elegant word to stand in place of shenanigan, and thought perhaps he'd use skulduggery.
After all these years, I am happy to say I remember this because I use the word shenanigan regularly, and I believe the word skulduggery is glorious and woefully underutilized. Then I went to my bookshelf to find a copy of the Selected Letters of William Faulkner (Blotner, Joseph; Vintage, 1978) to flesh out the story.
***************************************************
Faulkner writes to Robert K. Haas, his literary agent, several times between March and May of 1948 regarding his irritation, then growing concern, about his difficulty in assigning a title to the novel. He knew he wanted to use "in the dust". He writes that he wants a word synonymous with "substitution by sharp practice." (264-5) The word he thought most closely expressed the meaning he desired was jugglery, but he rejected it because it is a harsh, unattractive sounding word. He auditioned numerous words for the lead, including: Imposter, Malfeasance, and Malaprop. When he came upon "Intruder", he did not feel it completely satisfied the meaning he desired, but he very much liked the sound. Later, Faulkner wrote to Bennett Cerf (friend, writer and founder of Random House) that "lacking any short word for substitution, swap, exchange, sleight-of-hand, I think INTRUDER IN THE DUST is best." (268)
Faulkner uses "dust" and various forms of earth, dirt, soil, etc. throughout the novel. "Mud", "dust", "graveyard", "quicksand", "dusty", etc. all make an appearance, and Faulkner makes a particular effort to employ "dust" in his discussion of the jail. He tells us that it is the jail of a community that truly marks its history, trials, failures, and sentiments. It is "the agonies and shames and griefs with which hearts long since unmarked and unremembered dust had strained and perhaps burst" (Intruder) that demonstrate the collective past of the community. Faulkner's complex construction equates "dust" with communal strife and employs the jail to symbolize it. It is this shared communal history, the "dust", from which a community like Jefferson is built. The jail symbolizes everything a citizenry will go through to maintain its founding ideology. The jail is a monument, and it is central to the story. Intruding on the dust is Chick on the one hand and Lucas on the other. It's a story not of a stranger in town, but rather an intruder on the way things have always been.
Additionally, one can view Faulkner's notion of "intruder in the dust" in the much broader sense that the dust is the Earth, and the intruder is man. This more general view would apply to much of Faulkner's work, and he especially leans toward this in some of his poetry.
It's been many years since I read Intruder in the Dust, or any Faulkner for that matter, but this is what I remember about my youthful ponderings.
Reading your post, I was thinking, making "In the Dust" the full title might have been a Occam Razor solution. Probably not, but I agree with Faulkner that "Intruder" isn't the perfect word.
I'm always impressed with the knowledge of members like you and I Love Melvin on this forum. |
|
|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Sept 8, 2023 3:35:34 GMT
Buddwing by Evan Hunter originally published in 1964
Buddwing is the story of a middle-aged man who wakes up one morning in New York City's Central Park with a mid-life-crisis-driven amnesia sparked by a failing marriage and a voguish 1960s disaffection with middle-class values.
Author Hunter unwinds the mystery of Sam Buddwing very slowly as Sam puts the pieces of his life together over the next few days by following clues that help jar his memory. "Sam Buddwing" is just the name Sam chose to give himself on the day he woke up with amnesia.
Amnesiac Sam has some vague memories of his past that, with a few clues in his pockets, lead him to visit several places around New York City. He meets people who don't know him, but we still learn a bit about Sam in his questioning of them.
That is only part of this very 1960s novel, though, as we see Sam, a handsome man, meet a few different free-spirited girls at separate times with whom he has sex, one encounter even turning into a mini orgy with homosexual overtones.
It's all tame by today's standards (what isn't?), but for early 1960s, it's pretty racy stuff. It's also more effective than the gratuitous and graphic sex of modern novels as it doesn't drown you in salacious detail.
Sam also gets mugged in a bathroom at Rockefeller Center. Later he has a long conversation with a crazy man who thinks he's God and that Sam is the escaped convict from an asylum the police are looking for.
Sam then meets a middle-aged socialite on a rich person's scavenger hunt that takes him to an illegal dice game in Spanish Harlem. The dice game, for big stakes with shady characters, is told so well, it could be broken out as a heck of a short story.
