Books: Sanctuary Revisited

REQUIEM FOR A NUN (286 pp.]—William Faulkner—Random House ($3).

Who is the best novelist writing in the U.S. today? By many a gauge—including the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature—the answer is William Faulkner. Yet Mississippi Novelist Faulkner can claim more roots than rooters in the U.S. One reason: his explosive Southern fables are sometimes hooked to devious verbal fuses that leave the average reader weary or wondering. When he wants to, Faulkner can also be as direct as a bolt of summer lightning. Requiem for a Nun is a tantalizing blend of both Faulkners. It rates a middle pass on a fictional report card starred with such finer achievements as

The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and a dozen or more brilliant short stories.

Requiem is notable for lesser things: a structure spliced play-fashion into acts and scenes, a breathless, 49-page, nonstop sentence, one of the longest in world literature,* and a story which reads like a moral sequel to Faulkner’s own gamy shocker, Sanctuary.

Melodramatic Lesson. The brutal core of Sanctuary was the rape of a teasing little society bitch named Temple Drake, and her forced month-long stay in a “Memphis sporting house” after her drunken gentleman escort, Gowan Stevens, had abandoned her to a bunch of petty hoodlums. Temple fell in love with one of the mob named “Red,” only to see him murdered.

Requiem finds Temple and Gowan eight years older, but not much wiser. Bound by shame rather than love, they have married, have two children. Gowan is strictly on the wagon, but doubts that he is the father of the elder child. Temple’s case is worse. Secretly she yearns for the bad old days, licks the memory of evil as a tongue searches a newly empty tooth-socket. She gets her chance to sin again when Red’s younger brother Pete shows up to blackmail her with a packet of her own racy love letters to Red. Staring at Temple, Pete soon forgets about money, and Temple almost forgets about honor and duty, until her Negro maid Nancy gives her a melodramatic lesson in both.

A casual prostitute and drug addict, Nancy nonetheless has an implacable loyalty to children. Better a dead child than a neglected or abandoned one, she feels. When Temple gets ready to snatch up her six-month-old daughter and run off with Pete, she finds the infant smothered to death in its crib. This brings Temple, screaming, to her senses, and Nancy, serene, to the gallows.

Modest Yes. Faulkner lets Temple tell most of the story in confessional flashbacks. To set her sordid saga in symbolic perspective, however, he flanks dramatic dialogue with three incantatory prose sections. Flush with rhetoric and folk humor, these evoke what Faulkner himself calls “the vast splendid limitless panorama of America.” They also invoke the high codes and courage Faulkner associates with the Old South, in this case the founders of Jefferson, Miss, in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, seat of Faulkner’s fictional kingdom. The Temple Drakes, the Gowan Stevenses and their slack-spined, country-clubbing breed have corrupted these codes, he implies. The only atonement is suffering. In the South, the Negro knows most about suffering. Perhaps, Faulkner seems to be saying, the Negro will yet help the South find redemption.

Certainly Nancy comes as close as anyone to redeeming Temple. Just before Nancy is to die, Temple asks her: “Is there a heaven, Nancy?” Answers Nancy: “I don’t know. I believes.” “Believe what?” Temple asks. “I don’t know. But I believes,” repeats Nancy. After years of the big No in American writing, this modest Yes may be the biggest symbol of all in Requiem for a Nun.

*Longer: the Molly Bloom soliloquy which concludes James Joyce’s Ulysses.