FIGURE 10 Requiem for a Nun, carbon typescript page, from William Faulkner Manuscripts by William Faulkner. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Aside from early reviews of plays by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O’Neill, Faulkner’s major foray into theater was The Marionettes (1920), one of his first publications.1 Drawing on the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, the play follows the stock character Pierrot and his seduction of the virgin Marietta, a romantic affair in keeping with the sentiments of the author’s early prose. But Faulkner did not persist with the form: indeed, not only would he give up stagecraft in favor of prose, but as Richard Godden points out, the comical figures of his early play would later wind up in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem as mere “show puppets” who are “blasted with syphilis, and being bred by Charlotte for magazine covers.”2 His early experiment in theater was lovingly written in longhand and made available only in a small artisanal print run of six copies for close friends, but when the marionettes reappear in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, they are completely caught up in the world of shop-window commodities. Abandoning the stage for its even more popular relative, Faulkner thereafter followed the more lucrative trail of the screenplay through most of his career.
But the relationship between cinema and theater in Faulkner’s work was always more intertwined than these remarks would suggest. For example, even before it was to become The Story of Temple Drake, the rights to Faulkner’s Sanctuary were acquired by a new theatrical firm, Walker Towne. “Rehearsals start next week, I hear” (SL, 53), he wrote Estelle, but, although scheduled for the 1932 season, the play was never produced.3 And while at Warner Brothers, Faulkner had considered adapting Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) for the stage, but even that motion was raised with the intention of creating a product viable for Hollywood consumption: “I wish I could buy the option myself now,” he wrote Harold Ober. “I would make the play first, then sell to the movies” (SL, 169). After almost two decades in the studio system, a return to playwriting seemed unlikely for Faulkner. But as I suggest in this chapter, his experience in the studio system actually encouraged Faulkner to engage with theater in a more challenging way, allowing him to think about the shifting destinies of fictional characters between stage, page, and screen. And with Requiem for a Nun (1951), a novel that contains three dramatic acts, he also thought keenly about the fate of his characters as they migrated across different media.
In Requiem he reintroduces characters that had appeared elsewhere. In particular, Gavin Stevens, who had already made his mark in Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, and Knight’s Gambit, makes an encore. But while Stevens had become something of a Yoknapatawpha fixture by this point—and, indeed, sustained Faulkner’s interest for the rest of his career—Temple Drake’s arrival back in the fictional county is quite a momentous one. While its prose preambles take in the entire history of Jefferson and its surrounds, the reading plays in Requiem for a Nun pick up where Sanctuary left off, exploring Temple’s eventual marriage to Gowan Stevens, her reliving of the trauma of the earlier novel, and the murder of her baby at the hands of her black maid Nancy Mannigoe. Reflecting on the decision to pursue his infamous early novel in a sequel, Faulkner had wondered, “What would be the future of the girl? and then I thought, what could a marriage come to that was founded on the vanity of a weak man? What would be the outcome of that? And suddenly that seemed to me dramatic and worthwhile” (FU, 96). While he remained interested in the characters that first appeared in Sanctuary, Faulkner had always seen the novel as being conspicuously implicated in the world of commerce, as a “cheap idea . . . deliberately conceived to make money” (ESPL, 176). It would fall to Requiem to make something honorable of the earlier work.
The title had come to him as early as October 1933, when he wrote a short story featuring Gavin Stevens having a consultation with a black couple, “the woman’s throat bandaged,” bringing to mind the events of “That Evening Sun” (1931).4 But the novel as it stands only really got going in the early months of 1950, when Faulkner began collaborating with a young protégée, Joan Williams, on the play scenes of Requiem. “You can begin to work here,” he wrote. “This act begins to tell who Nancy is, and what she has done. She is a ‘nigger’ woman, a known drunkard and dope user, a whore with a jail record in the little town, always in trouble” (SL, 298). The work would change considerably over time, but here in embryo (written on stationery from the Hotel Algonquin in New York) was the story of Requiem, “not only a few pages of play, but (as I see it now) a kind of synopsis of it” (SL, 299). To the short story was added the play, and the whole was reconstituted as a novel, with three prose preambles describing the changing face of Yoknapatawpha and three dramatic acts corresponding to the dramatic events of Temple’s life. But in early 1951, enter stage left: Hollywood.
When Faulkner had nearly completed work on Requiem, he was called away by Howard Hawks to write a screenplay based on The Left Hand of God, a novel by William E. Barrett. The director had acquired the rights under his own production company, Winchester Pictures, as part of a three-film deal with RKO—a studio neither he nor Faulkner had worked for since his failed efforts with Gunga Din—making it a quasi-independent feature. The narrative follows an American pilot, Jim Carmody, who, finding himself stranded in China, works as a mercenary for Yang, a local warlord. Carmody, disguising himself as a Catholic priest, escapes and goes into hiding in a remote village, struggling to keep up the ruse even as he falls in love with Ann, a missionary and nurse. Revealed for who he really is, Carmody has a final bloodless showdown with Yang, the pilot successfully gambling his way out of trouble. Although the plot was fairly simple, owing to the fact that its protagonist impersonated a priest, the film quickly came under the fire of the Hays office, so much so that Hawks moved on to other projects. “I understand the Catholic church objected to it,” Faulkner later remarked in an interview.5
Faulkner may have been unable to find a diplomatic solution to this problem, as he had done for To Have and Have Not, but he did make a key modification to the narrative, introducing Hank, Carmody’s sidekick who was to take on the responsibility of voice-over narration. The long passages of voice-over dialogue Faulkner wrote for Hank were more notably “Faulknerian” in their syntax than anything he had written before for the screen. Although perhaps a little more constrained than he had been with “Revolt in the Earth,” here was Faulkner again writing an independent screenplay, giving free rein now to his tendency toward the lengthy sentence.
