M&D: Cowart article/ch.35

[Michael Crowley]

> Seems to be an ALMOST father/son relationship. Ives sends  'Mer bank
> drafts, doesn't it say early in the book?

J Wade is the uncle who sends Ethelmer "bank-drafts on whims inscrutable"
and takes him along to visit the stables (31), thus making it hard for
'Thelmer to reconcile this generosity with the family stories of Wade's
arms trading before the war.

DePugh is definitely Ives's son, made clear when he first appears: "DePugh
is the son of Ives LeSpark, like Ethelmer home on a Visit from School"
(96).  The likeness here seems to be that they're both home on visits, not
that they're both Ives's sons, though that's a possibility.  As I
mentioned before, p. 350 seems to indicate Ethelmer is Ives's son, but on
both 217 and 263, Ethelmer refers to Ives as "Nunk."  It seems unlikely to
me that Ethelmer is Lomax's son and I don't recall any evidence supporting
Lomax.Maybe Ethelmer

The narrator comments on p.30, "Ethelmer smiles and pollicates the Revd,
and less certainly Mr. LeSpark, his own Uncle, as if to say[...]"
I guess "his own" marks the constrast between Wicks (to whom he's not
really even a nephew-in-law) and Wade (who is the brother of whomever his
father might be--Ives, Lomax, somebody else?).  Which eliminates my next
guess, that Ethelmer was like the Robert Duvall character in the
Godfather, taken in by the LeSparks and made part of the family...

I'm just going to assume that Ethelmer is Ives's son and calls him Nunk
for fun and that Ives, in a manner typical of lawyers, has hedged his
political bets by sending one son to school at Cambridge, on at Princeton.
Although I have to admit, it kind of pisses me off to have read the book
several times and still not be sure.

Mike Crowley
------------
crowley at arches.uga.edu