The Alumni House
University of Mississippi
Oxford
Wednesday October 14, 1959
Dearest Jay
…
I did not see Falkner [sic] in the end, but only Mrs
Falkner: but this was beyond all reasonable expectation. The Connection is made, & if ever Falkner
wants a platform, I think she’ll fix it.
But I don’t suppose he ever will.
He has lived
here all his life. The house is simply
beautiful. White as usual, built of wood
on Kentish ply-board lines, the usual tall wooden portico pillars, cedars surrounding. The tall, airy, high-ceiling-rooms and the
slender wooden bannisters & the weathered timber floor all joined in a
lovely unity. They were burning cedar in
the fireplaces, & the aroma spread through the house.
Falkner stands
for absolute negro equality, for the new South, for the American south in a
way. Like an Irishman he savours and
chews over the intolerable inescapable marvellous memories of his childhood
& his past, but could not, I think, be called backward looking in any
way. He is unsentimental, and is no
longer fighting the civil war, as so many of them are in a fatuous Golf Club
kind of way, claiming association and identity with virtues & graces they
never had & never will have except by bogus proxy – and yet the picture
over the sitting room fireplace in Falkner’s house is the picture of Robert E.
Lee…
Mrs Falkner,
Mrs Estelle, is 58, delicate, survivor of two husbands, fragile, once a
Southern Belle, and an absolute No 1 knock-out with more sex-appeal in pure
concentrated quite irresistible form than all of Hollywood added together &
multiplied by six. She was adorable,
and, of course, quite impossible I suppose.
She does not vote, ON PRINCIPLE: and what the principle is, as you watch
her holding her cigarette between her fourth and little finger, her hands
moving exquisitely on the fulcrums of her thin brown wrists, as you watch here
alert, lovely head, and take in the lace and the fragrance, what the principle IS,
who can tell?
I liked
her. A knock-out. Once an alcoholic I seems,
and her sister a crook. Oh Jay, you
should have been here. To hell with
California, interesting like Selfridges: but here, the interest is like
Chartres or Dublin.”
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