Just a Light Lunch, Charleston Style

When I think of eating a light lunch, to me that means something like half of a turkey sandwich and an apple. Not surprisingly, our friends the Old Charlestonians had rather different notions about what constituted a light mid-day meal. After the jump, we've prepared another edition of Southern Cookin' for you. This time it's just a very delicate, sparse four course meal, with recipes taken from the invaluable Charleston Recollections and Receipts: Rose P. Ravenel's Cookbook.  (More info on the cookbook can be found in post one here.)

So if you're feeling just a teeny bit hungry around lunchtime, do be sure to check out the  following recipes. They are absolutely perfect for a small snack! 

Doppelganger Dresses, Part 3: Scarlett's Surprise Party Dress (Book Version)

"He was in her closet, going through her dresses swiftly.  He fumbled and drew out her new jade-green watered-silk dress.  It was cut low over the bosom and the skirt was draped back over an enormous bustle and on the bustle was a huge bunch of pink velvet roses."

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter LIII

Our Doppelganger Dresses selection for this week is a change of pace from what will typically be the main focus of the series: Walter Plunkett's costumes for the movie version of Gone with the Wind. But Plunkett isn't the only person in the GWTW world known for scrupulous attention to detail and historical accuracy--there's also Margaret Mitchell to contend with, of course. So this time, we have three fashion plates for you based on MM's description of the notorious dress Scarlett wore to Ashley’s birthday party. 

I admit I have always had a hard time picturing what this dress looked like in my mind ("an enormous bustle with pink velvet roses - huh?!").  So if this dress leaves you sartorially stumped like me, I hope these images help bring it into greater focus.

Check them out after the jump. Which one can you most imagine Scarlett wearing to Ashley's surprise party? 

Rue de la Paix

This week's collage provides a rather sweet interpretation of an otherwise intense and unhappy night for Scarlett O'Hara Kennedy. 

Scarlett's Sewing Circle by carol@themovies

Crossing Paths: Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner (part 2)

Yesterday we examined some letters and a review that gave us an idea of what Margaret Mitchell must have thought of William Faulkner's writing. As promised, today we're back with William Faulkner's side of the story.

William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell

William Faulkner about Margaret Mitchell

I will preface this by saying that, although some articles (like the one encompassing Mitchell's review from yesterday) suggest that Faulkner was jealous of Gone with the Wind's success, I've found no direct evidence to that. It wouldn't be surprising, though. One can't know for sure whether Faulkner resented the quasi-total obscurity of his own name, in light of the popular recognition and prizes Gone with the Wind scored (see the 1937 Pulitzer, thought it must be said that more highbrow awards tended to ignore Mitchell). What is certain though is that he wanted at least one aspect that came with this success: the money. He had always had a hard time making ends meet and still finding enough time to write. And as you can read below, the phenomenon that was Gone with the Wind gave him hope that he could make more money with his novels as well.

Did William Faulkner read Gone with the Wind? The answer is most probably no. At least he claimed he hadn’t in an interview for the Memphis Commercial Appeal dating from November 18, 1937. According to the article in question: “His reason for not having read Gone with the Wind is that it is 'entirely too long for any story.' Nor has he read Anthony Adverse [another highly-popular historical novel made into a movie in 1936] for the same reason: That no story takes 1000 pages to tell."  We must of course take into account the fact that Faulkner famously disliked giving interviews and his answers were often short and/or flippant, and moreover that, in this particular case, we get to see the reporter's account and not his entire answer.  But the derogatory note still remains.

Gone with the Wind the movie is an entirely different story. Its connections to Faulkner are easy to trace. There is no clear indication of whether he had seen the movie or not. Blotner, one of his biographers, goes as far as to suggest that Gone with the Wind - that had played in Oxford, Mississippi, the writer's hometown, as it did all over America - might have inspired the title of one of Faulkner's books, Go Down, Moses, a collection of short stories published in 1942. [As you well know, the song Go Down, Moses appears both in Gone with the Wind the book and in the soundtrack of the movie.]

It would be a funny crossing of paths, especially if one is aware of another little coincidence regarding titles. Both Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner had considered the Macbeth quote "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" as title for their books, Gone with the Wind and The Sound and the Fury. But however entertaining this drawing of parallels is, I personally don't think Faulkner watched Gone with the Wind. The reality is that the only time he refers directly to a scene from the movie, he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.

