19
Two Lives/Two Faulkners
1949–1951
Black against a White Background
“William Faulkner took us sailing on his sailboat on a big inland lake they’ve cut out of the woods there—waves and everything, big,” wrote Eudora Welty on September 2, 1949. She called him “a wonderful person” with “the most profound face, something that nearly breaks your heart though, just in the clasp of his hand—a strange kind of life he leads in Oxford, two lives really.” Strange, perhaps, because there was nothing bookish about it and literature never entered her conversation with him. “He can do or make anything, and can sail beautifully,” Welty noted. “We got in his 20 year old Ford touring car which he hunts and fishes and goes over the farm in, with holes in the floor (‘well, I know where all the holes are’) and when we couldn’t open a back door he said, ‘There’s a cupboard latch on it,’ you ought to see that car.”
Welty did not mention anyone else at the party. Stuart Purser (1907–1986), the new chairman of the Department of Art at Ole Miss, came aboard on sketching trips. The two had first met in an unusual encounter on the square. Purser heard a voice over his shoulder asking the artist about his preference for drawing black people against white backgrounds. Purser, engaged in his drawing and unaware that the voice behind him was William Faulkner’s, did not say much, but the questioner persisted: “Did you give my brother John Faulkner the graphic award because you thought the drawing had merit?” What was Faulkner really asking?, Purser wondered. Did John have talent, or was he chosen because of his last name? Purser explained that the drawing of a possum hunt had been submitted anonymously. Thereafter Purser watched Faulkner talking with country people, black and white, not in groups but as individuals. “You get your ideas and inspiration from observing these people, while I get mine through talk with them,” Faulkner told him.
The remarkable aspect of the Faulkner-Purser colloquies is that Faulkner took the initiative. About a local black artist Purser had championed, Faulkner asked, “Does Mayfield have real talent, or is his work getting attention because he is black?” Both, Purser answered. M. B. Mayfield (1923–2005) with a seventh-grade education, painted and wrote poetry without any formal instruction, making him a fitting contemporary for William Faulkner. Purser had discovered Mayfield’s roadside art work in Ercu, Mississippi, and had found Mayfield a job as a janitor at the University of Mississippi. The job was just a cover for Mayfield, whom Purser installed in a broom closet of a classroom, where Mayfield could observe, through his “narrow opening,” classes devoted to art. Did Purser share with Faulkner this secret worthy of a Faulkner novel?1
Purser objected to an Ole Miss librarian’s comment about an unfriendly Faulkner, and she replied, “Oh yes, he loves to talk to Negroes and poor white trash.” Purser felt he learned from Faulkner. The artist liked to quote Dr. Robert Coles’s comment in the Christian Science Monitor: “Here in the United States William Faulkner made it his business to spend hours with his townsmen in Mississippi—he made brilliant use of his dreams and fantasies—but he also knew that his understanding of others made him a rich man. He was willing to be taught by his neighbors.”2
Black against a white background is what Faulkner seemed to have in mind when he wrote Hal Smith in October 1933 about a novel, Requiem for a Nun, “about a nigger woman. It will be a little on the esoteric side, like AS I LAY DYING.” But then he put it aside, for no reason, except that Absalom, Absalom! began to press upon him, although he considered returning to Requiem for a Nun the following year.3 Sixteen years later, in an Algonquin Hotel room, he was hard at work on the first act of a play, returning to the “nigger”—a word he put between quotation marks:
a known drunkard and dope user, a whore with a jail record in the little town, always in trouble. Some time back she seemed to have reformed, got a job as nurse to a child in the home of a prominent young couple. Then one day suddenly and for no reason, she murdered the child. And now she doesn’t even seem sorry. She seems to be making it impossible for the lawyer to save her.
So at the end of this act, everybody, sympathy is against her. She deserves to hang, a sentiment which reflects even on the lawyer defending her.4
This time, unlike Intruder in the Dust, the accused black person has committed murder. The remaining question is why, and what role these white people will have in her story. Faulkner seemed to want to know himself when he asked Joan Williams to write the play with him.
Did the response to Intruder in the Dust, the novel and the film, rouse Faulkner to resurrect Requiem for a Nun? And why a play? Early on, before he had written his first novel, the theater of Eugene O’Neill had fascinated Faulkner, especially the playwright’s exploration of dualism in the form of the masks that his characters wore to occlude seething passions that threatened to overwhelm them. In 1933, just as the idea of Requiem for a Nun occurred to him, he met Ruth Ford, a philosophy graduate student at Ole Miss, whom Dean Faulkner brought to Rowan Oak. Ten years later, Ford met Faulkner again at Warner Brothers, where she was under contract. “The one thing I want most in the world is for you to write me a play,” she told him. She was a striking, dark-haired beauty—the photographs of her as Temple Drake are mesmerizing. She had a commanding presence that made her courtier politely propose: “Ruth, I’ve been your gentleman friend for quite a while now. Ain’t it time I was promoted?” She laughed and brushed him off with, “Oh, Bill!” She steadfastly denied a romance and emphasized, instead, their deep friendship and their bond as southerners. She called him “the perfect gentleman.”5
Ford wanted a professional relationship, not a romance, and Faulkner seems to have respected her all the more for it. In New York in October 1948, she had been one of his friends who had found him almost unconscious in his Algonquin Hotel room and arranged for his hospitalization. He had seen her again, along with his Random House editors, in February 1950 on a trip to New York to consult about Collected Stories. Ford knew a lot of writers and took Faulkner to their parties—all part of her determination to snag him and of his desire to please her. If this was not All about Eve, it was pretty close to being all about Ruth Ford, although William Faulkner, so bent on his promotion, was not deceived. In November, he did more New York party-hopping with Ford. If he still did not talk much, he listened “avidly,” observed reporter Rhea Talley, who also said “his companions had little trouble getting him away to the next party.” She watched him ask questions about an eccentric painter who had become the object of discussion. Then he turned to Talley and said, “This is what I come to New York for—gossip.” Ruth Ford admitted she had coaxed him onto this social tour by saying they would “drop in on some people.”
