AUTOMOBILE

WILLIAM FAULKNER and META CARPENTER - EROTICA - LITERATURE - WHERE THE COLLECTIONS LAY

If you happen to be near New York City, or the University of Virginia or Ole Miss, you might get permission to see these collections for yourself.

NEW YORK TIMES - NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY EROTICA COLLECTION

EXCERPT: More recently, hundreds of works that make up the triple-star collection have been liberated from the restricted controls. An adult with a library card can simply fill out a request and peruse the material on the premises. (The library maintains a filter system to restrict access to erotic materials on the Internet.)

The library has highbrow erotica as well. Deep in the Berg rare book collection, for example, is a work that has never been publicly displayed: William Faulkner’s pencil drawings of him and Meta Carpenter Wilde, his mistress, having sex.

 

Ms. Wilde gave the drawings to the library on condition that they remain inaccessible until the death of Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, who died in 2008.

 

OLE MISS (UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI) Faulkner Collection

 

FAULKNER - VIRGINIA - Audio Collection Archives

GARDENIA : WHEN WILLIAM FAULKNER HELPS RESCUE META FROM HER MARRIAGE TO WOLFGANG REBNER

 

 

NOTE: As her marriage to Wolfgang Rebner, a German-Jewish concert pianist from a wealthy family is eroded by financial problems tied into the horrors of Nazism in Europe, Meta sacrifices in New York, until she becomes very ill, has surgery, and becomes skin and bones.  So she decides to leave her marriage, go back to her parents, who now live in Arizona.  But instead a telegram to William Faulker, leads to a train, and a hotel room in New Orleans, where he wanted her to stay.  He is, at this point, living back in his home town of Oxford, Mississippi.

 

page 242-243 from A LOVING GENTLEMAN - THE LOVE STORY OF WILLIAM FAULKNER and META CARPENTER by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten

 

"It was romantic extravagance (for him to suggest that she stay in New Orleans), like the gardenias pinned to my pillow, the poems, the outpourings of amorous hyperbole when he made love.  I gave no answer, knowing that he couldn't mean it,  he was a writer who was most inspired when he was in Oxford.  He was fanatically slavish to the books and short stories that clogged his imagination.  He was a farmer, with cotton and hay crops to bring in."

COCKER SPANIEL

This images provided to wickicommons by Pearson Scott Foresman

an educational publisher.  Public Domain

William Faulkner gifted Meta Carpenter a puppy,
a cocker spaniel they name Chloe,
early in their relationship. 
She had the dog for many years.

WILLIAM FAULKNER HEIRLOOM AUCTION AT SOTHEBY

DAILY MAIL ; JUNE 2016 AUCTION OF WILLIAM FAULKNER HEIRLOOMS EXPECTED TO NET $2 MILLION FOR FAMILY  go to article for full report and images of William Faulkner

EXCERPT:

It's a literary treasure trove, said Justin Caldwell, a specialist in books and manuscripts at Sotheby's, who said Faulkner's original writings are a rarity in the literary marketplace

William Faulkner's Legion d'Honneur medal presented by France to Faulkner in 1951 and his Nobel handwritten acceptance speech draft are all to be included.

*****

This image is from Google Images and is listed as in Public Domain in Canada




SOTHEBYS AUCTION RESULTS

DECLARATION FOR MISTRESSES : Knowing Your Self Worth

"My gifts may not be expensive, but they are just the thing, and beautifully presented."

Mistresses, especially those of you who are gifted generously and living the life of a millionairess because of your man and learning all about the good things in life, this may be difficult. You see so many beautiful things when you shop and travel and you want to give him a memento.

Still, if you are not equals economically, it is more important that you save your money than buy him expensive gifts that you cannot afford. BESIDES IF YOU HAVE NO INCOME OF YOUR OWN he sees that you are using the money he gave you to spend on him - as if you don't need it when you do.

For those of you who are working and have your own income, that does not equal what he earns, also be aware that something small and special, just right for him, even if it is not expensive, is what to do.

Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot C 2010-2024 All Rights including Internet and International Rights

First published December 11, 2010

WANDA JACKSON - PLEASE LOVE ME FOREVER

META ON HER MARRIAGE PROPOSAL from WOLFGANG REBNER

A LOVING GENTLEMAN

The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter

by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten

"I could no longer cope with the situation.  I could not handle subterfuge, play games, deceive, live in the Back Street, as we called it then, of a married man's life."  (page 187) 


NOTES: She was in her mid twenties.  She thought about ten years hence she would be in her mid thirties and it would be difficult if not impossible to bear healthy children.  Instead, she said nothing to bill and withdraw gradually "gently from the coil of our love" and she did that by working nights for Howard Hawks.  She thought that Wolfgang Rebner was lovelorn and rich, and she accepted his proposal.  When she told Bill she had, he asked  her "give us more time. wait it out."  She felt she couldn't want him to loose Jill, his daughter, on her account.  He asked her out for drinks and then asked her to go to her place, which she refused.  Two days before her wedding, Bill showed up haggard, "vivid gashes caked with blood disfiguring his face," where his wife, Estelle, had assaulted him.  He said he was driving when she did this, and they could have been killed in an accident.

