Louis Jordan & the Tympany Five, “But I’ll Be Back” (1939)

[listen up!]

This song, written by Louis Jordan, comes from early in his career, when he was still in Harlem before he moved to Los Angeles and when he was a little more buttoned down. Well, he was always buttoned down, but his humor and the music more generally grew wilder, more absurd and frenetic, as he moved more into jump blues pure, with tongue-in-cheek attitudes Chuck Berry would put to grand use inventing rock ‘n’ roll. But I love Jordan’s more simple, deadpan delivery here. He never breaks character as a doleful but plucky and determined loser cast aside. A muted trumpet—probably Courtney Williams—smoothly locks down the melody for a verse, then Jordan enters with his dogged tale. He’s been rejected, but he’s not giving up. “I’m goin’,” he announces, as we seem to be arriving at the end of a breakup conversation. “But I’ll be back.” The charge is larceny of his love in the first degree, and he’s prepared to take real action. “Gonna bring my mom and pop / And I’m gonna bring a cop / Gonna make you give me back my love / Before I blow my top.” Jordan’s vocal avoids any menacing hint of a stalker, which is exactly what makes the tune work. Instead, he is more like Wile E. Coyote, overrunning the cliff and suspended in space before he realizes he is about to plummet to his doom. The singer probably doesn’t deserve what he’s getting, but ain’t that the way? The youtube page concludes the listening experience with perhaps the single greatest youtube comment of all time (in a field not at all competitive), the only one on the page in 11 years: “Thanks for posting. I’m going, but I’ll be back.”

Tropic of Capricorn (1939)

It's hard to know what to do with Henry Miller. He can be as exhilarating as he can be exasperating, often in the same (very long) paragraph. Caution: this book contains paragraphs that go on for pages. (I know I'm not one to complain about a lack of paragraphing.) Wikipedia calls Tropic of Capricorn "a prequel of sorts" to the more widely lauded Tropic of Cancer. Where Cancer riffs on Miller's life in Paris in the 1930s (his "bohemian novel," a friend calls it), Capricorn dances around his life in New York City in the 1920s, scrabbling to get by and write. These books are called "novels" because that's closer than "memoirs," but really they are something else apart entirely. They make me think most often of poetry, paintings by Picasso, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring—modern, bracing, alive. They are iconoclastic, electrifying the humdrum with holy charges. Miller even name-checks J. Krishnamurti in both—!! I often have no idea what is going on from page to page, but the sentences and vocabulary have their own charming magnetism, and in the confusion there are vivid and concrete moments of joy and desperation. It's fully energized with life, which might sound trite, but Capricorn is no pep talk jive. If Miller is fully engaged with joy he is also fully engaged with despair. One of the recurring themes is the life-sucking soullessness of most full-time jobs and their necessities. I also find the treatment of sex interesting, given the book's history of being banned until 1961. There aren't many sex scenes as such, but sex is a frequent topic of discussion and the language is raw, with animal urgency. It's not pornographic. It's hard to imagine it turns anyone on but I might be wrong about that and/or it's a generational thing? He's as matter-of-fact about getting laid as he is about eating. Both can be sensual delights and to some degree (arguable on sex, I know) both are necessities. So there tends to be a deep everydayness to his treatment of sex and an anecdotal quality to his experiences that makes them as interesting (and necessary too) as good conversation. As for organization, I don't know what to say. There's one chapter-like break, a few line breaks scattered in at random, and lots of the paragraphs go sprawling across pages. Sometimes the copy editor in me stepped forward and idly attempted to break these monsters up. But that is where I discovered how good Miller is. My presumptive exercises only showed how tightly woven together it all is, with everything including transitions packed in there basically the way it should be—the way it must be. Miller blows my mind and amazes the hell out of me sometimes. I wonder which one I should read next, and if I can even take it.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Wild Palms (1939)

