Noel Polk (1943–2012)

Abstract

Noel Polk (1943-2012) O ne of the four founding editorial advisory board members of The Faulkner Journal, Noel Polk was an internationally recognized Faulkner scholar whose editorial, textual, and critical work shaped and enlarged the discourse on Faulkner for some fifty years. He died on August 21, 2012, in Jackson, Mississippi, following a short illness, shor after completing another important scholarly task, the Folio Society edition of The Sound and the Fury, done in partnership with Stephen M. Ross. That edition prints the Benjy section ofthe book using different colored inks for each of the different time levels in the youngest Compsons interior recollections of his family’s affairs from the day when he and his three siblings discover that their maternal grandmother has died up to the present, April 7, 1928, the Saturday of an early spring Easter weekend. It was a typographical experiment that Faulkner had endorsed but never realized. Noel was such a mainstay of Faulkner studies, one realizes that our enterprise could hardly proceed without all that he did for us. He was an editor ofthe invaluable Faulkner concordances issued from West Point and one ofthe four editors ofthe 25-volume facsimile reprints ofthose Faulkner manuscripts housed in the New York Public Library and the University ofVirginias William Faulkner Collection. While serving for 24 years at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he taught not only excellent classes but also NEH Summer Seminars on Faulkner, he also found time to enhance the contents of Southern Quarterly, to help found the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and to (literally) bring to the University ofSouthern Mississippi a large portion of the 81 library that had belonged to Cleanth Brooks. He did the rigorous textual work for the Library of Americas volumes of Faulkner’s nineteen novels, which became the new corrected texts also published in paperback by Vintage International now widely used by all who teach Faulkner. His critical books and essays on Faulkner’s fiction represent a provoca­ tive body of work that has raised the level of discourse on Faulkner, and he had a long relationship with Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, as author and, ultimately, editor when in 2004 he moved to the fac­ ulty at Mississippi State University, continuing its annual Faulkner issue. Noel also took over the general editorship of the Reading Faulkner series of glossaries and commentaries of Faulkner’s novels started by Jim Hinkle with the University Press of Mississippi. With Ross, his co-editor of the Folio Society’s The Sound and the Fury, he edited the series volume on that novel. He was editor ofAn Anthology ofMississippi Writers, did the textual work for the restored edition of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, published a touching memoir, Outside the Southern Myth, and in his last year surprised many of us with an excellent volume of poems, Walking Safari, published by Texas Review Press. His criticism includes Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and Children ofthe Dark House, an exploration of Freudianism in Faulkner’s work. He held visiting professorships in France and gave lectures throughout eastern and western Europe and in Australia, Japan, and China. And, of course, he had almost as much influence on the study of Eudora Welty, publishing his invaluable bibliography of her works in 1994, writing essays for conferences and journals, editing journal issues devoted to her ca­ reer, and encouraging the evolution of the journal devoted to Welty studies, now an annual titled the Eudora Welty Review. Among the many tributes that came to him by e-mail during his last month from scholars everywhere was the note from Sharon Monteith at the University of Nottingham that prom­ ised to dedicate to him The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, in which, she explained, so many people who knew Noel have contributed essays. His shadow remains long, and we live in that shadow. Tom McHaney Georgia State University 82 ...