If we were to trust Virginia Faulkner, the “Lost Generation” had no desire to be found. In The Barbarians (1935), her account of the Bohemian life of expats and war veterans set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1922, to be “disoriented, wandering, directionless” was more fun than having to be tied down to any particular plan. The Barbarians — a loose cluster of creative types — painters, a sculptor, a writer, a pianist, and a gigolo — value independence over all:
Because their work was concerned with the forms of things, they had little time to bother with problems of behavior when in the presence of substance. They possessed great singleness of purpose, and because they found simplicity in all that they most admired they tried to regulate their lives as simply as possible. What they disliked they avoided or ignored, or pretended was non-existent. Life all students of reality, they were experts at make-believe. Like all people who must live intensively, they were sometimes cruel and impatient. Like all specialists, they had a good many blind spots.
This sounds remarkably insightful coming from a writer who was all of 22 when The Barbarians, but bear in mind that Faulkner was nine years old in 1922 and had spent less than a year in Europe, mostly attending a tony girls’ finishing school in Rome. So, there’s far more in this book one has to attribute to precocious powers — of either observation or imagination or probably both. “Tauchnitz had taken the place of experience,” Faulkner writes of one particularly naïve young woman, but it might have truer for the author herself than she might like to admit.
Faulkner later wrote scripts for Fred Allen’s radio show and dialogue for Hollywood comedies, and her talent for rapid-fire conversation in an absurdist vein takes center stage in much of The Barbarians.
“There are so many things to think about. For instance, did it ever occur to you that there are an equal number of hands and feet in the world — at least to start with?”
“And the thumb is the strongest of the fingers?” said Phip helpfully.
“And monkeys have knuckles,” contributed Beppo. “At least, I think they do. Funny how you never associate a monkey with a knuckle.”
“And if we didn’t have fingernails, what would we scratch with?” said Marie.
“Do you suppose if we weren’t subject to itching we’d have fingernails?” inquired Andreas.
“Pulling off the fingernails was a medieval form of torture,” said Sarkesso.
“The Chinese take great pride in long fingernails,” said Lise valiantly.
“And short feet.”
“And many a foot is not twelve inches long.”
“And there is a kind of worm called the inch-worm.”
“And it is very hard to tell one end of worm from the other.”
“Can worms back up?”
This provoked quite a long discussion which ended by Lise and Beppo going out to get some worms….
Faulkner also tries her hand at romantic farce involving mistaken identities and hiding under beds à la Feydeau and proves herself a quick study. The Barbarians collectively foil Baroness Von Schanzburg’s attempt to arrange a marriage between her daughter and a passing American millionaire (“An income for herself from the son-in-law was not essential but would be acceptable,” she muses) and spirit her off to their Left Bank suite of garrets.
With no apparent talent aside from looking beautiful, she’s soon convinced by a ne’er-do-well to join him selling fake native artworks to tourists in the middle of the Sahara. Faulkner may have taken a page from Evelyn Waugh’s just-published A Handful of Dust in that the girl finds herself held prisoner by an especially sadistic local trader. Unlike Waugh’s Tony Last, however, several Barbarians come to the rescue, and the comic crew rides laughing into the sunset.
When it came time for The Barbarians to be published, however, it was Faulkner herself who was the butt of jokes. As the story came out in May 1935 when the New York Supreme Court granted her an annulment, one night two months before Faulkner had been entertaining friends, including Tallulah Bankhead, at her hotel. As more drinks were poured, the party flowed out of the hotel and into one or more nightclubs, until at 3 A.M. the next morning, she was standing up in front of the Justice of the Peace of Harrison, New York pledging to love, honor, and obey one Everett Weil, whom reports identified as a “cotton converter,” whatever that is/was. Hours later, Faulkner awoke, finally sober, to find Weil bringing her breakfast in bed. Faulkner, who was likely gay and in any case in no mood to get hitched, fled the scene and began a frantic search for the fastest route to an annulment. A few papers picked up the story in March, but when the court ruling came out on 15 May 1935, The New York Daily News gleefully put its best headliner writer to work:
“Fifteen Scotch highballs preceding a dawn elopement mystified Virginia Faulkner so thoroughly that she didn’t know what was happening until the blissfully happy bridegroom, Everett V. Weil, revived her with a platter of scrambled eggs of his own making in his apartment at 42 W. 74th St. Then she fled,” the article opened. You can hear the copy writer chuckling as he went to town on this story. “He Scrambles, She Scrams,” quipped a subheading. It ended with testimony from her application: “All she remembers of the honeymoon’s final chapter, she deposed, was that the bridgegroom gave her his card and phone number as she was leaving his apartment, and said: ‘Call me up some time.'” Not even Faulkner ever managed to come up with a story quite as wild as that.