On Writing, Page 3

  It is characteristic of Lawrence that in describing the relationship between the two women, March and Banford, which is outwardly unconventional, he is stating perfectly clearly within his story’s terms the conventional separation at work in the two halves of the personality—the conscious and the unconscious, or the will and the passive susceptibility, what is “ready” and what is submerged. March and Banford may well be the two halves of one woman, of woman herself in the presence of the male will. Lawrence prosecutes his case with the persistence of a lawyer, with the mowing down of any dissent that the prophet is allowed to practice. But what moves, convinces, persuades us, all the same, is, so to speak, the odor of the fox—for the senses, the poetic world that lies far deeper than these shafts of argument or preaching really go, work Lawrence’s spell.

  For Virginia Woolf in her stories the senses mattered extremely, as we know; toward sex she was a critic. But the beauty and the innovation of her writing are both due to the fact, it seems to this reader, that the imprisonment of life in the word was with her a concern of the intellect as much as it was with the senses. She uses her senses intellectually, while Lawrence, if this is not too easy to say, uses his intellect sensually. While Chekhov patiently builds up character, Lawrence furiously breaks down character. It doesn’t need fiction writers to tell us that opposite things are very often done in getting at the truth. But it was Lawrence who was like the True Princess, who felt that beneath forty featherbeds there was a pea. Lawrence was as sensitive to falsity as the True Princess was to the pea, and he was just as sure to proclaim the injury. He quarrels with us terribly, of course, because it matters to him, in getting his story to the way he wants it, to quarrel.

  Those who write with cruelty, and Lawrence is one, may not be lacking in compassion but stand in need to write in exorcisement. Chekhov was exorcising nothing, he simply showed it forth. He does not perhaps put his own feelings above life. Lawrence in his stories protests the world, and at the same time he gives the world an almost unbearable wonder and beauty.

  His stories may at times remind you of some kind of tropical birds, that are in structure all but awkward—for what is symbolic has a very hard time if it must be at all on the ground; but then when they take wing, as they do, the miracle occurs. For Lawrence is an artist: his birds fly. Outrageousness itself is put to use, along with all that is felicitous. The bird in its flight is in superb command, our eyes are almost put out by iridescence. The phoenix really was his bird.

  So much for “The Fox.” “The Bear” begins:

  There was a man and a dog too this time. Two beasts, counting Old Ben the bear, and two men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which ran in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it and in only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion was taintless and incorruptible.

  And we’re in a different world. There is a world outside, which we’re expected to be acquainted with in its several stratifications, to which our inner world communicates and to which it answers. The blood in this story may not be conscious or unconscious, but it can be tainted—that is, it can be considered in its relation to action, to opinion, to life going on outside. Blood can be plebeian, mongrel, taintless, incorruptible in one sentence of William Faulkner’s, whereas in all of Lawrence it is one thing, the abode of the unconscious.

  You will remember that this is a hunting story. A boy has known always of a great bear in the hunting country he was born into; encounters the bear after his initiation into the wilderness, and does not kill him; but at last, years later, with a beast that is trained to be his match (the mongrel, Lion), the fatal encounter takes place, and bear, dog and old pure-blooded Indian all die of it.

  We see at once as we read that this narrative has the quality of happening, and the blood of inheriting; the story indeed has signs of having so much to do with the outer world that it can happen, and has happened, more than once. In one respect, this story is a sample of that happening which is continuous, indigenous to the time and the place and the human element in and through which it happens.

  Ike McCaslin, in whose experience at various stages we are told the story, realized later that it had begun long before that. It had already begun on that day when he first wrote his age in two ciphers and his cousin McCaslin brought him for the first time to the camp, the big woods, to earn for himself from the wilderness the name and state of hunter provided he in his turn were humble and enduring enough.

  Humble and enduring—qualities that apply to our relationship with the world.

  He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area of almost a hundred square miles had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man—the long legend of corncribs broken down and rifled, of shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured, and traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and shotgun and even rifle shots delivered at pointblank range yet with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a child—a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before the boy was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape. It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he ever saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big, too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it, for the men and the bullets they fired into it; too big for the very country which was its constricting scope.

  See the outer edges of this bear becoming abstract—but this bear is not the fox. “It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet …”

  For this bear belongs to the world, the world of experience:

  that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old, dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old, wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;—the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam, reft of his old wife, and outliving all his sons.