Most intriguingly, eleven leaves of the Requiem for a Nun typescript share the page with scenes from “The Left Hand of God,” often with the designation “F—LH of G” (“Faulkner—Left Hand of God”) printed in the upper-left-hand corner, and at other times the screenplay is also superimposed over the draft text of the novel.6 The material connections between the two are very suggestive, especially so since the contents of both screenplay and novel have certain shared interests—fugitive characters, corporal punishment, and divine justice, to name a few. The two works cross paths in interesting and unpredictable ways, mutually illuminating one another. Before I explore the relationship between these two works, however, it is worth considering some of the major differences between screenplay and stage play and the ways in which each genre is enacted.
In his preface to the third act of Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner meditates on Cecilia Farmer, the daughter of the Jefferson town jailer who had already appeared in The Unvanquished (as Celia Cook) and as “one of the daughters of the jailer” (N, 4:321) in Intruder in the Dust. In her most extended appearance in Requiem, Cecilia scratches her name on the windowpane of the town’s jail, bidding for her remembrance alongside the more famous historical notables alluded to in the passage. Cecilia’s scratched name on the window invites speculation about exactly who the young girl was, and the narrator, refusing to pin down her identity, leaves open the possibility that she might have been just as historically important as “Jenny Lind” or “Mark Twain” or “Maximilian of Mexico” (N, 4:648).
Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, the two great ladies of European theater at the turn of the twentieth century, are also comparable to Cecilia in this regard, pitched “among the roster and chronicle, the deathless murmur of deathless faces, the faces omnivorous and insatiable and forever incontent” (N, 4:648). Aside from their exploits in theater, the pair later became known for their appearances on film; intriguingly, Duse and Bernhardt both passed from the stage to the cinema screen near the end of their careers, a move that allowed them to forestall their retirement from the world of acting. And both were excited by the promise of such a move. After her performance in Camille (Louis Mercanton, 1911), Bernhardt was full of praise for the new medium: “I never thought . . . that I would ever be a film,” she proclaimed, “but now that I am two whole reels of pictures I rely for my immortality upon these records.”7 Duse, meanwhile, both starred in and cowrote the screenplay for Cenere (Febo Mari, 1916), embracing the new medium as a chance to reorient her acting style.8 Composing several other scenarios for potential films, she made sure “to exclude any subject from the usual dramatic repertory” and was pleased to remark on the vital innovation of Cenere relative to theater: “Throughout the whole film I never speak.”9 However varied their experiences of acting for the camera, the fact remains that, as André Bazin has observed, it is ironically “the cinema that has preserved their bones, fossilized in the films d’art.”10
Just as Cecilia Farmer’s signature in Requiem indicates “not might have been, nor even could have been, but was” (N, 4:648), the “deathless faces” of Duse and Bernhardt, recorded or “fossilized” on film, refuse to fade into the ether but are immortalized for generations to come. And to cement the likeness between the young girl and the older actors, Cecilia’s written name conjures not just a voice but the very origins of photographic media: “speaking, murmuring, back from, out of, across from, a time as old as lavender, older than album or stereopticon, as old as daguerreotype itself” (N, 4:644). As for the actors, so too for the unknown girl: voice, presence, and the written record of that presence, are in the final analysis augmented by the possibilities of the photographic image, a more definitive method of preservation. As I detail, Faulkner’s invocation of the two actors who resisted retirement—plus another who went from stage to screen (“Mistinguette, too, invincibly possessed of a half-century more of years than the mere three score or so she bragged and boasted” [N, 4:648])—was not incidental.
Cinema could not preserve the careers, or lives, of every actor who came knocking on Hollywood’s door. Tallulah Bankhead, for whom Faulkner had written “Night Bird” and then “The College Widow” while at MGM, was not long for the cinema and returned to the stage shortly after her film debut. If twenty years before he had tried to help a fellow southerner move from stage to screen, now Faulkner was called on to assist another Mississippian—Ruth Ford—to make a move in the opposite direction, with Requiem as the conduit. Ford was the sister of poet Charles Henri Ford and was married to Zachary Scott, whom Faulkner had worked with on The Southerner several years before. As an actor, she had been a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, starring in his play Too Much Johnson (1938), a screwball comedy adapted from an 1894 farce by William Gillette. In a structure that offers some suggestive parallels with Requiem, each act of the play was supposed to be preceded by a short, silent film that would introduce the characters and provide a counterpart to the action on stage. The footage—not finished on time, in true Wellesian fashion—would have seen actors like Ford present both on stage and screen during the production.
And indeed, Ford did move between the two throughout her career. Not having much luck in Hollywood, she asked Faulkner to write her a play—in which she would be the lead—a request freighted with more than a little anxiety about her future in show business. Later, as he revised Requiem into the play that Ford would indeed star in, Faulkner noted that his friend was “shooting the works on this,” even “missing radio and t.v. jobs because her known commitment to the play had removed her from availability in people’s minds” (SL, 325). Ignoring the financial certainties of the newer cultural outlets, Ford had opted for the tradition of the theater, and it was here that her career would flourish or flounder: the theater, Faulkner mused, was Ford’s “last-best-chance to make tops as an actress” (SL, 326). The stage had the potential to give Ford what the screen had offered for Duse and Bernhardt: a new lease of life. But what was the difference between these two avenues for the twentieth- century actor? And more importantly, what separated the writing of a screenplay from the writing of a stage play (and in Faulkner’s case, the writing of a stage play within a novel)?
