PROSE
William Faulkner
The Bear
“it was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with ploughs and axes who feared it because it was wilderness. Men, myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had 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 drowning elephant…”
William Faulkner, The Bear
Why this book?
The Bear is not so much a long short story as it is a short novel or novella. Nevertheless, it is a work of great depth and complexity by one of America’s most admired writers, the Nobel Laureate William Faulkner.
The story
Ostensibly a coming-of-age story, focusing on the hunt for the eponymous creature, the narration also probes the cracked surfaces of human relationships—between mentor and child-man, between slave and master, between hunter and prey. Equally potent are the relationships between man and the pulsing world: between the beast and man and the wilderness both around and within him. The story was published in the 1942 collection Go Down Moses, described as the most spiritual of all Faulkner’s work.
The writing
Although the work is short, we can’t pretend that it is easy and Faulkner is often accused of trying his reader’s patience. Referring to the fourth and most difficult section of the book, Faulkner scholar Malcolm Cowley (as editor of The Portable Faulkner) comments:
‘. . . in it Faulkner carries to an extreme his effort towards putting the whole world into one sentence, between one capital letter and one period. There is a sentence that occupies six pages . . . with a two page parenthesis . . . it is probably the longest sentence in American fiction, longer than any in English or Irish except for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. In all this section of The Bear the reader may have difficulty in fitting the subjects to the predicates and in disentangling the subordinate clauses; and yet, if he perseveres, he will discover one of Faulkner’s most impressive themes: the belief in Isaac McCaslin’s heart that the land itself had been cursed by slavery, and that the only way for him to escape the curse was to relinquish the land.’
Malcolm Cowley
The reading
As already suggested, this can make challenging reading. The issues that Faulkner is grappling with in The Bear are his toughest: race, miscegenation, man vs. nature, man against his own history . . . and he is doing this within one of the most sharply drawn hunting stories ever created.
While most of the five sections of this story centre on the hunt and the growth of the central character, Isaac, it is the difficult fourth section (already mentioned above) that has attracted the most critical attention.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record: read, then read again. Read actively, noting in the margins places where you are clear on the action and themes—and noting where you are not. The book is only 100 pages, but it takes time and will reward the investment. If you have any reading time or energy left, it is worth exploring the rest of the collection, the other stories include characters from The Bear which will illuminate the relationships.
Some questions you may wish to consider while reading the story:
- What and how does Isaac McCaslin learn over the course of the story?
- What does this story reveal about racialised relationships in this time?
- How does Faulkner use the passage of time?
- What is the significance of blood?
- How does the bear function as both a symbol and a physical presence in the story?
- Are there passages that you as an individual find particularly meaningful?
- Is this ultimately a morality tale?
The author
Born in 1897 into an old Southern family, William Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi. He joined the Canadian and later the British Royal Air Force during the First World War, but did not serve in combat. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi and worked for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper before returning to Oxford where, apart from some brief stays in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and a few trips to Asia and Europe, he remained, working on his novels and short stories until his death in 1962. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”.
Recommended Edition: The story collection Go Down Moses contains the whole text, the Vintage edition is not always in stock but is available with perseverance in book form and as an e-book. Please avoid the abridged ‘American Roots’ print edition and other e-book versions!
POETRY
Philip Larkin
An Arundel Tomb
An Arundel Tomb, written in 1956 and first published in The Whitsun Weddings in 1964, can best be described as an almost love poem. Inspired by the 14th century memorial effigy in Chichester Cathedral of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and Eleanor of Lancaster, his second wife, its much quoted final couplet has divided readers since publication. Did the famously difficult and misanthropic Larkin really write a tribute to the power of love or is he saying something more complex?
The poem is written in rhymed six-line stanzas, with a faultless rhythm that makes it a joy to read aloud. It is surprising and moving, the tomb providing a metaphor around which Larkin weaves the themes of history, impermanence, survival and love, but he also wrote in the margin of his workbook: “Love isn’t stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years”.
Renowned for his dark sense of humour and obsession with death, in a 1981 interview with Professor John Haffenden Larkin said he was delighted when a friend asked him if he knew a poem ending “What will survive of us is love”, commenting “It suggested the poem was making its way without me. I like them to do that.” Self-deprecation also formed a key aspect of Larkin’s personality, and In the same interview he criticised his own poem “. . . technically it’s a bit muddy in the middle – the fourth and fifth stanzas seem trudging somehow, with awful rhymes like voyage/damage. Everything went wrong with that poem: I got the hands wrong – it’s right-hand gauntlet really – and anyway the hands were a nineteenth-century addition, not pre-Baroque at all.”
In spite of this, An Arundel Tomb remains one of Larkin’s best-loved poems. The last lines, now amongst the most famous in modern British literature, are inscribed on his memorial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.
You can hear Philip Larkin reading An Arundel Tomb on the Poetry Foundation website, where you will also find a transcript of the poem and a recorded discussion about the writing and the poet’s possible intentions.
About Philip Larkin:
Born in Coventry in 1922, Philip Larkin became one of post-war Britain’s most famous poets, often referred to as “England’s other poet laureate”. After graduating from Oxford University he embarked on a career as a librarian, working in libraries in Shropshire, Leicester and Queens College Belfast before, finally, becoming the librarian at the University of Hull, where he remained for three decades and produced the majority of his published work. Acclaim for Larkin, who died in 1985 aged 63, was based on a remarkably small body of work: four slim volumes of poetry and two relatively unknown novels. In spite of his reluctance to court publicity and his reputation as a lugubrious curmudgeon, he was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey – almost two decades after his death – as Britain’s best-loved poet of the previous fifty years.