By May 1950, he had written two acts of the play but realized “more than ever that I cant write a play,” although he hoped someone could rewrite it. The someone, Joan Williams to begin with, had neither the time nor the heart to make William Faulkner playable. And that’s when Faulkner thought of how what he had already written might get onto the page, if not the stage. Before the month was over he had written a third act but was calling it a novel, with “three introductory chapters which hold the 3 acts together.” He had not given up on a producible play, but concentrated, for now, on the project as a book, while he still sought contributions from Joan Williams. By January 1951, after the Nobel trip, he returned to his novel/play, expecting to publish it in the fall of 1951.6
Then Howard Hawks called and called and called.
Collaborating with the Enemy
A Hawks biographer boils down the director’s pitch: A picture based on William E. Barrett’s “timely and inspirational novel, The Left Hand of God, about an American flier trying to escape the embattled China of 1947 disguised as a priest. The trappings of the story—the resourceful pilot hero, a gorgeous young nurse, the endangered outpost of humanity [a Catholic mission] trying to stave off violent and unpredictable forces—had obvious appeal to Hawks, who certainly would have played up the adventure and romance angles.”7 But what was the appeal to Faulkner? Hawks telephoned eight times in one evening from Hollywood, and before the eighth time, Faulkner told Aunt Bama, “I hope he doesn’t phone me again because I will have to give in.”8
The money was good: two thousand dollars per week and a bonus if Faulkner finished the work in a month. But did Faulkner need the money after the thirty-thousand-dollar Nobel award? In fact, he did, because he had set up a twenty-five-thousand-dollar trust fund. Much of the Nobel wealth would go to doing good works so that Faulkner would become the benefactor of his community—just like his great-grandfather. Phil Stone advised him on his will, his trust, and the impact on his taxes. “Best of luck, and let me know if there is anything I can do for you,” Stone wrote in a letter sent care of Charles Feldman, now handling Faulkner’s Hollywood contracts.9
But would money alone be enough to entice a Nobel Prize winner to return to the site of the Hollywood horror show and memories of the Ward, where he bent over his typewriter turning out products like a machine for the two-headed Warner Brothers monster? In a handwritten discarded draft of his Nobel Prize address on Algonquin Hotel stationery, he had recorded his humiliation and outrage: “A few years ago I was taken on as a script writer at a Hollywood studio. At once I began to hear the man in charge talking of ‘angles’, story ‘angles’, and then I realized that they were not even interested in truth, the old universal truths of the human heart without which any story is ephemeral—the universal truths of love and honor and pride and pity and compassion and sacrifice.”10 Why collaborate with the enemy? What could Hawks have said that would have moved Faulkner to return? Well, it was Howard Hawks, and Faulkner believed he owed a man whose work Faulkner respected and learned from. As a deeply loyal man—Faulkner had held on to Hal Smith even after the publisher’s bankruptcy had meant the loss of Sanctuary’s royalties—how could he deny Hawks, the director who had been responsible for two of Faulkner’s most important screenwriting credits, for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep? He had another reason, as his letter to Meta on August 8, 1951, reveals: he wanted to see her again, and working on a film would be his excuse to leave home.11
And what if The Left Hand of God abetted Faulkner’s own life and work? What if Faulkner’s adaptation of this “inspirational novel” fulfilled the work on “The De Gaulle Story,” “Battle Cry,” and Requiem for a Nun, all of which dealt with the theme of redemption and of individuals asserting a newfound integrity in the midst of history? Faulkner’s first draft screenplay has been called “craftsmanlike” but “rather dull and sincere, with an abundance of narration,” which is why Hawks did not produce the film, according to one of his biographers.12 But Faulkner’s work is neither perfunctory nor boring and is superior to the film eventually released starring Humphrey Bogart and Gene Tierney.
Like so much of William Faulkner’s life, what was deeply personal and what motivated his writing remain mysterious, one of those “trade secrets” he begrudgingly confided just once in a letter to his mother way back in those heady New Orleans days in 1925. “He lived in a world that we did not enter,” his niece Dean said: “My grandmother was the only person with whom he shared those brilliant people he created. . . . They would go into a bedroom and close the door. He shared the stuff he loved with her.”13 What Faulkner gave to his work he wanted to stay there, as if to share too much of himself even with his intimates would have robbed him of his powers—forces that had to be kept inside. At all costs, he had to avoid spillage, the leaking out of energies that more properly belonged in the books. Consequently, the biographer, like one of Faulkner’s own characters, has to, at some points, speculate in order to complete the story of that character, William Faulkner. With Faulkner, one detects, surmises, infers, imagines, and ratiocinates.
Faulkner wasn’t just the writer and the sailor/farmer/carpenter/painter/hunter/novelist. He was also the lover/screenwriter/playwright. Between 1949 and 1954, Faulkner worked away at A Fable, started a play, turned the play into a novel, turned the novel back into a play, went to Hollywood, and wrote and carried on with Joan Williams, Meta Carpenter, and Else Jonsson, traveling to Memphis, Hollywood, New York, London, Paris, Stockholm, and Oslo before meeting Jean Stein in St. Moritz. Each of these women enjoyed a part of the man, and each of them also built him up into a character of their imagining, one who could now deploy himself surreptitiously across continents. “This is in most complete confidence,” he wrote to Saxe Commins from Hollywood in February 1951. “The principal reason is, I dont want my family in Oxford to learn about it until I decide to tell them myself. If it works out that way, I will let them think that I am merely in New York finishing my play-novel.” What was “it”? Faulkner wanted to go to Europe in mid-April for two weeks, and he wanted to travel via “Betty Haas’s aeroplane.”14 The old spelling for airplane, more British than American, defined Faulkner’s vintage, the young man on the loose in the 1920s, who now had it in mind to visit Else Jonsson, although he did not say as much to Saxe, who, along with Robert Haas, was expected to collaborate in their author’s machinations—in this case employing Haas’s daughter to pilot Faulkner to his tryst.