The most obvious differences between film and theater acting can be discovered both in terms of production and presentation. In film production, the actor does not perform for an audience, but for the camera. Bankhead, as we have seen, had a voice that was perhaps better suited for the film industry than stage, even if her image was not. But the opposite could also be true, especially in the silent era. Sarah Bernhardt, who was perhaps unaccustomed to performing without an audience, apparently overacted her part when she appeared in Les amours de la Reine Elisabeth (Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaines, 1912). After seeing the film, John Howard Lawson bluntly remarked that Bernhardt’s “ludicrous” performance derived from its inappropriateness for cinema, where “the camera exposed and mocked the gestures that had emotional validity on the stage.”11
For Walter Benjamin, the film actor is always exiled from her audience, separated by the “mechanical contrivance” of the camera, which becomes a spectatorial surrogate. Because many of the actor’s histrionic achievements on film are altered after the fact, with the aid of editing, she is also denied the immediacy of human encounter granted by the stage. Unlike the single event of the stage play, motion pictures are instead “assembled from many individual performances,” as the actor’s work ruptures “into a series of episodes capable of being assembled.”12 As opposed to an enacted stage play, where the actors follow the script chronologically, film production allows for scenes to be shot in any order the director desires.
The mechanical aspect of filmmaking also brings itself to bear on the screenplay, both in terms of the image and sound of the film it imagines. Mark O’Thomas, while remarking on its similarities with the stage play, writes that “from the very beginning the format of the screenplay was dependent on and determined by technology.”13 The camera dictates the dramatic action of the screenplay even before it makes its bulky presence felt on set, the page clearing sufficient space for the technical object that will make its progression from page to screen possible. As we have seen, Faulkner understood the special exigencies of the screenplay, and he put that understanding into practice in his earliest treatments for MGM, which are conspicuously unlike stage plays in their use of camera angles and effects.
Although the inclusion of camera directions in the scene text might at times prove disruptive in the reading of a screenplay, the camera is also key to its unbounded sense of narrative freedom. Budgets of course constrain the number of shooting locations a screenwriter might suggest, but even the most innocuous changes in scene can have a profound effect on a story. In Requiem, both the constraints of the stage and the gaze of the camera determine how the plot unfolds. Faulkner was certainly aware of the impact that each genre would have on his work, and while he presented the dramatic action in the form of a “reading play” (itself another genre altogether), he was conscious of how it would have appeared were it written for the screen.14 Indeed, the importance of the camera for the screenplay is evident in an early discarded scene from the novel.
In the first act of the published novel, Temple is on holiday in California, where she has fled with her family after Nancy’s sentencing. Stevens sends her a telegram from Mississippi, wondering what she would do after Nancy had been hanged: “But where will you go then?” he goads her. Wracked with guilt over her part in Nancy’s murder of her child and over withholding this information from Stevens, who suspects she knows more than she has said, Temple returns to Mississippi to save Nancy. But rather than admitting that it was Stevens’s remonstrance that compelled her to return, Temple “invent[s] the coincidence” (N, 4:532) that her son, Bucky, had uttered the exact same words to her that Stevens uses in his telegram on the day Stevens had written them. This is the lie she uses to go back to Jefferson, where she offers her assistance to Stevens and hopes to appeal to the governor for a stay of execution. It only sounds a minor note in the finished novel, but is important in revealing Temple’s potential to bend the truth, and it matters that the lie she tells details action that could only have occurred offstage.
In August 1950, before Faulkner had finalized the scene as it stands, he wondered about how it might appear on film, describing it in a letter to Joan Williams:
What do you think of this? This is what sends Temple back to Jefferson. If this were film, we could show the scene: a California beach say. But in a play, Temple had probably better tell Gavin (the lawyer) this: she and the little boy on a beach, Temple reading perhaps, the boy with a toy shovel and pail.
CHILD
Mama, we’re a long way from Jefferson now, aren’t we?
TEMPLE
(reading)
Yes, a long way.
CHILD
How long are we going to stay here?
TEMPLE
As long as we want to.
CHILD
Will we stay here until they hang Nancy?
TEMPLE
(reacts now, listening, probably knows what’s coming but it’s too late to stop now.)
CHILD
Where will we go then? (SL, 306–7)
Here Faulkner hits on the most rudimentary of differences between film and enacted theater: the older craft is subject to spatial restrictions that its successor is not. Importantly, the potential intrinsic to the camera’s freedom of movement also permits the taking of certain narrative liberties in the text itself, whereby a false memory could be filmed as a flashback. But if the scene were to be written in this way, it would appear as a factual occurrence, suggesting to the reader that Temple is not the liar she turns out to be.
In the scene as published, Temple tells Stevens about the conversation between her and Bucky on the California beach. As such, the invented “coincidence” is at first convincing because of Temple’s dramatic reenactment—we are not privy to any other recounting of the event, and so, along with Stevens, we believe her—but soon enough, Bucky’s words are revealed as Temple’s own fabrications. In response to his question whether his telegram was the coincidence that moved her to return (N, 4:525), she responds:
TEMPLE
No. This is.
(she drops, tosses the folded paper onto the table, turns)
It was that afternoon—the sixth. We were on the beach, Bucky and I. I was reading, and he was—oh, talking mostly, you know—“Is California far from Jefferson, mamma?” and I say “Yes, darling”—you know: still reading or trying to, and he says, “How long will we stay in California, mamma?” and I say, “Until we get tired of it” and he says, “Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?” and it’s already too late then; I should have seen it coming but it’s too late now; I say, “Yes, darling” and then he drops it right in my lap, right out of the mouths of—how is it?—babes and sucklings? “Where will we go then, mama?” And then we come back to the hotel, and there you are too. Well? (N, 4:525)
In this published version of the same passage, the difference is clear: without the screenplay’s camera to film Temple’s fantasy in California, the burden is on her to play both her and her son’s parts in this flashback, and it is her unconvincing performance that gives the game away to Stevens. Temple is also forced to enunciate the scene text here, leading to an uncertain explanation of Bucky’s actions (“he was—oh, talking mostly, you know”). Such faltering speech patterns are common in Temple’s dialogue throughout Requiem. However, if Faulkner were to have “shown the scene” as though in a screenplay, this particular fabrication would have appeared less strained, as Temple would have had the support of the camera to confirm her invented coincidence, as well as the props and setting necessary to round out the episode.
