Requiem For A Nun – William Faulkner, 1951 ★★½

More Misery for Temple

Many novels can be said to have split personalities; few wear them as open and proud as Requiem For A Nun.

Alternately a series of narrative prose-poems detailing the history of a Southern American town, and as acts in a play about the murder of an infant, Requiem For A Nun demonstrates William Faulkner’s willingness to push against boundaries of culture as well as genre. The result is a mess, if sometimes a moving and involving one.

To start with the play, we are reintroduced to Temple Drake, featured character in Faulkner’s earlier novel Sanctuary, still dealing eight years on with the repercussions of the fateful day depicted in that novel. Her uncle-in-law, Gavin Stevens, has just lost his case defending the woman who murdered Temple’s six-month-old daughter. Now he calls upon Temple to face her own part in the crime:

GAVIN STEVENS: We’re not concerned with death. That’s nothing: any handful of petty facts and sworn documents can cope with that. That’s all finished now; we can forget it. What we are trying to deal with now is injustice. Only truth can cope with that. Or love.

TEMPLE: Love. Oh, God. Love.

The Warren County Jail in Vicksburg, Mississippi, circa 1864. A similar jailhouse in Jefferson, Mississippi figures prominently in both the play and prose elements of Requiem For A Nun. "…actually not isolated by location so much as insulated by obsolescence…" Faulkner writes of it. Image from https://oldcourthouse.org/photos/civil-war-tour/

For three acts Gavin lectures Temple about the injustice that her maid Nancy is about to be executed for smothering Temple’s daughter. This has all the makings of a disaster but manages to hold together pretty well. Gavin isn’t being a sore loser; he has a point. The real trial comes in the form of long essays which open each act, essays about Jefferson, population center in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. These present a case for Faulkner both as maverick and windbag.

Imagine a beat poet taking a stab at God’s Little Acre:

In the beginning was already decreed this rounded knob, this gilded pustule, already before and beyond the steamy chiaroscuro, untimed unseasoned winterless miasma not any one of water or earth or life yet all of each, inextricable and indivisible; that one seethe one spawn one mother-womb, one furious tumescence, father-mother-one, one vast incumbent ejaculation already fissionating in one boiling moil of litter from the celestial experimental Work Bench…

I needed a cigarette after reading that.

A view of Courthouse Square in Oxford, Mississippi, real-life inspiration for much of the prose sections of Requiem For A Nun. Image from Hines, Thomas S. William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0z09n7jz/.

Sentences run like that for dozens and dozens of pages, sometimes relating bits of story about Jefferson’s founding, other times just philosophizing about life in general and Southern traditions in particular.

Sometimes Faulkner grabbed me with an idea, a line, or an expression that more than justified wallowing through all his verbiage. “…so vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream…” he writes. He sets out to prove this in Requiem For A Nun’s rambling, shambling way.

Temple Drake is more central to this novel than she was in Sanctuary, which presented her as a mute and passive victim. This time she has a lot more vitality and personality. I felt like Faulkner was making a conscious effort to remake her in a more positive light, especially as he spends much time having Temple and the others discuss her actions in the earlier novel.

While in name an adaptation of Faulkner's Sanctuary, this 1961 film actually lifts much of its plot from Requiem For A Nun. Yves Montand plays Temple Drake's (Lee Remick) seducer, who leads her down a path similar to the one she finds herself on in Requiem. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Sanctuary-Movie-Poster-22-Inches/dp/B004UWYQ2C.

Why did Nancy Mannigoe, often described as a “dope-fiend whore,” kill Temple’s child? Why does Temple agree with her uncle to ask the governor to grant Nancy a stay of execution? The play portion of Requiem For A Nun concentrates on these questions, and a related one of whether Temple (not Nancy) can be saved:

TEMPLE: Temple Drake is dead.

GAVIN STEVENS: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

The above is a famous line that out of context I always interpreted as more cosmic, suggestive somehow of time as a pretzel. The reality here is simpler; that actions undertaken long ago have not only a bearing but a grip on what we live through now.

This may tie into Requiem For A Nun’s focus on race.

Relations between black and white people is always close to the center of things in Faulkner’s fiction, if not always so (Sanctuary is one such exception). Here Nancy Mannigoe, Temple’s African-American maid and, we learn, close confidante given their common experience of being sexually used by men, was moved to murder not by hate, but by a kind of selfless love for Temple. Temple calls Nancy “already damned before she was ever born, whose only reason for living was to get the chance to die a murderess on the gallows,” and we understand without it being spelled out that race forms the basis for this inequity.

