For a What?

(The Faulkner Project) Requiem for a Nun from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 pp. 471-665 Library of America $40.00 ****

I’ve always loved the title Requiem for a Nun.  Haven’t loved it enough to read the book, but it had a certain ring to it.  I once saw, in the Duke library, a French translation, which I liked even more, Requiem pour une nonne.  My memory is that, when I was young, it was published in a Modern Library edition with another of Faulkner’s shorter titles, possibly As I Lay Dying.  Talk about odd pairings.  It looked like a play, but wasn’t widely produced.  It was never on my list of things to read, even though it apparently featured the return of Temple Drake, the adventurous young woman from Sanctuary.

Faulkner wrote it at an odd interim moment in his life.  He’d finally had a success with Intruder in the Dust in 1948; he sold it to the movies and the novel itself was the bestseller of his whole career up to that point.  Malcolm Cowley had published The Portable Faulkner, which revived his reputation in this country and for which Faulkner wrote a new appendix to The Sound and the Fury, his best novel.  He had already begun A Fable, the one work in his life which he didn’t write at white heat, taking eleven years to finish (though he apparently took long breaks).[1]  In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and gave his famous acceptance speech.

Nothing like a Nobel Prize to buoy the spirits.

An aspiring Mississippi actress named Ruth Ford wanted him to write a play for her.  There may have been something romantic going on there.  He also had his eye on a Bard College student named Joan Williams, who lived in Memphis and contacted him about mentoring her as a writer.  He did eventually have a romance with her.  He began Requiem as a play, and actually asked Joan if she wanted to collaborate on it.  That doesn’t sound like Faulkner, who didn’t seem the collaborating type, and it’s got to be intimidating for an undergrad to make suggestions to a Nobel Prize winner.  He finally decided to write it as a half play/half novel, the action rendered in a script in three acts, but broken up by long prose prologues at the beginning of each act, detailing various aspects of Yoknapatawpha history.  The prose passages were Faulkner’s usual dense prose.  The short play was more straightforward.

Ever since I read Sanctuary (months ago, it seems) I’ve been thinking that when Temple Drake returned, she would reveal why she testified falsely in the murder trial at the end of the novel, not naming the man she knew had committed the crime (and sending another man to his death).  I assumed that was a case of an abducted person identifying with her abductor, the way Patty Hearst did years later, and refusing to betray him, even though he treated her horribly.  I had it in my head that, in Requiem for a Nun, Temple would explain herself.

No such luck.  Requiem takes up Temple’s story years later, when she has married Gowan Stevens, the man who took her to the bootlegger in the first place.  They have two children, and her younger daughter has apparently been murdered by her housekeeper, an African American woman named Nancy who was a recovering drug addict and part-time prostitute.  The play opens with that woman being sentenced to hang, and instead of collapsing or sobbing, she yells, “Yes, Lord.”  That definitely draws us in.

Temple, alas, is not doing well.  Her life has been devastated by that early trauma, and she apparently hired Nancy as a fellow trauma survivor whom she could talk to.  Now the woman has murdered Temple’s child, and been convicted, and though Temple doesn’t understand why, she believes she can reveal some details that may compel the governor to commute the sentence.  Her overwhelming feeling in this situation is guilt.  If she hadn’t wandered off the beaten track on that day some years back, if she hadn’t been such a wild adventurous young woman, all this might never have happened.  In the first act we hear the basic set-up, in the second she goes on a last-minute trip to the governor, and in the third she meets with Nancy.

Temple does a certain amount of hemming and hawing in her meeting with the governor, and the gasbag Gavin Stevens—the lawyer who keeps showing up in Faulkner’s later work and who is kin to her husband—steps in to explain (at great length).  I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying there was never much hope in this situation.  A Mississippi governor is going to commute the sentence of a black woman who murdered a white child?

My problem with the work as a whole was that I wanted to know what happened: what Temple would reveal to the governor, what Nancy would say to Temple.  I therefore grew impatient with the long prose passages in between, which were fascinating in their own way but had nothing to do with the trial, and I hurried through them.  I’m now rereading them.  They’re like a separate work, a brief history of Jefferson and of Mississippi in general.

Nancy when we finally meet her is riveting.  She’s obviously had a horribly difficult life, and we know nothing of her back story.  We also have no idea why—whatever Temple’s personal situation—Nancy thought the right thing to do was to kill her child.  But she has an overwhelming religious faith, a trust in God that Temple is unable to fathom.  I assume she’s the nun of the title, by which Faulkner must mean holy woman.  She’s certainly like no nun I ever heard of.[2]

What I recommend to a prospective reader is to read the play first and satisfy your curiosity.  Then go back and read the prose pieces, and enjoy them for what they are (as I’m doing now).  This is another bizarre William Faulkner work, like nothing else in the entire oeuvre.  But you wouldn’t want to miss it.

[1] The slow pace at which he wrote that novel—his longest—wasn’t a function of age.  He wrote his last novel, The Reivers, in something less than three months.

[2] I’ve wondered if the title is an allusion.  I checked with my brother, who had wondered the same thing, but he didn’t have an answer.  I’d be happy to hear from anyone who does.