Later on, Temple does narrate act 2, scene 2, in its entirety in a reenactment, recounting the death of her child at Nancy’s hands. But this is a different flashback entirely, wherein Temple narrates the events to the governor and Stevens, while the reader follows them on the page as different characters play out their roles in the reading play. Dramatic dialogue takes place between Temple, Pete, and Nancy, and although the death of the baby occurs offstage, there is no obvious sense in which Temple has lied about any of the events as they happened. Again, it is crucial for the narrative that this scene takes place in this way, as Temple is forced to relive the most horrifying experience of her life for the questionable benefit of Stevens. In these scenes and elsewhere throughout Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner demonstrates awareness of the limitations of the stage but also makes deliberate and productive use of those limitations in a way that drives the narrative. But he would soon find himself writing for the camera once more.
At the beginning of February 1951, Faulkner returned to Hollywood. He had agreed to work on the script for The Left Hand of God, which at that stage was still very much a Howard Hawks project but was eventually directed by Hollywood Ten member Edward Dmytryk in 1955. Meta Carpenter Wilde, whom Faulkner encountered once more during his stay, has suggested that he “did not share Hawks’ belief in the property as the basis for a successful motion picture, but he said nothing.”15 However, in a letter to Joan Williams he wrote ecstatically about the “fantastic place, fantastic work, almost worth the 2000 a week they pay me” (SL, 312). By all accounts he worked hard, producing a 170-page script in less than a month. His mood was still buoyant just before he left for Oxford on March 4, as he had received a bonus for completing the script within four weeks. Yet he still couldn’t resist firing a parting shot at the city from which he could soon distance himself: “This is a nice town full of very rich middle class people who have not yet discovered the cerebrum, or at best the soul” (SL, 313). Although seemingly finished with the property, Faulkner would continue to work on “Left Hand of God” back home, finishing up on March 21.16
This overtime might be explained by the fact that the script still had to overcome one major obstacle: the objection from the Hays Office to its protagonist masquerading as a Catholic priest. A New York Times article confirms that this had already been a sticking point for another studio: Paramount “originally wanted to buy the story but was advised that the Roman Catholic Church would view as sacrilegious any film in which the Sacraments were administered by an imposter.”17 What was being suggested was an imitation of an imitation, with the actor playing Jim Carmody (eventually Humphrey Bogart) conducting a ritual that amounted to nothing less than the making present of the body and blood of Christ. Of course, such an act could only be carried out by an ordained Catholic priest, and so dressing an actor up in the vestments and having him imitate the sacred procedure would be tantamount to blasphemy. Even with the additional revisions he completed in Oxford, Faulkner was unable to find a solution to Hawks’s pretend priest, and the director later sold the rights to Zanuck at Twentieth Century–Fox.
Faulkner’s screenplay survived, however, and it remains fascinating both in spite and because of its rejection. For while at times it offers a fairly straightforward adaptation of Barrett’s novel, it also draws surprising inspiration from Requiem for a Nun. Faulkner had written most of his novel when he started writing scenes for the film on the verso pages of his typescript, returning to his habit of reusing manuscript pages as he finished work on his script for Hawks. While most of the recycled pages from Requiem derive from the novel’s second act, the scenes from “Left Hand” are from both the beginning and end of the script, suggesting that Faulkner was reworking much of his “completed” screenplay.
An early sequence from “Left Hand” in which Hank and Carmody make good on their escape both overlays the text of a scene from Requiem’s act 2 in which Nancy and Temple argue before her child is killed and also figures on the back of a page of the typescript from the same act, where Stevens articulates his theory about Temple to the governor. The escape scene does not appear in Barrett’s novel: there, the seven-day journey Carmody makes after fleeing Mieh Yang’s lamasery is outlined in a number of short pages, and there is little sense of urgency or danger attached to it, incognito as Carmody is now without his beard.18 Faulkner’s rendering of this episode involves Hank’s voice-over narration and dramatizes the getaway by adding a landslide that injures Hank’s leg.
Faulkner emended at least part of Hank’s narration as he wrote, and the changes to the script are worth commenting on. The final passage expresses Hank’s concerns that Yang will track the pair down: “Because as soon as Yang found out the next morning that Jim and I were missing, and that the priest’s robe was gone too, he would know what had happened, he just didn’t know where” (WFATCF, 793). Following on from this are the original lines, typed over the top of the Requiem manuscript. They further convey Hank’s misgivings about Carmody’s sudden departure from the compound, and were originally more expansive, suggesting the sidekick’s anxiety in his compulsive, repetitive syntax: “I mean, about Yang’s new idea for fun and games with the whip, which after all would have been my business, since it was my face Yang aimed to use, and like I told Jim, I’d a heap rather take a whip across it than jump out of that 54 again onto a hundred miles of jagged mountain with nothing on top of it but one thin cloud——.” Here, Hank refers to the plane, the Douglas C-54 Skymaster, out of which he and Carmody had to jump. As Carmody later reveals, Hank saved his life by helping to drag him to safety down a mountain, an incident already hinted at in Hank’s earlier narration in scene 7. But Faulkner, writing in his own hand, replaced this long sentence with the line that remained in the script: “And still Jim never had told me why he decided to leave when we did, what it was that happened so sudden that we had to pull out practically carrying our shoes in our hands” (WFM, 19.2:65). This revision leaves Hank far less vocal in his concerns about Carmody’s decision, and the suggestion that corporal punishment would be less disquieting a prospect compared with their previous travails has been eliminated. Additionally, Faulkner’s truncation of the line reveals something about his estimations of the voice-over more broadly, which is here reined in from taking one of its more candid turns.
