In the June 6 issue of The New Republic, David Thomson gives a favorable review to The Golden West: Hollywood Stories by Daniel Fuchs (published by the wonderful house of David R. Godine). In the review, Fuchs, who was born in 1909, comes across as an amiable guy with a quiet gift. In the ’30s, he wrote three novels to a lukewarm reception: Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937). (Thomson rates the novels, republished in the ’60s as The Williamsburg Trilogy but now out of print, as “pretty good.”) Fuchs then went to Hollywood where he had a productive career as a screenwriter.

Compare and contrast to Faulkner who was publishing around the same time — Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932) — and then went onto Hollywood as well.

After the jump, Thomson on the different ways the two writers adapted to Hollywood:

So I don’t mean to say that we lost a great writer when Fuchs went West. I think he was always pretty good, and much happier, doing pictures. And the way things look now, our culture is going to keep some of his movies available long after it smiles politely if you ask about his books. Fuchs knew what was for the best, and he did good work for that heroic version of us and the crowd, the audience. Just consider the pictures, and the size of his audience.

I was thinking such thoughts when I happened to see J.M. Coetzee’s review of Jay Parini’s recent life of Faulkner in The New York Review of Books. Coetzee is rather disapproving of Faulkner in Hollywood, and surely such a case can be made. Faulkner had none of the “snappy” gifts that Fuchs had. He did not seem to notice the light; shaded rooms and binge drinking were his hobbies. Fuchs worked with him a bit, couldn’t reach him, but guessed at a “silent, secret tumult” going on inside. That much inner life was seldom a good thing in the studio system, and it actually works against suntan. (This is not commonly known: worriers do not tan!) Faulkner is quoted by Coetzee on how movie work may have spoiled his style. Now, I love Faulkner’s style, but I find the idea that anything affected it beyond his head and the booze rather funny. There is evidence here and there that Faulkner could write a good movie line, or even a scene, without going out of his mind or losing a masterpiece. And there is, I think, something a little snooty and humorless, something that could have made Fuchs smile, in Coetzee’s conclusion that “nothing he [Faulkner] wrote for the movies proved worth rescuing.”

To which I must respond that so far To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep have not needed rescuing, because any night of your life someone is watching them and having a grand time. (Though I’m not altogether sure that Faulkner did very much on either except get credit or hang around.) There are other films Faulkner touched, and there may be scenes in which scholarship could locate a finger or a hand of the master for a moment. But there’s no need. Faulkner may just have been there in the office, passing the bottle and looking at Lauren Bacall and wondering who was going to get her first. Call it mood. He was a figure in the room, and Fuchs understands that in these situations that was enough. The Hard Way and Criss Cross are probably not as good as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, but they are pretty good, and Daniel Fuchs is just as appealing as a fine cat curled up in the late afternoon sunshine. And as near as anyone can prove, sometimes the cat wrote some of the picture.