Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-05-13 09:35
Major de Spain's office is described as "the big, airy, book-lined second-storey room with windows at one end opening upon the shabby hinder purlieus of stores and at the other a door giving onto the railed balcony above the Square" (301). Its furnishings include "a wicker-covered demijohn of whiskey" and a "bamboo-and-paper punkah [fan]" kept swinging back and forth over the Major's desk by "old Ash," the Negro servant who sits "in a tilted chair beside the entrance pulling the cord" (301).
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-05-13 09:32
Neither "Lion" nor Go Down, Moses says what Major de Spain does for a living. In some texts he is clearly a planter, running a plantation, but in these texts he has an office in town. When Quentin visits him there in the short story, he mentions the "expensive, unobtrusive clothes" which De Spain wears at work and the "secretary" who works in a separate room (198). In the novel, where it's Ike McCaslin who visits De Spain, this office is described in more detail.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Fri, 2016-05-13 09:04
Before his marriage, Ike McCaslin lives "in one small cramped fireless rented room in a Jefferson boarding-house where petit juries were domiciled during court terms and itinerant horse- and mule-traders stayed" (285; later in the novel Ike lives in private house). Gavin Stevens also lives in a boarding house where he has his "noon meal" (356) on work days; we are assuming it is the same house. It is elsewhere described as a "back-street stock-traders' boarding-house" (334). Presumably it is close to the Courthouse Square in Jefferson, since it houses juries regularly.
