Word: compsons
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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...
...JUNE 2 of my sophomore year, the 62nd anniversary of Quentin Compson III's putting flatirons in his shoes and jumping off of the Anderson bridge, I spent the evening with a girl, who was then a close friend and was then from the South, reading Absalom, Absalom! for our English 700 exam (back then it was and it deserved to be called 700). We read to each other by the light of a street lamp on the bridge next to the secret plaque marking the spot from which Quentin was said to have jumped. Such dedication to Faulknerian trivia...
...real world for a discussion of Oxford politics and two hours of flying, then back to the typing of chapter two and an analysis of chapter three. The only value of such adherence to chronology is that it makes Faulkner's antichronological depiction of the Sutpen and Compson stories seem logical by comparison...
...could have guessed just from the sound of the name of the biographer that the approach would be neither magical nor mysterious. It's good, it's all there, but it's Blotner. Why not Carvel Collins, Cleanth Brooks, Malcolm Cowley? These names (and writings) ring, echo Quentin Compson, promise a more magical treatment--a story told worthy of the great story-teller. But Collins fought with the Faulkner family a while back--sin number one for a megabiographer--and his biography had to wait for Blotner's. Cleanth Brooks will eventually come out, I hope, with his second volume...