Requiem pour une nonne

Long before Requiem for a Nun, and long before the Nobel Prize (which Faulkner himself received as early as 1949), the American writer declared: “I think Camus will improve; but I don’t think Sartre ever will” (lecture at the University of Virginia, May 1957): “Yes, I know Camus very well and hold him in very high esteem. He is the man who… always does what I have tried to do, that is, to probe… his own soul.” Fittingly, the tribute to Albert Camus published by La Nouvelle Revue Française on March 1, 1960, included a translation of Faulkner’s article entitled “L’âme qui interroge” (“The Questioning Soul”), in which he revisited Camus’s essential themes and, referring to the telegram sent after the Nobel Prize, returned to “the soul that constantly seeks and questions itself […].”

Camus, for his part, admitted in a 1945 interview with Janine Delpech that L’Étranger used the narrative technique of Faulkner and Steinbeck, and that he considered Sanctuary — for which Malraux had written the preface — a masterpiece (Hommage de la NRF, p. 538). Finally, for a special issue of the Harvard Advocate devoted to Faulkner, Camus provided a letter confirming that he was “a great admirer of William Faulkner, whose work I have known and read closely for a long time. He is, in my opinion, your greatest writer; the only one, it seems to me, who belongs to your great nineteenth-century literary tradition […]. I mean that he has created his own world, recognizable among a thousand and irreplaceable, as Dostoevsky or Proust had done before him. Sanctuary and Pylon are masterpieces” (Yale French Studies, no. 25, spring 1960, p. 122).

A fine copy.