Word: faulkner
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GREAT LITERATURE, it has often been pointed out, does not come out of great events. Rather, it comes from the happenings in the lives of everyday people. Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and the like could not have written good novels--much less great ones--about Jerry Ford or Dick Nixon. And any attempts in that direction have failed miserably--see Philip Roth's The Gang or any of the unmemorable fictional treatments of Roosevelts and Rockefellers, Trumans and Truman Capotes for proof positive...
...subject is the twilight of Empire. The year is 1878, but already night has fallen all along India's northwest frontier. Someone in the 20th Indian Light Cavalry is assaulting women. The entire regiment is in a flap. Surly, cynical Second Lieut. Edward Millington (James Faulkner) is accused of brutalizing comely Marjorie Scarlett (Susannah York), widow of a regimental hero...
Belle, he married another woman equally devoted to him and his work. He was also the most miserable, self-sorrowing author in the American pantheon. The reasons seem as petty as his tantrums: Yale would not give O'Hara an honorary degree, the critics curtsied to Faulkner and Hemingway but not to him, the Nobel Prize was never to be his. Successful beyond avarice, O'Hara proceeded to fume through life like the eternal arriviste...
Dunce Cap. The success of Appointment in Samarra (1934) bolstered O'Hara's self-esteem without relieving an iota of his insecurity. The novelist of the future, he protested, will take "the best of James Joyce, the best of William Faulkner, the best of Sinclair Lewis, the best of Ernest Hemingway and, naturally, the best of me." Reviewers who praised him received pathetically vulnerable letters of thanks...
Onstage, the boys-Alan and Derek (Longmuir), Les (McKeown), Eric (Faulkner) and Woody (Stuart Wood) -are the ultimate squeaky cleans. They claim not to drink. Only one admits to smoking, and then only cigarettes. At their press conferences, a pitcher of milk is always conspicuous on a table front and center. Their personal promotion describes them as just working-class lads from Edinburgh. That turns out to be true...