William Faulkner, screenwriter: "Sutter's Gold" and "Drums Along the Mohawk".

Gleeson-White, Sarah

OVER THE YEARS, SCHOLARS HAVE MADE (FREQUENTLY OFF-HAND) references in introductions and footnotes to screenplays that William Faulkner might or might not have written and/or collaborated upon. More tantalising are those references to his screenplays and treatments presumed lost, the content of which we are only left to speculate about. These passing remarks--found in George Sidney's and Bruce Kawin's groundbreaking work on several of the screenplays, and in Joseph Blotner's biography--are in the end only frustrating. The discovery and subsequent publication of these screenplays have the potential to reconfigure the way in which we read and think about the major fiction in at least two ways: first, they would require that we expand the Faulkner canon and that we consider Faulkner as something other than the great writer of modernist experiment and of regionalism--the literary giant who Flannery O'Connor feared would run lesser Southern writers off the rails--as a participant in Hollywood's Golden years, working for some of the great directors of the 1930s and 1940s. How might this Faulkner--a popular cultural Faulkner--sit with the Portable Faulkner and Nobel Laureate? (1) Second, the work Faulkner undertook as a writer in Hollywood must also affect the way in which we read his major fiction. What submerged patterns or meanings might they act to draw out? Finally, as regards broader disciplinary concerns, the discovery of these screenplays and their incorporation into the Faulkner canon would raise the question of just where the unpublished, collaborative and/or unrealized screenplay and treatment might sit within the field of literary studies.

Surprisingly, serious extended scholarship on Faulkner's film work is thin. Sidney's and Kawin's important work initiated the field, but very few scholars since have followed up in earnest their critical engagement with Faulkner's scenarios, even though both scholars have published many of his original screenplays and treatments: Kawin in his Faulkner's MGM Screenplays (1982) and Sidney in his 1960 dissertation, "Faulkner in Hollywood: A Study of His Career as a Scenarist." Robert Hamblin's "The Curious Case of Faulkner's 'The De Gaulle Story'" is something of an exception in its assertion that Faulkner's 1942 screenplay, "The De Gaulle Story," significantly informs both his later screenplay, To Have or Have Not (1942), and A Fable (1954). Most of the work on Faulkner and film either remains tied to the adaptations of his novels or examines and accounts for the use of filmic techniques, such as montage, in his fiction. (2) As valuable as this scholarship is, the fruitful field of Faulkner screenplay studies remains, on the whole, a neglected one, at best emerging. But this state of affairs could be about to change. Robert Brinkmeyer, in his new book, The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950(2009) performs a reading of two screenplays, "The De Gaulle Story" and "Battle Cry," in light of Faulkner's newfound "role as defender of democracy" (188). Julian Murphet has recently started work on a project provisionally entitled "William Faulkner: Between Cinema and Literature," in which be examines the retroactive influence, formal, thematic and compositional, of Faulkner's work for the Studios on his serious fiction.

It is generally accepted that Faulkner undertook screen writing in Hollywood for one reason only: money. A further assumption is that be loathed Hollywood: the work, the industry, the place. The myth of Faulkner and Hollywood prevails, to be fair to its proponents, for quite compelling reasons: he made public his loathing for the place; (3) he was at rimes treated badly by the studios, particularly Warner Bros.; and his (strangely overlooked) 1935 short story, "Golden Land," presents a rather distasteful portrait of Hollywood and its decadent inhabitants. Whether or not this account of Faulkner and Hollywood is true, it has proved an almost unassailable obstacle to expanding the Faulkner canon to embrace the film work, some of which he undertook for such notable directors as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Jean Renoir. But the probability that Faulkner did not enjoy working in Hollywood and the collaborative and formulaic work the studio system required of him does not mean that his film work is not worthy of scholarly engagement. Further, as John Matthews has so succinctly argued, to "segregate any writer's serious art fiction totally from his or her writing for commercial uses ... is to participate uncritically in a myth advanced by modernist aesthetics" (69-70). The troubling neglect of Faulkner's screen work in its own right and in its relationship to the rest of his opus is rather ironic, for there is a good case to be argued that it was indeed thanks to Hollywood--along with Malcolm Cowley's 1946 The Portable Faulkner and Faulkner's award of the Nobel Prize in late 1950---that he was transformed from a struggling virtual unknown into the scare quotes "Faulkner." Hollywood intervened in the making of Faulkner's reputation between these two significant dates, with its arrival in Oxford, in March 1949, to film Intruder in the Dust--an unusual occurrence at a time when the majority of Hollywood films were shot in the studio rather than on location. Later that same year, Oxford's Lyric cinema hosted the film's world premier (Blotner, Faulkner 501-10).

