Word: compson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now--the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts...and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South...--William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom...
...mean to be a Southerner? Poor Roony Lee, Robert E. Lee's son, who suffered Henry Adams' acute description, completed his Harvard career three years before the Civil War broke out. It was a time when what it meant to be a Southerner was all too clear. Quentin Compson, who went to Harvard just before World War I, was so distressed by the Southern ghosts tugging at him in these northern climes that he killed himself by leaping off the Lars Anderson Bridge...
...fellow Southerner and I went to Anderson Bridge not long ago in search of the plaque commemorating Compson's mythic jump. Years ago a group of Faulkner fans are said to have placed a bronze plaque on the side of the bridge that saw Compson's tumble. It is also said that not long ago, a group of equally ardent fans stole the plaque. We did not know that as we approached the bridge, eager to pay homage to the desperation Compson felt; I understood a bit of his confusion...