The title William Faulkner originally had for this unusual novel, one of my favorites by him, is If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, but his publishers had other ideas and these days it's seen both ways. I read it first as The Wild Palms and always think of it that way. The experimental aspect is that it is actually two long stories shuffled together in alternating chapters. The first is called The Wild Palms and involves a torrid hothouse love affair as perhaps only Faulkner could imagine it (see also Sanctuary). The other is called Old Man and tells the story of a convict put to humanitarian work in Mississippi during the 1927 floods. What I like is how straightforward, concrete, and vivid these stories are. It's from a few years after Absalom, Absalom!, arguably peak Faulkner (though I tend more to favor 1929 to 1932 as his peak). There's a sense of a writer in frenzy, with so much to tell and explain and so little time, continually forced into eruptions of detail that come in torrents. He commits amazing feats of balance with his long abrupt sentences. Perhaps, also, I like it because it's not elaborating the Yoknapatawpha County history. Both tales have obvious biblical sources—Adam and Eve and Noah's flood, to start. The Wild Palms story is not exactly depraved, but it is fairly wrong. She is married to another in what appears to be a free-love style open relationship. He's a self-destructive underachiever with medical training. I know these events are nearly a hundred years old, and different times, different times, but it felt to me like an alien toxic man-and-woman dynamic. I had a hard time buying it. I can believe the toxicity in a general way but this is nothing like anything I know. I recognized some aspects—Faulkner's descriptions of her fierce creativity rang true, very much, but I could never understand what these two were doing together. Old Man, meanwhile, works often and best like an adventure story with a rich dark vein of humor in it as well. The movements of the waters on the grand scale in a flood situation of the Mississippi River and its tributary system, the whole look and feel of being trapped in a boat in a flood of such scale, is really amazing stuff. When I was poking around for information, I found an interesting list of Faulkner in-betweener narrative pieces, such as "Spotted Horses," a long story that he later incorporated into The Hamlet (the first novel in a trilogy completed 20 years later), "The Bear" (a long story that is arguably a stand-alone and arguably part of what is arguably a novel, Go Down, Moses), and these two long stories, as novel or read separately straight through, which latter I've never done. I like the way Faulkner kept blowing up the very idea of what a novel is. This is one of the best and most rewarding examples.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

USA, 129 minutes

Director: Frank Capra

Writers: Sidney Buchman, Lewis R. Foster, Myles Connolly

Photography: Joseph Walker

Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Editors: Al Clark, Gene Havlick

Cast: James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Thomas Mitchell, Edward Arnold, Eugene Pallette, Harry Carey, Guy Kibbee, Beulah Bondi, H.B. Warner, Astrid Allwyn, Ruth Donnelly, Charles Lane, Porter Hall, William Demarest, Jack Carson

You don't need me to tell you what kind of crazy year this has been, and not even half over. But I want to mention that I looked at Mr. Smith Goes to Washington a few months ago during the impeachment and found it much more resonant than I expected. Remember the impeachment? It's hard to believe that even happened this year. Of course, as a movie directed by Frank Capra, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has certain known quantities going in. The last 10 minutes will be a train wreck of happiness. The little guy will always get his say, and the girl too (usually all she's doing is cheering him on). People will generally regard Abraham Lincoln as real swell. And where, in John Ford tableaus, the pilgrims solemnly assemble for a verse of "Shall We Gather at the River," in Capra pictures it's going to be brass bands, patriotic marches, and "Auld Lang Syne." Set your expectations accordingly.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington just has too many solid elements going for it to be spoiled by animus toward Capra. They include the beautiful young James Stewart (though best seen in this period in The Shop Around the Corner), the sturdy Jean Arthur, who never strays far from her slightly wised-up Betty Boop girl-next-door salty leading lady persona but was made for these times of Depression and war (I love her), Claude Rains his typical consummate professional, and the usual impressive assemblage of character actors: Thomas Mitchell (drunk again), goose-voiced Eugene Pallette (I love him too), Harry Carey, Guy Kibbee, Beulah Bondi, etc. They don't call 1939 Hollywood's greatest year for nothin'.

Stagecoach (1939)

USA, 96 minutes

Director: John Ford

Writers: Ernest Haycox, Dudley Nichols, Ben Hecht

Photography: Bert Glennon

Music: Gerard Carbonara

Editors: Otto Lovering, Dorothy Spencer, Walter Reynolds

Cast: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, Donald Meek, John Carradine, Berton Churchill, Andy Devine, Louise Platt, George Bancroft, Tim Holt, Chris-Pin Martin, William Hopper, Hank Worden

Like The Day the Earth Stood Still would do 12 years later for science fiction, director John Ford's Stagecoach was instrumental in moving the Western from the ranks of genre B movies onto the A list. It's Ford's first picture shot in Monument Valley, John Wayne's first step into the Hollywood limelight, and a star-studded ensemble exercise packed with irresistible characters and friction. It's also one of those happy accidents where so many things fall together well, screenplay, casting, performances, and all kinds of little things. Even though it's black and white the shots of Monument Valley are stunningly beautiful. It's remarkable how entertaining and absorbing Stagecoach is. You might remember it as a little stiff or antiquated but you may be surprised.to look again and see how sturdy it is in construction and execution.