To resurrect our attempts to understand Faulkner's work in Hollywood, I introduce here two works that have not attracted any critical engagement whatsoever. One is the lengthy treatment "Sutter's Gold," which Faulkner wrote for Howard Hawks in 1934 at Universal Studios, and which tells the story of the real-life Colonel Johann Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who settled in California in the late 1830s. In Faulkner's version, Sutter travels across the continent from New York to California via St. Louis and the Hawaiian Islands and establishes a quasi empire--New Helvetia--in what would become Sacramento. The discovery of gold on his land by James Marshall in 1848, which ushered in the Californian Gold Rush, leads to Sutter's downfall: the death of his son; the razing of his entire estate; a seemingly endless series of lawsuits he undertakes against both state and federal governments in a desperate attempt to have legitimized his claims to large sections of California; and his eventual death.

The "Sutter's Gold" treatment has been presumed lost for the past seventy years (Bochner 50; Sidney 360 n.1). (4) In fact, the one-hundred4 eight page treatment is held in the Howard Hawks Papers in Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library. The treatment is an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars's popular 1925 novel, L'Or, which became an instant bestseller when translated into English and published in the US as Sutter's Gold in 1926. Both Hawks and Faulkner were taken off the project and the film was eventually directed by James Cruze and scripted by a handful of writers, only to become Universal's flop of the year. Sergei Eisenstein had originally been interested in the project at Paramount, (5) and there are quite intriguing similarities between Faulkner's and Eisenstein's treatments, which comes as something of a surprise when we remember that the two men were in fact contracted to rival studios (Bochner 50). We can only speculate about the way in which Faulkner's borrowing from Eisenstein might have come about.

The other recently unearthed Faulkner treatment is "Drums Along the Mohawk," dated July 1937. Set in upper New York state, "Drums" relates the trials and tribulations of a young married couple, Gil and Lana Martin, who have settled in the Mohawk Valley at the time of the Revolution and, with their fellow settlers, are caught up in the conflicts that rage between the Continental Army and the Loyalists and their Seneca allies, the so-called Destructives.

While Sidney, in his 1960 dissertation, reproduced an earlier (March 1937) and much shorter treatment (thirty-eight pages) of Faulkner's "Drums Along the Mohawk," which contains no dialogue, this dialogued treatment, to which there is absolutely no reference in any film or Faulkner scholarship that I have encountered, is much longer (two hundred-thirty-seven pages); it's held in the manuscript collection of the Huntington Library. Faulkner wrote this dialogued treatment for John Ford at Twentieth Century-Fox. While Ford went on to complete the project (a very good film, starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert), Faulkner's contribution is not acknowledged; Lamar Trotti is listed as the screenwriter. Interestingly, it is Faulkner's shorter treatment, reproduced in Sidney, not this longer dialogued treatment, that bears a much stronger resemblance to Ford's final 1939 film. Like "Sutter's Gold," Faulkner's "Drums" treatment is an adaptation of a best-selling novel, Walter D. Edmonds's 1936 Drums along the Mohawk.

