The rebuilt cities and built-up towns in the South modeled themselves on Chicago and New York, but were unable to stop themselves from blindly importing the Northern corruption that comes with the model. Just as the political and art institutions reworked themselves, so too did the reporters and writers who would represent their southern cities as imitations of Chicago. The Memphis newspapers had only recently declared the city the “Murder Capital” of the country, imitating Chicago’s moniker, and the lurid stories about larceny, cold-blooded murder, arson, and bootlegging sold newspapers through their subtle suggestions that the “shadow of the mob” lay behind the outbreak of violence.62 Faulkner most likely based his gangster, Popeye, on stories told about the Memphis bootlegger Neal “Popeye” Pumphrey. After a set of Memphis fires that were most likely arson, the newspapers reported: “One local whisky faction backed by Al Capone’s gang in Chicago and another faction backed by a New Orleans—St. Louis Outfit are struggling for control.”63 “Popeye” Pumphrey, a low-level underworld figure, stood one step below the struggle and it’s unclear with which gang he ultimately aligned himself.
Faulkner repeats the same idea in Sanctuary of how the South imports its models from the North and the corrupt and violent consequences that follow. Popeye is from Chicago metaphorically because he is based on popular representations of Chicago gangsters. The popular-culture gangster figure was created in Chicago and is associated with the city still. Little Caesar, William R. Bennett’s novel analyzed at length by Peter Lurie as a source for Sanctuary, tells of small-time criminals who move to Chicago and become mixed up in the Outfit.64 Faulkner also borrows from Allan Pinkerton’s early memoirs about the exploits of the Chicago-based Pinkerton Detective Agency and acknowledges this debt when he adds that Popeye’s father, like the Pinkerton Detectives, was “a professional strike breaker” in 1900. Dashiell Hammett, who will become a good friend of Faulkner’s in the 1930s, joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency as a young man and worked for them until taking time off to go serve in the war.65 He will fuse these experiences together and create the first hard-boiled detective stories that will be published throughout the 1920s by Mencken in The Smart Set. Faulkner will borrow from Hammett’s short stories to add a veneer of literary respectability to the wide commercial appeal of his gangster Popeye, despite his claim that he wrote the “little potboiler” for purely commercial reasons.
After Popeye rapes the judge’s daughter, Temple Drake, with a corncob and takes her to Memphis, he deposits her at Miss Reba’s brothel. Miss Reba tells the shocked and traumatized Temple that her profuse bleeding is “nothing” because “Doctor Quinn’ll stop it in two minutes.”66 Faulkner named Doctor Quinn after the New York attorney and wealthy patron of modern art, John Quinn, who defended The Little Review in court on charges of pornography stemming from the publication of Ulysses. It was natural that Quinn would defend The Little Review in court and establish their legal defense. Quinn began his descent into the modern art world as a collector and by the early twenties, his collection overflowed into a second large apartment, bought by Quinn solely to house his art. He was instrumental in putting together the 1913 Armory Show in New York and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound benefited from the friendship immensely because the connection aided him in becoming the editor/correspondent with control at several of the small magazines, including The Egoist, Poetry, and The Little Review. Faulkner’s naming of the doctor after Quinn indicates that the reader should associate what Quinn did for The Little Review with what the doctor does for Temple: clean up the mess created by the gangsters from Chicago, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap.
The Little Review serialized almost half of Ulysses from Spring of 1918 to the end of 1920. Twenty-one-year-old Faulkner read the chapters as they came out in Oxford, Mississippi, because his friend and mentor Phil Stone gave him copies of The Little Review to consume along with Poetry, The Dial, and The Egoist.67 Faulkner would have been drawn to this new and aesthetically rich modernism, and it easily provided the fuel for his February 1921 attack on the realists of Chicago. He would have also been drawn to the magazines’ implicit championing of the ideas of creating art for its own sake, not for financial or personal gain. When an outraged reader wrote to the magazine to complain about Joyce’s piece—“Each month is worse than the last”—Jane Heap responded sharply: Joyce “has no concern with audiences and their demands.”68 Her words destroy Whitman’s mantra that great art produces great audiences and speak back to that founder of the idea of American literature, William Dean Howells, who spent the last decades of his career tying Chicago writing, which he saw as the center of American art, to saleable ideas and marketing. In Joyce and The Little Review, Faulkner found examples of radical new kinds of art not being made to make money or to please a publisher, but to advance the state of writing and art.