It's set in the wide open spaces of the West but with most of the action confined to eight or 10 players jammed in and around a stagecoach making its way across the desert, thus offering a self-conscious microcosm of 19th-century American society after the Civil War. There's a drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell), a scarlet woman named Dallas (Claire Trevor), a whiskey peddler everyone mistakes for a preacher (Donald Meek), an Old South reprobate pretending to be a gentleman (John Carradine), a bank president absconding with the church funds (Berton Churchill), the outlaw Ringo Kid (John Wayne), and others. It works like a road movie, when it cuts away to long shots of the stagecoach rolling down the line and the music revs up, and it works like a chamber piece inside the stagecoach and at the various stops.

Union Pacific (1939)

USA, 135 minutes

Director: Cecil B. DeMille

Writers: Walter DeLeon, C. Gardner Sullivan, Jesse Lasky Jr., Jack Cunningham, Ernest Haycox, Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, Jeanie Macpherson, Stanley Rauh

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: Sigmund Krumgold, John Leipold, Gerard Carbonara, Leo Shuken, Victor Young

Editor: Anne Bauchens

Cast: Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Preston, Brian Donlevy, Henry Kolker, Akim Tamiroff, Lynne Overman, Robert Barrat, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Ridges, Evelyn Keyes, Regis Toomey, Lon Chaney Jr.

I've never entirely understood the term "movie movie" (and the internet is little help on it at the moment) but my sense is that it might apply to this cracking epical Cecil B. DeMille yarn about the building of the railroad from Omaha, Nebraska to Ogden, Utah. It's pulpy, old-fashioned, a little bit long, and thoroughly enjoyable. There's enough fizzy calculated confrontation and tension from scene to scene to keep it constantly interesting. It takes place shortly after the Civil War and plays much like an extended Dudley Do-Right cartoon, complete with a Snidely Whiplash villain (Brian Donlevy, in the screenshot above, who is often seen dunking the sucking end of his cigars into his drink, eww). 

Also on view: buffalo, Indians, Mexicans, gold fever, fancy shooting, gamblers, horses—practically everything Western except Mormons, and they're probably waiting in Ogden. And trains, of course, the ol' Iron Horse, with not one but two spectacular train wrecks. The story is some extended nonsense that is at once about opening the Western frontier and also about the amiable political corruption that drove it. The bad guys don't get everything they want, but as usual in American history they get about 80%, enough to pay for the cigars and fancy suits. 

Gone With the Wind (1939)

USA, 238 minutes
Directors: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood
Writers: Margaret Mitchell, Sidney Howard, Oliver H.P. Garrett, Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, John Van Druten
Photography: Ernest Haller, Lee Garmes
Music: Max Steiner
Editors: Hal C. Kern, James E. Newcom, Ernie Leadlay, Richard L. Van Enger
Cast: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Barbara O'Neil, Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, Victor Jory, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Rutherford, Laura Hope Crews, Harry Davenport, Jane Darwell, Ona Munson, Ward Bond, George Reeves, Rand Brooks, Carroll Nye, Oscar Polk

It's arguable that the two most significant American movies of the first half of the 20th century were D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which invented epic cinema, and Gone With the Wind, which fully implemented it in technicolor with sound. It's arguable, but I wouldn't want to make the argument, because they look to me too much like propaganda exercises for the valorization of the South and its slavery culture, busy with misleading historical reclamation projects. Or maybe I would prefer to argue that screwball comedies have more significance than epic cinema. Still, the ticket buyers have voted. That's Gone With the Wind even now sitting atop the list of all-time domestic grosses adjusted for inflation. It's the most commercially successful movie of all time, even taken out of circulation for decades after its initial release. (For the curious, the rest of that all-time top 10 goes Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, The Ten Commandments [1956], Jaws, Doctor Zhivago, The Exorcist, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.)

I have never warmed much to Gone With the Wind, which I finally had a chance to see in the early '80s on VHS, and I like it less all the time as the country spirals backward in values. Alabama's Roy Moore, for one, specifically pointed to the South's slavery period as the last time America was great, and it seems as likely as anything (because who knows what that "great" is supposed to mean in "Make America Great Again") that's the era they're thinking of and clamoring so hard for. I find myself arguing all the time with the title cards in this ridiculous overwrought show: "Here in this pretty world," an early one burbles, "Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave ... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered." Dream for some, nightmare for many. I'm sure you can guess my complaints. As an exercise, as a remedy, and to maintain the equilibrium I need for this movie, I decided to focus on what I think is good in Gone With the Wind.

