In "Knight's Gambit," the one text in which he has a significant presence, Max Harriss is the twenty-one-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Harriss (nee Melisandre Backus). Gavin Stevens calls Max "the rich young earl" (192). As a son he takes after his gangster father; in a sense, the eyes have it: despite his "delicate face," there is "nothing delicate about the eyes" (143). Max is the older of "two spoiled children [born] a year apart" (148).
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.
Charles Mallison's "great aunt" is one of several "aunts" in the canon that are hard to place on a family tree. She is mentioned in "Knight's Gambit," in a sentence about Mrs. Harriss: she has "spent ten years among what his great-aunt would have called the crowned heads of Europe" (168). There's no way to tell from the story, or from the larger history of the Stevens family in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, if she is related to Charles' mother or his father.
General Compson's appearance in this novel, the thirteenth different time he has appeared, makes him the last Compson Faulkner ever describes. In his first appearance, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), his grandson Quentin imagines him standing "on a high place" (like a monument) in his Confederate General's uniform, "and Grandfather was always right" (176). In this final appearance in Faulkner's last book, he has been taken off that pedestal.
Near the end of this third volume in the Snopes trilogy, Faulkner's narrative bluntly recalls the fates of Quentin, Caddy and Caddy's daughter. He also revises Benjy's story: having in the "Appendix" described the way Jason sent Benjy to the state's mental home after their mother's death, he here says that Mrs. Compson "whined and wept" so much after Jason committed Benjy that Jason agreed to bring his brother "back home," where two years later Benjy set fire to their house, and perished himself in the flames (354).
The Compsons remain basically offstage in this novel, mentioned but not seen. The General's name comes up in connection with the hunting camp in the big woods, and his wife, Mrs. Compson, is identified as the person who gave Old Het the hat she has worn for fifty years. More intriguingly, it is the next Mrs. Compson, the widow of the General's son, who owns the building in which Montgomery Ward Snopes sells pornography. The only member of the next generation mentioned is her son Jason, who collects the rent from him "prompt on time" every month (159).
Two of the four Jason Compsons in the fictions appear in this novel, as father and son. The father appears in "Act I" without a first name, as "a man named Compson" who, while not among the very first white men to arrive in the settlement that becomes Jefferson, is a leader in its early history.
The "man named Compson" who appears in this story as the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha is never given a first name (206), and so it is difficult to know which Compson Faulkner is thinking of.
General Compson makes a brief appearance here, in Chick's list of "the hunters" who in "the old days" had a wilderness "within twelve miles of Jefferson" in which to pursue deer and bear and wild turkey. Major de Spain heads the list, but it spans classes, races and even species: it includes the mixed race Boon Hogganbeck and "the Negro Sam Fathers," and ends with "Major de Spain's one-eyed hunting mule Alice" (90-91).
Nineteen years after Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, he added this "Appendix Compson" at the request of Malcolm Cowley, who wanted The Portable Faulkner he was putting together for Viking to include something like the "Genealogy" Faulkner created for Absalom, Absalom! As he did so, Faulkner decided to take the Compson saga back to 18th-century Scotland, which added four new members to the family, and to update the biographies of the four younger Compsons who were alive at end of the novel.