The Little Review published those chapters of Ulysses alongside of Sherwood Anderson’s stories, as well as advertisements, Dadaist poetry, and editorials. The Little Review also published Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, and so the mere fact of publication in the modern magazine wasn’t enough for Faulkner to be impressed. Because Anderson’s stories were in the issues containing Joyce’s, Faulkner would have seen Anderson as more radical and anti-commercial than those other Chicago writers that he critiques harshly. It’s impossible to know whether young Faulkner had knowledge of Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and Sherwood Anderson’s friendship in Chicago or whether Phil Stone had told Faulkner previously that the magazine had recently moved from that city to New York. When Faulkner finally met Anderson in New Orleans, he would have learned quickly of his association with the 57th Street artists’ colony and of his friendship with Margaret Anderson. Anderson had joined the group that had set up in old storefronts used for the Columbian Exhibition along 57th Street and Stoney Island Avenue. Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg lived there, and all of the other significant artists working in Chicago at the time visited frequently: Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, Vashel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Tennessee Mitchell, who would become Anderson’s second wife. Floyd Dell encouraged him to associate with the colony and soon after, he introduced Margaret Anderson to the colony. Sherwood saw Margaret as one of the most charismatic members of the group and Floyd Dell understood immediately that she would be publishing something of great significance. Margaret Anderson first conceived of The Little Review at this colony taking up the mantle of Dell’s Literary Review and Sherwood Anderson would have witnessed its inception.69
Because Sherwood Anderson’s connection to The Little Review was personal and Faulkner was deeply impressed with Ulysses, it would have stood out for Faulkner from the vast array of connections Anderson maintained. Faulkner would see The Little Review as a Chicago magazine that defied the commercialism and propagandist uses of art that he rallied against in his early criticism. Although Anderson and Heap had moved to New York by the time of the publication, Faulkner’s exposure to Anderson’s stories about the editors of the magazine at its inception would have made the magazine a firmly Chicago publication in Faulkner’s mind.
The Little Review lost its case and Margaret Anderson writes in the next issue of the magazine: “This decision establishes us as criminals.”70 The US courts consider certain kinds of scenes and ideas in writing and art to be just as corrupting as actual rape and violence to young women, and Faulkner’s discussion of the difference between art and pornography in Sanctuary hinges on understanding that idea and its implications for art. Popeye, a Chicago gangster figure, rapes and violates Temple Drake. The editors of The Little Review are now also criminal because in publishing Ulysses, they may have corrupted the young Temples of the United States. Just as Dr. Quinn is brought in to clean up Temple in the literally pornographic space of the brothel, John Quinn must be brought into the courtroom to clean up the mess created by The Little Review. Faulkner, too, has published material potentially corrupting and definitely pornographic in telling the story of Popeye’s rape of Temple. He,
too, needs Dr. Quinn, and perhaps his attorney double in the novel, Horace Benbow, to clean up the story and make the corrupt act more palatable to the reading public.71
Peter Lurie has argued that Faulkner’s treatment of Temple reveals “two very different representational practices at play in the same text, those associated both with modernism and with commercial fare like potboilers and film.”72 Faulkner juxtaposes a high modernist critique about the treatment of Ulysses by the US government with a more popular, lurid, and sensational story about a southern girl contaminated by a Chicago gangster and brought into White Slavery. Quinn argued, in Margaret Anderson’s words, “that the offending passage of ‘Ulysses’ will revolt but not contaminate” and so the concern is that the passage will contaminate young female readers.73 Faulkner writes this idea metaphorically into the novel because Temple, as a representation of a young female reader, is corrupted by what she sees and experiences at Old Frenchman’s Bend. She is also a common figure in popular pamphlets and posters that began to circulate warning about the dangers of being seduced into white slavery. Temple is both the corrupted and the popular, commercial figure that warns about the corrupted. She is just like Popeye, in that she is an equally popular commercial representation in American Culture.