The Man Who Sold the Moon (1939-1950)

This collection of stories by Robert Heinlein practically amounts to Exhibit 1 in his Future History cycle of stories and novels. The earliest stories were written in 1939 and 1940, and later revised after World War II with updated information about atomic power and weapons. The stories establish new technologies such as solar power, mass transit innovations, and developments in rocketry and imagine how they transform society. One result of Heinlein's ingenious road system, for example, is population gathering along roadways rather than clustering in urban concentrations. I mean, I'm not sure that works for me, but it's one way to move the pieces of the future around. In fact, Heinlein's "hard" science fiction technology is often a matter of bluster and sciency jargon. He's actually equally concerned with how technical advances and social pressures interact specifically in the context of hustling big business American style. Heinlein is all but an unreconstructed capitalist, railing in his midcentury way against taxes and regulation. You can almost smell the cigar smoke. The long title story, more technically a novella, whatever, focuses on the machinations of one D.D. Harriman, industrialist tycoon, to send a man in a rocket to the moon. It's as much about getting deals done in a can-do capitalist system as about the technology or developing it. I thought it was interesting that, in about 1950, Heinlein projected a privately funded scheme reaching the moon in 1978. Sometimes it seems like SF guesses for the future are way too optimistic (jet packs and/or personalized copters, say), but this one turned out to be late by nine years. I've read a bit of Heinlein over the years and always find him instantly engaging. He has a rollicking kind of tone reminiscent of Frank Capra movies, buoyed on pure confidence. The attitude is that anything at all is possible if you're smart and try hard enough. It's tempting to roll your eyes at this sort of pep talk (and it can get tiresome) but then you remember things about Heinlein. He imagined remote manipulator technology, for example, before it was ever invented—in fact, his 1942 story "Waldo" (not in this collection) is what inspired development of it in 1945. So there's something to his fast-talking showmanship too. This is a reasonable place to start with him.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939)

Read story by James Thurber online.

This brief story by James Thurber, told third-person but with majority interior dialogue of its title character, is amusing but not that insightful, though it's among Thurber's most famous. The basic idea is that this Walter Mitty, a mild-mannered middle-aged man, has a head full of heroic fantasies about himself. They range from wartime scenarios (interesting given the publication date six months before Hitler entered Poland) to grave medical emergencies to high-stakes courtroom dramas. He appears to have little clue about the realities of medical treatment in the one fantasy, where he is an expert on "streptothricosis," a real skin disease, discussing "obstreosis of the ductal tract," a completely made-up procedure. The sound effect "pocketa-pocketa" recurs across a few of these fantasies, and occasionally reality intrudes on them in strange ways, a bit like waking in the fog of a dream. The outside scene involves Mitty taking his wife on a shopping trip and he does some shopping himself. That's about it. It has a few moments that might get you a smile—for example, I enjoyed the "pocketa-pocketa" sound effect—and as with anything published in the New Yorker it's at least a pleasure to read (except for those times, which come, when you tire of the urbane metropolitan voice). In terms of a look at the dark corners of a human soul, no, it's not that. I mean, you know what goes on in your own head, so you know right away what's missing if you give it any thought. No sex fantasies, no revenge fantasies, no brooding or seething. That's not the kind of guy Walter Mitty is (or, more realistically, that part of him is buried out of reach of this story. If he's that alienated from himself I don't want to think about it). A recent figure he reminded me of is Ken Bone, who was briefly famous during the debate season the other year with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Walter Mitty is just a guy going about his workaday shopping business and imagining himself in heroic roles as he does so. You get the impression he does a lot of this, but so do we all, right? And really, his are the sanitized versions and not much more. But fun to read the story.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

USA, 102 minutes
Directors: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, Norman Taurog, King Vidor
Writers: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf, L. Frank Baum, Arthur Freed, Irving Brecher, William H. Cannon, Herbert Fields, Jack Haley, E.Y. Harburg, Samuel Hoffenstein, Bert Lahr, John Lee Mahin, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Jack Mintz, Ogden Nash, Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, Sid Silvers
Photography: Harold Rosson
Music: Harold Arlen
Editor: Blanche Sewell
Cast: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Margaret Hamilton, Billie Burke, Charley Grapewin, Clara Blandick, Terry (Toto)

(Early cut for the Facebook countdown here.)

