Harriss

The first husband of the woman whom Gavin Stevens eventually marries is a bootlegger from New Orleans named only Mr. Harriss. Faulkner describes his offstage death memorably in three different texts: in "Knight's Gambit" he dies at his desk, "maybe," "because you can be shot just as discreetly across a desk in an office as anywhere else" (167–68); in The Town, he is brought back to Yoknapatawpha from New Orleans in "a bullet-proof hearse" (187); in The Mansion, he dies in a barber's chair, of "his ordinary thirty-eight calibre occupational disease" (218) - i.e. getting shot by another gangster. The two novels only mention him briefly. As a living character, he is described in the most detail in "Knight's Gambit." He's "a man whom nobody in that part of Mississippi had ever heard of before" who marries the daughter of a local plantation owner (150). "He was more than twice her age, old enough himself to be her father - a big florid affable laughing man about whom you noticed at once that his eyes were not laughing too; noticed so quickly that his eyes were not laughing too that you realised only later that the laughter never had gone much further than his teeth; - a man who had what his uncle called the Midas touch, who as his uncle said, walked in an aura of pillaged widows and minors as some men walk in that of failure or death" (153). He achieves a pseudo-aristocratic status among the bootleggers and gangsters that Prohibition made possible: "Baron Harriss" (220), as he becomes known, is "no petty furtive peddling of pint bottles in hotel barbershops" (157). After his father-in-law's death he turns the plantation into a parvenu's palace.