When Virginia Faulkner published her first novel, Friends and Romans, she was 21 and managed to sound like 41. Or 37, to be more precise. Faulkner narrates this wise-cracking romance through the voice of Marie Manfred, just past 37 and taking a hiatus from her busy career as the world’s greatest concert pianist. To get away from the world, her manager finds a villa in the Alban Hills outside of Rome. She is also trying to get away from the publicity generated by a tell-all biography, Gaudy Calliope, written by a former lover. The Romans she encounters are all confused by the book’s title: they all associate it with the muse of poetry, when it’s actually a jab at her piano-playing style, suggesting it’s akin to a bunch of steam-powered locomotive whistles.
Lunch with another acquaintance, the Principessa Colosini, leads to an introduction to the Principessa’s younger brother, the dashing and devastatingly handsome Don Ricardo dei Retti. Sparks fly. Animal magnetism takes its effect. He whisks Marie off to a quiet dinner in his discreet seaside villa. Unfortunately, on her way back, Marie discovers that Don Ricardo is more than vaguely connected with Mussolini: he is, in fact, on the hit list of the still-active Fascist resistance movement. They would, so to speak, like to put him at #1 with a bullet.
Danger, however, only adds to Don Ricardo’s allure. A week or two of entanglements, interrupted by periodic calls to vague affairs of government (eventually explained when it’s revealed that Don Ricardo is, in fact, Mussolini’s chief of intelligence), ensues. Marie is convinced that this is the man worth abandoning her career for. Only to run into the very chauvinistic side of Italian raffinatezza: as … come se dice? … a woman with una storia, Marie would be perfect as a mistress. As a wife … eh, non così tanto. As Marie tells herself early in the book, “Most men regard women as the hunter regards the game — precious and exciting during the chase, but after the kill one begins to look for blemishes in the pelt.”
Less than a year after publishing Friends and Romans, Faulkner followed with a second novel, The Barbarians (1935) — but a comparison of the two books suggests that Barbarians was probably the first to be written. There are numerous references to “the Barbarians” — a loose-knit collection of artists and musicians in Paris — throughout Friends and Romans and Marie and Tavo are prominent characters in the book. I shall have to read and report back soon.
At the time she wrote the two books, the sum total of Faulkner’s international experience was a year at Miss Moxley’s finishing school in Rome and a bit of time in London, Paris, and the Riviera after that. Yet she managed to come off as sophisticated and worldly wise as one of the queens of the international set, Daisy Fellowes (and a far better writer). No wonder she was soon writing for America’s poshest magazine, Town and Country, and trading quips at the Algonquin Round Table not long after. A rival to Dorothy Parker, she left her mark on Broadway and in Hollywood as well, but unlike Parker, she pulled herself out of a downward spiral somewhere in the early 1950s and returned home to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she became a key member of the staff of Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press. She died in September 1980 while watching Monday Night Football. Definitely a life overdue for recognition.