Faulkner wrote this letter during his reunion with Meta Carpenter. During their separation, she had read “everything that came my way about Faulkner—book reviews, interviews, evaluations of his body of work, squibs in Time magazine.” She rejoiced when he wrote her that MGM had bought the movie rights to Intruder in the Dust. His correspondence, she admitted, often treated her as his own, not the woman remarried to Wolfgang Rebner. She was still Faulkner’s “sweet love,” as he signed one of his letters to her. Rumors about her involvement with Faulkner had spread, and she became an object of “awakened interest.” Only then, more than a decade after their first assignation, had she realized she had been “loved by a man for the ages.” But she could only imagine what the Nobel celebration at Rowan Oak was like. Then the powerful agent Charles Feldman had finally broken the Warner Brothers contract, and Faulkner was free to accept Howard Hawks’s offer.
He called her from the plush Beverly Carlton on Olympic Boulevard, and she arrived to see him looking like his recent photographs: “august, bonier and more severe of mien, somewhat professorial” but still the man she loved with the crinkling eyes. But did he still love her? She suspected he had become involved with a secretary, and when she confronted him, he broke down, lamenting the ten years they been away from one another.15 For the first time in five years they made love, but this time a “grave and sweet ardor” replaced their earlier unbridled passion. He seemed remorseful: “Why did we let it happen? I, more than you. This long, agonizing time away from each other. Foolish. Senseless waste. No warrant to it.” His regrets included Estelle: “I’ve been hard on her in many ways, some of them, I now realize, without justification.” He surprised Meta by not saying much about Jill, now eighteen. She said Faulkner did not share Hawks’s belief in The Left Hand of God as the “basis for a successful motion picture, but he said nothing.” It is hard to believe this was his last word on the project.
On February 11, Faulkner wrote to Joan Williams, who had declined to join him at the Beverly Carlton, “Fantastic place, fantastic work.” That’s not much to hang a story on, but with Faulkner it has to serve. He followed the spirit and often the letter of Barrett’s novel, but with an added value. By happenstance, Hawks had found a property worthy of a Nobel Prize winner, and Faulkner went at the screenplay in what looks like a Hollywood-be-damned mood even as Faulkner, an old Hollywood hand of nearly twenty years standing, perfected certain Hollywood/Hawksian conventions.16
To begin with, Faulkner conceived of the film, although set in China, as a Hollywood western. Here is how his film opens: “Evening after sunset. A small gorge or mountain pass, barren solitary. A rough trail along which pass a column of mounted men and heavy though crudely laden packanimals with their drivers.” The studios almost always wanted their audience to identify with foreign characters and situations as though the world abroad was American. So in the released version of the film, Lee J. Cobb plays a Chinese warlord. Faulkner did not suggest actors for the roles, but in creating Hank, it is hard to believe he did not have Walter Brennan in mind, one of the stars of Banjo on My Knee and To Have and Have Not. Hank is not in Barrett’s novel. He is a singular Faulkner creation but also a Hollywood creature. He is the wisecracking sidekick so often employed in the Brennan-Cooper films and, even more notably, for Faulkner’s purposes, in the Brennan-Wayne collaboration in Red River (1948). After the first appearance of Jim Carmody (Humphrey Bogart) comes the “second white man,” Hank, subordinate to Carmody but also his critic, functioning as Brennan does in Red River as Wayne’s conscience. In one version of the film, Brennan also narrated the story, providing a perspective—by turns serious and comic—on the hero just as Hank does, who supports Carmody but also questions his decisions. As for the Chinese, well, they are make-do American Indians and even sometimes sound like refugees from Drums along the Mohawk.
Without Hank, the released film lacks humor and tension, so that even an actor as great as Humphrey Bogart can seem if not exactly boring, then without enough to do, since he has no one, really, to answer to.17 Listen to Hank narrate the story and you can hear Walter Brennan: “China, 1951 right under the edge of Tibet a thousand miles from nowhere and for my nickel you could have had the country and the job both two years ago, and by now even Jim too was going around to that idea.” The hard-boiled, apolitical language—right out of The Big Sleep—is applied to history. Soon the Communists would take over this part of the country, but their encroaching power is only an off-camera phenomenon alluded to in the dialogue.18
Hank’s voice-overs, it is true, are uncommonly long for the screen, but they could have been compressed while retaining his mordant humor. His narrative interludes function like the introductory sections of Requiem for a Nun, a draft of which Faulkner was writing on the reverse side of the Left Hand of God script.19 Without narrative, the released version of the film lacks the background necessary to savor Carmody’s developing moral consciousness, which he works out under Hank’s intense scrutiny.
Jim and Hank are downed pilots now working for a Chinese warlord, Yang, their rescuer who will not let them go. They are also in the midst of a civil war trying to avoid “soviet gangs” who are moving across Yang’s territory. When one of Yang’s men kills a traveling priest, Carmody whips the murderer across the face—assuming an authority that Yang accords to himself. When Yang orders Carmody to do the same to Hank, the two white men escape, knowing full well that Yang, not daring to lose face, will come after them.
Carmody, wearing the dead priest’s clothes, and Hank, dressed as a servant, find refuge in a Catholic mission, which has been expecting the arrival of a priest. Carmody, who has said, “Religion is for children,” is called upon to perform mass, hear confession, administer communion, attend to the dying, and, in general, take care of the mission, which becomes his mission—at first only as an effort to save himself but, in the end, to serve humanity, the “Chinks,” as Hank calls them. Carmody, for all his reluctance, performs well as a priest, inspiring reverence among his congregation—rather like the recalcitrant Nobel laureate who found, perhaps to his surprise, that he could fulfill his public responsibilities with considerable success. It had not been easy. “Billy has gotten so touchy we don’t dare mention his fame, and believe me, we edge off. He is so very proud and happy over winning the prize, but is his own shy self about publicity,” his mother explained.20
Faulkner had insisted in his graduation speeches that the world could change only if individuals, one by one, changed themselves and protested injustice. Carmody mentions he was an altar boy but is now a lapsed Catholic, and the dying priest replies, “There is no such thing.” He might as well say, as Gavin Stevens does, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Later Carmody says, “there is no such thing as was.” Although Carmody jokes when he calls himself “an American white devil” when rejecting the attentions of a courtesan, he regards himself as unredeemed.
