“Quentin Compson. Drowned in the odour of honeysuckle. 1891-1910.” This seemingly inscrutable epitaph is inscribed onto a brick-sized plaque on the eastern railing of the Larz Anderson Bridge, just down JFK St. The plaque commemorates one of the most notorious freshmen ever to grace Harvard’s campus. Alienated by Northern academic culture, consumed by memories of his Mississippi home, and still lusting after his sister Caddy, Compson was looking for a way out on June 2, 1910. After a day of wandering aimlessly in Boston, he tied a pair of tailor’s weights to his feet and jumped from a bridge to drown in the Charles River below.
Thankfully, this story is not fact, but fiction—taken from William Faulkner’s famous novel, The Sound and the Fury. There’s no proof that Faulkner even visited the campus before publishing the novel in 1929. But Faulkner fanatics have ensured that Compson will be remembered alongside other—albeit more visibly memorialized—Harvard figures such as Harry Widener.
Which fanatics did this, however, has been a difficult question to answer. In a 1985 article for The Washington Post, Dale Russakoff claimed to have discovered the original authors of the plaque: Stanley Stefancic and Tom Sugimoto, graduate students at Harvard in the mid-60s. Since then, the plaque has been stolen and replaced, with no clues as to the identity of the culprit.
That mystery may remain unsolved, especially since finding the plaque is enough of a challenge. Each semester, preceptor Thomas A. Underwood sends his Expository Writing 20, “Southern Writers Reconsidered,” students off on a quest: find the plaque and bring back proof. “You open up The Sound and the Fury,” Underwood says, “and what you find is quite off-putting.” Bribing his students to search for the plaque with the promise of cookies, Underwood has found a way to make Faulkner’s dense prose more real.
As the plethora of photographs of the plaque adorning Underwood’s office attests, many students rise to the challenge each year. This year, Dough E. Anderson ’07 and David J. Baron ’07 were two of only a handful of students to find the plaque. The two friends teamed up to search through the snowdrifts of early March, scouring both the Lars Andersen and the Weeks Footbridge before striking gold. Chocolate chip cookies, anyone?