Hysteria about the corruption of young girls, whipped up by popular culture stories about farm girls abducted out of Chicago railway stations, reached a head in 1909, when Representative James R. Mann of Illinois introduced the Mann Act. He did so at the request of Chicago prosecutors who claimed that girls were being forced into prostitution after being tricked, drugged, and forced to stay in a brothel. Faulkner, then, tells a story about white slavery that originates in Chicago, using two characters, one a Chicago gangster, the other, a modern girl. Lurie points out that “Faulkner’s canonical, high Modernist works reveal traces of the market, particularly of film, even when Faulkner was supposedly writing in opposition to its effects”74 Sanctuary, then, straddles the line between high modernism and popular culture by fusing together the writer’s critique of the banning of Ulysses with a desire to make money by borrowing popular culture characters guaranteed to sell books.
Just as in Hemingway’s work, a tension arises for Faulkner’s reader who must negotiate between the popular culture kitsch and the parody of the critical recycling of narratives. Both writers’ work is filled with references to popular culture stemming from the Chicago literary scene, but at the same time, the audience informed about the Chicago scene laughs ironically at the way each writer represents these scenes in their narratives. Temple’s capture can be read as a contemporary retelling of the same old Chicago story that led to the Mann Act, with its theme of the off-screen rape of its heroine by an invisible menace. However, by parodying the desire for these stories, the novel shows the abduction plot to be a cultural artifact, and its reliance on a simple good versus evil construct ridiculous and naïve. At the same time, Faulkner shows the Chicago plot and style to be similarly ridiculous and naïve.
Faulkner claimed to have never read Ulysses in his 1932 interview with Harry Nash Smith, and he gives a rather tongue-in-cheek explanation of why a reader might find multiple allusions to the novel in his work. He smiled and said: “‘Sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact. I had heard of Joyce, of course,’ he went on. ‘Some one told me about what he was doing, and it is possible that I was influenced by what I heard.’” He then handed Smith a 1924 copy of the book.75 Nash explained away the presence of the book as a “borrowed copy.” In 1932, the book was still completely banned in the United States and so Faulkner’s statement should be understood as a statement about pornography, banned books, contraband, and illegal art production. He could not possibly have read the partially published episodes of Ulysses in Oxford, because a Southern gentleman from that small town would never admit to doing such a thing.
Faulkner’s production of his 1924 copy of the novel is meant to amuse because his gesture reveals that he owns contraband and purveys illegal goods. The United States prosecuted Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in 1920 after the publication of the “Nausikaa” episode in The Little Review, in which a character masturbates. Despite the fact that few readers would have known what was going on in the chapter or the novel, at the conclusion of the 1921 trial, Ulysses was declared obscene and banned in the Unites States. The United States Post Office burned all found copies through the 1920s. In 1922, Sylvia Beach published the novel at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. She considered it an “honor” to do so on Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Faulkner’s 1924 copy is from the fourth edition produced by Beach at Shakespeare and Company and recorded as part of his library with his signature on the first page.76
How, exactly, Faulkner received that copy is unknown and his production of it at the 1932 interview was meant to provoke questions. Smuggled copies of Ulysses were making their way into the United States in the early twenties, and it’s possible that Anderson may have gifted him a copy, particularly after discovering Faulkner’s interest in The Little Review and his respect for the editors. Anderson was in Paris when Sylvia Beach decided to publish the novel, and he wrote in his notebook of his surety that Ulysses may be “the most important book published this generation.” He paid the fee of twelve dollars for a copy once published and gave her a list of “possible subscribers” from the United States.77 He had just met Joyce in May of 1921 and was in awe of him, in part because of Beach’s constant championing of the man and his writing. Anderson considered Joyce and in particular Ulysses to be a great influence on his prose rhythms and stream of consciousness shifts and so it’s highly unlikely that he would have given Faulkner his own prized copy of Ulysses.78 Daniel J. Singal claims that Faulkner bought a copy while in Paris.79 While he gives no evidence for his assertion, it makes sense. Faulkner’s copy is dated the year before he went to Beach’s bookstore and it would have been the easiest way to obtain a copy. Faulkner must have smuggled his own copy back to the United States.
