Shots in the Forest

 Western man, don't you come around... Ft

Item, from the Wiener Allgemeiner Forst- und Jagd Zeitung, February 25, 1927

The bestial murder of a forester

A horrible light was thrown a few days ago on the murder of Forester Popp in the Bohemian Forest of Untersteinbach, which happened seven years ago. A detective took lodgings in a hotel in a low part of town, presenting himself as an unemployed laborer. On his jobs he worked so badly that his comrades almost became suspicious. But finally the belief spread that he was a student on a frolic. He succeeded in establishing a stand in Sophienthal, where he sold beer and schnaps. There he found out what he wanted to know. In the night, he had his confederates surround Sophienthal and arrest 20 persons. Seventeen were released. Three rumored poachers, Hischmann, Muzer and Georgius, workers at a porcelain factory, were accused of the forester’s murder. The dutiful poacher had recognized the three louts as poachers. So Hirschman, who is said to be a fence, shot the forester with a pistol, and as he lay there, still alive, the others kicked and stomped on him, as he was shot again. But Popp was still not dead. So they buried him alive! With his hands the wounded forester tried to dig his way to the surface, as he wasn’t buried too deeply He broke his fingernails digging, and finally suffocated. The louts had even robbed the unhappy man! The grave, in a lonely part of a hunting reserve, was only discovered by accident, since the hands of the corpse stuck out of the ground.

2.

The sound of shots in the forest is taken as a hallmark of American literature – not least by D.H. Lawrence. It is the fifth chapter in Studies in Classic American literature that everyone remembers – the chapter on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstockings novels. Novels that, as Lawrence says, he loved from a very young age; and which are now absorbed into his curious cosmic vision, with its racism and snobbery and preternatural sensitivity to a certain kind of masculine culture to which he was, for the most part, an outsider. The gamekeeper’s point of view in Lady Chatterley, Lawrence’s own reply and replay of the Natty Bumppo myth. In an astute phrase, Lawrence divided the Cooper persona into two “actualities” – the striver for social recognition, whose writing was judged under the concept of being “good” or not – and the quester in the imagination, whose actuality was elsewhere:

“In another actuality he loved the tomahawking continent of America, and imagined himself Natty Bumppo. His actual desire was to be: Monsieur Fenimore Cooper, le grand écrivain américain. His innermost wish was to be: Natty Bumppo.”

Lawrence has his ESP out for the innermost wish; and we read him, or I read him, for those ESP moments. I think the America book falls in relation both to the Etruscan book and the Lady Chatterley book – in all of which there is a yearning for the indigenous, a yearning that is wrapped inside a mourning. The mourning is for the “inevitable” displacement, i.e. murder of the indigenous. For Lawrence, America is unimaginable without the murder of the “red man” – which is about as far as Lawrence gets with understanding the complexities of Amerindian societies. But if we give him his mocked up conceptual players, there is something to his sense of American violence:

“When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical.

Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.”

Interesting. In 1923, when this was written, the truly bloodsoaked soil was in Northern France, in Gallipoli, on the large Eastern Front, in the Ukraine and Poland. Lawrence saw the stone cold killer in the American soul. But was it that much different from the stone cold killers in Europe?

3.

While Natty Bumppo was hunting in Northern New York State, out in the fields and forests of Bohemia, the Vosge region in France and the Pyrenees, in East Prussia and Krain, that region of Austrian that now comprises Slovenia, in the Urals and by the Danube, the rise in forest offences was being recorded by magistrate and Imperial officer. The German novelist Theodore Fontaine was told a story about the feud between a poacher and a gamekeeper in the Silesian resort town of Krumhübbel (now called Karpacz, and located in Poland) in 1885. He made the feud and the murder of the gamekeeper into a novel, Quitt. Jean Giono, the French novelist, published in 1947 a novel, Le Rois sans divertissement, set in the 1840s in a village in the Southern Alps in France, which centers around a hunter of wolves, the enigmatic Langlois.