These two scenarios have at least three elements in common: both are set outside the South; both are frontier narratives; and both are adaptations of popular novels. However, that "Sutter's Gold" and "Drums Along the Mohawk" are indeed adaptations should not limit the way in which we engage with them. There are many moments in both treatments that deviate from the adapted novels, and might really be described as Faulknerian. Although these differences are not the focus of the discussion here, it is nonetheless worth enumerating several of them, to drive home the point that these texts are Faulkner's, and not mere translations or faithful copies of source texts.

One of the most significant discrepancies between the novel and the treatment of Sutter's Gold is in characterisation: Faulkner transforms Colonel Sutter into a megalomaniac. (6) There are also considerable plot changes in the treatment, principally revolving around the fates of Sutter's wife and children. Faulkner also introduces a plot secondary to the central Sutter narrative, which concerns Sutter's rivalry with James Marshall (culminating in Marshall's murder) and Marshall's fictitious wife and child who are indentured to a cruel tavern owner. (7) Another significant difference between the novel and the treatment is that Cendrars confines Sutter's transcontinental travels to a brief six-page account of his stay in Missouri, just long enough for him to hear tell of the marvelous West; Faulkner's narrative of Sutter's journey across the continent is an extensive account of his trials in Indiana, Ohio, and, finally, Missouri, where he first encounters the Marshall family. The account of Sutter's westwards travels manifests an embittered vision of a new nation that is inhabited by slavers, murderers, pimps and gamblers and that breeds only brutality and greed. Indeed, the misery and ruthlessness that Sutter witnesses force him to repudiate "abstraction and justice" (49). This is a frontier more akin to Mark Twain's Missouri than to Cendrars's in its depiction of a colonial entrepreneurialism that is only violent and exploitative.

Faulkner's "Drums Along the Mohawk" treatment similarly casts doubt on the exceptionalism of the new nation, this time at its very inception, during the Revolutionary era: this is one of the most significant ways in which it diverges from Edmonds's novel. While in the novel frontier violence is largely a result of Indian hostility, in Faulkner's treatment the violence emerges equally--at least--from white America. Other changes effected in the move from novel to treatment are no doubt a result of the demands of the Hollywood narrative. Faulkner clearly had to make decisions to excise much of Edmonds's material; the novel is almost picaresque in its structure as it leaps about from character to character and battle to battle. Faulkner makes central to the story one couple, the Martins, who function as the structuring device of a plot that in Edmonds's hands must have seemed rather unwieldy.

By the time Faulkner carne to write the first of these two treatments--"Sutter's Gold" in July 1934--he had been thinking about what would become Absalom, Absalom! for several years, indeed since writing the unpublished story "Evangeline" in 1931 and "Wash" in 1933. "Evangeline" narrates the bate bones of the life of Colonel Sutpen, already dead at the time of the narration. We discover that Sutpen received land from the Indians in 1840 or 1850; he built a house with the help of a foreign architect; he had a wife, who died during the war, and two children, Judith and Henry; he once traveled to Germany; and he died, rather ingloriously, in a wagon accident. "Wash" does not divulge much more of Sutpen's life, focused as it is on his death at the hands of Wash Jones, an event Faulkner will of course recycle in Absalom, Absalom!. These two early 1930s stories, as Bochner has also observed (56), may map out the death of Colonel Sutpen and some of the milestones of his life, from the moment of his arrival in Jefferson, but they do not yet describe those details of his life that motivate his trajectory and characterisation, the account of which--or, the attempt to account for which--comes to dominate Absalom, Absalom! (8)