Day laborers pick cotton in Mississippi, circa 1941. Faulkner describes cotton in Requiem as "that tender skim covering the winter's brown earth, burgeoning through spring and summer into September's white surf crashing against the flanks of gin and warehouse and ringing like bells on the marble counters of the banks." Image from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7153565/Color-photos-shanty-towns-sprang-America-Great-Depression.html

That inequity comes through most strongly when we see in flashback Nancy trying to talk sense to Temple, and drawing this angry reply:

TEMPLE: Are you really trying to make me hit you again?

In the narrative sections that run before each act, the entire Temple plot is ignored for these long run-on sentences that deal with the founding of Jefferson, its role in the Civil War, and its path toward modernization, with running water and window screens being innovations largely confined to the white part of town:

…the shadowless fluorescent corpse-glare bathing the sons and daughters of men and women, Negro and white both, who were born to and who passed all their lives in denim overalls and calico, haggling by cash or the installment-plan for garments copied last week out of Harper’s Bazaar or Esquire in East Side sweat-shops…

Why else Faulkner spends so much time on various aspects of life in Jefferson over a century and a half was unclear, at least to me. In almost alluvial style he brings up the same things over and over, such as the isolation of the jail within the town center or the business of a padlock we learn was stolen from the town without its having proper title of said lock. This created a kerfuffle with its rightful owner and set in motion a structure of governance, an anecdote Faulkner presents in a half-amusing, half-strangled fashion.

William Faulkner with his daughter Jill on her wedding day in August, 1954, three years after Requiem For A Nun was published. Image from www.cnn.com.

I skimmed through much of this. The long run-on sentences, broken up by semi-colons even between paragraph breaks, tested my patience and did not reward my effort. But Faulkner’s intensity of expression did hit me, and I found my attention waxing and waning as I pressed on.

Press I did. Faulkner offers for me a variation of Dorothy Parker’s famous maxim about writing; I hate reading Faulkner but love having read him. There is just so much density in his prose; and his willingness to press outside his comfort zone, to drive outside his lane, is inspiring and sometimes yields great results.

I don’t think it does quite that here. The characters speak at times with annoying artificiality, especially Uncle Gavin (“You are drowning in an orgasm of abjectness and moderation when all you need is the truth,” he tells Temple). Temple has been transformed from the party girl of eight years before into something of a philosopher.

TEMPLE: People. They’re really innately, inherently gentle and compassionate and kind. That’s what wrings, wrenches…something. Your entrails, maybe. The member of the mob who holds up the whole ceremony for seconds or even minutes while he dislodges a family of bugs or lizards from the log he is about to put on the fire –

A line like that isn’t anything like real human speech, especially not Temple’s from Sanctuary, but it’s so good you don’t really care.

The State Capitol of Jackson, Mississippi, the slightly-fictionalized site of the middle and longest act of Requiem's three-act play, "The Golden Dome." Here Faulkner writes of Temple and Gavin's meeting with the governor of the state, "a mythical one, since this is rather the State of which Yoknapatawpha County is a unit." Image from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503186/25-things-you-should-know-about-jackson-mississippi.

Requiem For A Nun is not rated highly in Faulkner’s body of work, though it has fans. French writer Albert Camus even reworked it as a full-on play. It presents a theme of Christian existentialism, little evoked today yet quite common as a theme in the mid-20^th century, when mankind still reeled from World War II and contemplated holocaust of a nuclear kind. Faulkner’s argument is that the possibility of an uncaring God doesn’t absolve man of the responsibility of seeking forgiveness from Him, or from each other.

It’s a powerful message, if more than a bit muddy. Temple veers between defiant and abject, while Gavin Stevens is unendurable. He does get the governor involved – introduced by Faulkner “as someone’s idea not of God but of Gabriel perhaps, the Gabriel not before the Crucifixion but after it.” Yet Gavin knows the governor is no use.

Nancy gets many of the best lines in terms of the meaning of faith, as she holds onto hers and even asks Temple to do the same. “…hoping: the hardest thing of all to break, get rid of, let go of, the last thing of all poor sinning man will turn aloose.” She’s the noblest character, even though the fact remains that for whatever reason she did kill the infant.

When it comes to right and wrong, all is in doubt:

JAILOR: I’d a heap rather believe there wasn’t nothing after death than to risk the station where I was probably going to get off.

Faulkner’s been tough for me from the get-go, and he doesn’t get any easier the more of him I do read. I’ve only ever hated one of his novels, though (As I Lay Dying), and his best remains beyond compare. I saw more than flashes of this mightier Faulkner in Requiem For A Nun, enough to relish if not enjoy the experience of reading him again. I can recommend it to readers of Sanctuary, if not anyone else.