“Many writers have lamented the tribulations and debilitating temptations of the screenwriting life, but few could resist the urge to incorporate  into their own work. Faulkner, by contrast, used a California setting once only—‘Golden Land,’ published in 1935, distills his misgivings in an archetypal tale of insidious corruption.” 

IF HE had been thirty, he would not have needed the two aspirin tablets and the half glass of raw gin before he could bear the shower’s needling on his body and steady his hands to shave. But then when he had been thirty neither could he have afforded to drink as much each evening as he now drank; certainly he would’ve not done it in the company of the men and women, in which at forty-eight, he did each evening, even though knowing during the very final hours, filled with the breaking of glass and the shrill cries of drunken women above the drums and saxophones—the hours during which he carried a little better than his weight both in the amount of liquor consumed and in the number and sum of checks paid—that six or eight hours later he would rouse from what had not been sleep at all, but instead that dreamless stupefaction of alcohol out of which last night’s turgid and licensed uproar would die, as though without any interval for rest or recuperation, into the familiar shape of his bedroom—the bed’s foot silhouetted by the morning light which entered the bougainvillea-bound windows, beyond which his painful and almost unbearable eyes could see the view which might be called the monument to almost twenty-five years of industry and desire, of shrewdness and luck and even fortitude—the opposite canyonflank dotted with the white villas half-hidden in imported olive groves, or friezed by the sombre spaced columns of cypress, like the facades of Eastern temples whose owners’ names and even faces were glib and familiar in the back corners of the United States of America, and of the world where those of Einstein, and Rousseau and Esculapius had never sounded.