I’ve been asked to write an essay on Faulkner and fox hunting for a forthcoming book on fox hunting in Mississippi. A draft is below. If you’re a Faulkner reader (or a fox hunter), I’d welcome your suggestions.
—————————
William Faulkner and Fox Hunting
William Faulkner liked sports and gamesmanship, all kinds. It was a lifelong interest. He played football and baseball during his high school days, and late in life, while at the University of Virginia, he enjoyed attending Little League baseball games with his friend and future biographer, Joseph Blotner. In 1955 he signed on as a sportswriter of sorts to cover a New York Rangers hockey match and the Kentucky Derby for the fledgling magazine, Sports Illustrated. Scholars have identified in Faulkner’s fiction references to more than twenty different sports and games.[i] These range from the holy trinity of American sports—football, baseball, and basketball—to table games like poker and chess and popular folk competitions like horse trading and practical jokes.
At the apex of Faulkner’s delight in sports, of course, is hunting. As a young man he accompanied his friend Phil Stone and others on deer hunts at the hunting camp owned by Stone’s father, General Stone. He continued to deer hunt into his middle age, joining such friends as Bob Harkins, Ike Roberts, Red Brite, and John Cullen on their annual hunts; and one of his finest and most-beloved stories, “The Bear,” describes the annual hunts for the legendary Old Ben in the Yoknapatawpha wilderness. Sometimes joined by his daughter Jill, he often went bird hunting on Greenfield Farm, his farm east of Oxford, where he built a hunting lodge to accommodate his frequent visits.
Over time Faulkner’s love of hunting evolved into a preference for fox hunting, which enabled him to combine his love of horses, hounds, and the outdoors with the thrill of the chase.[ii] As early as 19— he had become associated with the Longreen Hunt Club in Germantown, Tennessee, near Memphis; and he had jumps built for the paddock at Rowan Oak so he could practice riding and jumping. Faulkner continued his involvement with the Germantown club for the rest of his life. Club members recall that he participated incognito in the hunts, preferring not to be identified by his actual name; and he often spent the weekends of the hunts with his friends, the Muellers, sleeping on the couch at the Muellers’ house.
The history of the club, Longreen: 25 Years of Horse Sports in West Tennessee, includes a description of Faulkner by Bart Mueller, the huntsman of the Longreen Hunt:
From the beginning, the thing about him that impressed me most was the extraordinary courtesy and gentleness of his manner of speaking; the softest masculine voice I ever heard, which seemed remarkable coming from the powerful creator of Yoknapatawpha County.
He was a man of very small stature. Standing before the fire in his faithful hunt jacket, so lovingly patched and repatched at the elbows, he was quite of a size with the teenagers who surrounded him. With them he was completely at home and they accepted him as one of their very own, riding and chatting with him on equal terms. Only once did I ever see him draw back, when, during a protracted check, they proposed to liven things up with a quick gallop over some nearby jumps.
“I am too old,” Faulkner said, “to take a jump unless there is a fox on the other side.”[iii]
There is also an account of a particular hunt in which Faulkner participated:
One afternoon a very devious fox suddenly changed tactics and went away up the wide open, clipped right-of-way under the TVA power line, with the pack in full cry from Nonconnah Creek almost to the center of Germantown. Here he took a right, across Stout Road, through all the big white fences of Wildwood, between the tennis courts and out the other side. The pace was terrific and at this point only three riders were still up with the hounds – and one of them was William Faulkner.[iv]
In May 1961 Faulkner wrote to Mary Winslow Chapman, the secretary of Longreen Hunt, enclosing a check for his subscription and adding, “I leave for Va. Sunday, will be back in July, when I hope you will bring the hounds and the mounts down here. We can do some night hill-topping with cars and see how the fox will run, and ride the country by day and see where to open it up.”[v]
A large part of the hunt for Faulkner was the tradition, the ritual. A good example of this is the hunt breakfast Faulkner and Estelle hosted at Rowan Oak on May 8, 1938. A group of fourteen of his hunting companions, including Ross and Maggie Brown, Hugh Evans, Bell Wiley, and cousin Sallie Murry Wilkins, gathered on the Oxford square and paraded to Rowan Oak, dressed in their hunting finery and riding horses and mules. Faulkner wore a ruffled shirt, velvet jacket, and hunter’s breeches , with cap, boots, and gloves. A hunting horn was draped around his neck. When the group arrived at Rowan Oak, they were met and served drinks my Uncle Ned Barnett, whom Faulkner had brought in from Greenfield Farm to serve as butler for the occasion. Uncle Ned was wearing a high-collared broadcloth coat once owned by Faulkner’s grandfather, John Wesley Thompson Faulkner. Faulkner invited J. R. Cofield to come to Rowan Oak to commemorate the event with a series of photographs.
