Grappling With "The Bear"

Reading Bright Book of Life, Alfred Kazin's book of ecstatic essays on American "novelists and storytellers," I got to part 2 devoted to the "Secret of the South," where Kazin singles out William Faulkner's "The Bear" as a great example of his "belief in thought as rumination over a past completed, final, irrevocable":

'Surely this explains the attempt, in "The Bear," to make a single sentence out of so many pages. This is the most famous instance of what Faulkner described as "my ambition to put everything into one sentence - not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present."'

My first encounter with "The Bear" was as a part of Three Famous Short Novels by Faulkner that I was assigned to read in my first college English course. The three "short novels" in the book, "Spotted Horses," "Old Man," and "The Bear," had been extracted from three previously published novels, The Hamlet, The Wild Palms, and Go Down, Moses. Like everyone else unaccustomed to Faulkner's style (which Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to the Viking Press' The Portable Faulkner characterized as at times "putting the whole world into one sentence, between one capital letter and one period.") I found reading "The Bear" rough going. 

I didn't know it then, but "The Bear" first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on May 9, 1942. But it was published in only four sections. Two days after it appeared as a short story of a little more than 6,000 words, it appeared in Go Down, Moses And Other Stories, published by Random House. "The Bear," now with five sections, is the largest of seven stories in Go Down, Moses. Random House imposed And Other Stories in the title, despite Faulkner's insistence that it was a novel. Other sections had appeared as short stories as early as 1940 in four other periodicals. Faulkner wasn't being entirely misleading by calling his collection of the stories a novel. All of them bear a "family resemblance." In Go Down, Moses, "The Bear" takes up 140 pages, with the interpolated fourth section occupying 61 of those pages. Faulkner called this section "just a dangling clause in the description of that man [Ike McCaslin] when he was a young boy." In his introduction to the Viking Portable Faulkner, published in 1946 (when all of Faulkner's books except Sanctuary were already out of print), Malcolm Cowley wrote that "if you want to read simply a hunting story, and one of the greatest in the language, you should confine yourself to the first three parts and the last, which are written in Faulkner's simplest style."

The problem is, without the fourth section, a synopsis of "The Bear" makes it sound like a Hemingway paean to masculine virtues, a story one might find in the Juvenile section of a publc library. In 1955, Faulkner placed it in another collection called Big Woods, without its fourth section. Some critics suggest to readers that the fourth section should be omitted. 

Near the end of the story as it appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, the scope of "The Bear" is encapsulated in a single sentence: "He had heard about a bear, and finally got big enough to trail it, and he trailed it four years and at last met it with a gun in his hands and he didn’t shoot." But it would be an understatement to say that the fourth section of the story in Go Down, Moses takes the story to a greater depth. Within it, Faulkner explains to the reader why Ike McCaslin makes his peace with the wilderness. It isn't because of any bear or all the lore that Faulkner dwells on in rich detail about Ike's many encounters with it through the years and the many hunts in which he is included by his elders.

Relinquish. Relinquishment. Repudiated and relinquished. These are the words with which section 4 of "The Bear" ring out. At 21, Ike McCaslin stands before his second cousin McCaslin Edmonds and, in an impossible outpouring of words, refuses to accept his legacy, the legacy left him by his grandfather Carothers McCaslin, who first bought the land from a Chickasaw chieftan - the same Chickasaw tribe that was cast out of Mississippi in 1837:

"'I cant repudiate it. It was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father's and Uncle Buddy's to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather's to bequeath them to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never old Ikkemotubbe's to sell to Grandfather for bequeathment and repudiation. Because it was never Ikkemotubbe's fathers' fathers' to bequeath Ikkemotubbe to sell to Grandfather or any man because on the instant when Ikkemotubbe discovered, realised, that he could sell it for money, on that instant it ceased ever to have been his forever, father to father to father, and the man who bought it bought nothing.

"'... Because He told in the Book how He created the earth, made it and looked at it and said it was all right, and then He made man. He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title for-ever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of his face for bread.'"

In their grandfather Carothers McCaslin's commissary, Ike and McCaslin Edmonds take down the ledgers with their heavy binding and yellowed pages in which their twin uncles, Theophilus and Amodeus accounted for every slave, their price at purchase, their dates of birth and death, how many offspring, for the decades before and after 1865. 

Having found the beneficiaries of Carothers McCaslin's legacy of $1,000 to each, Ike learns of another crime against nature committed by his grandfather - a child by his own daughter. It is all too much for Ike to inherit, not just his grandfather's land, but the "truth" ("there is only one truth and it covers all things that touch the heart"). After presenting his long argument to McCaslin Edmonds, his interlocutor in the fourth section, even he pronounces that Ike is "free." And then, topping it off - o'ertopping it - is the "silver cup" filled with gold coins, a last legacy to Ike from his drunkard uncle Hubert Beachamp. This is clearly a symbol of the heritage of the South, when Ike and McCaslin Edmonds take the object, wrapped in burlap, and place it on a table and Ike unwraps it to find the silver cup has been replaced by a tin coffee pot filled, not with gold but with copper coins and pieces of paper on which Hubert Beachamp wrote his I.O.U.s. "So you have plenty of coppers anyway," commented McCaslin Edmonds. That's all that was left of the story of the South - a fortune reduced to an unspeakable history, translated into the lowest currency and empty promises to pay all of it back.

After all this, with the course of the harmless story about the hunt for an old bear changed to the story of how a young man learns how power and corruption have changed his legacy into something obscene, repugnant, and unacceptable - with such an overwhelming change of course, one would think the story couldn't possibly end the same way it ended in The Saturday Evening Post. And, indeed, it does not. Ike returns to Major de Spain's land only to find a large part of it, the primeval Mississippi forest in which he had hunted for so many years, has been leased to a logging company. Granted permission to hunt once more, on condition that he bring back a "small squirrel" to Major de Spain, Ike follows the now familiar trails to a place he has treasured in his memory all his life:

"Then he was in the woods, not alone but solitary; the solitude closed about him, green with summer. They did not change, and, timeless, would not, any more than would the green of summer and the fire and rain of fall and the iron cold and sometimes even snow"

It is there that Ike finds Boon, the man who had shot and killed the bear Old Ben, sitting at the base of a gum tree, hysterically smashing to pieces the gun he used to kill him. A powerful image summing up Faulkner's "dangling clause," making "The Bear" one of his most compelling works.