All the above adds up to a very 1960s trip through the aborning counterculture / hippie / psychedelic zeitgeist that would explode into the open in just a few years. But the Sam Buddwing story is more than just a preview of the later 1960s.
In an awkward construct that blends what is happening to Sam today with his foggy memory, Sam meets several women whom he confuses in his mind with his wife at earlier stages of their marriage. A marriage, we quickly learn, that was troubled almost from the start.
We see Sam and his wife as college kids meeting and falling in love and, then, as newlyweds struggling to get their post-college lives started. Later we see them in their twenties no longer infatuated with each other's quirks - her astrology, his writer's block.
The end, no spoilers coming, pretty much explains the mystery of the book, but after three-hundred-plus pages, it feels unsatisfying. The pact any storyteller makes with his/her reader is that the longer the mystery goes on, the better the payoff should be.
What really works in the novel, its most enjoyable part, is its intimate insider's journey through 1960s New York City when neighborhoods still had specific ethnic identities, when middle class people could still afford to live there and when it truly never shut down at night.
With Sam, we visit a few iconic landmarks, but better still, we visit a neighborhood diner, a penny arcade on Broadway, when that was a Saturday night's entertainment for some, several other NYC curios of the era and, finally, that awesome illegal dice game.
Sam Budding is a middle-aged man whose life and marriage didn't work out as planned, in part because of his failures, and in part because life is hard. In the early 1960s, we were just starting to learn how good it feels to blame others or "society" for the failures in our lives.
Buddwing is an interesting if overwrought effort that is worth the read if you like novels that are a combination of a distressed personal discovery journey, 1960s zeitgeist and, the best part, time travel to a vibrant 1960s New York City.
N.B. Comments on the book's 1966 movie Mr. Buddwing, staring James Garner, here: "Mr. Buddwing" |
|
|
|
Post by I Love Melvin on Sept 8, 2023 13:45:56 GMT
Hunter also wrote a lengthy series of crime novels under the name of Ed McBain, so that probably enhanced his ability to deal so atmospherically with urban underbellies and alternative "scenes". I love your description of it as a "combination of distressed personal discovery journey and 1960s zeitgeist". I haven't read it but you've given me a good sense of what it is.
|
|
|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Sept 20, 2023 3:18:00 GMT
Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig originally published in 1922
Stefan Zweig penned a poignant tale of unrequited love in his long short story Letter from an Unknown Woman. For fans of the 1948 movie, while there is a similar jumping-off point, the written tale differs in several ways from the Hollywood version.
Bridging the Romantic Era and our modern and more pragmatic times, Zweig's story can be seen as a throwback tale of an overwhelming love or, in today's terms, as a story of an obsession, almost a mental disease, crippling a life.
Set in Vienna in the early twentieth century, an unnamed teenage girl falls in love with her unnamed wealthy, cultured and handsome neighbor, a successful writer in his twenties. She is besotted with him even though he does not notice her.
A move to Innsbruck does nothing to quell her passion, so at eighteen, she returns to Vienna to work in a shop to be near to him. After, effectively, stalking him, they meet and spend three "passionate" nights together where she willingly gives her virginal self to him.
He then leaves on a trip as their time together was casual to him, while she learns shortly afterwards she's pregnant. Unwilling to inform or burden him, she has the child as an indigent, but then becomes a high-priced escort so that his child can be raised with the finer things.
Ten year of sacrifice and pining later, they meet one more time. Her heart soars, but he does not recognize her. Once again, a night of passion is just a casual thing for him. He then gives her some money in the morning as he knows she's a prostitute. It's awful.
To tell more is to give the climax away. The story itself is told as one long cathartic letter from her to him, hence the title. How you react to this powerful story depends on your personal framing.
In 1922, many would see this as a moving tale of romantic love where one selflessly devotes oneself to another, because the passion of love is just that strong. Ethereal love was an embraced ideal of the, then, waning Romantic Era.
With that waning, though, pragmatism, not unrelated to technological advancement, was gaining cultural currency. Today, we would see her as a victim, not of him, as he never knew of her love or sacrifice, but of an obsession bordering on a mental illness.
It is hard as a modern reader to appreciate the story as Zweig probably intended it as a paean to the Romantic Era. Although, it's possible Zweig wrote it as a cynical rebuke of the Romantic ideal. Like most good art, it's up to each reader to decide.