Faulkner’s serious moral purpose as well as his enmity toward Hollywood and his own dealings with popular culture erupt as he pictures Hank lying in bed reading a “movie magazine or detective story of True Confessions, or maybe a battered Saturday Evening Post two years old”—none of which prepare him for the hazardous and morally complex sojourn in the Chinese mission, which includes encountering Dr. Sigman, a disaffected radical who has fled Europe to this poor village of people “not even valuable as political material.” Carmody states his fear of the “Soviets” and shies away from political talk. What matters, in Faulkner’s screenplay, is Carmody’s courage and loyalty to Hank and Hank’s self-sacrifice. Carmody explains what happened after their plane crashed: “It must have taken him [Hank] days to keep me alive and still get me down that mountain to where he could find help. I don’t know how he did it.” Carmody tells the hero’s story just as Faulkner spoke of a crash landing that entitled him to his cane and head wound plate.21
Hank has saved Carmody, but the hero has not yet figured out how to save himself. That the mission welcomes Carmody as a priest becomes less significant, ultimately, than his understanding that their faith in God and humanity is what will redeem him. His qualities as a man, not just a priest, invite the attention of Dr. Sigman, his wife, and Anne, the wife of a lost American pilot (presumed dead). Anne, a devout Catholic, is troubled by her romantic attachment to Carmody, who does not tell her he is not actually a priest. He is susceptible to her as succor to his soul. Faulkner plays down their sexual attraction as he concentrates on Carmody’s spiritual revival. He has been a man who figured all the angles, a soldier of fortune, who gradually renounces his own ambitions.
Dr. Sigman suspects Carmody is hiding a secret and jokes with his wife, who also finds Carmody attractive: “Go on. Be a papist. Defend him.” Faulkner’s Dr. Sigman relinquishes the stereotypical role that Hollywood usually assigns to well-meaning white people. His hospital has failed to attract patients until Carmody shows up. Sigman laments that “we—the white men—have lost face.” They have run out of supplies: “What else can these people think of a foreign god who cannot even keep aspirin in his dispensary.” They have to leave, Sigman says, before the “communist troops” start “hammering at the gates.” His wife, like Anne, refuses to leave. “Then I am,” Sigman answers. “We went through that once”—that is, running from the Communists in Europe. Dr. Sigman, like “Father” Carmody, says, “there are no miracles,” and yet almost in the same breath he practically quotes from Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address about the “human race, which, for all its baseness and folly, is still capable of fidelity and sacrifice for the sake of love.” For all Hollywood’s corrupt dealings, Faulkner was still trying to redeem it in this script.
When the villagers come to Carmody he is so moved that he kneels to them—a spontaneous gesture that Hank is sure came as a surprise: “I don’t guess he knew why, either. But it was the right thing to do. It was exactly right. It was as if the Lord himself was taking care of him—of us—.” The “us” is everyone, white and Chinese alike, and Carmody’s spontaneous submission to his fate, to saving the village, seems like a gift of grace, not an action of his own volition. Without Hank, how could the power of this salvation have been conveyed? It certainly does not occur in the released film. Was Faulkner also thinking of the grace he had shown in the Nobel ceremony, the pirouetting that Else Jonsson noticed—not aware that this was the same man who had doused himself with liquor in the days approaching the Nobel event? When Faulkner said the award was not just to him, he meant it. Accepting the prize meant he could no longer go it alone, as he had done so often in Hollywood, in New York, at home, acting as his own soldier of fortune.
By all accounts, Faulkner’s presence at Stockholm, notwithstanding his virtually inaudible voice, inspired awe. Anne, watching Carmody perform as Father O’Shea, exults: “Never in my life did a Mass move me as that one did. He was so deliberate—so reverent—so sincere. It was as though it could go on forever, and I wanted it to go on forever—none of us ever to leave the church again—.” She is speaking of a moment but also of eternity and universality, the very terms of Faulkner’s Nobel sermon. The Communists in the film are described as godless—not only in the disbelieving sense but in their obliteration of individuality. No wonder, then, that the Nobel declaration of faith is a key Cold War document reified by this film. Such moments sound preachy, but Hank is always there to be earthy—this time at a baptism to say he can assist Carmody: “I can co-pilot on that. (Carmody reacts) The baptizing. I can hold a Texas yearling while they notch its ear. I guess I can hold a Chink kid while you sprinkle it.—Okay, okay, just say I’m bored.” How Walter Brennan, a devout Catholic and Oregon rancher who loved using racial epithets, would have relished saying the lines William Faulkner had written for him.
Carmody is Faulkner in character: “The whole Chinese family is watching him with the same air of complete trust. He sees the family and speaks to them in the hill dialect, indicating that he is learning even something of that.” That Faulkner had a similar impact is undeniable. Perrin H. Lowrey Jr., writing to Phil Stone while Faulkner was in Hollywood working on The Left Hand of God, testified that “as a young writer, I wanted to tell someone close to him how much his speech of acceptance in Stockholm meant to those of us who are trying to turn out something good. The dignity and selflessness and awareness of that speech must have been particularly meaningful and encouraging to all the young writers of my generation. . . . So I wanted him to know . . . I simply wanted to thank him for doing so generous and so fine a thing.”22 Even if Stone never forwarded this letter, Faulkner had to know through Joan Williams, Shelby Foote, Eudora Welty, and many others that his words inspired generations of writers.
