"Without Even His Hat Took Off": Faulkner's Sanctuary

Abstract

"Without Even His Hat Took Off":Faulkner's Sanctuary William Brevda In his infamous introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary, William Faulkner stated that he wrote the original version of the novel just "to make money" (v). Angry and frustrated about his difficulties getting Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury published and being told that Sartoris was not going to sell, Faulkner decided to write a more commercial novel: "I took time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine" (vi). Although Faulkner did not identify these trends, it is safe to say that they were the gangster phenomenon, the vogue of Freudianism, movies, sex, and fashion. Faulkner exploited popular trends to make money, but he also parodied them for a laugh. Sanctuary is primarily a gangster novel, but it is also a criticism of the artificiality of modern life. The attributes of Popeye are the attributes of a material object. Faulkner's gangster has no self that is separate from his things or from the current trends out of which he has been fashioned. The indifference of Popeye and Temple Drake to their own corruption is the indifference of the inanimate world in their lack of a conscience. Sanctuary is a gangster Waste Land, as Faulkner might have expected even a person in the "Sahara of the Bozart" (Mencken) to recognize, breeding gangsters out of the dead land. Sanctuary depicts a world of dead matter and spiritless "already dead" people (Sanctuary 115). Pop-eye is the most "thing-like" character, but all the characters, as I argue in this essay, are hat-like (Adamowski 32). How would we know the gangster without his gat and his hat? The gat is important, but the hat is essential. Writing a gangster novel would have seemed like a good way to make money in 1929 when Faulkner began writing Sanctuary. Damon [End Page 393] Runyon's first four Guys and Dolls stories were published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1929. That year Donald Henderson Clarke's Louis Beretti sold 11,000 copies and another 99,000 when the movie version Born Reckless was released in 1930. Armitage Trail wrote Scarface in 1929. It was published in 1930 and released as a film in 1932. Also published in 1929 were Frank L. Packard's The Big Shot and W. R. Bur-nett's Little Caesar and award-winning short story "Dressed to Kill." The pulp magazine Gangster Stories began publication in 1929. All an author needed in 1929 to make a killing in the popular market was a tough Italian gangster, or so it must have seemed to Faulkner, who needed money for his impending marriage. Popeye's ethnicity is a pop culture stereotype: he is pop Eyetalian. Faulkner's writing of Sanctuary coincided with Al "Scarface" Capone's well publicized reign as the "King of Gangland" from the mid-1920s to 1931 (Enright 85). On February 14, 1929, one month after Faulkner began work on Sanctuary, the media coverage of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre turned Capone into a national celebrity. In March 1930, Capone, the personification of the gangster myth, made the cover of Time Magazine (nine years before Faulkner did). That same year, Fred D. Pasley popularized the Capone legend in Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man. Popeye is not Al Capone, and even Capone said that he did not belong in Pasley's book "any more than I belong in a book by Horatio Alger" (Ruth 118), but Capone is the archetype of the literary and cinematic gangster. When Faulkner "took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends," it would not have taken him long to identify them and to see how they were related (Introduction vi). In a 1930 story by Runyon, a character based on Walter Winchell uses Freudian lingo to call the public's obsession with gangsters "an underworld complex" ("Social Error" 70). This fascination with "gangster chic" had a lot to do with...