In the 79 years since its release, The Wizard of Oz has come to represent virtually all things to all people. Several years ago, for example, you can see I attempted to drop the overlay of horror on it for the Facebook countdown, comparing it to It's a Wonderful Life and Blue Velvet. I was sincere—The Wizard of Oz has scared me nearly as much as any other movie. Things like the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys are pretty serious business, and not necessarily just for kids. The joke TV description is funny because it's true: "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again." More recently I've noticed The Wizard of Oz taken by some as a road movie. It's certainly a cartoon, and obviously a musical, and the Munchkins briefly transport it into Freaks territory. Like Casablanca, it speaks to the power of Hollywood collaboration and against the idea of auteurs, with its five directors and 19 writers. Like A Christmas Story (and It's a Wonderful Life) its reputation was cemented only long after its release, facilitated by television. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon got roped into the circus at some point by stoners. By now, we know The Wizard of Oz so well there's a version of it edited to alphabetize every word. I enjoy it and you might too, a few minutes at a time, but before viewing Of Oz the Wizard take heed of the warning: "This film contains extremely fast editing, flashes of light, abrupt changes in image and sound."

I still forget, or really never knew, the popularity of the original series of children's novels by L. Frank Baum. They arrived at the turn of the century, were wildly loved for decades (though somewhat disreputable among librarians, like Nancy Drew mysteries), and are paid respect in a note at the start of this picture. This iconic 1939 Judy Garland breakout vehicle was actually already the seventh attempt to film Oz—seventh time's the charm, right? It reminds me of the Frankenstein story—once Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published two centuries ago, stage and then film productions never stopped coming. But now I'm drifting back to talking about it in terms of horror, so let me be clear. I think the best way to view The Wizard of Oz is by taking it as what it's intended to be: an expensive MGM musical built on the bones of vaudeville and meant to be seen in color.

"Cruel and Barbarous Treatment" (1939)

Story by Mary McCarthy not available online.

Mary McCarthy published this story in 1939 and later included it, without the mysterious scare quotes used in the Robert Penn Warren collection, as one of the sections in her episodic first novel in 1942, The Company She Keeps. It was written in the early days of her marriage to the literary critic Edmund Wilson, from 1938 to 1945, her second marriage. It's an icy-cold story of divorce, told from the point of view of an unnamed wife, who is having an affair with a "Young Man" (my scare quotes). She describes the emotional progress of the affair, how it starts as a secret, and then becomes a secret to be kept only from her husband. She relishes each stage—the delicious secret itself, and then the delicious reveals. Eventually that includes telling her husband. She senses her marriage is headed for divorce, but also seems to believe it will then go on to a remarriage. She has no scruples about hurting her lover that way—after all, look at what he is doing to her husband. The description of these events continues, in long sentences and sprawling paragraphs. It is so granular at points that it feels like an insect being dismembered in slow motion. At the same time, the wife's behavior may be "cruel and barbarous" (not sure whose scare quotes those are). There's a familiar childish id down there controlling the action, which seems to be mere irrational acting out. The idea in her mind comes up more than once: divorce and then a remarriage. She is trying to win an epic power struggle more than remove her husband from her life. In fact, she's not happy when she sees her husband accepting her choice to keep and flaunt a lover, even judging her a little. Her bid for ultimate control has inadvertently liberated him. That wasn't supposed to be part of the plan. If the totality of the story is a little off-putting at least it's probably intended that way. I haven't read much McCarthy so I'm not sure how typical it is. It's hard to prepare for the level of rage. That's what's startling and ultimately so disturbing about it. This is a story told by a soul utterly consumed with rage. It'll get you by the throat if you let it.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