Hank, who has kidded Carmody all along, calling him “Father,” admits, “something has happened to you.” Hank does not have to spell it out. Nor does Carmody: “something happened to me. I don’t even know myself what it was. Yes, I do know—an old Buddhist priest—a man dying of leprosy—a woman dying in childbirth who held my hand and believed in me while she died—the patience, the suffering, the hope, but above all the trust—You see, I can’t tell you,” he says to Dr. Marvin, the priest who comes to relieve Carmody after he has saved the mission. Like the marshal (Gary Cooper) in High Noon, one of Faulkner’s favorite pictures,23 or the sheriff (John Wayne) in Rio Bravo (1959), everyone awaits the appearance of the head villain. “What are you going to do when this—Mieh Yang?—finally arrives?” Full of Gary Cooper doubt, Carmody replies, “I don’t know.” In the end, Carmody relies on himself, in his reading of Yang, but also on the faith the mission has instilled in him.
What Carmody does know is that he can only save the mission by dealing with Yang one-to-one. It is a literal gamble. They will throw dice. If Carmody wins, the mission is saved. If Carmody loses, Yang may still withdraw from the village, but at the price of enslaving Carmody. Even before the dice have rolled, though, Carmody tells Yang why he cannot win, even though he threatens Carmody with torture: “if I stood the torture well, people would say that I was stronger than Mieh Yang, since he could not break me. And if I stood it badly, they would marvel that such a weak man commanded your troops. They would wonder if maybe you too were not weak.” In short, Yang’s putative victory over Carmody and the mission would result in the warlord’s ultimate defeat.
William Faulkner’s Left Hand of God never got made because of Production Code violations and the Catholic Church’s opposition.24 Even with his redemption, Carmody, in Faulkner’s script, was too unsavory for the Production Code, which forbid, for example, scenes with a character pretending to be a priest and actually performing holy services. The absurdity of this prohibition is apparent: This is a motion picture. Any actor playing a priest would be bogus. Words like “papist” would have been excised. And the cynical Dr. Sigman, clearly an atheist who attacks the Church, required a Production Code anathema. When he touches Carmody’s cassock, the doctor thinks of “all the bloody history of this cloth—the fanaticism, the injustice which has been committed in its name.”
After two decades in Hollywood Faulkner knew that his mixture of the profane and the sacred could never be approved. Perhaps he thought Hawks could finesse the censors, as he had done in previous pictures. Or perhaps writing a screenplay drawing on both an understanding of Hollywood limits and a wish to transgress those limits was enough compensation. Or he knew that his script, like all Hollywood products, would be rewritten, and he might as well have his say—as he did, for example, with Sutter’s Gold and Drums along the Mohawk, films rewritten and released, but not nearly as powerful or as honest as his scripts.
Staging History
On the flip side of those Left Hand of God pages, Faulkner went back to work on Requiem for a Nun, another work of redemption ramified through a succession of pasts—not only the various stages of Temple Drake’s life but also those of Jefferson, her community, and its extension to the world. Faulkner’s work on women’s films, The Damned Don’t Cry and Mildred Pierce, which created strong, if morally compromised women, broke new ground in his fiction.25 As he worked on Requiem for a Nun, his sense of the historical became more pronounced, stimulated by his acute consciousness of change, and of the need to interpret and to live with that change, which included new roles for women.
Eight years after the ending of Sanctuary, Temple has married Gowan Stevens and acquiesced to a conventional life with two children, until Pete, brother of Red, the lover Popeye murdered in Memphis, blackmails her with letters she sent to Red. Her dealings with Pete arouse in Temple a passionate desire to forsake all for an affair with her blackmailer, who resembles her former lover. She can no longer abide her husband’s sufferance of her past. He, in turn, endures the guilt of not having defended her honor. For him the marriage is a kind of atonement, but husband and wife, trying to forgive one another, have been tormented by their bad faith. Nancy, the family’s black nursemaid, a reformed prostitute and drug addict, and now a devout Christian, is the only one Temple can talk to without apology or explanation. Nancy has failed by every means she knows to keep Temple at home. In desperation, Nancy, willing to do anything to prevent Temple’s departure and the breakup of the family, kills the youngest child. Sentenced to hang, Nancy becomes the burden Temple bears for her own infidelity. Gowan’s uncle, Gavin Stevens, puts Temple on trial, in effect, seeking to compel her to reckon with the chain of events that have resulted in her child’s murder. Realizing that Temple will do anything to save Nancy, Gavin Stevens persuades her to make a plea in person to the governor to prevent Nancy’s death, although Stevens’s larger mission is to get Temple to reckon with her past and to reconcile herself to her present marriage.
Temple has been viewed as a “transitional figure . . . representing both the breakdown of the icon of the southern white lady and her reinvention as a moral agent.”26 Temple suffers, in part, because she is expected to be wife and mother exclusively and to settle down, as Estelle did, after returning from her misadventure abroad. Then the death of their first child had troubled their marriage, and Estelle’s fragile condition meant extra care and concerns about her stability. The prolonged tensions between husband and wife also filtered through his affairs with other women, especially now with Joan Williams, whom he encouraged to abandon her middle-class restraints. She was nothing like Temple Drake, but her desire to break from convention made her an ally in his effort to probe Temple’s divided psyche. Temple’s impressive vocabulary troubles one biographer,27 but it would not be amiss in a characterization of the well-read Estelle Faulkner, or Joan Williams.