So many similarities between the lives of Sutter and Sutpen and their homophonic names deny that they are coincidental, so it seems reasonably clear, as Bochner has also suggested, that Faulkner's writing of "Sutter's Gold" contributed to his creation of that other nineteenth-century pioneering colonel, Colonel Sutpen. (9) Ina letter to his publisher, Harrison Smith, dated February 1934, Faulkner describes a new project, "The Dark House": "It is the more or less violent breakup of a household or family from 1860 to 1910.... Roughly, the theme is a man who outraged the land, the land then turned against him" (Blotner, Faulkner 327). In March of the following year, Faulkner "had dated a sheet of his margin-lined paper and written at the top, 'Absalom, Absolom!'.... Faulkner would later say, 'when I took it up again I almost rewrote the whole thing.' He had his principal characters well in hand: the Sutpens, the Coldfields, the Joneses, and Quentin Compson" (Blotner, Faulkner 346-47). In the intervening period, between beginning to write "The Dark House" and then picking it up again a year later as Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner wrote his treatment for Sutter's Gold (Bochner 56; Blotner, Faulkner 346). Indeed, Absalom, Absalom! transposes onto the Southern landscape the Far West story of Colonel Sutter, a story of white westward migration to the frontier, of the attempted establishment of a personal empire, of enslaved foreign labourers upon which that empire was founded, of the destruction of native peoples and their environment, and finally the demise of that empire.

The resonances between the two texts are quite startling. Both Faulkner's Sutter and Sutpen were born into poverty and both experience an epiphany which triggers a fanaticism directed solely towards the execution of a "design" and the establishment of a dynasty. For Sutpen, this crucial moment is his encounter with the black butler at the front door of the Tidewater plantation house; it sets in train his travels to the French West Indies, his brief marriage there, and his eventual arrival in Jefferson in 1833, where he purchases from old Ikkemotubbe what will become Sutpen's Hundred. Sutter, meanwhile, having escaped arrest in Switzerland for unpaid debts, boards a ship bound for the New World in 1830. He arrives in a violent New York and travels steadily westwards to Indiana in 1833 (the year Sutpen arrives in Jefferson), then onto Ohio and St. Louis. In Missouri Sutter experiences his epiphany: he witnesses the worst of white frontier greed, violence, and exploitation, in his entanglement with the invented saga of the Marshall family. In the end, Sutter "repudiates America as he repudiated Europe" at the very moment he acknowledges that the New World's "heritage of civilized people.., has even leavened new America with cruelty and corruption" ("Sutter's" 48). He thus seeks "justice in a new land free of white men" and joins a wagon train headed for the Far West. From Vancouver, he travels on to Hawaii where he procures, Sutpen-like, his own team of offshore "wild niggers"--Kanakas--who, aided by "his Indians," will help him execute his own design, New Helvetia in Spanish California, in 1839. The first image of California that Faulkner's treatment conjures is of an Indian in Christian clothes, his lifeless body filled with arrows.

The treatment's account of Sutter is animated by a repudiation of "America," which is figured as a nation founded on exploitative ambition and greed, in the service of which human beings--black and white women, Hawaiian islanders, and Native Americans--are dehumanized, traded, and slaughtered. The discovery of gold, signaling the institution of capitalism in the New World, destroys the long dreamed-of agricultural utopia of New Helvetia along with the House of Sutter, and puts a price on, thus enabling the ownership of, both land and people. The discovery also transforms Sutter into a Sutpen-like "fanatic," who announces 'Tm going to be king!... I'm going to be God!" ("Sutter's" 77-78). (10)

The "Sutter's Gold" treatment, then, describes the national enterprise in terms of human and environmental sacrifice--evoked in what would have been a quite powerful cinematic montage, beginning with Sutter's award of a Californian land grant by the Mexican government. Faulkner follows Eisenstein very closely here. This is Eisenstein's treatment of the settlement of New Helvetia:

In the courtyard sounds music of the drum and the flute, and groups of Indians are drilling to its rhythm. In the fields groups of Indians are harvesting wheat. Herds of cattle. Herds of horses are pasturing. Masses of Indians are feeding at a large trough, gathering the mush with their hands as it pours out of the rolling barrel. Through the swamps one hundred and twenty white oxen are dragging a machine for the mill. The first machine to come to California. The whips crack, the drivers shout, the wheels creak with mighty clamour. Slowly the machine wends its way through the virgin land. Tall piles of fruit--apples, pears, watermelons--grow as Indians heap them beneath shady and over-hanging caves. Rude wagons with wheat for threshing are being unloaded in a corral. The one hundred and twenty oxen with a mighty effort, and a last heave, drag the machine over the brow of a hill. Mountains of unthreshed wheat grow higher and higher.... The Indians who were taking part in the military exercises are now clothing themselves in soldier's uniforms.... A German officer, their instructor, gives commands .... Amid boisterous "Huzzas" the flag of the United States takes the place of the Mexican flag on the mast of Sutter's fort. (174-75)