  Experience in the world is the very thread this story is put together with. Here is the footprint:

  Then, standing beside Sam in the thick great gloom of ancient wood and the winter’s dying afternoon, he looked quietly down at the rotted log scored and gutted with claw marks and, in the wet earth beside it, the print of the enormous warped two-toed foot … For the first time he realized that the bear which had run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before he could remember, and which therefore must have existed in the listening and the dreams of his cousin and Major de Spain and even old General Compson before they began to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal and that they had departed for the camp each November with no actual intention of slaying it, not because it could not be slain but because so far they had no actual hope of being able to.

  Faulkner achieves the startling reality and nearness of the outside world by alternately dilating reality to the reach of abstraction and bringing it home with a footprint. It is reality that not only is, but looms—and this not just one time to one character, but over and over, with an insistent quality.

  There are several encounters between Ike McCaslin and the bear. The final one is a death struggle when the bear is

  on its hind feet, its back against a tree while the bellowing hounds swirled around it and once more Lion [the mongrel dog that is his match] drove in, leaping clear of the ground. This time the bear didn’t strike him down. It caught the dog in both arms
, almost loverlike, and they both went down.

  There is a terrible fight, Lion clings to the bear’s throat and the bear tears at Lion’s body and wounds him mortally, but Lion will not let go. Boon, Lion’s trainer who loves him, when Lion is clawed, runs toward them, a knife in his hand. He flings himself astride the bear and the knife falls.

  It fell just once … The bear then surged erect, raising with it the man and the dog too, and turned and still carrying the man and the dog it took two or three steps towards the woods on its hind feet as a man would have walked and crashed down. It didn’t collapse, crumple. It fell all of a piece, as a tree falls, so that all three of them, man, dog and bear, seemed to bounce once.

  The bear and the dog die of this, and so does Sam Fathers, the Indian, who is found lying motionless face down in the trampled mud when it’s all over: not a mark on him, “he just quit.” The bodies of the bear and Sam, open-eyed, teeth bared, brown—childless, kinless, peopleless—are stretched out alike.

  “The Bear” ends with the death of three and a falling tree, as, you remember, “The Fox” ended—if you count the life-in-death of March and Henry as one death shared. The tree in Faulkner’s story, along with the dying bear and his burden of victim and killer, is a wilderness falling. The fox is a denizen of the inner world, purely. The bear is, equally purely, of the outer world—not simply the material, three-dimensional outer world, which is good enough, but the measureless outer world of experience, the knowing and sentient past, the wisdom of Time and Place. Both bear and fox are vanquished by acts of the destructive will of man’s aggression. But Faulkner’s battles, taking place in an ever-present physical territory which now and again is also some projected country of the spirit, are conscious battles. Faulkner deals with such aspects of the human being as dignity and glory and corruptibility and incorruptibility and ridicule and defeat and pride and endurance—especially endurance, a word that might as well be in Cherokee to Lawrence. Lawrence’s battles are won and lost in the “blood consciousness.” It’s as if the two worlds of Faulkner and Lawrence were, here, the inside-out of each other.

  Faulkner seems to me, rather than an intuitive writer, a divining one. And his stories seem to race with time, race with the world, in an indirect ratio, perhaps, to the length of his sentences. The sixteen-thousand-word sentence in “The Bear” races like a dinosaur across the early fields of time. It runs along with a strange quality of seeming all to happen at once. It makes us realize once again that prose is a structure in its every part, that the imagination is engineered when we write. A sentence may be in as perfect control as a church or a bridge.

  “The Bear” is an apocalyptic story of the end of the wilderness. It ends with the senseless clang on clang of a man idiotically pounding pieces of his broken gun together while in the isolated gum tree over his head forty or fifty squirrels are running frantically round and round. It signifies, for one thing, the arrival of the machine age and the squealing treadmill. This story encompasses past and future, all the past of the land from Indian times on to now. It has towering heroic figures, wilderness figures, symbolic figures; and through the hunter—whom we see in the present, in boyhood, the past, the future, in ancestry (in the ledgers and memories and paraphernalia of the place)—we are aware in every happening of its power to happen again, over and over; we are aware of the whole world of the wilderness, the whole history of Mississippi.

  For in “The Bear,” the structure of time is constantly in danger of being ripped away, torn down by the author; the whole time bulges, tries to get into the present-time of the story. This dilation in time sense and intractability in space sense, the whole surface of the story, has of itself a kind of looming quality, a portentousness. Like the skin of a balloon, time and space are stretched to hold more and more, while the story still holds it as long as it can, and in both form and function it dangerously increases.

  And in Part Four of this long story the flimsy partition that keeps the story-time apart from whole time is allowed to fly away entirely. So the entire history of the land and a people crowds into a chapter whose expansion, in sentence and paragraph, is almost outrageous to the eye alone. Time and space have been too well invoked, and they tear through the story running backward and forward, up and down and around, like a pack of beasts themselves out of the world’s wilderness. And this is the beauty of the story. Its self-destruction, self-immolation, is the way the story transcends all it might have been had it stayed intact and properly nailed together. There is its wonder.