During the last five years of his life when he lived in Charlottesville as the writer-in residence at the University of Virginia, he was a member of both the Keswick and Farmington Hunt Clubs. He became a regular and enthusiastic participant in the clubs’ hunts. Joseph Blotner, who served on the committee that arranged Faulkner’s classroom visits and public lectures, recalled the time he asked Faulkner if he wanted to meet with students during the upcoming semester. Laughing, Faulkner replied, “I can’t. I’m too busy fox huntin’—six days a week. For a man my age, that’s all I can manage.”[vi]
Faulkner became close friends with Grover Vandevender, the huntsman for the Farmington club, who instructed Faulkner on riding to the hounds. Vandevender owned a horse farm and riding school near Charlottesville, and Faulkner would frequently arrive there early in the morning, have coffee and conversation with Grover, and participate in the “cubbing,” in which young puppies were taken out with the mature hounds to be trained for the fall hunts.
Faulkner was widely known to be a fearless but inexpert rider.[vii] Grover told Blotner that Faulkner would ride “with his stirrups too long and his toes pointed out, taking the jumps with his knees out instead of tight to his mount.” But he was “all nerve”: “he would follow anywhere through any kind of country and jumps.” Another hunter remembered that Faulkner “had the courage of a lion and adored the hunt.” As a hunt dragged on throughout the day, some hunters broke away and retired to the lodge for drinks and conversation, but Faulkner “stayed out to the last hound bark.”[viii] Jill recalled how much her father enjoyed dressing up in his pink coat, shined boots, and black derby hat—and how he prized the now-famous color portrait of himself dressed in his hunting outfit.
Faulkner mentions fox hunting throughout his fiction. In Flags in the Dust, Bayard Sartoris seeks to escape his town grief and troubles by going to the country to visit the MacCallums. Riding his pony across an open field, he observes the uncatchable fox that the MacCallums have named Ethel teasing and taunting the dogs that pursue him.
It sat there like a tame dog, watching the woods across the glade, and Bayard shook Perry forward again. The fox turned its head and looked at him with a covert, fleeting glance, but without alarm, and Bayard stopped again in intense astonishment. The clamor of the dogs swept nearer through the woods, yet still the fox sat on its haunches, watching the man with covert quick glances. It revealed no alarm whatever, not even when the puppies burst yapping madly from the trees.[ix]
The calmness of the fox under threat contrasts sharply with the anxiety and stress that Bayard is experiencing after the deaths of his brother and grandfather.
In “The Old People” in Go Down, Moses, a young Ike McCaslin delights in going into the woods with Sam Fathers, “the two of them sitting beneath the close fierce stars on a summer hilltop while they waited for the hounds to bring the fox back within hearing.”[x] In the same novel, in “Was,” a scene of comic relief counterpoints the announcement that the slave, Tomey’s Turl, has run away again and will have to be chased:
They heard Uncle Buddy cursing and bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox and the dogs came out of the kitchen and crossed the hall into the dogs’ room then they saw them cross the hall again into Uncle Buddy’s room and heard them run through Uncle Buddy’s room into the kitchen again and this time it sounded like the whole kitchen chimney had come down and Uncle Buddy bellowing like a steamboat blowing and this time the fox and the dogs and five or six sticks of firewood all came out of the kitchen together with Uncle Buddy in the middle of them hitting at everything in sight with another stick.[xi]
The lifelong passion that Southern country folks (and Faulkner) have for fox hunting is captured in the description of Old Man Killegrew in “Shingles for the Lord”:
Fox hunting. A seventy-year-old man, with both feet and one knee, too, already in the grave, squatting all night on a hill and calling himself listening to a fox race that he couldn’t even hear unless they had come right up onto the same log he was setting on and bayed into his ear trumpet.[xii]
As noted, fox hunting plays a role in a key scene in Faulkner’s first Yoknapatawpha novel, and it is also mentioned in his last, The Reivers, published thirty-three years later, in Lucius Priest’s remark that all of the stable hands believed old Dan Grinnup was given a job “because when Father was a boy he used to fox hunt with old Dan’s father out at Frenchman’s Bend.”[xiii]
Interesting, and ironically, Faulkner’s principal treatment of the sport, the short story, “Fox Hunt,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1931 and collected in Doctor Martino and Other Stories in 1934 and Collected Stories in 1950, presents a negative view of fox hunters—or at least one of them, the main character of the story. That character is a wealthy New York socialite, Harrison Blair, who has purchased and given to his wife a farm in “Carolina” which Blair and his friends use for their annual fox hunts. Blair may be loosely based on the legendary hunter and adventurer, Paul Rainey, an Ohio native and older contemporary of Faulkner who purchased eleven thousand acres in Tippah County, Mississippi, less than fifty miles from Oxford, and stocked the estate with various types of game for himself and his guests to hunt. In the story Blair has discovered that his unhappy wife is engaging in an affair with another man, and the pursuit and killing of the fox seems to be identified with Blair’s unspoken but subconscious desire to wreak revenge upon his unfaithful spouse.