Many of these images are repeated in Faulkner's montage: the drilling Indians in uniform, the Indians feeding from a trough, the oxen, the piles of wheat, the German officer, the replacement of the Mexican/ Spanish flag with the American flag. Faulkner's montage opens with a close-up of Sutter's land grant, and then rapidly dissolves to Faces of 3 crucified Indians. Dissolved Indians to: OCTOROON's face. Dissolve back to grant. DISSOLVE grant and then to handdrawn map, lettered New Helvetia. DISSOLVE octoroon's face. Resolve behind map: Men felling trees DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Oxen drawing logs. DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Men drawing logs by ropes. DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Horde of men drawing machinery, etc. DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Men pulling plows: Indians, kanakas, etc. DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Oxen drawing plows DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Men filling wheat sacks DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Mountain of wheat sacks growing and growing DOUBLE EXPOSURE TO Indians eating from long trough like cattle DOUBLE EXPOSURE to German officer drilling Indians and Kanakas with guns and queer uniforms DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Grapes being harvested DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Girls ... treading grapes in vats DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Casks mounting and mounting DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Herds of sheep and cattle DOUBLE EXPOSURE to Village, houses going up. (66-68)

A final fade-in reveals Spanish flags, which then dissolve to American flags, as in Eisenstein's treatment. The course of nation thus completes itself through the disciplining, dehumanisation, and sacrificial death of the indigenous people as well as the enslavement of Africans. Faulkner's montage is arguably more virulent than Eisenstein's treatment of this same material, as it inserts a slave--the quadroon--into its account of the establishment of nation. Versions of the sequence of this montage replay later in Faulkner's treatment (72, 91) and expand to include immigrant women and children. The sacrifices made in the name of Sutpen's design are similarly comprehensive and similarly racialized in Absalom, Absalom!: Sutpen abandons his creole wife and repudiates Charles Bon; he abuses Ellen and Rosa Coldfield and Milly Jones in aid of a "higher" purpose, the production of a male heir; and his slaves "overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing" for the creation of his empire (8).

Faulkner's dialogued treatment of Drums Along the Mohawk reemphasizes the violence of nation-formation, this time at the very founding moment of the polis and its effects on both white settlers and indigenous peoples. Faulkner depicts the friendly Oneida Indians according to now-familiar tropes, of white corruption and the Vanishing American. Blue Back, the principle Native American character in Faulkner's treatment, undergoes a quite radical textual vanishing; his role in Edmonds's novel is diminished considerably in the treatment, to such an extent, in fact, that Vice President of Twentieth Century-Fox, Daryl Zanuck, noticing Blue Back's almost complete absence, demanded that he be reinstated, which he largely was in the final version that Ford filmed (Aleiss 87). (11) Native Americans undergo a more poignant thematic vanishing in Faulkner's treatment, which ends with Lana Martin's observation that the Revolutionary War has meant that Blue Back "has lost everything now. Even the land his ancestors lived on" (238). The American enterprise is clearly at odds with its native peoples, an attitude which Go Down, Moses will later register in its depiction of the "Indian signifier," (12) Sam Fathers, who leaves no heirs, and one that is clearly at odds with both Edmonds's novel, which lingers on Indian brutality, and Ford's film, in which the Destructives (the hostile Senecas) are depicted largely as obstacles in the course of nation at the same time that the "friendly" Indians are swept up by, in order to embrace, the new nation. In a disturbing scene towards the end of Ford's film, colonial and racial exigencies are absorbed seamlessly into the new (white) nation, as Blue Back and an unnamed black woman (she is the slave, Daisy, named in the novel and in Faulkner's treatment) stand side-by-side to salute the new American flag.