One incident that happened when Gone with the Wind played in Oxford had amused Faulkner and he used it more than once as an example of how Southern women had never really gotten over the war, had never really admitted defeat. What happened was that his aunt, Holland Falkner Wilkins (Auntee ), excited by the prospect of watching Gone with the Wind, had paid 75 cents to reserve a seat at the screening.  But as soon as Sherman's name appeared in the movie, she stalked out of the theater. Faulkner recounts this incident in the series of  conferences he held at the University of Virginia in 1957-58. He also seems to be under the impression that Sherman himself appeared as a character in Gone with the Wind:

"But it was the—the aunts, the women, that had never given up. I—my aunt, she liked to go to picture shows. They had Gone with the Wind in the theatre at home, and she went to see it, and as soon as Sherman came on the screen, she got up and left. She had paid good money to go there, but she wasn't going to sit and look at Sherman."

Listen to the record or read the transcript in its entirety here.

Faulkner had already used this little incident in a paragraph from the novel Requiem for a Nun, published in 1951. Brace yourselves for a fragment (!) from a very long sentence. Lovely prose and imagery to compensate for the length: 

"(...) only the aging unvanquished women were unreconciled, irreconcilable, reversed and irrevocably reverted against the whole moving unanimity of panorama until, old unordered vacant pilings above a tide's flood, they themselves had an illusion of motion, facing irreconcilably backward toward the old lost battles, the old aborted cause, the old four ruined years whose very physical scars ten and twenty and twenty-five changes of season had annealed back into the earth; twenty-five and then thirty-five years; not only a century and an age, but a way of thinking died; the town itself wrote the epilogue and epitaph: (...) the marble effigy - the stone infantryman on his stone pedestal (...); epilogue and epitaph, because apparently neither the U.D.C. ladies who instigated and bought the monument, nor the architect who designed it nor the masons who erected it, had noticed that the marble eyes under the shading marble palm stared not toward the north and the enemy, but toward the south, toward (if anything) his own rear - looking perhaps, the wits said (could say now, with the old war thirty-five years past and you could even joke about it - except the women, the ladies, the unsurrendered, the irreconcilable, who even after another thirty-five years would still get up and stalk out of picture houses showing Gone With the Wind), for reinforcements; or perhaps not a combat soldier at all, but a provost marshal's man looking for deserters, or perhaps himself for a safe place to run to: because that old war was dead;"

--excerpted from Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner

[Compare to Mitchell's: 

"Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to look back."

Gone with the Wind, Chapter XXV

and

"Many ex-Confederate soldiers, knowing the frantic fear of men who saw their families in want, were more tolerant of former comrades who had changed political colors in order that their families might eat. But not the women of the Old Guard, and the women were the implacable and inflexible power behind the social throne. The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts than it had ever been at the height of its glory. It was a fetish now. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who had died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabres in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans. These women gave no aid, comfort or quarter to the late enemy, and now Scarlett was numbered among the enemy."

Gone with the Wind, Chapter XLIX]

So judging by the way he describes it, I doubt that Faulkner really watched the movie. He was interested in it for another reason, though. Faulkner had experience as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and he was not new to the scene of novels being translated into movies either. His own 1931 novel, Sanctuary had been adapted into the 1933 drama The Story of Temple Drake, the quality of which made Margaret Mitchell fearful of what Hollywood would do to her own book. Faulkner was less concerned, though, because what he desperately needed was money.

In September of 1936, when Absalom, Absalom ("the best novel yet written by an American," as the author described it) was close to being published, Faulkner had set to sell the movie rights to it for twice the amount David O. Selznick had paid for Gone with the Wind in July: $100,000. Later that month, he sent the galleys of the book and a note to  screenwriter and producer Nunnally Johnson. The price had dropped to $50,000: "Nunnally- These are the proofs of my new book. The price is $50,000. It's about miscegenation." But unlike Gone with the Wind, and unlike some of Faulkner's other novels, this was no heroic, romanticized view of the South. As a result, no one wanted to buy  Absalom, Absalom.

Two years later, however, Gone with the Wind's success did bring Faulkner some money. M-G-M, having lost the bidding war for Mitchell's book, looked into buying the rights for another Civil War novel that they could turn into their own Gone with the Wind, and found The Unvanquished, a novel published in February of 1938. It was fashioned from stories Faulkner had already published in The Saturday Evening Post and a little closer to Gone with the Wind than Absalom, Absalom. M-G-M bought the rights for $25,000 and intended to cast Clark Gable (!) in the leading part. The project never came to fruition. Here's Faulkner's account of it: 

"Yes, they—they bought the book. That is a funny story, too. A producer named David Selznick bought Gone with the Wind. M-G-M wanted to make it, and he—he wouldn't let M-G-M make it. He wanted to use Gable, who was under contract to M-G-M in it, and they—they wouldn't let him have Gable, and he wouldn't let them have Gone with the Wind. So they bought my book and told him that—that if he didn't let them make Gone with the Wind, they were going to make a Gone with the Wind of their own. They had no intention of making a moving picture out of my book. And so Selznick let them make the picture."