Gavin Stevens construes a narrative of events that also constrains Temple’s effort to escape the conventions that William Faulkner felt bound both to honor and to break. Like Faulkner’s fraught marriage, Temple’s holds, even though it is a kind of “horror fantasy about marriage and an heroic affirmation of marriage’s capacity to endure.”28 Faulkner may not have seen the play in such stark terms, but Temple can seem caught, “as Faulkner was . . . between the erotic promise of a new young mate—the possibility of repeating earlier sexual adventures—and the more mundane task of struggling to make a marriage survive.”29 Stevens hovers over the Temple-Gowan marriage—like Phil Stone did in wry comments about the Faulkners to Carvel Collins and others. Stone told Stark Young that Requiem was a “shoddy job.”30 If Faulkner was exploring his own guilt, as one biographer has suggested, with Stevens/Stone as his conscience, he found an odd way to dramatize it by making the wife, not the husband, unfaithful.31
Given Faulkner’s previous portrayals of religious fanaticism in Light in August, his portrayal of Nancy’s stolid faith, her repeated “Just believe,” uttered in her jail cell as she awaited her execution, is surprising. The rousing role faith can exert, which is captured in Carmody’s transformation in The Left Hand of God, perhaps reinforced the depiction of Nancy’s repose after her own history of sin. She regards herself as an instrument of the Lord, like Doc Hines, but she is curiously underdeveloped, a deux ex machina more than a fully developed character, forcing Temple to confront her derelictions. “What about me?,” the doubting Temple asks Nancy in her jail cell. If there is no heaven, how will she be forgiven? Nancy, if not a fully realized character, is a startling rebuke to the stereotypical black woman-in-waiting, the sentimentalized moral instructress in the Gone with the Wind school of southern literature. If her uncompromising rectitude is murderous, it also calls into question the compromised motivations that trouble Temple’s marriage.
Requiem for a Nun brings to the highest pitch Faulkner’s re-creation of history as a contemporary event, occurring now, as the author, the characters, and all of us probe a problematic past in the three prologues and the three acts of the play. The novel emphasizes the interdependence of fiction and fact by including both Jefferson and Mississippi’s actual capital, Jackson, in presenting the geographical and historical development of the state, even though Faulkner’s stage directions refrain from identifying the state with the setting of the play in which only his fictional characters appear: “On the wall behind and above the chair, is the emblem, official badge, of the State, sovereignty (a mythical one, since this is rather the State of which Yoknapatawpha County is a unit).” In Requiem’s play, Temple Drake and Gavin Stevens debate and define a range of responses to the past and to the present that make up the historical process in the prologues.
Requiem expands the method of the “Compson Appendix” by simultaneously updating the lives of characters who appear in earlier novels and extending the historical reach of the narrative to a remote past until the very beginnings of the county are revealed. In the “Appendix,” Jefferson begins as “one long rambling onestory mudchinked log building housing the Chickasaw Agent and his tradingpost store”; in Requiem the town is at first hardly more than a “postoffice—tradingpost-store.” In the “Appendix,” as soon as Jason Lycurgus Compson obtains possession of the land, that “square mile” begins to go through increasingly radical transformations; in Requiem, as soon as the people of Jefferson begin to think of themselves as inhabiting a town that requires a number of separate and progressively larger institutions, both the rate and the complexity of change are so great that “overnight it would become a town without having been a village; one day in about a hundred years it would wake frantically from its communal slumber into a rash of Rotary and Lion Clubs and Chambers of Commerce and City Beautifuls . . . a fever, a delirium in which it would confound forever seething with motion and motion with progress.”
Not just Jefferson but the world itself begins in an extremely chaotic form: “the steamy chiaroscuro, untimed unseasoned winterless miasma not any one of water or earth or life yet all of each, inextricable and indivisible.” Just as Jefferson must have its courthouse and jail, then a school, and then its “rash” of organizations, so the world itself becomes cluttered with more and more agencies and institutions, “changing the face of the earth.” As the prologues approach the present time of the play, dates begin to proliferate and become more specific. In particular, the second prologue ends with a comprehensive list of names, a roster of cities, lists of forms of transportation, accommodation, and diversion—all of which emphasize the multiplication of man’s activities and the acceleration of his motion through time. That Faulkner obtained his statistics from the WPA guide to Mississippi reveals his understanding of a state now opened up to the modern world—no matter how much it held on to its traditions. The changes are so swiftly accomplished a hundred years after its foundation that the members of the town “no longer even knew” who Doctor Habersham and old Alec Holston and Louis Grenier, the founders of the town, were. The original character of the land, forested in the “old days,” is replaced by “formal synthetic shrubs contrived and schooled in Wisconsin greenhouses.”
In the third prologue, Faulkner switches to the second person, suddenly addressing “you, a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West.” “Outlander” is a term frequently used in Intruder in the Dust, signifying Faulkner’s increasing awareness of how the world elsewhere had now come home, to him and to his characters. Between 1942 and 1948, he had rued but also relished the world’s neglect that allowed him his own preserve, invaded only intermittently by visitors. During this reclusive period, even while he resided in Hollywood, no interviews were published, and he did his best to scale back Malcolm Cowley’s efforts to profile William Faulkner of Oxford. Gavin Stevens’s long monologues in Intruder are a lost cause, insofar as the South will not be let alone to seek its own justice. Stevens cannot override the outlanders with words any more than Phil Stone could in his increasing diatribes against northern interference in southern affairs.
Faulkner decided, in Requiem, to meet the world head-on, acknowledging “you” as someone trying “to learn, comprehend, understand what had brought specifically your cousin or friend or acquaintance to elect to live here—not specifically here, of course, not specifically Jefferson, but such as here, such as Jefferson.” What you observe in Jefferson is a phenomenon occurring everywhere in a changing world. In Jefferson, and in all towns such as Jefferson, an awareness of the past increases at the same rapid rate as the changes that efface its traces. Those who hold on to the past find it in the objects that do survive, such as “one small rectangle of wavy, crudely-pressed, almost opaque glass, bearing a few faint scratches apparently no more durable than the thin dried slime left by the passage of a snail,” but that “you will descry to be a name and a date.” The scratches, like the cryptic notes in the commissary books, are the tracings of “that tender ownerless obsolete girl’s name [Cecilia Farmer] and the old dead date in April almost a century ago—speaking, murmuring, back from, out of, across from, a time as old as lavender, older than album or stereopticon, as old as daguerreotype itself.” The pane of glass commemorates the girl’s glimpse of the soldier whom “she had not known or even spoken to long enough to have learned his middle name or his preference in food, or told him hers.” Farmer would be no more than a ghost of the past—a Judith Sheegog that Faulkner re-created for his children—if not for the human desire to record a name and a life. Unlike Judith Sheegog, Cecilia Farmer rides off with her beloved and becomes an outlander. So history circles back and comes home in Requiem for a Nun, even as Temple tries to escape her past and, in the play, is forced to return after Nancy kills her child.