Faulkner's "Drums Along the Mohawk" treatment is further inflected by a dark vision of America in its depiction of the Revolution less as a war against foreign intervention and imperialism than as an intracolonial conflict. Thus, Gil Martin is imprisoned in the Continental prison by his own side for alleged desertion. In Edmonds's novel, the Loyalist, John Wolff, is held in this same prison. In changing the prisoners and thus political allegiances, the treatment underscores (arguably from a particularly Southern perspective) the rifts and conflicts present within the nation from its inception, conflicts that would of course erupt more fiercely nearly a century later.

In Ford's film, as mentioned above, the white settlers, a friendly Indian, and a slave woman gather around to salute the new flag; in Edmonds's novel, the women are moved to tears at the sight of this flag. However, in Faulkner's treatment, the settlers rather provocatively consider the new flag with its thirteen stars "unlucky" (88, 128), ah observation that chimes with what Gil earlier sensed: this cursed land "doesn't even want white men in it" (54; see also 48), an observation reminiscent of Sutter's desire to escape white men, the new Americans. The villain of Faulkner's "Drums" treatment is neither the Destructives nor the British, bur the American nation itself, which is personified as the newly formed Continental Congress and its Continental Army. (13) Indeed, one settler declares, "we handled Brant and Butler at Oriskany, and we handled Sillinger before Stanwyx. We even held our own pretty well with the regular troops, bur God save us from the Continental Congress" (176). And while in Edmonds's novel the settlers discuss the Revolution in economic terms, the farmers in Faulkner's treatment are ignorant of the causes of war; they simply want to farm and are certainly not concerned with who governs. As one of the settlers states, "This valley, this frontier, ain't just a matter of today's troubles and hardships and loss, not tomorrow's either. It's land, the only thing on earth that flood and fire and sorrow and grief can't hurt" (151). When, toward the end of the treatment, the settlers are told that Cornwallis has surrendered to Washington, someone asks, "Cornwallis? Who's Cornwallis?" (216). The formation of the national government only gets in the way of the authentic life of the frontier as well as its native peoples.

These Mohawk Valley farmers are recognisable from Yoknapatawpha County: (14) in the defiance of the "tall men" of Faulkner's eponymous 1941 short story as they resist New Deal "interference"; and in the posture of Roth Edmonds in Go Down, Moses in his attack on big government. We might even recognise this challenge in Faulkner's own assumed persona in his 1952 Address to the Delta Council, in Cleveland, Mississippi, in which he laments what he regards as a present-day forgetfulness of the responsibility of every individual to make his own way: "by his own efforts and sweat, he could gain dignity and independence, owing nothing to no man" and throwing off his dependence on government "charity" (131-32). In the registering of a certain antipathy, to say the least, in the formation and direction of the American nation, both the "Sutter's Gold" and "Drums Along the Mohawk" treatments return over and over to questions of legitimacy and inheritance--just as do Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses--troped as the cursed land and manifested in concerns about miscegenation, male heirs, illegitimate children, birthright and its repudiation, and questions of land ownership and the very possibility of this. As Edouard Glissant succinctly comments, "Faulkner implicated the setting of his work, the Place, in the vague interrogation of legitimacy" (227). It matters, then, that these interrogations take place on frontiers, whether Southern, Western or Northeastern. The reckless, fanatical quests of Sutter in the West and Sutpen in the South register a frightening mania at the very core of myths of a foundational and much lauded national entrepreneurialism.

