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."