Mon 19 Feb 2024
WILLIAM FAULKNER – Sanctuary. Harrison Smith, hardcover, February 1931. Modern Library, hardcover, 1932. Random House, hardcover, 1958 (revised and corrected). Reprinted as Sanctuary: The Original Text, edited by Noel Polk (Random House, hardcover). Reprinted as Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (Vintage Books, paperback, 1993; this is the edition currently in print). Film adaptations: The Story of Temple Drake (1933) and Sanctuary (1961).
Temple Drake is a haughty girl, a naughty girl, daughter of a judge.
She goes to an all-girls school with annoying rules which she breaks with impunity.
She has a date with Gowan, a dapper dandy, a University of Virginia graduate with a cute convertible.
Gowan’s a lush. And he insists on stopping at a still in the sticks for some moonshine. It’ll only take a minute.
But Gowan gets shitfaced, crashes his car, and strands Temple at the still among the yokels.
The yokels are fine as long as it’s daytime. But come night, the rapscallions all get drunk, horny and rapacious. No female is safe. Least of all Temple Drake. So she hides, unsuccessfully, from the men.
One of the men, Popeye, takes her and then takes her away, shooting a competing suitor.
You think Temple Drake is a helpless victim. A faux vamp scared straight from the depths of human depravity. But you’re wrong.
Popeye, her abductor, is impotent. And Temple taunts him.
At the end of the day, Temple is the last one standing. All the yokels go onto their reward. And Temple smirks. Mercilessly.
—
The book was a real freakin’ slog, I must say. Lots of technical Fauknerian wizardry, switched up POV’s, mélange of styles, cadence, speech patterns.
Frankly, mental midget that I am, I found it distracting. My understanding is that No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a blatant rip-off. I can’t remember. Orchids wasn’t that memorable. But I guarantee you James Hadley Chase cut to the chase and told the story straight, leaving out the mumbo jumbo.
Mumbo jumbo aside, Temple Drake is a great character. The story, when there’s a story being told, is gripping, white knuckling, and fearful. I’ll remember the story too. It’s a good story with a telling that gives you the vision of each character, with all the ramps and curls and squiggly lines of real life consciousness. It just wasn’t that fun deciphering it. It was work. But worth it.
February 19th, 2024 at 10:56 pm
I thought the film missed completely. Sluggish but with Miriam Hopkins, Wiliam Gargan, and Jack Larue, all doing their best with a title change: The Story of Temple Drake (1933).
February 20th, 2024 at 1:22 am
According to Wikipedia:
“Though some of the more salacious elements of the source novel were not included, the film was still considered so indecent that it helped give rise to the strict enforcement of the Hays Code.
“Long unseen except in bootleg 16mm prints, The Story of Temple Drake was restored by the Museum of Modern Art and re-premiered in 2011 at the TCM Classic Film Festival. The Criterion Collection released the film for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray in December 2019.”
They also go on to discuss the changes that were made in making the film, including a long section about the censorship it had to go through.
February 20th, 2024 at 6:14 am
I enjoyed the film TEMPLE DRAKE much more than I did the book SANCTUARY. In fact, I haven’t actually liked a Faulkner novel since LIGHT IN AUGUST.
February 20th, 2024 at 8:41 am
I couldn’t get through SANCTUARY. Maybe half-way. Didn’t like the style of writing. As far as NOFMB by Chase, now there’s a book. It should be read in the original British version, not the abridged U.S.
versions. Miss Blandish does NOT escape the Grissom mobs brutality. Maybe based on the real Ma Barker gang? Anyway it’s a real gut wrencher!
February 20th, 2024 at 10:06 am
Chester Himes reread Sanctuary often for inspiration for his Harlem Domestic series featuring Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones.
From the second autobiography ‘My Life of Absurdity’:
“The first thing I did on returning to my room with a pocket full of money was to reread an old beat-up paperback of Faulkner’s Sanctuary to sustain my outrageousness and give me courage. I have always considered the fiction of Faulkner the most absurd ever written and if I couldn’t get any ideas from it I was stuck.”
February 23rd, 2024 at 10:22 pm
The book is perhaps best recalled for the outrage and shock it caused though Faulkner was much more readable in the crime genre with INTRUDER IN THE DUST and KNIGHT’S GAMBIT.
Temple and Popeye are instant archetypes and both have haunted popular fiction, particularly the Southern Gothic mode of noir. They stalk through popular Southern fiction like rutting beasts.
I found some irony that Jack LaRue played the same role in the film version of NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH that he did in SANCTUARY.
I assume Bonnie and Clyde were the models for Temple and Popeye, particularly the rumors that Clyde was impotent.