Spoade I

There are two Spoades in the novel, father and son, both of whom attend Harvard. This is the father, who according to Charles Mallison "had been at Harvard back in 1909 with Uncle Gavin" (229). In The Sound and the Fury, 1909 is also when Quentin Compson enrolled at Harvard, and in that novel Quentin knows a young man named Spoade who, like the pair in this novel, also came from South Carolina. This raises the intriguing possibility that Quentin Compson and Gavin Stevens were at Harvard at the same time, but The Mansion says nothing more to confirm - or refute - this possibility.