Meta did marry Rebner - twice - but hers was a heart divided and William Faulkner remained in it, and would have liked her back as a Mistress living nearer him in the American South.

THE THINKING MAN SMOKES A PIPE

META CARPENTER on MEETING WILLIAM FAULKNER'S WIFE ESTELLE

A LOVING GENTLEMAN

The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter

by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten

NOTES:  Meta Carpenter told Bill Faulkner that their relationship had put her in a bubble, because she met him as a lover in hotel rooms that he stayed in when he's working in Hollywood.  Socially they are isolated.  Only a few people have been confided in.  He decides that she should meet first, his beloved daughter Jill, a young girl of about three, and then his wife Estelle, who he has brought to Southern California from Mississippi.  He's rented his family a house in Pacific Palisades.  Meta soon loves Jill but didn't like the idea of meeting Estelle, but finally she's persuaded to show up for dinner with his agent as a date.


page 159

"The real predicament I faced was serous enough without investing Estelle, whose photograph I had never seen, who was all mist and vapor in my mind, formless spectral, with power to smile.  Would I now, with all the moral detritus that had been stuffed into my head as a girl, all those precepts and dictates rattling around in my skill, be able to continue my relationship with Bill? Would my love for him be the same.... without shadow and shame, sweetly abandoned?


page 175

"The full force and import of the evening's shameful dissemblance would not hit me for years to come but it left me at the time.  With an enemy (Estelle) shrunken in sixe, foreshortened, no longer the commanding baleful woman whom I had constructed from the clay of imagination, my hatred had been taken from me without my consent.  But friend I would not be to her."


Soon after, Bill asked Estelle for a divorce and said he would want custody of Jill.

page 183-185

NOTES and EXCERPTS:

Estelle became  "a wraith of iron transformed by outrage into a screaming, frenzied woman... threatened to ruin him... " She wanted everything to "pauperize" him if it came to divorce.  And so Bill retreated.  He said he could not divorce even if he earned twice as much and at least not until Jill reached the age of 12 or so, old enough to testify in court that she wanted to live with him.  But he would not promise to quit Meta.  "I love her and will see her," he said.

Apparently this encounter resulted in a "truce" between Bill and his wife, and Meta felt that there was nothing Estelle could do about her (love).  But...

page 187

Meta found herself filled with dread and trembling "like a Victorian lady"

STACK OF DUSTY BOOKS

META CARPENTER : LONG YEARS OF LONG DISTANCE LOVE WITH THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNING AMERICAN AUTHOR WILLIAM FAULKNER

 

META CARPENTER

in a photo she gifted William Faulkner

which was taken by a photographer

working for Samuel Goldwyn Studios.

 

This picture, which appears in the book below,

also appears on the web site

AMSAW American Society of Authors and Writers - William Faulkner

 

 

The long-term love affair between Hollywood "script girl" Meta Carpenter, and the literary, eventually Pulitzer Prize (1963) winning author William Faulkner, who off and on also made money in Hollywood as a writer working on screenplays adapted from other author's literary works, is one that that began because they felt like two foreigners in the movie business.  They were both born and raised in the traditions of the American South to families with enough money to have servants. At first, when they met in 1932, it was this understanding of being two people from an alien culture that pulled them together.  She was a divorcee and he was unhappy and unfulfilled in his marriage to the stormy Estelle.  There was also a compelling sexual attraction between the two of them.

 

For many years these two lovers lived with their hearts divided, for Faulkner never did divorce, and Meta married, divorced, and remarried the same man, German-Jewish concert pianist Wolfgang Rebner, during these years.  Her marriage to Rebner was horribly effected by the Nazi's, World War II, changes in the economy, and poverty due to diminished employment for both of them. Yet, even when there were lulls in the relationship between Meta and Bill, due to physical distance or time passing, they were never completely out of each other's hearts, and a strong correspondence kept them together, as lovers, as friends, as special.

 

It's been suggested that Meta and Bill were involved for eighteen years but these were not all years in which their sexuality, which was highly erotic, was able to be expressed. Mostly they were apart.  When they began, in their early years, though Meta struggled with involvement with a married man and the relationship gradually unfolded, she went from a woman's residence called The Studio Club where many a starlet stayed, to a room mate, to renting her own place where they could feel more coupled, their relationship mostly played out in the hotel rooms William Faulkner lived in. 

 

Bill would arrange it that Meta spend time with his daughter, who she came to love, and meet his wife, who later went ballistic when he did actually ask for a divorce, all which made things more difficult.

