“Forgotten Hollywood”- A New William Faulkner Play…

Posted on November 19, 2015 by raideoman1 | No Comments

Manny P. here…William_Faulkner_1954_(2)_(photo_by_Carl_van_Vechten)

   Twixt Cup and Lip, written soon after World War I and being published for the first time, is a one-act comedy in which a modern, free-thinking woman finds herself courted by two men. But, the name of the playwright is the attraction: William Faulkner (right).

   Written when the future Nobel laureate was in his early 20s, Twixt Cup and Lip was discovered in the University of Virginia archives by The Strand Magazine managing editor Andrew Gulli, who has also tracked down long-lost and obscure works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. The play appears in the Strand’s holiday issue, which goes on sale Friday.

   Faulkner, who died in 1962, is an acknowledged giant of American fiction, but in his early years was more likely to write plays and poetry. Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, believes Twixt Cup and Lip was written in the early 1920s, when Faulkner was part of a theater group at the University of Mississippi.

   There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip

   The play’s title is lifted from an old English expression, meaning a seemingly settled event can still unravel. But readers will find nothing suggesting the tragic vision and anguish about the Southern past that made Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and the Fury, and other Faulkner novels; some of the most influential and haunting works of the 20th century.

   Around the time he wrote Twixt Cup and Lip, Faulkner also worked on the one-act The Marionettes, a romance based on Faulkner and his high school girlfriend (and future wife) Estelle Oldham. Twixt Cup and Lip also may be drawn from Faulkner’s relationship with Oldham. The importance of the piece might be that it’s an early influence to future authors that ushered in The Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Until next time>                               “never forget”

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2015 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


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