I think I can understand why a person might have a hard time with the deadly earnestness, not to mention the dialect and all the homespun trappings, of John Steinbeck's monumental greatest novel—it's the reason I put off even trying it for most of my life. When I finally got to it, just 10 or 15 years ago, I was surprised by what a beguiling narrative it is. Steinbeck manages this in a few ways. First, another disciple of John Dos Passos, he structured the novel with alternating chapters. The first and primary set is a closely observed story of the Joad family as they decide to leave Oklahoma for California, with incidents of what they find there and along the way. This is the main arc. The other chapters are much shorter, with heightened descriptive language, setting the historical and social context for the story. The Joad family is ignorant and poor, but also decent, perhaps even noble. The historical context of the Dust Bowl environmental disaster and the large-scale migration to California which followed provides a natural backdrop for a great American story. There are many Joads at the beginning, but death and other misadventures whittle down their numbers steadily. The precariousness of their situation is always felt. And there's no reason to think the disaster at the end is the end of their troubles—it's likely things get even worse beyond this novel. It's also an American story of capitalism, of course, critical of its excesses in the strongest terms. It was condemned as socialist, communist, and whatnot, and yes, it certainly illustrates in plainest terms how the wealthy few can control the impoverished many by any number of unscrupulous but legal dirty tricks. That's part of the great sadness of this book, which goes beyond the sad (if redemptive) elements of its story. Things are better now, but not by much. Not by nearly enough—indeed, with Republicans in complete control of the US federal government now, we appear in position to see every one of the hard-won economic victories that came of the Depression era erased, solely to benefit the wealthy. The problem of mistreating the people we need to grow and harvest food remains—these workers are not only not respected for doing the hard work most Americans prefer not to, but are vilified and ostracized as a matter of class. That part of this novel is still very much a heartache. I used the word "earnestness" before—what The Grapes of Wrath is earnest about is delivering the shock of understanding reality. It's more like searing in its effect. It ends on a profound image, one of the most powerful in all earnest literature. My issue might be that I'm uncomfortable with the honesty, integrity, and dignity of this book. I feel like a phony being reduced to such terms ("dignity") and I try to laugh off the effect this book has on me. Nice choice also to pick a lyric from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." That puts it at the center of American literature where it belongs. The title was not actually Steinbeck's, by the way, but came from his first wife, Carol.

In case it's not at the library.

"Barn Burning" (1939)

Read story by William Faulkner online.

This story sees William Faulkner in good form on the Snopes family. It's told third-person from the point of view of a young Snopes boy, who is ludicrously named Colonel Sartoris, though everyone calls him "Sarty." Sarty is only 10 or 11 years old, but he is regularly amazed and aghast at the behavior of his father, Abner. Abner Snopes is proud, filled with rage, and self-destructive. He perversely refuses to cooperate with anyone on anything, even friends or neighbors, even on things like building fences to enclose his animals. When these friends and neighbors object, and then impose penalties to counter his irresponsibility and offset the cost of their troubles, Abner gets mad and takes revenge, burning down their barns and such. Then the family has to move again. Abner Snopes is a classic Faulkner character—poor, white, ignorant, unyielding, and boiling with rage. Already Sarty can remember moving nearly a dozen times. Abner is described more than once as looking as if he were cut from tin, a familiar Faulkner formulation: " ... he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth—a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat." The story starts with a legal case against Snopes that can't be proved, but he and his family are run out of the area—once more Sarty has to move. At the new place, Abner immediately makes more trouble with his new landlord. The story is half shocking treachery and half pure comedy, as Abner alienates all people he suspects thinks they are better than him. In this case the victim is Major de Spain, also seen previously in Faulkner's work. The Snopes stories, in fact, are some of Faulkner's funniest, though the grim razor edges of violence and seething anger are never far. I'll also point out this story is a reasonably straightforward narrative. You always know what's going on and it has a lot of momentum. The ending, an epic confrontation between Abner and de Spain, is not entirely clear, but it's likely that's clarified elsewhere in the Faulkner canon. And if it's not, it's possible to make the note of ambiguity work too, so all good, right? The important part of the story to me is the unearthly unrelenting powerful physical presence of Abner. His anger can be felt palpably, yet even at his most threatening he is also an unmistakable comic element, a kind of downhome version of Tony Soprano, bumptiously cracking hilarious and maiming and murdering people. Remarkable balancing act and a good story.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"Open Winter" (1939)

Story by H.L. Davis not available online.

H.L. Davis is not a writer I'm familiar with, even by name. He's a native of Oregon and won a Pulitzer in 1935 for a novel (Honey in the Horn). "Open Winter" is a bit long, and somewhat obscure in its ending, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Set in the late winter in eastern Oregon, its two characters, "one past sixty and the other around sixteen," are taking a herd of work horses to a ranch for the spring, by previous arrangement. The old man, Pop Apling, has been caring for the horses all winter. But when they arrive at the ranch, no one is there. Beech Cartwright, the boy, is in favor of leaving the horses there. He argues they've done what they were contracted to do. But it's been a bad winter, dry with severe drought, and leaving them there untended is certain death for the horses. Pop favors taking them 90 miles over rough country to some grasslands he knows. Beech resists, he's sarcastic and jeering like a teenager, but Pop promises he will see something that will make it all worth the extra effort. The trail is dry and hard, and along the way they meet unscrupulous sheepherders, who want to kill the horses—and Pop and Beech if they have to—to protect the limited resources of water and grass. The story is told third-person and stays closest to the perceptions of Beech, though it rarely goes into anyone's head far. That's the obscure part in the ending. There's not anything that can easily be labeled an epiphany, and if there is a change in Beech, and I think there might be, it's subtle and ambiguous. Nonetheless, the story works very well for me just as a naturalistic story of the West. The work is hard, dangerous, and intricate. Pop and Beech simply accept that they have to do it and do it. The boy complains some but he is a boy. At the same time, it's easy to understand his annoyance with Pop, who won't take any shortcuts. There's a great scene involving the confrontation between Pop and Beech and the sheepherders. This story makes me realize that all Westerns (and some neo-Westerns too, such as Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian) are about or at least involve the physical landscape and traversing it—at least that's a theory worth trying for a while. "Open Winter" certainly has that at its core, and is at its best when that's what's happening. One memorable scene (of many) involves carting horses back and forth across a river at night in a purloined ferry boat. The ferry can only handle five or six horses at a time and it takes them all night and they still can't quite get it done, setting the stage for another complicated confrontation. Wonderful story.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"Witch's Money" (1939)

