On Writing Read Online Free Page B

falsity as the True Princess was to the pea, and he was just as sure to proclaim the injury. He quarrels with us terribly, of course, because it matters to him, in getting his story to the way he wants it, to quarrel.
    Those who write with cruelty, and Lawrence is one, may not be lacking in compassion but stand in need to write in exorcisement. Chekhov was exorcising nothing, he simply showed it forth. He does not perhaps put his own feelings above life. Lawrence in his stories protests the world, and at the same time he gives the world an almost unbearable wonder and beauty.
    His stories may at times remind you of some kind of tropical birds, that are in structure all but awkward—for what is symbolic has a very hard time if it must be at all on the ground; but then when they take wing, as they do, the miracle occurs. For Lawrence is an artist: his birds fly. Outrageousness itself is put to use, along with all that is felicitous. The bird in its flight is in superb command, our eyes are almost put out by iridescence. The phoenix really was his bird.
    So much for “The Fox.” “The Bear” begins:
    There was a man and a dog too this time. Two beasts, counting Old Ben the bear, and two men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same bloodran which ran in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it and in only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion was taintless and incorruptible.
    And we’re in a different world. There is a world outside, which we’re expected to be acquainted with in its several stratifications, to which our inner world communicates and to which it answers. The blood in this story may not be conscious or unconscious, but it can be
tainted
—that is, it can be considered in its relation to action, to opinion, to life going on outside. Blood can be plebeian, mongrel, taintless, incorruptible in one sentence of William Faulkner’s, whereas in all of Lawrence it is one thing, the abode of the unconscious.
    You will remember that this is a hunting story. A boy has known always of a great bear in the hunting country he was born into; encounters the bear after his initiation into the wilderness, and does not kill him; but at last, years later, with a beast that is trained to be his match (the mongrel, Lion), the fatal encounter takes place, and bear, dog and old pure-blooded Indian all die of it.
    We see at once as we read that this narrative has the quality of happening, and the blood of inheriting; the story indeed has signs of having so much to do with the outer world that it can happen, and has happened, more than once. In one respect, this story is a sample of that happening which is continuous, indigenous to the time and the place and the human element in and through which it happens.
    Ike McCaslin, in whose experience at various stages we are told the story,realized later that it had begun long before that. It had already begun on that day when he first wrote his age in two ciphers and his cousin McCaslin brought him for the first time to the camp, the big woods, to earn for himself from the wilderness the name and state of hunter provided he in his turn were humble and enduring enough.
    Humble and enduring—qualities that apply to our relationship with the world.
    He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area of almost a hundred square miles had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man—the long legend of corncribs broken down and rifled, of shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured, and traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and shotgun and even rifle shots delivered at pointblank range yet with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a child—a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before the boy was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible