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."

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.