Faulkner's Happy Hunting Ground

...It seems a good deal more at home here among the hunting stories, incidentally, than it did among the misfortunes of Temple Drake...

...In the third and most famous version (which made up the major portion of Faulkner's loosely organized novel, Go Down, Moses), two themes were hound together: the injustice of the white to the Negro, and the positive virtues of living and hunting in the big woods...

...Red Leaves" in its original form is a hunting story in its own right, the story of a Negro slave who is being hunted so that his corpse may accompany that of his master, the Chickasaw chief, on his journey to the happy hunting ground...

...A new protagonist (but still a 12-year-old boy) is tutored by a new guardian, Mister Ernest, who like Cas Edmonds and Gavin Stevens is raising a young boy not his son...

...The Old People" contains Faulkner's second thoughts about the significance of the Yokna-patawpha Chickasaws...

...It is entirely different from the real world where, as Yeats put it, "Things fall apart, the center will not hold," and "anarchy is loosed upon the world...

...have a chance to kill their quarry but purposely do not...

...In the following passage, again from "The Bear," young Ike McCaslin has returned a year later to pay tribute at Sam Fathers's tomb: "summer, and fall, and snow, and wet and saprife spring in their ordered immortal sequence, the deathless and immemorial phases of the mother who had shaped him if any had toward the man he almost was, mother and father both to the old man born of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw chief who had been his spirit's father if any had, whom he revered and harkened to and loved and lost and grieved: and he would marry some day and they too would own for their brief while that brief unsubstanced glory which inherently of itself cannot last and hence why glory: and they would, might, carry even the remembrance of it into the time when flesh no longer talks to flesh because memory at least does last: but still the woods would be his mistress and his wife...

...bigger than Major DeSpain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better...

...the intangible cosmos whose creatures act according to ruling principles that control their destiny...

...appeared in Harper's magazine in 1934 and developed an incident through the point of view of the man for whom the story is named...

...When Absalom, Absalom...

...The story serves the same function in both books...

...The Old People," the second story in Big Woods, is the story of Ike's first deer...

...Perhaps Faulkner's intention in making this change is to de-emphasize the role of the individual will in the hunting "mystique," or perhaps he simply likes the full-blown rhetoric of the later version better...

...Luke Provine in the original becomes Luke Hogganbeck, who is identified as one of the children of the Boon Hogganbeck we meet in "The Bear" and "The Old People...

...Shoot quick and shoot slow': and the gun leveled rapidly without haste and crashed" becomes "Sam said, 'Now...

...Faulkner follows the story line but does not attempt to give the original story...

...The passage is picked up word for word from one of the prose interludes of Requiem for a Nun (1951...

...here it follows it...

...The next interlude is from Faulkner's article in Holiday (April 1954) on his native state...

...Sam Fathers, like all of Faulkner's Indians, has a special symbolic function...

...The third of Faulkner's three most recent works, Big Woods, "The Hunting Stories of William Faulkner," has largely been ignored, although it, too, presents a puzzle that could benefit from exegesis...

...Both "Lion" and the Post "Bear" emphasize the wilderness theme and ignore the racial theme that is so important in Go Down, Moses...

...Perhaps the reason for the lack of critical interest in Big Woods is that it is a collection of previously published material...

...older even than old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who knew better in his turn...

...Some of Faulkner's best stories have appeared in two or three versions...

...As another example, "Spotted Horses" first appeared in Scribner's magazine in 1931...

...For six years now he had heard the best of all talking...

...Originally it preceded "The Bear...

...The first story in the book is a version of "The Bear," the fourth version to appear in print...

...In a way, Big Woods is an expansion of a major theme of earlier books, just as Intruder in the Dust is an outgrowth of the theme of white injustice to the Negro that was developed in Go Down, Moses and in earlier stories...

...By leaving out the long fourth section of the story that appeared in Go Down, Moses (which is chiefly concerned with the relationship between the white and black descendants of Carothers McCaslin), Faulkner can concentrate on the other theme—the virtues of living in a way that is in accord with the creatures of the wilderness—which is the unifying principle of the present book...

...By extension, Faulkner makes the strong emotional point that Negroes and whites in the South are tightly bound in a common heritage...

...twenty years later, Faulkner is more time-conscious and writes "Major DeSpain (not the old one: he was dead...

...Rig Woods, for its author, obviously has a special stature as an act of homage to his ideal world—the wilderness—and his ideal people?the Indians and hunters who find in the wilderness not just their homeland but a revelation of life...