The frontier effect in the United States is well studied, but there were frontiers traversing Europe well into the twentieth century, borderlines that were drawn not by the state, but by the population on site. As DJV Jones puts it, about the British case:

“Even in the 1880s and I890s contemporaries were periodically shocked by the bitterness and violence which accompanied this particular criminal activity. A study of poaching, therefore, tells us a good deal about the secret world of the village and the labourer.”

The occlusion of that world is connected to a larger occlusion, I think, one which posits the composite “Western man” against the composite “Colonized subject,” in as much as the frontier in which posited the former against the indigenous latter can be drawn, as well, in places Lawrence lived in: Shropshire, Wales, Sicily, etc.

Putting this another way: I spy with my little eye a problem with the costume worn by “Western” man – which is that Western man mostly didn’t exist in the West until at least the twentieth century. Or to put this another way, parodying the old alchemist’s principle of “as above, so below”, the principle of universal history could be stated thus: “as without, so within”. That is, the European encounter with the savages and the barbarians catalyzed the consciousness among a set of the educated, the bourgeois and the aristocrats, of savages and barbarians within Europe itself. The savage evokes the peasant, the slave the serf. America led the European humanists, even in the 17th century, to the rather shocking view that their own past, the past of the revered ancients, were closer in their beliefs and practices to the Iroquois (according to the Jesuit accounts of the mission in Canada) than to the powdered entities in Versailles or the high churchmen in their schools. Universal history, which proceeds by experiments – the plantation, the factory, free trade, representative government, the reservation, the labor camp, etc. – is coded from the beginning to separate the without and the within, even as every discovery produces this two fold effect. The compromise solution was to posit a homunculus within. The ideal Western man, that big wax figure, manipulated from within by a little dwarf.

4.

We began with the sound of shots in the forest twilight. In a forest. In a forest near the border with Germany. The back and forth over backroads. Oaks, spruce, beech, firs, old names, old lumber. Underbrush, the ground a little wet, clear spots covered with brown leaffall, the day’s humidity, the morning shower, the shadows here cast even during the height of noon that send a shiver through you, looking up at the great crowns of the trees. Sounds in the thornbushes. Foxes, rabbits, field mice. Shouts. There are four of them, one in a sort of uniform, a khaki overcoat, leather boots. Bareheaded. His hat lies some yards off, canted, its little rosette touching dirt. Disarray. The forester wears his hat as the policeman wears his kepi. The other men in a circle around him. The one holding the pistol. The pistol firing. The forester buckling, falling. The other men like beaters coming at him with kicks and blows. Insults in the dialect. Large hands. Boots less well made than the forester’s, but useful. Muddy, the toes hard, the kicks breaking ribs. Another shot. The forester lying there balled up. Then the body relaxes, the tension out of it, like when you cut the fishing line which has been pulled taut as its hook got entangled with some sunk branch or log. All the men know that moment. And the men begin to talk among themselves, in the dialect. What to do now? Comrades in wood thievery, comrades in their job in the little factory. The one with the pistol leaning over the body. Hand running over the coat. Into the pockets. Some change. A cigarette case. They smoke the dead man’s cigarettes, then disperse: the one with the gun sitting on a boulder, the others looking for downed branches, which they use their large knives to scorp, sharpen the end. Digging with them. The man who shot getting off his boulder and helping. Shallow, then a bit deeper. Loosening up the soil with their knives, they will sharpen them latter back in the village. Until at last there is a depression and a pile of soil and they can toss the dead man in it. The man who seems dead. They are no pulsetakers. Dead now or dead later. What is the difference? They scoop up the dirt pile with their hands, kick the dirt, covering the body with the dirt to a certain level. Face, chest, legs disappear under the dirt. Tamp it down. One goes to a sack on the edge of this clearing, a big game sack. Pulls out a lamp, a gas lamp, lights the wick with a match. The light shoots out towards the congregated darkness of the forest now. And the startsabove them now. They know the paths, they know them even when a man can't see his hand before him in a mist, or at midnight. They are not afraid. Although they know there are ghosts. They leave in silence the impromptu grave behind.