One reason for such an edit might be suggested by the ghostly presence of Requiem for a Nun. Revealed beneath the edited lines from “Left Hand”—which are dated “3/14”—is Temple’s flashback to the death of her baby, the text upside-down and reversed but still legible. In this passage, which appears to match that in the published novel, Nancy challenges Temple’s decision to take her six-month-old daughter with her as she elopes with her lover, Pete, suggesting that instead Temple should “just leave it in there in that cradle; it’ll cry for a while, but it’s too little to cry very loud and so maybe wont nobody hear it and come meddling, especially with the house shut up and locked until Mr Gowan gets back next week, and probably by that time it will have hushed—” (N, 4:598). Temple then threatens to hit Nancy, though Nancy continues to taunt her but is eventually cut off as “Temple makes a convulsive movement, then catches herself” (N, 4:599).
Comparing this scene from Requiem with the lines from “Left Hand,” there is a curious correlation between the two. Both detail plot points in which the major character will make or has already made an escape from their current situation; both characters become or will become fugitives for doing so; and both scenes recount a particular violent threat that is never realized. In “Left Hand,” the hint of violence is not realized because it was excised from Faulkner’s final draft screenplay. In Requiem, although Temple does slap Nancy “across the face” (N, 4:596), she doesn’t hit her again, and it is in fact Nancy who threatens Temple’s children and husband (N, 4:599). There is a clear connection between the two texts, insofar as Yang from the script “would know what had happened, he just didn’t know where,” while Gowan Stevens from the novel, on vacation at the Aransas Pass in Texas (N, 4:589), would find out what happened a week later; the first would pursue his escapees, but at Nancy’s suggestion, the second may not have done so (N, 4:598).
Another page of the typescript setting copy of Requiem on which a discussion about theological matters unfolds curiously mirrors a similar conversation on the verso of that page—a concluding scene from “Left Hand.” In the episode from the novel (N, 4:583), Stevens tells Temple that “God either would not or could not—anyway did not—save innocence just because it was innocent.” In the scene from the screenplay, Sigman, the chief doctor and religious skeptic at the village where Carmody and Hank seek refuge, tells the discouraged Ann, whose faith has thus far prevented her from marrying Carmody, that “your church can’t meddle in your dreams” (WFM, 19.3:259–60). On the manuscript page, Sigman convinces Ann that she is free to abandon her faith in order to go with Carmody, while on the overleaf, Stevens convinces the governor of precisely the opposite: that Temple’s “armistice with God” had made her “ready and willing—nay, eager—to suffer at any time” (N, 4:583).
In contrast to the way he is characterized in his final appearances in Barrett’s novel, here Sigman is an emboldened figure, and religion certainly seems to be on its way out at the story’s close. In Barrett’s Left Hand of God, Sigman does not assert himself so strongly, and there is a sense of melancholy at the end surrounding the romance between Anne (so spelled) and Carmody. She must stay behind at the mission, while Carmody goes on ahead, fairly certain of their future together but despondent and impatient to see her again: “He would not hear Anne’s answer before he went away. She was less than fifty yards away from him, yet she was months away. She would follow him as Beryl had followed Dave Sigman and, like Beryl, she would share what he had. He knew that with certainty. Yet tonight there was urgency in him, the urgency that a quiet priest had called emotional risk.”19
Although the rather thinly veiled “urgency” or “emotional risk” is not mentioned in Faulkner’s script, lust is implied in another form. Father Cornelius, the priest who visits the mission to pass judgment on Carmody and Ann, speaks to the nurse of her need to “suffer” for the sins committed by the American pilot, by which he means she should avoid giving into the “urgency” that comes from falling in love:
FIGURE 10 Requiem for a Nun, carbon typescript page, from William Faulkner Manuscripts by William Faulkner. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
You thought your sin was that you had fallen in love with a priest. You could not confess it because you believed the only priest available was the man you had fallen in love with. But this man was not a priest, so there is no sin in your love. But there is a sin in his masquerade, his sacrilege, and because of your love for him, you must suffer a part of his penance. (WFATCF, 926)
For readers familiar with the ethical quandary at the heart of Requiem for a Nun, the end of this passage should ring a bell. For Faulkner’s novel dwells on the nature and meaning of suffering: the suffering of Temple’s murdered baby, of Nancy on death row, and of Temple herself, who has suffered for eight years with the trauma of the events that transpired in Sanctuary. In act 2—the scene that shares the page with this material from “Left Hand”—Gavin Stevens misinterprets one of Christ’s parables from the gospel of Luke, as he discusses suffering with the governor: all of Temple’s experiences had “shown her that God either would not or could not—anyway, did not—save innocence just because it was innocent; that when He said ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me’ He meant exactly that: He meant suffer; that the adults, the fathers, the old in and capable of sin, must be ready and willing—nay, eager—to suffer at any time, that the little children shall come unto Him unanguished, unterrified, undefiled” (N, 4:583).
As Noel Polk has argued, not only is Stevens’s reading completely off the mark, but he himself ignores the suffering that he is now inflicting on Temple and the suffering that his interrogation might bring to Temple’s family: the very family that Nancy’s suffering was supposed to preserve.20 Father Cornelius in “Left Hand” also uses “suffer” in the sense of “endure,” but unlike Stevens, he does not conflate the two senses of the word, and the suffering to which Ann is condemned seems far lighter than Temple’s. These thematic connections offer proof of the intimate relationship between Faulkner’s novel and screenplay that the shared space of the drafts literalizes. This empirical, material connection of Requiem and “Left Hand” also appears to have worked on the content of each text in this clearest overlap between Faulkner’s screen-writing and novel-writing practices. But there is another, less direct way in which the two share common ground, and in this case it is a unique aspect of Requiem that develops from one of the screenplay’s innovations.
