A Speculative Note on The Mansion’s Myra Allanovna

Abstract

A Speculative Note on The Mansions Myra Allanovna I n William Faulkners novel The Mansion, a couturiere of male neckties named Myra Allanovna makes her first and only appearance in his work within the book’s art and genealogy leitmotifs (Dasher 361). Joseph Blotner has shown that Faulkner had some minor associations with Russians, but James B. Meriwether recalled that Saxe Commins, while reading proof for The Mansion, recognized in Allanovna’s characterization a New Yorker of his acquaintance; unfortunately, Meriwether did not remember the woman’s name (Blotner 944, 1224; Meriwether). I believe a source for Myra is Lucilla Mara di Vescovi Whitman (1893-1971), daughter of a Professor at the Uni­ versity of Rome.1 Carl Nagin says that Countess Mara (who was not tech­ nically a countess) “traced her lineage to the first bishops of Venice and to Tintoretto’s patron Marco de Vescovi, whose daughter Faustina married that great Mannerist painter” (77). At some point, presumably in 1938, she made what Sidney Pulitzer called “her famous trip across America” in order to test the waters for what became her tie business (Pulitzer). That same year she “incorporated herself as a cravateer, and a countess” and ended up owning and operating, under the corporate name Countess Mara, “a highly special­ ized store, bearing the sign ‘Men’s Shop,’ on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street”; the address was 338 Park Avenue (Heilman 319, 318). Countess Mara ties never come in conventional stripes or polka dots, but it is pos­ sible to buy examples in solid colors, though this requires a slight extra effort. Such deviations from the Mara line are not displayed. . . . The customer has to ask for them, and they are then produced from a closed drawer, not unlike a bottle of Scotch in wartime. The Countess does not really approve of them. In 1946, when sixty thousand dollars’ worth ofties were stolen from her store, the robbers won her respect by taking only ones with designs and by festooning the chairs around the place with solid-color numbers, in what she took to be a sardonically discriminating gesture. (Heilman 319)2 In The Mansion, Ratliff appears to buy one tie of solid color and one with a floral design (482, 539). 'While Geoffrey T. Heilman attests Whitman was born in 1893, her granddaughter Mara Bagier tells me that the countess rarely told the truth about her age and doubts that she was born in 1893 since Bagier’s own mother, the eldest child, was born in Rome in 1908 (Heilman 324; “Daughters”). 2 For more on the theft, see “Choosy Burglars.” 27 28 Merrill Horton The Mansions Myra Allanovna In addition to flowers, Mara’s ties “portray scenes featuring golf, tennis, polo, skiing, horse racing, giraffes, sea gulls, camels, bison, lobsters, ferns, fish, deer, mermaids, shells, vultures, . . . dancing girls, geese, Roman heads, [and] incidents in Aesop’s Fables and The Arabian Nights” (Heilman 319-20). Time lists more design examples and says there were “a few less discreet themes [that] have to be kept under the vest in polite company” (“Neck-Lace” 94). “At the bottom of the front face of each tie are the printed initials ‘CM,’ surmounted by a crown. Mrs. Whitman’s solid-color ties bear no signature.” In 1949, Mara’s ties ranged in price from “six-fifty to twenty dollars”—expensive at the time (Heilman 320, 318), but in The Mansion during the Spanish Civil War period, Gavin Stevens says Myra’s prices ranged up to $150, and Charles Mallison confirms that Ratliff bought two ties for $75 apiece (483, 617). In May of 1956, the New York Times reported that prices ranged from $7.50 to $100 (McCarty 14). Mara’s customers could afford her prices. They included Faulkner’s publisher Bennett Cerf as well as David Sarnoff, Eddie Rickenbacker, Nelson Rockefeller, Marc Connelly, Leopold Stokowski, Frank Sinatra, Eugene O’Neill, J. Edgar Hoover, and Time adds William Randolph Hearst Sr., Noel Coward, David Dubinsky, and Harry Truman (Heilman 319-20; “Neck-Lace” 94). In 1956, the countess was spending most of her time in Florence, Italy, from whence she mailed design ideas to New York, perhaps directly to...