Listen to the record or read the transcript in its entirety here.

So there you have it. In some ways these writers been in the each other's shadow for a good part of their lives. For Mitchell, Faulkner's work was the highbrow critical acclaim she never got, while for Faulkner, Gone with the Wind, both movie and book, represented the popular success that came late in his life. These are all the ways I could find in which Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner actually crossed paths.

Hope you've enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed digging for all these tidbits. I hope to update this post if I find more information (actually, what I am hoping is that I will find a secret correspondence between these two writers à la A.S Byatt's Possession, but it looks like that's not going to happen...).

Poster of the Week

This 1947 poster (23 x 30 1/2) comes from Belgium and shows a barbeque dress-clad Scarlett in a passionate embrace with Rhett. Hmm... perhaps the illustrator had a secret affection for GWTW "what if?" scenarios? 

 Image from moviegoods.com. Poster information cited from Herb Bridges' "Frankly My Dear..."

Crossing Paths: Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner (part 1)

1936 was undoubtedly a good year for Southern literature. It marked the publishing of the most popular novel that came out of the South--Gone with the Wind, without the shadow of a doubt--and of one of the most, if not the most, critically acclaimed books of the whole Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. Nothing could be more different than the trajectories of these two books. Gone with the Wind, published in June, immediately became the public’s favorite, selling over a million copies by the end of the year (the millionth copy was printed on December 15), while Absalom, Absalom, published in October, was by comparison a minor success at best. Its first printing only amounted  to 6,000 copies. 

Through the years, Gone with the Wind’s popularity continued to grow with audiences all over the world, though literary critics would always remain less than unanimous in their appraisal of it. By contrast, Faulkner's books always enjoyed a good reputation with scholars, academics and Europe’s literary elite, but remained virtually unknown to the American public until the late 1940s. In 1946, some of his works, that had all been out of print, were made available to readers in the form of a Portable Faulkner, and the Nobel Prize he won in 1949 brought him to the public’s attention for good. 

Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner

My goal today is not to compare the works of these two writers, though I don’t rule out the possibility of a post/posts with that topic in the future. (Have patience, your here blogger is quite the Faulkner fan.) Instead, what I put together for you is a selection of trivia, attempting to highlight the ways in which Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner crossed paths in American culture. I was fascinated to find clues of what they might have thought of each other, and hope you'll enjoy reading this as well. 

Me being me, however, the material quickly spiraled out of control. So in order not to have one gigantic unreadable post, today we'll look into what Margaret Mitchell thought/wrote about William Faulkner and tomorrow you can return to read his side of the story. 

Margaret Mitchell about William Faulkner 

Margaret Mitchell would have had little reason to like William Faulkner. The men who praised Faulkner were the same critics that bashed Gone with the Wind, notably Malcolm Cowley, the man who would later oversee the publishing of the Portable Faulkner. She professed herself untouched by their scathing reviews and maintained that she didn't want "the aesthetes and radicals of literature" to like her book. The aesthetes in particular were of course Faulkner's main audience at the time.

Moreover, her letters to Herschel Brickell show her opposed to many of the tendencies in her time's literature, of which Faulkner was a prime example: "I've seen so much confused thinking, been so impatient with minds that couldn't start at the beginning of things and work them through logically through the end, etc., that when I sit down to read I don't want to read about muddled minds even if the muddled minds are muddling along in lovely prose." Whoever read a page of Faulkner might recognize him in this unwillingness to "start at the beginning of things and work through them logically through the end." (As well, as in the "lovely prose," Bugsie hastens to add!)

But despite all this, and despite some criticism directed at him and Caldwell, she seems to have kept in touch with Faulkner's writing over the years. One thing Faulkner might have had in his favor was that, though his portrayal of the South differed in many ways from that of Mitchell's, his work was not directly reflective of the leftism she so much despised. [Indeed, before the war, he had been criticized for not tackling more social issues in his books.]

Surprisingly enough, Margaret Mitchell's first reference to William Faulkner dates from a time when both of them were basically unknown to the public. In the spring of 1926, she was writing for the Atlanta Journal, while Faulkner had just made his debut as a novelist. His first book, Soldiers' Pay, had been published in February and Margaret Mitchell was  among the earliest to review it for the Sunday Magazine Supplement of the Journal. It's not verified whether she was in fact the very first reviewer of the novel, though, according to E. Bledsoe, that is a distinct possibility.