He reveals this copy of Ulysses at the 1932 interview for two timely reasons. First, he would have known that the publisher Bennett Cerf, who had just started Random House, wanted to publish Ulysses in the United States and he needed the courts to allow him to do so. Cerf had been courting Faulkner for some time alongside Joyce. In March 1932, Random House signed a contract with Joyce for Ulysses. On May 3, 1932, four months after Faulkner’s interview, Cerf had a copy of the book shipped to him and allies of Joyce and Cerf ensured that custom agents would seize it. Cerf and the attorney Morris Ernst wanted John Woolsey, a judge with a track record of liberal obscenity rulings and a lover of art and literature, to preside over the trial. After a series of serendipitous reschedulings and delays of the court date, Woolsey did preside, and after reading the novel completely himself and listening to the testimony of literary critics, he overturned the ban on December 7, 1932.80 While Faulkner could not have seen into the future, his production of the book in that interview in early 1932 was a declaration that Faulkner was on the side of Joyce and his publisher. The second reason is that Harry Nash Smith was completely in on the joke and gesture because he had reviewed Faulkner’s earlier salacious novels Mosquitoes, Sanctuary, and The Sound and the Fury well, unlike the majority of reviewers who were put off when encountering scenes and material that could have been part of Ulysses. Faulkner had been having a hard time publishing “Miss Zilphia Gant” because of its alleged obscenities. Both Scribner’s and The American Mercury had rejected it. Later that year, Nash purchased the story for The Southwest Review and brought out a three-hundred-copy edition of the story with his own introduction to the story. That May, Nash was fired from the English department for the publication of what John O’ Beatty, his chairman, declared “the foulest book I have ever read.”81
So when Faulkner displays his 1924 copy of Joyce’s banned book during the interview with Nash in 1932, he does so proudly
and reveals that he, too, is a book smuggler, a breaker of laws, and purveyor of pornography. It also explains why, when he showed up in New Orleans in 1925, he no longer dressed as an artistic bohemian, as he did in Paris, but now donned the baggy suit of a bootlegger, often stocked with smuggled hooch from Mississippi. Seeing Faulkner playing at being a criminal bootlegger also reveals him to be embracing the new and corrupt forms from Chicago. He wants to be associated with the most daring kinds of modernism published by the Chicagoans, Anderson and Heap, and he wants his writing to be seen as equally daring and scandalous.
Wild Palms and the historical exchange between Chicago and the South
During the Summer of 1933, Faulkner wrote an introduction to The Sound and the Fury. It was never published and remained hidden until it was discovered in the Rowan Oak Papers in a stairwell closet.82 In it, he returns to his earlier idea from “The Big Shot” about how the South built itself in imitation of the Northern cities. He writes:
And Chicago even boasts of being young. But the South, as Chicago is the Middlewest and New York the East, is dead, killed by the Civil War. There is a thing known whimsically as the New South to be sure, but it is not the south. It is a land of Immigrants who are rebuilding the town and cities into replicas of towns and cities in Kansas and Iowa and Illinois, with skyscrapers and striped canvas awnings instead of wooden balconies, and teaching the young men who sell the gasoline and waitresses in the restaurants to say O yeah? And to speak with hard r’s, and hanging over the intersections of quiet and shaded streets where no one save Northern tourists in Cadillacs and Lincolns ever pass at a gait faster than a horse trots, changing red-and-green lights and savage and peremptory bells.83
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 20