Shiny Red Waco

One of the greatest challenges for a reader of novels is that their way of thinking, their point of view, the scale of their interests, invariably changes. So much so that upon rereading a novel of which they have only a vague memory, it conceals hidden treasures that they will only find when they return to it again, and again, the next day, or years later.

In the previous episode of this literary podcast, I talked about the iconic American novels about daredevils. For reasons of time, I only briefly touched upon the great William Faulkner, an egregious, brilliant madman if there ever was one. At least, that was the reason I tiptoed around his novel Pylon, one of the few that escapes the fabulous Yoknapatawpha County.

Everything Faulkner wrote in the novelistic genre was experimental, ahead of its time, and sometimes even classified as dirty—sometimes because of his insistence on evoking terror, other times because he insisted on testing the limits of freedom of expression, which was rather prudish in the 1930s. And many of his ideas would have been perfectly feasible if only the publishers of his time had chipped in, like using different colored inks so that slow-witted readers wouldn’t mix up the characters.

And then there is the author himself, who, driven by debt, had been working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, rubbing shoulders with another true daredevil, Howard Hawks—not to be confused with the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes.

At that time, aviation was in its infancy, and the film director Hawks introduced Faulkner to flying the Waco biplane for nineteen months, starting in April of 1934.

When he was young, Faulkner had enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Air Force branch in Canada; the experience was cut short by the unexpected arrival of the Armistice. Although this didn’t stop him from parading around his hometown in a military uniform, cane in hand, faking a combat limp and putting on a British accent in Mississippi, which earned him the nickname “Count No ‘Count” from his mocking neighbors.

Howard Hawks, for his part, before arriving in Hollywood, had been a flight instructor in Texas and a mechanical engineer, which meant that the flying scenes being filmed needed someone who knew the ins and outs of aviation. He went on to direct six films centered on the subject.

Faulkner and Hawks shared the missed opportunity of participating in the First World War, following the values of dedication and sacrifice that today seem irrational, mostly due to its meat-grinder nature. But that was the spirit of the time. And the foundation of their friendship.

Airplane prices were not exactly affordable in the midst of the Great Depression. The red Waco, an enclosed four-seater with a 200 HP engine, cost $6,000. And Faulkner didn’t let the opportunity pass, because he was receiving a weekly check for $500 from the studios, a far cry from the peanuts he had received in royalties for the novels he had published.

Faulkner’s precarious literary reality in the early 1930s is relentlessly reflected in the numbers of his early masterpieces. The Sound and the Fury, published with a meager initial print run of just under 1,800 copies barely two weeks before the crash of 29, brought him a little over $400 in royalties due to its complete lack of initial commercial impact.

A hardship that was repeated with As I Lay Dying in 1930, whose 2,500 copies sold left him with about $600, while he scraped by working the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant for $11 a week.

His previous glimpse of commercial success came with Sanctuary the following year, which sold over 10,000 copies and should have brought in about $3,000, but his publisher’s bankruptcy legally froze the funds and left him with only an advance of a few hundred.