To read Faulkner's film writings in tandem with the major fiction is indeed a methodology that has the potential to shift the focus of Faulkner studies. This approach encourages us to recognize alternative or even new patterns and meanings in the novels and stories, something that I have only briefly indicated here. While some scholars, like Kawin and Phillips, have sought to evaluate the film work of Faulkner--is it good writing or not?--the approach to the film writings proposed here places the value of their discovery and subsequent dissemination in terms of the transactions with, and the recycling of, the fiction with which they must engage. Attending closely to these non-canonical Faulkner texts, which so provocatively circulate around the major fiction, might bring into view a different Faulkner. A reading of Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, for example, through the lens of these Western or frontier treatments reveals a submerged bur recurring frontier narrative that, as I argue elsewhere, runs through several of Faulkner's so-called major novels. Reading across genres and forms a writer such as Faulkner--a writer who is so forcefully associated with the modern novel, regionalism and the Southern narrative--promises to resituate or remap the region, its narratives, and its authors. Herein lies the importance of reading and appraising, with scholarly seriousness and acumen, the film writings. Introducing to Faulkner scholars these two treatments--one heretofore believed lost and the other, unknown--might lay the groundwork for the configuration of new or alternative "Faulkners." The next step in the exciting and emerging field of Faulkner film studies, I would suggest, is to track down all of his Hollywood writings, rumoured and otherwise, and request that they be made available for publication and thus for critical engagement. Only then might the even more comprehensive work on Faulkner, screenwriter, and thus Faulkner, writer, begin.

I am indebted to Jose Rivera, Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, for his invaluable assistance in tracking down Faulkner's two treatments, "Drums Along the Mohawk" and "Sutter's Gold." I would also like to thank Twentieth Century-Fox for granting the Huntington Library permission to copy and me permission to quote from Faulkner's treatment of "Drums Along the Mohawk" for this essay.

Works Cited

Aleiss, Angela Maria. "From Adversaries to Allies: The American Indian in Hollywood Films, 1930-1950." Diss. Columbia, 1991.

Baldwin, Doug. "Putting Images into Words: Elements of the 'Cinematic' in William Faulkner's Prose." Faulkner Journal. Special Issue, Faulkner and Film. (16.1/2 (2000-2001): 35-65.

Barthes, Roland. "Theory of the Text." Untying The Text. Ed. Robert Young. London: Routledge, 1981.31-47.

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 1984. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991.

--. "Faulkner in Hollywood." Man and the Movies. Ed. W. R. Robinson. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967. 261-303.

Bochner, Jay. "La Fortune de L'Oren Amerique." Cendrars Aujourd'hui: Presence d'un Romancier. Paris: Minard, 1977. 35-59.

Brinkmeyer, Robert. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascista, 1930-1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009.

Cendrars, Blaise. Sutter's Gold. Trans. Henry Logan Stuart. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926.

Drums Along the Mohawk. [c] 1937-1939. Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox. Treatment by William Faulkner. Screenplay by Lamar Trotti and Sonya Levien. All rights reserve&

Edmonds, Waker D. Drums Along the Mohawk. New York: Buccaneer Books, 1981.

Eisenstein, Sergei. "Sutter's Gold." With Eisenstein in Hollywood: A Chapter of Autobiography. Ivor Montague. New York: International, 1969. 151-206.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. "Address to the Delta Council, Cleveland, Mississippi, May 15, 1952." William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches and Public Letters. 1966. Ed.

James B. Meriwether. New York: Modern Library, 2004. 126-34.

--. Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1995.

--. "Drums Along the Mohawk." MSS 55704 Huntington Library, Dialogued Treatment, July 3, 1937, 238 pp.

--. "Evangeline." Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. 1976. Ed.

Joseph Blotner. New York: Vintage, 1981. 583-609.

--. Go Down, Moses. 1942. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. "Golden Land." 1950. Collected Stories 701-26.

--. "Sutter's Gold." MSS 1404; Howard Hawks Collection, 1925-1970; Arts and Communications; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Treatment, July, 1934, 108 pp.

--. "The Tall Men." Collected Stories 45-62.

--. "Wash." Collected Stories 535-50.

Gleeson-White, Sarah. "William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: An American Frontier Narrative." Journal of American Studies 43.3 (2009) 1-17 (forthcoming).

