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.
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