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PARTISAN REVIEW
except for a word now and then spoken in a rich, very soft inflection;
Green, tall and slender, instinctively crouching so that he wouldn't
tower over Faulkner. He told Faulkner about England, about the places
where he'd hunted and fish ed. The more Faulkner merely listened, the
more nervously Green talked. Green told me afterward (while he wiped
his brow) that it had been a very difficult twenty minutes. Nevertheless
he had been delighted by Faulkner, no question about it.
I think
~omething
similar obtained for Lionel Trilling. A German,
who had been in a concentration camp, was in touch with Trilling about
a paper he was writing devoted to Faulkner's short stories. The German
was planning to write Faulkner, and Trilling hoped Faulkner would
answer the letter.
As
Faulkner listened in his polite and masked way,
Trilling apparently felt compelled to go into more and more detail.
So that when, at the end of a graceful but somewhat tortuous explana–
tion, Faulkner replied, "Yes, I will answer the letter," his simple directness
was so unexpected and incongruous that all of us, including Trilling,
burst into laughter.
Faulkner's innate consideration is part of a humanity that extends
to animals. Of all animals, his first and true love is the mule. He says
it is the most intelligent animal and the most maligned. He believes the
mule's so-called balkiness is in reality a considered judgment. "They have
thought it out," he says, "and they see no sense in going on." It is of
extreme interest to me that he once told a fri end his dream was to
write a
Moby Dick
of mules. Faulkner, to my mind, has written his
Moby Dick,
eX'cept that the whale was a bear instead of a mule. Faulk–
ner's bear in
The Bear
can be placed alongside Melville's whale. Not only
has Faulkner written an equally memorable poem to a mammal; it is
more closely related than that. Faulkner's bear resembles Melville's
whale, Both convey an anthropomorphic nuance; their aspects are touched
with human cunning, wisdom, malevolence and sometimes benevolence,
and they seem to be aware of human relationships; they are both unique
in their own mammalian kingdoms; and the initial sighting of bear and
whale are kindred: the scars a nd wounds in both are hideously visible,
and the ineffectual weapons too: the shot in the one and the harpoon
heads in the other.
(A deviation and a footnote: In
The Bear,
young McCaslin,
through a sense of love and history and identification, passes up his
chance to shoot the bear. Faulkner says one of the happiest experiences
he has had came about
~hen
a dozen hunters, himself included, tracked
a buck for twenty-four hours, only to have the animal outwit them in
the end.)
