Queer Places:
146 MacDougal St, New York, NY 10012
502 Central St, Greenville, MS 38701
Greenville Cemetery
Greenville, Washington County, Mississippi, USA
Benjamin F. Wasson, Jr., was born November 17, 1899, to B. F. Wasson (born
1868) and Rebeka Oliver
(born 1875) in Greenville, Mississippi. He attended the
University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, Mississippi, where he met
William Faulkner. Their shared
interest in art and literature made them friends. Ben Wasson knew
William Alexander Percy and even introduced Faulkner to him
in 1921. Wasson, Faulkner, and Judge
Lucy Somerville Howorth were instrumental in founding the dramatic society at
Ole Miss. Ben Wasson, who would prove to be one of Faulkner’s few lifelong
friends, was a homosexual, though he was not the only homosexual on the campus
at Ole Miss in the late 1910s. He was simply the one whom Faulkner chose to
court.
Wasson is best known as Faulkner’s literary agent, friend, and sounding
board. In a 1977 interview in Greenville with Ben Wasson and his sister Mary
Wilkinson by Mississippi writer Charlotte Capers, Capers states that Wasson
was a novelist, critic, and dramatist, and friend to many Mississippi writers.
Wasson wrote a regular arts column for the Greenville Delta
Democrat-Times.
Wasson graduated with his law degree in 1921 and moved home to Greenville,
but he often returned to Oxford, to visit Faulkner. In 1927 Wasson decided to
give up practicing law in Greenville to move to New York to try his hand as an
author and literary agent. Describing his first apartment on MacDougal Street
across from the Provincetown Theatre, Wasson brags in his memoir, “I thought
when I became an occupant of that room that I had become a genuine Greenwich
Villager. When Bill [Faulkner] first saw it, he remarked, Ah, the Bohemian
life!’”. Wasson’s family was less thrilled. He recalls, “My mother and father
and my sister Mary Wilkinson and her husband were outraged that I lived in
that house and neighborhood. Mary wept and called the room disgusting”. Wasson
leaves the reasons for their objections unclear except to emphasize the
proximity of his apartment to Washington Square, the heart of Greenwich
Village. In the coded language of his memoir, Wasson is advertising that he
lived in the gay epicenter of New York, near Washington Square and not simply
on the fringes of the Village in some out-of-the-way alley.
Wasson’s first effort as a literary agent occurred when Wasson was living
in New York and a poor Faulkner sent him the manuscript for Flags in the
Dust. At the time Wasson was writing his own novel, The Devil Beats
his Wife, but he took the time to take Faulkner’s manuscript to various
publishers. Faulkner himself traveled to New York to see Wasson. In the end,
Wasson’s own publisher, Harcourt, Brace and Harrison Smith, agreed to publish
Faulkner’s novel if Wasson would edit it, which he did for $50. Faulkner was
paid $300 for the manuscript, which, according to Wasson, was then stolen, so
they had to ask the publisher for more money to get Faulkner home. The novel
was eventually published as Sartoris.
In 1930 in the first year of William Faulkner's marriage, he needed a more
immediate marketing strategy to hype his novel and, hopefully, reap some
monetary reward. His agent in New York, Ben Wasson, found the perfect platform
for a large audience of potential readers in the weekly radio show of the
famous critic and member of the Algonquin Round Table,
Alexander Woollcott. Ben Wasson’s
tenure as Faulkner’s agent had no single original moment, but rather evolved
over time. As early as 1924, Wasson assisted in promoting The Marble Faun by
writing to the Billy Levere Memorial Sigma Alpha Epsilon House in Evanston,
Illinois, to include it in the SAE published record of alumni accomplishments.
He also sent along Faulkner’s picture, which he had convinced Faulkner to have
taken in Greenville on 29 March, by Willa Johnston, whom Wasson identified in
an interview as a lesbian. Wasson had previously introduced Faulkner to
William Alexander Percy in Greenville as well.
In Harlem in 1932 William Faulkner with Ben Wasson visited a drag bar along
with Carl Van Vechten and his
boyfriend. They went to see Gladys
Bentley perform.
Wasson went to Hollywood in 1933 as a movie agent, but he returned to New
York in 1938 again to be a literary agent. In the late 1940’s, he moved back
to Greenville, Mississippi, where he became literary and arts editor for the
Delta Democrat Times.
Wasson and Faulkner had a several-decades-long friendship, though Wasson
outlived Faulkner by almost twenty years. Wasson died on May 10, 1982, before
his book, Count No’Count: Flashbacks to Faulkner, was published in 1983.
The final preparation for the publication of his memoir about Faulkner (or
flashbacks as Wasson calls them) about Faulkner was approved by his sister,
Mary Wasson Wilkington.
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