“Fox Hunt” attracts critical interest primarily for the experimental narrative technique Faulkner employs, viewing the protagonist and the action from the contrasting viewpoints of three different characters—a poor white observer of the hunt and two associates of Blair—his valet/secretary and his chauffeur. To the poor white wearing overalls and riding a mule, Blair’s actions, like the behavior of the class to which he belongs, are baffling, an enigma.
“Wonder how a man as rich as folks says he is . . . is got time to hate one little old fox bitch like that. Don’t even want the dogs to catch it. Trying to outride the dogs so he can kill it with a stick like it was a snake. Coming all the way down here every year, bringing all them folks and boarding and sleeping them, to run one little old mangy fox that I could catch in one night with a axe and a possum dog.”[xiv]
To the valet and the chauffeur, Blair is a cruel, heartless egotist with whom one can do business but could never like or even admire. As the valet observes,
“One day he put his hand on me and I told him I would kill him. ‘When?’ he says. “When you get back from the hospital?’ ‘Maybe before I go there,’ I says. I had my hand in my pocket. ‘I believe you would,’ he says. So we get along now. I put the rod away and he don’t ride me any more and we get along.”[xv]
But the story also exhibits an informed knowledge of the methods and tactics of fox hunting, especially in the way that Blair violates both the means and the spirit of the hunt. He is motivated not by a love of the sport but by a pure hatred of a small animal on which he has transferred his hatred of an ungrateful and unloving wife, who, as one critic has noted, “is linked to the fox by her sex and comments made by others about her hair and eyes.”[xvi] He feels no sense of a community of hunters but is totally self-absorbed and self-centered. He abuses the black horse that he rides, and he rides ahead of the other hunters and even the dogs. The climax of the story is barbaric.
“[The fox] was on the ditch-bank, and he knowed it was there and he cut straight across the field without giving it no spell to breathe in . . . and when it had to run again and dropped over the ditch-bank, it dropped into the briers, I reckon, and it was too tired to get out and run. And he come up and jumped that ditch . . . and while he was going through the air he looked down and seen the fox and he clumb off the horse . . . and dropped feet first into the briers like the fox done. . . . He says it just swirled and jumped at his face and he knocked it down with his fist and trompled it dead with his boot heels. The dogs hadn’t got there then. But it so happened he never needed them.”[xvii]
Throughout the story Blair is portrayed as an individual interested only in ownership and control. With his portrayal Faulkner acknowledges that not every “gentleman” is a gentleman.
Faulkner wrote “Fox Hunt” years before he had the leisure and the means to engage in the sport, but the story clearly evidences his infatuation with the hunt, and fortunately the hunters Faulkner later met and associated with were not like Harrison Blair.[xviii]
Looked at in the totality of Faulkner’s life, fox hunting plays a significant role in what appears to be Faulkner’s desire to belong to the class of the landed gentry or squirearchy. From an early age Faulkner was extremely conscious of his family’s decline in both wealth and social status since the time of his great-grandfather, William C. Falkner, who had been a prominent landowner, slaveholder, businessman, soldier, builder of a railroad, and politician in Ripley. But since the glory days of the Old Colonel, the Falkner family had declined in prominence and prestige. Like many wealthy Southerners, Colonel Falkner lost much of his fortune in the Civil War—though he recovered some of it, possibly by dealing in contraband and running the Yankee blockade at the end of the war. Then, in 1889 (eight years before William’s birth), after becoming the principal stockholder in the Ripley Railroad and winning election to the state legislature, Colonel Falkner was murdered by a business associate; and his son eventually decided to sell the railroad, ending Faulkner’s father’s dream of a career with the railroad. Bitterly disappointed, Murry Falkner moved from Ripley to Oxford, acquired a livery stable, and settled into a middle-class existence.
