Faulkner at his Knottiest

(The Faulkner Project) Go Down, Moses from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 1-281 *****

I had an odd thought when I began this novel, the thirteenth in my survey of Faulkner’s work: This is the real Faulkner.  It’s a strange thing to say about a man who had already written four or five masterpieces, who was coming into a period where—as at no other time in his life—he would flounder in his writing and his life, deep in debt and having trouble making money.  I don’t know that I would put this book in the masterpiece category, though it includes his single best and most famous chunk of narrative, “The Bear.”  Yet I still think, having read it, that this is Faulkner at his most characteristic.

I’m not sure I’d read the whole book before.  I owned the Modern Library edition, perhaps inheriting it from my father’s collection.  But it has a forbidding beginning, a story[1] with the unlikely title “Was,” which opens with a sentence fragment, then two paragraphs that include no capitals and not much punctuation; runs on in stream of consciousness for a while, seems to assume we know the characters from long ago, though we have no idea who they are; goes on to tell an elaborate and unlikely tale about how one old confirmed bachelor was tricked into getting married: this is a story of Faulkner’s grotesques, with no concessions to the reader and what seems a willful wish to be difficult.

That story of being trapped into marriage echoes an earlier one in his work, just as the second story—about men being tricked into buying land by a fake buried treasure, planted by the seller—echoes a narrative from The Hamlet.  Faulkner is not easy or entertaining in these stories (though he has shown on various occasions that he could be both), but he is somehow fully Faulkner, brilliant and difficult and irascible.  You want to say, come on, man.  Give us some capital letters.  How about a few periods at the end of sentences.  And could you please introduce the characters just a little?

But this is also a work where, more than he has before, Faulkner begins to focus on race and the fact of slavery, how that cast a curse not only on the South but on the whole country, one that looks impossible to uproot; he even addresses, at least tangentially, the whole issue of white Europeans arriving on these shores at all, taking it over from Native Americans, “buying” land and destroying the wilderness, destroying a whole way of life, all to raise cotton (with slave labor) and get rich.

I won’t pretend I understand half of what’s going on in these pages, they’re so difficult and convoluted.  But the key figure seems to be the person introduced in that first sentence fragment (“Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike,’ past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated anymore, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one”) and the key work is “The Bear” a 107-page novella that sums up Faulkner’s vision of things better than any other.[2]

That narrative opens when McCaslin is ten years old and allowed to go on the yearly hunt with the older men for the first time, with such people as Major DeSpain and General Compson, members of families who are all through Faulkner’s work.  Isaac is already precocious at handling a gun; otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed at all.  His mentor in this endeavor is an old man named Sam Fathers, who is part Native American (sired, supposedly, by the great chief Ikkemotubbe, who sold the land to DeSpain) and part African American, who at one time lived in Jefferson but has moved to the wilderness full time, living there year round and joining the men from town for the hunt.  He takes Isaac into the wilderness and counsels him on how to handle himself, is present when the boy kills his first deer (and knew exactly where to await that deer), and initiates Isaac by painting his face with the deer’s blood, letting him know that, if he is going to be taking life, he has to be worthy of it.  It’s a primal scene, but not as primal as what follows.

The men go to the woods for two weeks every year to hunt bear and deer, but there is one legendary bear that they’ve been hunting for years, Old Ben, who’s not only larger than any other bear but far smarter.[3]  One reason he’s difficult to hunt is that the dogs, from past experience, cower from him and won’t “tree” the bear in preparation for killing him.  What the men need to find is a dog who isn’t afraid.  When they finally do find and train him, he becomes the personal companion of Boon Hoggenbeck, a big fearless man who is courageous beyond belief but not much in the brains department, and not too good with a rifle.  (He was once at point blank range of Old Ben and had five shots in his rifle.  Missed five times.)

That scene of finally chasing and killing the bear is one of the greatest in all of Faulkner.  The bear seems to represent the wilderness itself; when he dies, Sam Fathers does too, fittingly.  Sam would have wanted to die when the bear died.  The slightly puzzling thing is that this climactic scene happens in the middle of the story, and we can’t imagine what the next fifty pages are for.  They’re devoted to a discussion (rather like that in the second half of Absalom, Absalom!) about the whole issue of race and what to do about it, between Isaac McCaslin at the age of 21 and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, who is somewhat older.  That section is Faulkner at his most rhetorical, going on and on about glory and honor and pride but not making a whole lot of sense, at least not to me.  Faulkner as a descriptive writer of landscapes and physical action is brilliant almost beyond belief, he’s probably the best dialogue writer in all of American literature, but as a thinker he’s just average, though he summons all the rhetorical devices he has.  The problem, obviously, is that freeing people from slavery isn’t enough.  How do you really give them equality?  My vague—and I mean very vague—impression is that both of these cousins are on the right side of this issue, but Isaac is the more progressive, more willing to give up what he has in order to promote equality.

That is why, I have to say, I was deeply disappointed by Uncle Ike in “Delta Autumn,” a story in which he is in his late seventies and is going on the hunt with the descendants of the men he had once hunted with.  Now, instead of the thirty miles they once had to travel to find wilderness, they have to travel 200, and go by railroad, which cuts right through an area that was once primal wilderness.  The men on the hunt seem no match for their ancestors, but that may be just through the eyes of Uncle Ike, who was seeing the older generation when he was ten and is seeing these men when they’re comparatively young.  One of them—Roth Edmonds—has been sneaking off from the hunt to meet a woman (something that would have been unthinkable in the old days; the whole point was to get away from women); now, in this story, we find out that she is African American, and descended from the Beauchamp family that has been the most prominent of the black families in Faulkner, including Lucas Beauchamp, who will be the protagonist of Intruder in the Dust.

I’m afraid, in this situation, the wise old saintly Uncle Ike comes across more as a sputtering old man who people see as a wisdom figure but who also—understandably—goes on and on about how much better things were in the old days, talking about glory and honor and courage and pride and sacrifice, all the words that begin to ring hollow when you use them too many times.[4]  He’s disgusted when he realizes that Roth Edmonds has been sneaking off to see a woman, and is leaving money to pay her off.  But he’s practically speechless when he discovers she’s African American (and uses the n-word one time too many for this reader).  I’m sure that is an accurate portrayal of an elderly white Southerner in 1942, when this novel was published.  But it still disappointed me, in a way I’d never been disappointed by a Faulkner character.  And I was glad when the woman pointedly stood up to him, saying, “Old man, have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don’t remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?”  That is indeed the question.

There is a vision in this book of what this country might have been if it hadn’t been ruined by greed almost as soon as the white settlers got here.  There’s a vision that wilderness is not only beautiful and restorative but necessary to humankind; without it we become less human.  I found this an exasperating and difficult book to read, but if there is one book I will reread, once I am finished with my survey of Faulkner, this is it.  It’s difficult and exasperating because that’s the way Faulkner is.  But he’s worth it.

[1] The first edition of this book was titled Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, somewhat to Faulkner’s surprise, because he believed he had woven it into a single narrative, as the did The Unvanquished.  But every chapter reads like a self-contained story, and there’s a kind of repetition that wouldn’t be present in a novel.

[2] To Zen Buddhists I would say, “The Bear” is to Faulkner’s oeuvre what the Genjokoan is to the Shobogenzo: if you understand this, you understand everything.  But good luck at understanding this.

[3] I read online that this is supposed to be one of the last grizzlies that inhabited that part of the country.  I don’t know how the online commentator knows that; Faulkner never uses the word grizzly.  But this bear acts like no black bear I’ve ever encountered.

[4] They sound fine in a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, not so good in a work of fiction.