When Hollywood got its hands on the story in 1948, it made extensive changes owing to the demands of telling a story on film and the restrictions imposed by the Motion Picture Production Code.
The result is a more-rounded story with a moral wrapper absent in Zweig's tale. It makes for a traditional and satisfying movie, but mitigates the arrantly painful, unrequited and unjudged yearning of the novel. Both versions haunt; each in its own way.
Zweig's writing has an economy of words that leans more Hemingway than Romantic Era, which happens during periods of stylistic change. It also makes Letter from an Unknown Woman more approachable for a modern reader looking for a short Romantic tale.
Comments on the movie version here: "Letter from an Unknown Woman" |
|
|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Oct 1, 2023 2:23:10 GMT
Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E. W. Hornung originally published in 1898
E. W. Hornung, a brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, wrote this collection of eight stories almost in response to a challenge from his famous relative to create a gentleman crook equal to Conan-Doyle's famous gentleman detective.
Hornung's character, Raffles, is less well known and, to be fair, the quality of writing in these stories isn't at Conan-Doyle's level. Yet the collection is enjoyable as Raffles is an engaging character. Plus, today, the book time travels a modern reader back to Victorian England.
Raffles is a "gentleman" in a time and place when that term had a class distinction. He has few funds, but being a gentleman and a successful amateur cricket player, he is accepted into "proper society" That's the plus; the minus is "proper society" is an expensive place to be.
This has "forced" Raffles to turn to pilfering jewels from his rich friends and jewelry stores. We're introduced to Raffles when his old school chum, Bunny, comes to him asking for help as Bunny has written checks that he can't cover, which will ruin his reputation in society.
Raffles, to save his friend, takes him along on a caper to rob a local jewelry store. With that first crime together under their belts, this crooked-world's mirror image of Holmes and Watson (Bunny's no genius either, but has his moments, like Watson) is off and running.
Raffles is the brains behind this team. He is a meticulous planner with a deep knowledge of the criminal profession. Yet, at his core, he's also a gambler and adventurer who isn't afraid to take a chance on a whim as, in truth, a crook has to have a gambler's nature.
In different capers, we see Raffles use wit, disguises, guile, tools, nerve and patience with, usually, only a little help from Bunny. Like his fictional detective reflection, Holmes, he often sees people's next move or motivation almost before they do.
These vignettes, narrated by Bunny, are pretty well-written crime mysteries that you'll, occasionally, figure out ahead of time. That's okay, though, as the real fun in these tales is the relationship between the two crooks.
Bunny is in awe of Raffles, but Raffles needs Bunny as, otherwise, he'd have no one to show off too. As opposed to Holmes, he can't advertise his exploits. Overtime, these two form a deep bond that sits at the core of the stories.
While the stories work individually, there is an overall narrative arc that makes these tales much more than just good "crime drama" stories. We see that, while Raffle and Bunny's life of crime, maybe pays, it also has an enormous cost.
Hornung slyly tucks a morality tale inside his "simple" stories as Raffles' and Bunny's lives get brutally buffeted several times. They don't always get away with their crimes and the cover-ups or escapes often exact a very large price. There's is not an easy life.
Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman is a fun, quick read that takes you to Victorian England with two "gentlemen criminals" as your guide. It's a light criminal-doppelganger pairing with Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales.
Written in 1898, it is wonderfully free of the obsessive modern politics that ruins most of today's period novels. It also nicely rounds out the character of Raffles that many of us know only through one or more of the several movie versions that have been made from the book.
Comments on the enjoyable 1930 movie version of Raffles here: "Raffles". The movie only covers one chapter in the book and takes several large liberties with the story. |
|
|
|
Post by topbilled on Oct 1, 2023 14:01:13 GMT
Good review. Have you seen the 1939 version of RAFFLES? It starred David Niven, Olivia de Havilland and May Whitty.
|
|
|
|
Post by Fading Fast on Oct 1, 2023 14:24:18 GMT
Good review. Have you seen the 1939 version of RAFFLES? It starred David Niven, Olivia de Havilland and May Whitty. |
|
|
|
Post by topbilled on Oct 1, 2023 14:55:47 GMT
Good review. Have you seen the 1939 version of RAFFLES? It starred David Niven, Olivia de Havilland and May Whitty. |
|