Glissant, Edouard. Faulkner, Mississippi. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Hamblin, Robert. "The Curious Case of Faulkner's 'The De Gaulle Story.'" Faulkner Journal. Special Issue, Faulkner and Film. 16.1/2 (2000-2001) 79-87.

Kawin, Bruce F. Faulkner and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977.

--. "A Faulkner Filmography." Film Quarterly 30.4 (1977) 12-21.

--. Faulkner's MGM Screenplays. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1982.

Lurie, Peter. Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Matthews, John. "Faulkner and the Culture Industry." Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Ed. Philip M. Weinstein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.51-74.

Phillips, Gene D. Fiction, Film, and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1988.

Sidney, George. "An Addition to the Faulkner Canon: The Hollywood Writings." Twentieth Century Literature 6.4 (1961): 172-74.

--. "Faulkner in Hollywood: A Study of His Career as a Scenarist." Diss. New Mexico, 1960.

--. "William Faulkner and Hollywood." Colorado Quarterly 9 (1961): 367-77.

Trefzer, Annette. Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007.

SARAH GLEESON-WHITE

University of Sydney

(1) John T. Matthews argues that Faulkner's writings for both film and popular magazines reflect a resistance to the culture industry.

(2) See Phillips, Baldwin, and Lurie, who identify the ways in which many of Faulkner's novels absorb certain cinematic styles and techniques.

(3) Faulkner once said that "Hollywood is the only place on earth where you can get stabbed in the back while you're climbing a ladder" (Blotner, Faulkner 320).

(4) Kawin lists the "Sutter's Gold" treatment in his Faulkner filmography (167), but gives no indication that he is familiar with it. I am following Sidney's terminology in "An Addition to the Faulkner Canon": "a screenplay (also known in Hollywood as a scenario or a script), is the detailed written plan from which the film is made; a treatment is the screenplay in embryo" (173). Kawin defines a treatment as the "preliminary outline of the film" ("Filmography" 18).

(5) Eisenstein's 1930 scenario of Sutter's Gold is reproduced in Ivor Montagu's With Eisenstein in Hollywood: A Chapter of Autobiography.

(6) Faulkner may have followed Eisenstein in this characterisation of Sutter, which differs vastly from Cendrars'. See Eisenstein 185.

(7) The Marshall family subplot is Faulkner's invention, found in neither Cendrars' novel nor Eisenstein's treatment. Hannah, Marshall's wife, prostitutes herself in order to buy her and her daughter's freedom but she ends up committing suicide out of shame.

(8) Faulkner's "Sutter's Gold" treatment, with its account of the discovery of gold leading to the Californian gold rush, might also encourage us to think again about the trope of buried treasure in the short story, "Gold is Not Always" (1940), and the "Fire and the Hearth" section of Go Down, Moses.

(9) Kawin, who had not read Faulkner's "Sutter's Gold" treatment, speculated that Faulkner's writing of the treatment "may well have influenced [his] plans for Absalom, Absalom! since both are stories of drifters who 'strike it rich' and whose love-lives reflect their ambitions" (88). Ina fascinating article on the place and influence of Cendrars' novel in the US, Jay Bochner, while lamenting the loss of Faulkner's treatment, finds echoes of L'Orin Faulkner's literary writings, in particular Absalom, Absalom!.

(10) In Eisenstein's "Sutter's Gold" scenario, it is the public who call Sutter king, on the discovery of gold (185).

(11) It is unclear from Aleiss' account whether Zanuck's comment pertains to the shorter, earlier treatment, reproduced in Sidney, or to the longer one, which is the focus here. However, Zanuck's remark makes sense in relation to both treatments.

(12) This is Annette Trefzer's useful term. Although Sam Fathers is a creolised combination of black, white, and Native American, he functions in the narrative as an Indian, and he must thus make way for the establishment of new American: Ike McCaslin.

(13) Sidney also notices this in the shorter treatment ("Faulkner in Hollywood" 129).

(14) Sidney makes a similar observation, bur pertaining to the shorter treatment ("Faulkner in Hollywood" 115).