When a young Billy Falkner told his third-grade teacher he wanted to be a writer just like his great-granddaddy, he perhaps expressed an unconscious desire to imitate the Old Colonel in other ways as well. He tried to become a soldier, and he would one day own a farm if not a plantation. Most revealingly, he would be compelled to own “a big house,” Rowan Oak, not unlike the one Colonel Falkner owned in Ripley. Jill Faulkner well understood her father’s compulsion to reclimb the social ladder. She saw the ownership of Rowan Oak as crucial to Faulkner’s sense of “being somebody,” adding, “Everybody in Oxford had remembered that Pappy’s father ran a livery stable, and he had lived in this house . . . not too far from the livery stable, and this was just a way of thumbing his nose at Oxford . . . [by owning] a nice old house [that] had a certain substance and standing to it.”[xix]
Fox hunting—wearing the red coat and riding horses with the gentry—was another symbol that Faulkner had become “somebody.” In some respects, it was that, and never the fox, he pursued.
Notes
[i] See H. R. Stoneback, “Sport,” A William Faulkner Encyclopedia, ed. Robert W. Hamblin and Charles A. Peek (Greenwood Press, 1999), 377-81.
[ii] As will be noted in this essay, Faulkner was interested in fox hunting as practiced by members of the lower socio-economic class, that is, on foot with dogs; but his greater fascination and love was for the aristocratic version of the sport, fox hunting with hounds and horses.
[iii] Longreen: 25 Years of Horse Sports in West Tennessee, ed. M. Winslow Chapman (Memphis: Towery Press, 1982), 24.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin, eds., Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection: Volume II: The Letters (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 288.
[vi] Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974), 1770.
[vii] On June 17, 1962, while riding at Rowan Oak, Faulkner was thrown from his horse and suffered a severe back injury. When medications failed to relieve the pain, he started drinking, heavily. Two weeks later he entered the sanitarium in Byhalia, Mississippi, for treatment. He died there on July 6.
[viii] Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1984), 657-58.
[ix] William Faulkner, Flags in the Dust (Random House Vintage Books, 1974), 355.
[x] William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Modern Library, 1942), 170.
[xi] Ibid., 4-5.
[xii] William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Random House Vintage Books, 1977), 27.
[xiii] William Faulkner, The Reivers (Random House, 1962), 8.
[xiv] William Faulkner, “Fox Hunt,” Collected Stories, 590.
[xv] Ibid., 595.
[xvi] Arthur A. Brown, “Fox Hunt,” A William Faulkner Encyclopedia, 139.
[xvii] Faulkner, “Fox Hunt,” 606.
[xviii] Faulkner wrote this story of an unhappy marriage at a time when his own marriage was in jeopardy, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to speculate whether there is an autobiographical element to the story.
[xix] Quoted in Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (1984), 261.
I'm definitely a fan of this one, Bob. Existing Faulkner readers will recognize the "count, no count" ironies and contrasts of his life and fiction. Sports fans new to his writing are very likely to be intrigued enough to seek more details... and contributing to the birth of a new Faulknerian is its own kind of joy!
For me, the most accurate and interesting statement made in this essay, for both Faulkner vets and new recruits:
"Looked at in the totality of Faulkner’s life, fox hunting plays a significant role in what appears to be Faulkner’s desire to belong to the class of the landed gentry or squirearchy."
Also for me, the most poignant Faulkner-fiction reference in this essay is to Bayard in Flags. What desperate, unmanageable grief that young man was stuck stagnant in. 😢 It is significant that once he had lost everything ("everything" to him), he went on auto-pilot back to a physical environment and people that comforted him. This is an emotionally sharp scene in the Yoknapatawpha world, but you also present the more humorous side (albeit often dark humor) with "Fox Hunt" and The Reivers.
📝Note: I found a short article online for The Horse Review, dated January 7, 2020 and "compiled by" Nancy Brannon. Title: "Faulkner and Foxhunting". The target audience is for horse and hunting enthusiasts, and it is an enjoyable introduction to WF for that market. I believe that Nancy Brannon is the second generation owner of Brannon Stables in Georgetown, KY. Personally, I'm curious to know what prompted this article from her and / or the magazine. 🤔
Brannon 2020 Article:
https://midsouthhorsereview.com/article/7149
Brannon Stables fire:
https://www.lex18.com/news/brannon-stables-in-georgetown-burns-down