Faulkner’s major intervention in William Barrett’s narrative was not only the addition of Carmody’s sidekick, Hank, but also and more importantly the voice-over that he bestowed on the new character. It is this voice-over that takes the screenplay away from the novel form (intended as it is to be spoken) and directs it toward the screen, where real, living actors could imitate the characters ordained for them. Although atypical in the course of his career, Howard Hawks had used a voice-over just a few years earlier for Walter Brennan’s narration in Red River (1948). Indeed, two versions of that film were released, another with textual narration that ran almost eight minutes longer.21 And in what stands as a quasi sequel to that film, the RKO picture The Big Sky (Hawks, 1952), the director used voice-over narration once more. This may have been the decision of the studio rather than Hawks’s own, but nevertheless, it is a trend in the director’s career at this point.22 This is perhaps why Faulkner opted to begin his screenplay the way he did, with Hank’s initial voice-over setting the scene for the action to come. The mode of Hank’s voice-over, which we hear in thirteen separate scenes in the film, is what Claudia Sternberg, following Gérard Genette, would call embedded or “homodiegetic,” since his words are spoken from a place external to the world of the film, even as he is also a character within that world.23 Paradoxically, Hank is both integral and peripheral to the plot: an accident that befalls him and prevents the two fugitives from moving on ultimately confines the narrative action to one village, but at the same time, and particularly in the voice-over, Hank is only a “micro-narrator”—although he has a part to play here, he is essentially telling Carmody’s story, and though his expository remarks and reflections on their travails might reveal something about himself, they are mostly concerned with his partner.24
And indeed, Faulkner initially presents him as a minor character: his introduction to Hank goes nowhere near to suggesting the character who so idiosyncratically delivers his first lines: “The second white man is Hank. He is about the same age is obviously a subordinate though he is loyal to Carmody rather than to Carmody’s superior. He is faithful probably has plenty of guts, is a good man to have on your side though you do have to do some of his thinking for him” (WFATCF, 761–62). This is not the most flattering entrance. But then, as if from nowhere and in a way that suggests a far more complex character, Hank’s voice-over begins, the narration running across several pages:
HANK’S VOICE
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. Not that Mieh Yang wasn’t a right guy for a Chinese and the dough was right dough—when you got it that is whenever the dice fell right. Which they did sometimes because at least Yang wasn’t a crook since why should he be since he owned the whole country in the thirteen days hard ride. Because even Jim’s welcome was wearing out now. Yang took us—Jim—on because he needed and liked tough men and had faith in his judgment of men enough to pick one, so to prove his judgment was right he would have to find tougher and tougher things for Jim to do, and so the tougher the job Jim brought off, the bigger Jim got, until after awhile there would not be any space between Jim and Yang, not enough for just one district thirteen days wide anyway. So me and Jim both probably knew it wouldn’t be long now. Though we never thought that morning that this would start it. Because he had done it before: one of the usual Soviet gangs moving in across what Yang called his boundary, deadline. Not that Yang cared anything about Soviets or of anybody except himself, he just did not allow any other gang to chisel into his territory. (WFATCF, 762)
Compared to most dialogue Faulkner wrote for cinema, this is certainly a radical and unexpected contribution. What is immediately striking about Hank’s first address—aside from the fact that it belies his initial characterization—is its undeniably “Faulknerian” quality: the use of conjunctions to begin sentences; the way that each sentence worriedly modifies the one before it; the near tautology (“boundary, deadline”). It is the kind of writing that Faulkner was accused of concocting for “Banjo on My Knee,” what David Hempstead, the film’s second unit director, referred to as “practically blank verse.”25
More than ever before, “The Left Hand of God” allowed Faulkner to build a character replete with the same anxious habit of qualification that marks the author’s narrative voice, broadly speaking. This is partly evident, too, in Hank’s desire to cautiously downplay his involvement in the story, narrating for Carmody even as he undergoes many of the same experiences (“Yang took us—Jim—on because he needed and liked tough men”). Hank’s extended commentary on the history of the Chinese warlord Mieh Yang’s relations with Carmody and himself also constitutes the most unique utterances in the screenplay, which are spoken as though to the audience itself, in the second person. Hank’s voice usually stands in for the lack of intensive conflict in a scene—most of his voice-overs accompany long shots or close shots without dialogue and are especially prevalent in transitional scenes involving long journeys. As Hank and Carmody—dressed as a priest—escape Yang’s fortress, they are met by a caravan of the warlord’s men but continue on, unfazed:
27. CLOSE SHOT. Carmody in front of Hank, riding slowly and gravely and steadily on, not looking back.
CARMODY
(to Hank behind Him)
Don’t look back.
Hank’s voice over scene.
HANK’S VOICE
Not me. I’d already seen too much. Because that tore it. But at least we had six days—three of them until the caravan reached the lamasery, and the three more it would take Yang to reach the corner. So we might have got away with it even then, only four days after that—(WFATCF, 794)
At this point, Hank injures his leg and is bedridden for almost all of the remaining pages. And, perhaps not coincidentally, he has by this stage already spoken his lengthiest narrative asides. Seemingly introduced as an expedient for exposition or maybe even to satisfy the desires of Hawks or RKO for a voice-over narrator, Hank now gives way to Carmody, whose story this truly is. Faulkner has had his fun with the sidekick’s protracted sentences and now finds a reason to have him retreat from the story.