The past is gone and yet forever present in this paradoxical novel. Temple can no more escape her past than Carmody can really renounce Catholicism or Judith Sutpen retreat to England in “Revolt in the Earth.” At the end of The Left Hand of God, Carmody puts himself under the discipline of the church and awaits his punishment for impersonating a priest. He has not become a believer, exactly, any more than Temple will become a model wife and mother at the end of the play, but the desire to redeem the past, to fix what went wrong, fuels the theological thrust of Requiem for a Nun and The Left Hand of God.
Although Cecilia Farmer’s scratches can seem pathetic, they are really no more so than the labors of the settlers as they “clawed punily” a “tiny clearing” out of the “pathless wilderness,” or than the very creation of the “broad blank mid-continental page for the first scratch of orderly recording.” All attempts at communication, at defining the world and its history, begin in a seemingly feeble way. Nevertheless, the girl has made her own “scratch of orderly recording,” and we are made to feel it, in all of its tangibility, as the message of one human being to all human beings who will follow her: “Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.” Earlier in the novel the narrator says we want to say “no to death” and to project ourselves into history, back into the past of 1865 and forward into the future of 1965, the last date mentioned in Requiem for a Nun. This is our mission, Faulkner implies.
Near the end of the novel the narrator, who has become “the culture itself, relating its collective and imperfectly synthesized memories of its own beginnings,”32 says that “all you had to do was look at it [the pane of glass] a while; all you have to do now is remember it,” and then “you” will hear the “clear distanced voice as though out of the delicate antenna-skeins of radio,” the modern mode of communication that Faulkner abhorred in his own home. The radio tended to drown out the artist’s voice, but in Requiem radio is paradoxically, metaphorically, used to suggest that the lines of communication are still open, still continuous, like the fragile thread of Cecilia Farmer’s signature.
The narrator can operate with a degree of flexibility that Faulkner tried to work into Hank’s voice-overs, making film at least an approximation of Requiem’s eyewitness reporter, speculator, and synthesizer, condensing and dramatizing different rhythms of past and present—and differing points of view. The present overcomes the past, the prologue announces, like the “next act and scene” of a play, “itself clearing its own stage without waiting for propertymen; or rather, not even bothering to clear the stage but commencing the new act and scene right in the midst of the phantoms, the fading wraiths of that old time which had been exhausted, used up, to be no more and never return.”
The play joins the historical process of the prologues in the argument between Temple Drake and Gavin Stevens: She insists that her life now is what constitutes her identity, and he counters that her life must now be viewed within the context of her past. The very absoluteness of Stevens’s statement—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—has to be set against the narrator’s evocation of life as motion, with a succession of pasts that are left behind in the tremendous velocity of human energy. Not only is each successive moment superseded, the past lives only to the extent that in living in the here and now we can imagine what it was like to live there and then.
And yet the relentless Stevens has a point that is made in the narrative prologues. As soon as the people of the Chickasaw trading post decide to name their place of habitation Jefferson and call it a town, they hitch themselves to the racing engine of history. The analogue in Temple’s life to Jefferson’s development, to the sense that the present emerges out of the past, is her belief that her child’s death has been caused by her involvement eight years before the present time of Requiem with the gangster Popeye, and a lover, Red, in a Memphis whorehouse, after her boyfriend Gowan, now her husband, got drunk and passed out. Of course the events of Sanctuary are not the precise and the immediate cause of Nancy’s killing of Temple’s six-month-old child any more than the decision of the men at the Chickasaw trading post to call themselves a town is the precise and immediate cause of the modern city of Jefferson. But each of these initial events sets in motion a train of cause and effect leading to the present. To that extent Temple is neither more nor less responsible for Nancy’s actions than the founding fathers of Jefferson are responsible for its present state.
Instead of admitting Temple’s right to exist as Mrs. Gowan Stevens, Stevens insists on referring to her as Temple Drake, which is tantamount to thinking of the town of Jefferson as no different from the Chickasaw trading post. Eight years have elapsed in which Temple has tried to be a good wife, to raise a family, to live with her guilt feelings concerning her own past and with her husband’s constantly forgiving her for that past. But Nancy killed Temple’s child in order to prevent Temple from returning to her past even as Temple’s attachment to Nancy, a reformed whore and dope fiend, suggests that Temple has never been willing to abandon that past entirely. Stevens, then, is carrying on Nancy’s left-handed work of redemption by putting Temple on trial, so to speak, in their appearance before the state’s governor—ostensibly so that Temple can plead for Nancy’s life.
Stevens’s attempt to uncover the sequence of events that led to the death of Temple’s child places a greater burden on Temple than is necessary or wise for a human being who must go on living after a terrible tragedy. In Stevens’s view the past completely eclipses the present, and Temple’s obsessively repeated question as to whether she will have to reveal all of her past merits sympathy for her and suspicion of Stevens’s moralism. His obstinate refusal to set aside any part of her past is as unrealistic and self-defeating as Drusilla Hawk’s rigid unwillingness in The Unvanquished to set aside any part of Bayard’s past. Yet without Stevens’s persistence, it is doubtful Temple could surmount the past that she is too quick to say she jettisons. For all their antagonism, the two function together to provide a comprehensive reading of historical continuity.