...Some of the passages in "Race at Morning" are funny in a way that is reminiscent of The Hamlet, but it is a thin story and it gains nothing from the inevitable comparison with the earlier masterpiece...

...In modifying it to serve as a transition between two other stories, Faulkner has also taken the opportunity to clear up discrepancies between the dynastic line of the Chickasaw Indians he first wrote about in 1930 and that of the same Indians in "The Old People...

...Another familiar figure from "The Bear," old Major De Spain, is one of the characters in the 1934 version of the story...

...mother, father, mistress and wife...

...Presumably, the impersonal narrator of the original version is replaced because the device of having the story told by an adolescent boy is more in keeping with the other stories in the volume...

...they would give him his paw back even, certainly they would give him his paw back: then the long challenge and the long chase, no heart to be driven and outraged, no flesh to be mauled and bled...

...It was not unpublished, though...

...presumably Quentin becomes the narrator rather than Ike McCaslin because Faulkner wants to place the time in the 20th century rather than in the period immediately after the Civil War...

...Faulkner's Big Woods may be unsatisfactory as a new creation, but as a ritual celebration, an act of veneration for an ideal, it needs no apology...

...Big Woods is not a new work growing out of the earlier hunting stories...

...it had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in March 1955...

...There is a change in technique as well as subject: In the present version, Ike McCaslin tells his story in the first person...

...In 1931, Sam Fathers was a half-Negro, half-Indian retainer on the Compson plantation and had not achieved his later dignity...

...Faulkner's Happy Hunting Ground By Roderick Craib Author, "Our Yesterdays" In the present resurgence of literary interest in William Faulkner, a good deal of attention has been paid to the obscurities in his play, Requiem for a Nun, and novel, A Fable...

...Like "A Justice" and like "Lion," it is narrated by Quentin Compson (in this version: in the original it is told by a nameless storyteller who speaks for the whole community and is a Yoknapatawphau hard of the sort Faulkner later experimented with in The Humlet...

...The quotation has an unhappy relevance since the appearance of Big Woods, which bears many resemblances to Cowley's excellent gallery of Faulkner's work and because of its anthological approach inevitably suggests that its author is at last "all written out...

...In the decade between the publication of "A Justice" and "The Old People," Faulkner's thinking about the Indian role in Yoknapatawpha history has solidified, and the story of Doom's winning the chieftainship is revised accordingly...

...it was reworked to expand the story of the Snopeses when it appeared in book form in 1940 in The Hamlet...

...This was his son, a banker, called Major in memory of his father and the rank and title which his father had earned and bore valiantly by 1865...

...If, as Robert Graves has asserted, the true business of the poet is to celebrate his goddess, Faulkner here is engaged in the business of the true poet...

...It may be that Faulkner had Big Woods in mind when he wrote the Holiday piece...

...older than old Thomas Sutpen of whom Major DeSpain had had it and who knew better...

...John Hutchens, interviewing Faulkner for the New York Herald Tribune in 1948, asked him what he thought of Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner and was told that Faulkner "especially liked it, though he regretted it in a way...

...It is little changed from the original...

...He is a natural man, attuned to the wilderness, and consequently the true leader in the big woods...

...Wash," for example...

...In an obvious way, this is still another version of "The Bear...

...The material in "The Old People" about Doom, the chief from whose blood line Sam Fathers is descended, is itself a retelling of a story Faulkner first told in "A Justice" in These 13...

...Much of the material of the original story is not pertinent to the hunting theme and is eliminated...

...This cyclic theory is a good introduction to "Race at Morning," the only story in Big Woods not previously collected in book form...

...He makes a number of changes here...

...The opening passage is one of Faulkner's rhetorical marvels, a single-sentence, five-page introduction to the early history of the Mississippi hunting grounds...

...The hunt this time is for a deer rather than a bear, but the theme is familiar—the hunters, boy and man...

...In the new form of the story, all reference to the Negro McCaslin girl with whom Roth has fallen in love is carefully removed...

...it makes explicit Sam Fathers's relationship to the wilderness...

...The wilderness then, the big woods, is the great good place, the happy hunting ground, the best talking and the best listening...

...Faulkner seems at last to have accomplished what he set out to do and didn't quite achieve in the earlier versions...

...The story is little changed from its first appearance (Co Down, Moses, 1942) except in punctuation and position...

...To a communicant of his mysteries, there will be nothing redundant in Big Woods...

...It is a comic story, originally told by Sam Fathers to Quentin Compson...

...There are other changes in the details of the story...