Story by John Collier not available online.

John Collier was a British story writer admired by Ray Bradbury, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Paul Theroux, and many others. He won an International Fantasy Award for his 1951 collection, Fancies and Goodnights. Not surprisingly, there's an air of the horror story here—which has nothing to do with the supernatural, only human stupidity verging on depravity. In the small and remote Spanish village where the story takes place, an arrogant American bohemian appears one day. The story is told third-person from the point of view of a lifelong village resident, Foiral, who instantly decides the American is a lunatic, but a different kind of lunatic, one he hasn't seen before. The American exclaims over the aesthetic points of the village, which are too familiar to Foiral to mean much. Then the American wants to rent Foiral's second home, which is vacant and untended. Foiral loses patience with the madman quickly, turning him down. Then the American offers to buy it, offers to pay too much, and produces cash to hold as security. This changes everything. When the American returns a week or two later, he pays Foiral the balance with a check. Foiral is naïve of such things, but humors the American. Later, he asks for the money in cash. The American is brusque and dismissive, telling Foiral to go to a bank and cash the check himself. This requires a daylong journey and Foiral, who is confused by the bank procedures, ends up opening a checking account. A week later he takes another day to travel to the bank, where he closes the account. The bank withholds a nominal fee, as banks will do. This enrages Foiral, who asks the American for the amount of the fee. Again the American rudely brushes off Foiral. Foiral and his friends conspire to steal the American's checkbook and they do what must be done to get it. Once they are in possession of it, they believe themselves wealthy and begin to spend and borrow money liberally. The story ends as the group takes yet another day to travel to the bank to convert the checkbook into cash. The last scene is the doomed and foolish group entering the bank. This story reminds me of Paul Bowles stories, probably because of the exotic foreign setting combined with the cruelties. It also has elements of a social morality tale, showing how irrational beliefs about money can corrode the soul. It's cold and clinical, observing alarming behavior without comment, simply reporting, though it gets well inside the head of Foiral. At the same time, it makes us guess about the exact nature of the ignorance, it is so deeply inside his head. The action can be swift, with all things changing at once, even when the characters they are happening to remain unknowing of their fates, which we see all too clearly.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier

"I'll Be Waiting" (1939)

Read story by Raymond Chandler online.

Raymond Chandler later derided this story as "slick fiction," probably because it was published in the Saturday Evening Post. And to the extent that Chandler was a precise writer, which he was, perhaps it is. It's also complicated and allusive, working on multiple levels, which is also something Chandler did a lot. Tony Reseck is the main character, a hotel detective. He is keeping an eye on Eve Cressy, a woman who has been at the hotel for five days without leaving. She tells him she's "waiting for a tall dark guy that's no good." The tall dark guy was released from prison a few days earlier, convicted with the aid of Cressy. But the story between them seems more about love than vengeance—seems, I say, as nothing is quite clear. As it happens, the tall dark guy is already there in the hotel, though Reseck and Cressy don't know it yet. At that point, Chandler's cinematic style is engaged and there's a lot of activity we are left to parse and piece together. The players—Cressy, Reseck, and the tall dark guy, as well as a few other hotel employees—are moved about like checker pieces. There are complications involving open and closed elevators. People don't know some things that others do—sometimes they come to learn them, sometimes not. It's lucid about its details, as Chandler often is, with vivid and concrete physical description. The motivations of characters, however, are somewhat more murky. At a basic level, it's hard to tell if things went the way Reseck intended them. Or maybe he was lucky—or maybe he was not lucky. It's hard to tell, even though we have a much better sense of who is alive and who is dead, though even that is not entirely clear. What's great about this story is the language, which is often the case with Chandler. Yes, he's prone to some belabored overworking of similes and metaphors in his descriptions, but they rarely feel unearned. Everyone in this story has known hard times and good times, and moreover they know both are coming around again. Until death do them part. For now, they'll be waiting.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)

