BRODSKY'S FAULKNER COLLECTION DEDICATED

A collection that could draw scholars from all over the world to Cape Girardeau was formally dedicated at Kent Library on the Southeast Missouri State University campus Tuesday night.

About 100 people, some from as far away as St. Louis, heard Louis Daniel Brodsky talk about how he came to collect one of the four largest collections of books, manuscripts, photographs and memorabilia by and about the Nobel-Prize-winning fiction writer William Faulkner.

Brodsky, a poet and factory manager who lives in Farmington, talked about how his collection began in the 1960s when he was a student at Yale with 200 books.

After graduating from Yale and earning graduate degrees from Washington University and San Francisco State University, Brodsky came to Farmington to manage a clothing factory his father owned.

Brodsky told of how his "consuming goal" has always been to be as fine a writer as Faulkner, and that drove him to make contact with the people who could supply him with the materials. Using a biography of Faulkner as his road map, Brodsky traced down people who were close to the Mississippi writer. He would get to know them and buy their memorabilia.

Brodsky said his success came as a result of persistence and lucky timing. When he read that Faulkner's high school sweetheart was in New Jersey, he went there, looked through all kinds of public records, and after two years traced her to West Virginia. She was elderly and her children weren't interested in her Faulkner materials.

Like others who were close to Faulkner, she seemed grateful that someone was interested and wanted to keep them together, Brodsky said.

His search for materials led him to "realize that Faulkner was not just a great writer, he was a human being," Brodsky said.

A lucky coincidence brought the collection to Southeast Missouri State.

In 1978, English professor Robert Hamblin, a Faulkner scholar himself, taught Bob Benham, a Farmington High School teacher, in a night class. Benham knew Brodsky and told Hamblin of the collection, Hamblin said.

Brodsky and Hamblin collaborated on cataloguing the collection, but their collaboration alone was not enough to bring the collection to Cape Girardeau permanently.

Brodsky said he offered the collection to Yale, but the university would not pay him for it nor allow him to have a say in how it would be handled.

His reception at Southeast Missouri was much friendlier, he said. Brodsky is now curator of the collection.

Fred Goodwin, dean of the College of Humanities until 1988, said the collaboration of Hamblin and Brodsky was one of four major pieces of scholarship that took place on the Southeast campus in the 1970s. Others were the cataloguing of the complete works of the 18th-century composer Michael Haydn, the discovery of manuscripts of 19th-century German sacred music and the subsequent performances, and the discovery of ancient Egyptian artifacts in Malden.

Goodwin said all four demonstrate his belief that "research in the arts is worth a life of dedication."

Susan Swartwout, who teaches creative writing at Southeast Missouri State, said the collection will be invaluable for her students so they can see the process a great writer went thorough in "something as crucial as word choice."