Mitchell's review, appearing on March 26, a month after the novel was published, praised Faulkner for striking "an entirely new note in post-war fiction." To me, two aspects of her commentary stood out. First, that she warns the readers against the "obvious crudities" in Soldiers' Pay, which ties in quite nicely with the way she would later distance herself from a perceived naturalistic note in contemporary literature, by pointing out that Gone with the Wind contained "precious little obscenity in it, no adultery and not a single degenerate." And the aspects she does praise are, quite interestingly, those that anticipate the focus in Faulkner's later novels and that might have appealed to Mitchell's artistic sensibility as well:

"The atmosphere of the small southern town where the duck-legged Confederate monument ornamented the courthouse square, the red dust of the road settled thick on the magnolia blossoms in the hot afternoon and the summer somnolence pervading everything except the hearts of the characters, is perhaps the best thing in the book."

From Peggy Mitchell's review of Soldiers's [sic] Pay

Margaret Mitchell seems to have maintained her interest in Faulkner's writing after Gone with the Wind was published. The first indication of this we get from a letter dated November 13, 1936, relatively soon after Absalom, Absalom appeared, and addressed to her friend, literary critic Herschel Brickell.

"Herschel, did you review William Faulkner's latest? I will not be able to read it as my reading for months will be so limited. If you can get a copy of your review without too much trouble, please send it to me. I would go to the library and read it but I have abandoned the library. I know all the librarians and most of the regular visitors and when I go there I get backed in a corner or asked to autograph or have to stand for hours talking so that I come home exhausted and ready to weep. I'd be more interested in your opinions than anyone else's so I'd like to see them."
--excerpted from Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone with the Wind Letters edited by R. Harwell.

We don't have her thoughts on Absalom, Absalom, which would have been quite interesting to read. Also, there is no record of Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner meeting in person or corresponding, though the following letter Mitchell sent him on May 17, 1949 may suggest that they were at least acquainted with each other:

"Dear Mr. Faulkner:
"When I was cleaning out my files recently, I came upon an old catalogue sent me by the Italian publisher of 'Gone With the Wind.' Going through it, I observed with interest that Arnoldo Mondadori was also your publisher. On the chance that you never saw this catalogue with the reproduction of the 'Sanctuary' jacket, I am sending it to you. I showed it to a friend who is a great admirer of your books—'Dear me—how explicit the Italians are!'"
--excerpted from Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone with the Wind Letters edited by R. Harwell.

[Sanctuary is one of Faulkner's most controversial novels, quite crude in some of its details. An 'explicit' jacket of Sanctuary? My personal guess is that it would involve corncobs.]

There are no letters of admiration and praise, like those Margaret Mitchell sent to other writers of the time (see Stark Young), and all things considered, I sincerely doubt she was a fan of Faulkner's writing. But she was undoubtedly familiar with some of his work and it seems to me, not unfriendly towards him either.

Did Faulkner return the courtesy? How did he take Gone with the Wind's immense success outshadowing his own work? Stay tuned to find out!

The Quotable Rhett Butler: Gain the World, Lose Your Soul

So I figured we should continue our incursion into biblical territory with a quote whose origin eluded me until very recently (read: last week). Of course, if on a scale from Bugsie to Bible scholar, you lean towards the latter, it probably won't be a new reference for you as well, but I thought it would still be fun to share. Here it is:  

"That's not a vast age. It's a young age to have gained the whole world and lost your soul, isn't it?"--Gone with the Wind, Chapter LXIII

This comes from Rhett's final speech. I've always had a vague intuition that it had to be a quote by the sound of it, but was never curious enough to actually look it up. And when I did, I found that we had another candidate for our list of biblical references. The phrase appears more than once in the New Testament, but we'll go with Mark :36. Words - Jesus, emphasis - Bugsie (translation - whoever King James paid):

"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

And now, contrary to the popular belief, I won't go into an elaborate rambling tying this reference to the rest of Rhett's speech. Not only because I rather enjoy writing short posts, but also because his meaning is pretty much obvious. Instead I will say that my favorite thing about it is, for once, Scarlett reaction ("But Rhett is my soul and I'm losing him. And if I lose him, nothing else matters!") and invite you to answer a question. Do you think this phrase (to have gained the world and lost his soul) can apply to Rhett as well, at the end of the book?

PS: Don't forget to tune in on TCM for Gone with the Wind tonight!