Hank’s voice-overs in “The Left Hand of God,” as imagined by Faulkner, were themselves never incorporated into the filmed version of the story, precisely because they resisted the explanatory simplicity required of them. Although Todd McCarthy suggests that “the results, while craftsman-like, were disappointing—rather dull and sincere, with an abundance of narration,” this is also clearly what is most fascinating about Faulkner’s script.26 The bold introduction of Hank might have even piqued Hawks’s interest, but once the rights were handed over to Fox, the sidekick and his voice-over seemed completely out of place. When William Bacher (one of the original contributors to the plot of A Fable) prepared a treatment for Fox on March 16, 1954, Zanuck commented that “the added character of Hank and his function is entirely unnecessary. He gives value to certain scenes but he also destroys a great many important elements. I think it is entirely wrong to have anyone share or know about the great ‘deception’” (WFATCF, 757). Where screen dialogue had previously merely weathered Faulkner’s peculiar touch, the expository voice-over was more capable of harboring his style. Perhaps partly for this reason, Faulkner’s voice-over never survived after the first draft of the screenplay. If there was a potential for blasphemy inherent in an actor administering the sacraments, then more worrying for the studio was the narrator’s own authoritative pretense in “Left Hand of God.” Hank’s voice-over was eventually sacrificed, while Humphrey Bogart’s role as a Catholic priest was retained.
The role of another medium—radio—is crucial in assessing Faulkner’s voice-over for “The Left Hand of God” and the way it seems to have influenced his later revision of Requiem. In her important work on film dialogue, Sarah Kozloff demonstrates that along with the novel, “radio was cinema’s major role-model for first-person narration.”27 Before it would appear in feature films, the idea of voice-over narration was borrowed from the radio for use in newsreels and documentaries. The radio voice would also suggest itself to other cultural objects, perhaps even altering the way in which first-person narration of prose fiction was transcribed. Indeed, Fredric Jameson, in his work on Raymond Chandler, has asserted the presence of a “radio aesthetic” at the heart of the voice-over common to detective film and fiction. For Jameson, the voice-over in Chandler’s prose signals “in advance the closure of the events to be narrated,” and it also depends on “the omnipresence of a radio culture” in the 1930s that veered away from the relatively traditional “yarn-spinning” of an author like Conrad and toward a fresh coupling with cinematic images.28 Moving away from the more exclusive voice of the storyteller to a voice that was premised on mass circulation and presence, radio drove not only the talkies but also the hard-boiled detective novel, which would supplement its retelling of past events with a certain present-tense feeling of “doom and foreboding.”29 From radio to cinema to the novel, this “reproducible oral aesthetic” would continue to spread in the first decade of the talkies, and the voice-over would come to attach itself to a particular star and a particular studio, Orson Welles at RKO.30 In the late 1930s, Welles had been an instrumental figure in the history of radio narration, making waves with his “The War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938, and he subsequently made the move to Hollywood. Here he began recording voice-over narration for feature films and went on to direct Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)—two of Faulkner’s favorite films—which both make prominent use of voice-over narration.31 Each of these films was produced by RKO, a company that had formed out of the merger of a theater consortium and a film studio, brought together under the auspices of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1928. From the beginning, RKO had had designs on bringing together the best of radio and the movies, and by the time that Welles signed for the company in 1939, this vision—which underlined the continued importance of radio—was still very much alive.32 But by the 1940s, as Kozloff points out, the voice-over had taken a slightly different turn: it was now ubiquitous on television, which often made use of on-screen narrators, and so cinema no longer had a monopoly on the technique.33 With RKO in disarray under the leadership of Howard Hughes between 1948–52 and cinema forced to reorient itself to a new postwar media landscape, the voice-over did not seem to enjoy the same positive association with radio that the studio had earlier fostered.34 In any case, although it was certainly an interesting addition to the film, once “Left Hand” had made its way to Fox, the voice-over was discarded altogether.
When Faulkner returned to Requiem in late March, the manuscript was mostly finished. One section he revised, however, was “The Jail,” the typescript for which wasn’t sent to the printer until the beginning of June, a month after the other two acts.35 Before he had left for Hollywood, Faulkner wrote his collaborator, Joan Williams, requesting “our act three section,” the “two or so pages” of the “scene in the jail” that they had evidently worked on together. At the time of writing, Faulkner considered that he was “getting the mss. in good shape,” but he was worried that “this job will interrupt it for a while” (SL, 312). Not only was he working on the play scenes for that section but also the prologue. Indeed, as he would soon remind Saxe Commins, “the prose is not at all a prologue, but is an integrated part of the act itself” (SL, 316).
Faulkner’s work on “The Left Hand of God” did indeed put a brief stop to the progress of the novel, but at the same time, it appeared to push the prologue for “The Jail” section in an interesting new direction that closely resembled the voice-over. Although it has many virtues, perhaps the key oddity of Faulkner’s preamble to act 3 of Requiem is, as Polk has indicated, that it is the only prose in his entire oeuvre written in the second person.36 What is equally as interesting is that Faulkner only wrote “The Jail” in the second person after he had completed work on Hank’s voice-over for “The Left Hand of God.”
This is a chain of events that is certainly worth contemplating further. Compare, as Polk does, an earlier version of this section of narrative with the final published version of the same passage:
The visitor would descry . . . a name and a date; not at first of course, but after a moment, a second, because at first he would be a little puzzled, a little impatient because of his illness-at-ease from having been dragged here into the kitchen of a strange woman busy cooking a meal; he would think merely What? So what? until suddenly, even while he was still thinking it, something would happen: the faint frail illegible meaningless even inferential-less scratchings in the ancient poor-quality glass would seem to move, to coalesce, actually to enter into other senses than vision——(WFM, 19.3:394)
. . .
you will descry to be a name and a date;
Not at first, of course, but after a moment, a second, because at first you would be a little puzzled, a little impatient because of your illness-at-ease from having been dragged without warning or preparation into the private kitchen of a strange woman cooking a meal; you would think merely What? So what? annoyed and even a little outraged, until suddenly, even while you were thinking it, something has already happened: the faint frail meaningless even inference-less scratching on the ancient poor-quality glass you stare at, has moved, under your eyes, even while you stared at it, coalesced, seeming actually to have entered into another sense than vision. (N, 4:643)
The principal change from the first to the final version of the passage is clear: the impersonal “he,” the “visitor,” enunciated in the third person, becomes the reader, the “you” addressed in the second person. This intimate mode of address, unlike the narrative voice in the rest of the prologues, interpellates us directly, reaching to the present reader, at over a century’s remove, through the power of the direct voice. And, although not exactly the same as Hank’s second-person voice-over, it seems more than coincidental that Faulkner made this change to the manuscript just after he had finished “The Left Hand of God.” This shift in perspective is extended over several pages of the section, positioning the reader as a visitor to Jefferson: “You, a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West, passing through the little town by simple accident” (N, 4:642). The voice that was formerly limited to addressing a “visitor” within the book now goes outside of its jurisdiction, calling beyond the time of the novel’s setting—and even its future projection of 1965 (N, 4:642)—and on into the present.
