An essay excerpted from
Hunting and the Ivory Tower:
Essays by Scholars Who Hunt
Edited by Doug Higbee and David Bruzina
Essay by Robert DeMott |
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“[Hunting] certainly makes life less highfalutin and more real.”
– T. H. White, England Have My Bones
Fifty years ago, during my first semester as a graduate student, I enrolled in a seminar on William Faulkner, a writer I’d heard of but never before encountered on the page. I’d heard that he was a difficult and demanding technician whose prose was convoluted, intricate, even impenetrable, and that it represented the zenith of American literary modernism, which is to say patently aesthetic and rarefied. I considered myself an average reader in skill, insight and dexterity, so I feared I would be in for a trying time, given Faulkner’s avant-garde stylistic difficulties. But I also heard that Faulkner had a reputation as a drunk, a bounder and, as if it were the final condemnatory nail in his coffin, a hunter. Faulkner, the gossip went, was not in the take-no-prisoners category of He-Man Hemingway, but he was a hunter nonetheless, and that was enough for many of my seminar mates to cast a cold eye.
But it was precisely Faulkner the hunter (“a good hunter and one of the fairest and most agreeable men we ever had in our camp,” John Cullen said in Old Times in the Faulkner Country) who appealed to me. Behind Faulkner’s vaunted linguistic artifice and stylistic sleight of hand, there was a backdrop of gritty physical reality to be imagined—wet, tired dogs, empty shot shells, heft of dead quail in the game bag, a man and child hunting together—that (except for Luster and the mule) resonated deeply with me and echoed similar events in my own life. For someone who had never thought much about the physical underpinnings of literature, the scene was a crossover moment between the world outside and the world inside my books, a startling moment, in other words, as sharp and compelling as the first flush of a covey of wild bobwhites.
English setters, beagles, fox hounds—my own or my uncles’—were a large part of the sporting fabric of my working-class family life in Connecticut and Vermont. Bird dogs and trailing hounds were part of an earlier education mentored by my uncles Pete and Tony Ventrella that had taken place outside school and that I admit, because of its visceral quality, often commanded more of my attention than homework. Later in the Faulkner semester, when we tackled Go Down, Moses and his signature outdoor tale, “The Bear,” in which a hunting dog is a chief character, my enthusiasm was boundless, and I became something of a village explainer expounding on the intricacies of hunting and the dynamic of the chase to my untutored and mostly urban male and female seminar mates, whether they wanted to hear it or not.
I came away certain that where hunting (like every other hot-button issue) is concerned, ironies and paradoxes abound, not hard and fast conclusions.
“The Bear” and “Delta Autumn” brought out the most heated critical discussions on literature I had ever witnessed up to that point. There was much to debate: spilling blood, gun violence, racial injustice, white privilege, wilderness decline, hunting ethics and especially Faulkner’s portrayal of Ike McCaslin, whose pattern of masculine behavior featured a willful withdrawal from domestic society. Half the class judged that characterization to be romantic, even heroic, and saw Ike as an exemplar of resolute American frontier values; the other half said Faulkner was treating Ike ironically and that whatever he had learned in the big woods of the Mississippi Delta was undercut or tempered by his relative ineffectualness in social, domestic and emotional spheres.
And though I saw validity on both sides of the debate, then as now, none of those issues, none of those controversial and emotionally charged questions, could be solved or answered to everyone’s complete satisfaction. The hunter in me left that seminar with an abiding sense of how suspiciously and inaccurately the academic world viewed hunting, and yet the scholar in me admired the way the academy rigorously interrogated the subject. More to the point, I came away certain that where hunting (like every other hot-button issue) is concerned, ironies and paradoxes abound, not hard and fast conclusions. In the end, we make a separate peace according to our own lights and predilections. Rabid adherents for and against hunting, which is to say extremists of both stripes loudly occupying their high ground (moral and otherwise), are the only ones who believe they have answers to otherwise nuanced and complex problems. |
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