  Of course, such transcending might belong to some subjects and to other subjects it would bring foolishness. In the case of “The Bear” we can assume that to Faulkner the escapement of wild time and place seemed one attribute of the thing he was writing about—the lost attribute, implicit in it, and supplied now, in his story. In letting time and place out of the box he was not, by any standards but our ordinary ones, being reckless. By his own, he was being true, faithful to his composition of the story at hand. There is no other integrity.

  —

  We’ve observed how a story’s great emphasis may fall on any of the things that make it up—on character, on plot, on its physical or moral world, in sensory or symbolic form. Now we may venture to say that it’s this ordering of his story that is closest to the writer behind the writing, and that it’s our perception of this ordering that gives us our nearest understanding of him.

  And we have observed that the finest story writers seem to be in one sense obstructionists. As if they held back their own best interests—or what would be in another writer their best interests. It’s a strange thing. And what is stranger is that if we look for the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer, how often do we not find that it seems to be connected with this very obstruction.

  The fact is, apparently, that in pressing to our source of pleasure we have entered into another world. We are speaking of beauty. And beauty is not a blatant or promiscuous or obvious quality; indeed, it is associated with reticence, with stubbornness, of a number of kinds. It arises somehow from a desire not to comply with what may be expected, but to act inevitably, as long as some human truth is in sight, whatever that inevitability may call for. Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

  Two qualities that cannot be imitated in this life, beauty and sensitivity, may in fiction’s making be related to each other. But, reading and writing, we can only strive for one. Sensitivity in ourselves. And then beauty we may know, when we see it.

  I think it ought to be said that a fiction writer can try anything. He has tried a great deal, but presumably not everything. The possibilities are endless because the stirring of the imagination never rests, and because we can never stop trying to make feeling felt.

  So we know what will most pertinently describe the writing of our future too. Not rules, not esthetics, not problems and their solutions: not rules so long as there is imagination; not esthetics until after there is passion; not even problems that will always rise again and again for the honest writer. For at the other end of the writing is the reader. There is sure to be somewhere the reader, who is a user himself of imagination and thought, who knows, perhaps, as much about the need of communication as the writer.

  Reader and writer, we wish each other well. Don’t we want and don’t we understand the same thing? A story of beauty and passion, some fresh approximation of human truth?

  1949

  WRITING AND ANALYZING

  A STORY

  Writers are often asked to give their own analysis of some story they have published. I never saw, as reader or writer, that a finished story stood in need of any more from the author: for better or worse, there the story is. There is also the question of whether or not the author could provide the sort of analysis asked for. Story writing and critical analysis are indeed separate gifts, like spelling and playing the flute, and the same writer proficient in both ha
s been doubly endowed. But even he can’t rise and do both at the same time.

  To me as a story writer, generalizations about writing come tardily and uneasily, and I would limit them, if I were wise, by saying that any conclusions I feel confidence in are stuck to the particular story, part of the animal. The most trustworthy lesson I’ve learned from work so far is the simple one that the writing of each story is sure to open up a different prospect and pose a new problem; and that no past story bears recognizably on a new one or gives any promise of help, even if the writing mind had room for help and the wish that it would come. Help offered from outside the frame of the story would be itself an intrusion.

  It’s hard for me to believe that a writer’s stories, taken in their whole, are written in any typical, predictable, systematically developing, or even chronological way—for all that a serious writer’s stories are ultimately, to any reader, so clearly identifiable as his. Each story, it seems to me, thrives in the course of being written only as long as it seems to have a life of its own.

  Yet it may become clear to a writer in retrospect (or so it did to me, although I may have been simply tardy to see it) that his stories have repeated themselves in shadowy ways, that they have returned and may return in future too—in variations—to certain themes. They may be following, in their own development, some pattern that’s been very early laid down. Of course, such a pattern is subjective in nature; it may lie too deep to be consciously recognized until a cycle of stories and the actions of time have raised it to view. All the same, it is a pattern of which a new story is not another copy but a fresh attempt made in its own full-bodied right and out of its own impulse, with its own pressure, and its own needs of fulfillment.

  It seems likely that all of one writer’s stories do tend to spring from the same source within him. However they differ in theme or approach, however they vary in mood or fluctuate in their strength, their power to reach the mind or heart, all of one writer’s stories carry their signature because of the one impulse most characteristic of his own gift—to praise, to love, to call up into view. But then, what countless stories by what countless authors share a common source! For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.