This shift to the second person also intensifies the end of the prologue, announcing its kinship less with the pastness of the novel genre and more with the presentness of the stage and also with the vast reach of radio. Here, Cecilia Farmer’s spoken proof of life—“Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I” (N, 4:649)—which she adds to her inscribed name on the glass, arrives to us at long last, “the clear undistanced voice as though out of the delicate antenna-skeins of radio” (N, 4:648). It is a simile, as Spencer Morrison has noted, that maintains “a crucial gap between the actual patter and screams of mass culture and the acoustical clarity aspired to by radio but, in Requiem, achieved by the storyteller’s voice.”37 In Morrison’s view, the narrator here makes a claim for the importance of the voice, not as recorded and transmitted on radio waves from the past into the present but as passed down over time in the form of oral history. While radio might seem to be the more reliable means of transmission, the endurance of Cecilia’s story instead bears witness to the power of “knowledge or memory of leisure” (N, 4:642). Counterintuitively, those who remember enough to tell it, “instead of dying off as they should as time passed . . . were actually increasing in number” (N, 4:642).
But the simile seems to register instability between old and new forms of storytelling rather than the victory of one over the other—not exactly the complete triumph of the radio aesthetic that Jameson sees in the detective fiction of the 1930s, then, but a shift in the recalcitrant South nevertheless. In the prologue to “The Jail,” Faulkner is juggling the seemingly irreconcilable balls of technological modernity and classical literary humanism, expertly tying the contradictions of a rapidly expanding American media ecology to the very stuff that resists it: the more traditional representation of Yoknapatawpha as registered in the novel form. In his brief analysis of the section, Julian Murphet points out that this last mention of the radio, which follows hard on the heels of a catalogue of modern mediations across the county, is part of a “wholly unexpected figural chiasmus” that begins several pages earlier. Faulkner begins by invoking “an oak leaf” (N, 4:633), its networked veins forming “a natural semaphore,” as “the only way to figure forth mediation,” but now, Murphet suggests, that image is inverted: “The most effective way of figuring the unmediated, ‘undistanced’ voice of the living past, to make its ‘vast instantaneous intervention’ aesthetically comprehensible, is to compare it to the radio voice itself.”38 While here as elsewhere Faulkner rails against the seemingly inevitable drive of the modern world to subsume all that is particular about the South, it is clear that he at the same time relies on such modern devices as the radio for making the past present once more.
The changes wrought in the South usher in not only “a new century and a new way of thinking, but of acting and behaving too” (N, 4:634). The radio is only one among many material innovations creeping over the Mississippi horizon between the Civil War and 1951, preceded by the railroad, electricity, and paved roads, and followed by domestic appurtenances like “automatic stoves and washing machines and television antennae” that transform “little lost lonely farmhouses” into “glittering and gleaming” (N, 4:638) beacons of the modern. It is not the radio alone that carries Cecilia’s voice from 1861 through to the mid-twentieth century, but its sphere of influence is such that it registers more acutely what is happening all over the South, namely, the eradication of local institutions (such as the jailhouse) and their replacement by immense national flows of power and capital and noise: “the county’s hollow inverted air one resonant boom and ululance of radio: and thus no more Yoknapatawpha’s air nor even Mason and Dixon’s air, but America’s: the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists, the babbling pressure to buy and buy and still buy arriving more instantaneous than light, two thousand miles from New York and Los Angeles; one air, one nation” (N, 4:637). Taking charge of the voice, radio takes control of the air, thereby enveloping all and pressuring those that hear its call to consume. And just as radio in Faulkner’s account seems inspired by the oak leaf’s veins and the twinned grids of road and rail, so too does it stimulate other media to follow its example, colonizing public and private spaces alike.
One such medium was cinema, where the radio voice had also managed to locate itself, appealing to a generation of moviegoers by providing voice-over narration for the images projected before them. Hank’s voice-over in “The Left Hand of God” was intended to introduce the viewer to the unfamiliar world of postwar China. But although it went unappreciated in the production process, Faulkner’s creation made its way to the South, a radio voice reaching all the way on “delicate antenna-skeins” from Los Angeles. In Requiem for a Nun, the second-person voice is similarly designed so as to guide “you, a stranger” through Jefferson’s long history. It is a southern voice, to be sure, purpose built to make sense of the Mississippi landscape for the interloping reader and, more particularly, to demonstrate the importance of Cecilia Farmer’s scratchings on the glass. But it is a voice that is also a product of California. Here, revitalized by the power of the voice-over with which Faulkner had been recently wrangling in “Left Hand,” those statements in the second person preserve a small part of the South, creating out of the name on the windowpane a past that is “never dead. It’s not even past” (N, 4:535). While Faulkner’s version of “Left Hand” was not produced, here something of the screenwriting process is preserved, as words become sounds, become life: “And again one sense assumes the office of two or three: not only hearing, listening, and seeing too, but you are even standing on the same spot, the same boards she did that day she wrote her name into the window” (N, 4:645).