The Day of the Locust (1939)

I must say it was a little distracting to return to Nathanael West's great novel for the first time since the '70s and encounter a schlubby character named Homer Simpson (he was played by Donald Sutherland in the 1975 movie directed by John Schlesinger, which is not to be missed). The mystery deepens as it appears Matt Groening has pointed to it as one source of his cartoon character's name. Yeah, right. It was also hard to get an image out of my mind from Jonathan Lethem's introduction, pointing out the vertical lines of West's Miss Lonelyhearts, set in New York City in the early '30s, and the horizontal lines of The Day of the Locust, set in Los Angeles in the late '30s. Finally, just to give some indication of how fully packed this little novel is, the biblical locust story is wrapped in to pretty much every single incident of the action, and in many ways explains everything in this strange litany of episode: the landscape is blighted and dead many different ways, not least in the psychic dimension, overrun by soulless feeding lost people, the late arrivals and still pouring in to Southern California's paradise. Between the time of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, one of the most devastating environmental disasters in American history deepened to catastrophic levels, with the advance of the Dust Bowl. John Steinbeck of course has one vision of the aftermath in The Grapes of Wrath. West has another here—one that is much closer to (yet infinitely intensifies) Horace McCoy's 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a companion novel to The Day of the Locust if ever there was one. By the time the streak of violence in West's novel has erupted into a closely described cock fight and finally explodes into a riot in Hollywood for glimpses of the attending stars at a movie premiere, there is a kind of satisfaction that occurs, a fitting resolution to the burden of dread and anxiety and anomie we live with on a daily basis. It's realistic too, in terms of the beneficial side of catharsis, which after all may be unpleasant in the actual moment but ultimately cleansing, so cleansing. The Day of the Locust is packed full of random incidents, but the elements linger and cohere, chillingly, long after the book has been put down.

In case it's not at the library.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

#23: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming/George Cukor/Mervyn LeRoy/King Vidor, 1939)

There are things I trace back directly to my early exposure to those annual television airings of The Wizard of Oz hosted by Danny Kaye, which usually occurred around Easter time, if I recall correctly: A fascination with tornado footage (better than ever nowadays via the storm-chaser shows). An appreciation for long roads that stretch to the horizon—my idle meeting-time doodles are full of them. How many shots of long roads and horizons, only partially blocked by the backs of our heroes, are in this? You'd be surprised.

More than anything, this is where my taste for horror movies started, because that's what basically happens here. It's a bit like that joke about going to the fights and a hockey game breaks out. Right in the middle of a colorful, goofy MGM musical, there's a witch who scares the hell out of any sensible 9-year-old expecting carefree, happy-go-lucky, parent-approved saccharine. Or anyway that's what happened to me. Mary Poppins this is not. Getting through it was a rite of endurance for a lot of years, a battle with my own adrenaline, and I didn't always win. But I survived, and that's the paradoxical pleasure of horror reduced to its fine point.

The Rules of the Game (1939)

La règle du jeu, France, 106 minutes
Director: Jean Renoir
Writers: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch
Photography: Jean-Paul Alphen, Jean Bachelet, Jacques Lemare, Alain Renoir
Editors: Marthe Huguet, Marguerite Renoir
Cast: Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Jean Renoir, Mila Parély, Julien Carette, Gaston Modot, Roland Toutain, Odette Talazac, Claire Gérard

It may be hard to imagine now what made The Rules of the Game so controversial in its time and place—Paris, 1939—but then it may not be so easy either to grasp the circumstances of that time and place: a European economy long mired in the doldrums of a global depression and pestilent politics, with the shadows of Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Russia creeping ever steadily across the landscape.

There's little question that it was controversial. Director Jean Renoir in an introduction to the film that appears on the Criterion edition and was shot more than 20 years after the initial release of this film, expresses his conviction that it's about a society "rotten to the core." He also notes that the aristocracy took evident exception to the events depicted, destroying seats at the premiere. One man evidently attempted to set the theater on fire. The ruling regime subsequently banned it. Ah, France. Renoir wryly notes that of all his films this was "clearly the biggest failure."