That continuity seems the point of introducing Sutpen’s French architect. In Absalom, Absalom! he is created as an adjunct of Sutpen’s demonizing in Miss Rosa’s account, and in Mr. Compson’s as a complex abettor and obstructor of Sutpen’s outrageous design. In Requiem, he is first introduced as Sutpen’s “tame Parisian architect—or captive rather.” But the “settlement had only to see him once to know that he was no dociler than his captor.” Not a mythological figure but a man, the architect speaks to a community’s desire to build an edifice of itself: “You do not need advice. You are too poor. You have only your hands, and clay to make good brick. You dont have any money. You dont even have anything to copy: how can you go wrong?” Jefferson takes its shape from his molds and kilns. Even the destructiveness of war fails to disturb “one hair even out of the Paris architect’s almost forgotten plumb.” The architect’s imprint remains, more than a hundred years later, “not on just the courthouse and the jail, but on the whole town,” for he has built and made possible the community’s own drive to preserve and perpetuate itself, a drive more narrowly conceived in Absalom, Absalom! in relation to Sutpen’s ambitions. In Requiem, even after the community apparently loses much of its historical identity—“gone now from the fronts of the stores are the old brick made of native clay in Sutpen’s architect’s old molds”—still there is a surviving remnant of memory and of place found in the “thin durable continuity” of the jail itself and what it stands for.
The analogue in the play is Temple’s account of Rider’s lonely despair, which is very much like her own. Temple’s memory of Rider reveals an awareness that her suffering is not unprecedented in her community; and to that extent the drama of her life is simultaneously a part of her people’s history—white and black—entangling all of them, as Nancy tried to demonstrate in her demented murder of Temple’s child. It is significant that Rider’s name is not mentioned, since Temple is recalling a past separate from her own but similar enough to stimulate a communal consciousness the narrator exhibits in the prologues. Temple’s struggle to recall Rider’s story becomes particularly poignant when one reflects on the white deputy in “Pantaloon in Black” who missed the meaning of the black man’s hysteria. By making Temple a witness to Rider’s suffering, Faulkner finds yet another way of making Yoknapatawpha morally and historically coherent. But Temple herself, like her author, does not feel redeemed. She remains in her marriage, answering her husband’s call at the end of the play, but her fate (she is still in her twenties) remains undecided. “Temple cannot resee her past so as to begin anew. Nor could her author, with respect to his own life,”33 as he headed into one of his most demoralizing periods.
The reviews did not help. In the New Yorker (September 22, 1951), Anthony West considered the play preposterous and the product of a writer working in the wrong genre, consoling himself with the thought that “Henry James, too, wrote plays, and that Shaw wrote novels.” In the New York Post (September 23), Maxwell Geismar, never very friendly to Faulkner’s art, called Requiem “absolutely worthless.” He wondered what Faulkner actually made of this trite, sophomoric, and pretentious book. Sterling North’s review in the New York World-Telegram and Sun (September 24) perpetuated the portrayal of an author wallowing in the “sensational and melodramatic” in “ungrammatical, clumsy prose.”
In the Hudson Review (Spring 1952), Frederick Morgan argued that the play actually resembled a movie scenario, citing Temple’s hard-boiled retorts:
TEMPLE (crushes cigarette into tray) Then listen. Listen carefully. (She stands, tense, rigid, facing him, staring at him) Temple Drake is dead. Temple Drake will have been dead six years longer than Nancy Mannigoe will ever be. If all Nancy Mannigoe has to save her is Temple Drake, then God help Nancy Mannigoe. Now get out of here. She stares at him [Stevens]; another moment. Then he rises, still watching her; she stares steadily and implacably back. Then he moves.
Line up Lauren Bacall, Morgan suggested. Without a camera close-up to make gestures like crushing the cigarette pop out while understating the passion, the scene seemed too remote for stage work.
Many reviewers did not know what to make of the three prose narratives, but there were exceptions. Milton James Ferguson in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (October 7) declared the novel a “Greek tragedy, in three acts, with the public and the history of the county taking the part of the chorus.” Louis Rubin in the Richmond News Leader (September 24) regarded the Jefferson jail as the meeting point of history, where Temple joins Nancy, where the prologues join the play in the awareness of evil and the moral purpose of civilization. In the Delta Democrat-Times (September 30), Carvel Collins suggested the “major change from the earlier Faulkner being that he now chooses to write about the struggle for affirmation of belief rather than about the outrage felt by the potential believer. This is not a new coin: it is the other side to the old, the best montage in twentieth century American letters.” Rubin considered Requiem one of Faulkner’s “strongest novels,” whereas others, like Irving Howe in the Nation (September 29), called it an “ambitious failure,” reflecting Faulkner’s unceasing experimentation, seeking “new forms and widening the bounds of his subject matter.” He lauded Faulkner’s rehabilitation of Temple, now a morally complex character, but regretted the play’s lack of action. Nancy troubled him, as she did many reviewers: “Her murder of the white child is hard to take in terms of ordinary human motivation,” especially since Nancy’s action is viewed as the impetus for Temple’s salvation. Few critics commented on the novel’s title, but in the September 23 Arizona Republic, the reviewer said it was a “song for the dead Nancy, who has taken the veil in spirit and has been purified from sin.” Granville Hicks (New Leader, October 22) regarded Nancy’s smothering of Temple’s child as an existentialist acte gratuit, a sudden disruption, a rebellion against the course of events that she is otherwise unable to stop. In the New York Times Book Review (September 30), Robert Penn Warren observed that we accept Nancy, “if we accept her, because we know the world she came from, the world of old Yoknapatawpha.” In effect, the review declared Warren’s loyalty to a body of work that overrode certain qualms about the play, as though the history presented in the prologues sanctioned the play.
Howe marveled at what he called the prose interludes—the rhapsodic, elegiac, and “humorous recall of the Yoknapatawpha past.” For Malcolm Cowley (New York Herald Tribune, September 30), the prologues provided a necessary context for the play but also an overview of Yoknapatawpha itself, as if Faulkner’s whole body of work is brought to bear on the actions of his dramatis personae. The prologues brought history itself to the subjectivity of his characters, providing a new objective voice to his fiction. This new novel replaced the “unregenerate author of novels about incest, rape, arson, and miscegenation” with a “reformed Faulkner, conscious of his public duties, who has become the spokesman for the human spirit in its painful aspirations toward ‘love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’ . . . Soon his readers on the five continents will have to decide which of the two authors they prefer.”34