And, unlike other Mistresses I've elected to be Mistresses of the Month here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO, who are at least in part defined as Mistresses because there is evidence of the woman (or man) being Kept financially, there is no reason to think that William Faulkner, who pled poverty due to familial responsibilities and debt from the start, ever Kept Meta. 

 

This woman was independent and sacrificial and unspoiled.  When he brought Estelle out to Hollywood and rented a house for them in the Pacific Palisades, complete with their servants, I have to wonder if Meta didn't wonder if he was telling her the truth about his inability to make her life easier.  I think he was cheap with her, but then again, in her early twenties she was pleased with his poetry and a ribbon for her hair.  She was willing to be a "careerist" and would never have children.

 

Was he full of promises?  Yes and No.  He seemed to diminish her expectations while also pledging his eternal love.  He also said, and she believed, that she excited him like no other, that he wasn't womanizing, and what they had was what he wanted.

 

According to Meta, when they were seeing each other two or three times a week, he said, "I know that right now I'm a married man... I know I'm piss poor... I can't give you anything"  (page 47)  Like the Mistress of the notable musician-poet Bob Dylan, Ruth Tryangiel, who said the only gift she got from Bob was an orange, Faulkner gave small gifts such as a cocker spaniel puppy and a warm coat - not a fur but a full length evening brocade for $75 dollars at Bullocks-Wilshire, or a locket that she kept his picture in.  But he also tried to help her 2nd husband get work and when came a day that she was skeletal and sick in New York and wanted to leave that husband,  Faulkner provided her the money for a train ticket to visit him, and begged her to take some work on films being made in the South. 

 

When in Hollywood, the couple were regulars dining and drinking at Old Hollywood writer's hang out, Musso and Franks restaurant, but they never went to concerts or plays, as she would have loved.  Their involvement wasn't exactly a secret but it felt isolated. His lawyer and agent and some of her friends were in the know, that's how he got her letters, and there was a lot of whispered gossip about the two of them at various studios where they worked, more than she realized at the time.

 

But perhaps the material things didn't count so much.  What he did give her was this: "He was my best friend, the lover who exalted me, the teacher who gave me wisdom, the source from which I drew strength."  (page 242)

Faulkner he screwed up his Hollywood script doctor job eventually, because of his alcoholism.  He apparently drank too much in response to learning of her marriage, and got blackballed by all the studio chiefs, though after he won that Pulitzer years later, he was brought back, but still for a demeaning fraction of what he used to get paid.  The Pulitzer put him in demand as never before elsewhere though, and, as Meta one day accepted, she would never see him in the flesh again.  When she was told he had died, in 1962, she "felt like a widow."

 

The book below, which is the primary reference for this post, has a lot about Hollywood before and through and after World War II, as well as the effect that the Nazi's had on her husband Wolfgang Webner's family, and his career.

Meta's loved music and culture. Not so long after it became clear that Bill would not or could not divorce, she thought she'd take care of her life and get married.  She married a concert pianist who had pursued her for a long time and who was in love with her. On their honeymoon to see his wealthy family in Germany, in the days before World War II, it became clear that the Nazis were going to wipe them out, and in fact they did suffer the loss of their wealth and several family members commit suicide before it was all over.  The couple made it to New York where Wolfgang's ability to make money was thwarted.  Many of their musician friends suffered the same and yet at first Meta had told Bill she was happy and that they had a wonderful cultural life, attending concerts, operas, and recitals.  As their fortunes dwindled, Meta sacrificed, sold a platinum bracelet the family had given her, and began to starve and sicken, then needed surgery. 

 

 

LA TIMES OBITUARY FOR META CARPENTER WILDE 1908-1994 (age 86)

Faulkner died in 1962, Meta in 1994 at the age of 86.  In her New York Times Obituary, which is briefer than this one, it is said that their love affair lasted 18 years.

A LOVING GENTLEMAN

The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter

by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten

 

This book stands as a primary reference for this months posts,

along with articles in the New York and Los Angeles times,

including the 1994 obituary for Meta,

who died that year at the age of 86 as Meta Carpenter Wilde.

Faulkner died in 1962.

 

 

Try using the term "Hollywood" in the embedded search function of this Google Blogger, to bring up other Hollywood associated Mistresses and Misters including George Reeves (Superman), Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, and Marion Davies.

 

* According to Wikipedia here is the job description today of the work that Meta did: "A script supervisor (also called continuity supervisor) is a member of a film crew and oversees the continuity of the motion picture including wardrobe, props, set dressing, hair, makeup and the actions of the actors during a scene. The notes recorded by the script supervisor during the shooting of a scene are used to help the editor cut the scene. They are also responsible to keep track of the film production unit's daily progress. The script supervisor credit typically appears in the closing credits of a motion picture and is listed on IMDB under Misc. crew, even though they have a crucial role in the shooting of a film.

 

 

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