...The book contains four hunting stories, introduced and strung together by passages from other writings...

...The "Red Leaves" material introduced an Indian dream world, a happy hunting ground where honor was a cohering force in an uncivilized society...

...It is not simply a reprint, though...

...the animal exists at the end of the story as a promise that hunting as a way of life, a cult, will endure...

...At any rate, the article makes the point that the old hunter, the wilderness, and the Mississippi are part of a natural cycle that keeps reappearing, though in changing forms...

...Hunters," a term that signifies something quite different from men who go into the woods with guns to kill animals, are those who have a knowledge of the way to live...

...The stories have been rearranged and to some extent revised to expound Faulkner's wilderness theme...

...Even viewed in this light, though, Big Woods has significance...

...To finish the book, Faulkner chose to revise rather drastically "Delta Autumn," a fine story from Go Down, Moses...

...It was a 1934 Post story before its first appearance in book form in Collected Stories in 1950...

...The third version, considered only as a story and not as an integral part of the novel it appears in, suffers from incoherence...

...This has been greatly changed...

...Written as part of Go Down, Moses, it is as preoccupied with the Negro-white theme as with the hunting-wilderness theme...

...The first version of Faulkner's quest for the bear was the story, "Lion," which appeared in Harper's in 1934 and was primarily concerned with the development of the dog that eventually bayed the bear...

...The original phrase, "Sam Fathers said, 'Now...

...The symbolic value of the Indians changes from book to book as Faulkner's thematic interest changes...

...was published in 1936, the incident was recast from the point of view of Colonel Sutpen, the protagonist of the novel...

...To make a link between "The Bear" and the second story in Big Woods, Faulkner uses for a transitional passage material taken from "Red Leaves," which first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1930 and was reprinted without change in These 13 in 1931...

...There is a difference, though...

...Some names and some genealogical details are changed as the Indian territory of Yoknapatawpha County becomes a full-fledged creation in its own right...

...This, perhaps inevitably, changes the language a little...

...The latest version of "The Bear" is a taut and wonderful story...

...The answer seems to be that hunting, for Faulkner, is neither a sport nor an occupation, but a way to live life in meaningful terms...

...The story in its original form tells how Roth Edmonds, the latest white descendant of Carothers McCaslin, inevitably becomes as entangled with the Negro descendants of old Carothers as his ancestors had been with their half-caste brothers...

...A few pages later and Ike is talking of the tobacco and food he had left to supply Sam in his wandering through the happy hunting ground: not vanished but merely translated into the myriad life which printed the dark mold of these secret and sunless places with delicate fairy tracks, which, breathing and biding and immobile, watched him from beyond every twig and leaf until he moved, moving again, walking on: he had only passed, quitting the knoll which was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad, yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable progression and, being myriad, one: and Old Ben too, Old Ben too...

...Between "The Old People" and the third story, "A Bear Hunt," comes another interlude, also taken from "A Justice...

...Whatever Faulkner's purpose, the reader who notices the change is likely to look for the reason, to ask what Faulkner's purpose is in making a book out of this material...

...It was of the men, not white nor black nor red but men, hunters with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter—the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening...

...The second, "The Bear" as it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, was a condensed version of the present story...

...I planned to get out a book like that myself some day when I was all written out,' he said...

...So far as these changes can be characterized, they show the infatuation with phrase making that has accompanied some of the occasionally genuinely creative rhetoric in Faulkner's most recent writing...

...It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document:—of white man fatuous enough to believe that he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey...

...in the earlier version, it was told from his point of view but in the third person...

...The portion of "Red Leaves" that does appear serves as an introduction to the Indians and without mentioning either Sam Fathers or Ike McCaslin—the two chief characters of "The Bear"—helps explain why Sam Fathers's descent from the blood of Chickasaw chiefs makes it possible for him to initiate young Ike McCaslin into the mysteries of the hunting cult...

...The following passage from "The Bear" describes Ike McCaslin at 16: "For six years now he had been a man's hunter...

...It relates the procedures followed by Doom in bringing an abandoner steamboat twelve miles overland to be his headquarters and his castle...

...Faulkner, of course, has never been content to abandon a promising situation or character simply because the book or story in which he develops the situation has appeared in printed form...

...The story that follows, "A Bear Hunt," is also a comic tale...

...Shoot quick and shoot slow': and the gun leveled rapidly without haste as though of its own volition and will and crashed...

...It is a kind of official reiteration of Faulkner's familiar theme of man's place in nature...