By Stuart Mitchner
And suddenly, leaning against the wall beside the doorway, there was, bewilderingly . . . a fox.
—Ford Madox Ford on D.H. Lawrence
Foxes come and foxes go, but there’s no getting away from the fox “leaning against the wall” who died 95 years ago on March 2, 1930. After referring to the “nature passages” in D.H. Lawrence that “run like fire through his books,” Ford Madox Ford has to admit “that at times when you read him you have the sense that there really was to him a side that was supernatural.” A colossal understatement, but at least it explains why Lawrence just showed up a few weeks short of his 140th birthday.
There was nothing of Lawrence in my thoughts the late June evening a fox trotted up the street and turned into our driveway as if it were the designated route to a comfortable spot near my wife’s herb garden, which is where the photo shown here was taken. Every day that week, at around 7, up the street and down the driveway it came, the last time with a kit in tow. When both nestled together in the same spot, in the waning daylight, it was as if our backyard had a story to tell. Better yet it gave us something to share, and since one visit occurred on the eve of my wife’s birthday, I found a card showing a fox nuzzling a hedgehog that’s still on display two months later.
Nature’s Story
At the usual hour on the Friday of our week with the fox, the backyard was the setting for a festive family scene as three kits romped and rough-housed while the parents watched, the father from atop the huge Princeton Ridge boulder in the center of the yard. A day later, during the July 4 weekend, we discovered a dead fawn in the bushes at the back of the yard, the mother close by staring down at it, waiting for it to come back to life. After a phone call to the police, we were told nobody would be able to collect the body until Tuesday because it was a long holiday weekend. When we mentioned the foxes, the cop on the other end said, in effect, no worries, “nature has a way of taking care of these things.” All through the “glorious Fourth” we were haunted by an awareness of what was happening out of view at the back of the yard; when the Wildlife Service came, there was nothing to collect but a small pile of bones.
Looking Beyond
Not yet thinking of Lawrence, even with his works in the bookcase at my back, I found this sighting in Catherine Raven’s Fox & I (Spiegel & Grau 2021): “I pondered the scene. There sat, just beyond my doorstep, rain soaked and shivering, a few hours after the death of Pope John Paul II, a fox.” The next paragraph is closer to our experience, except for the repeated reference to the Pope, after whose death Raven continued to see the fox: “he strolled up and down my driveway, sunned on my boulders, hunted in my meadow, and absconded with my voles.”
What eventually turned me toward Lawrence was a passage from Fox & I in which Raven is eye to eye with Fox. There was “no sound no smell no movement. Just two amber eyes…. After that, whenever I wanted, I could close my eyes and see Fox’s face just as clearly as if I were still staring at him. I was grateful for the image whenever it appeared. His eyes were beautiful and wet and astonishingly convex.” A page later, “Our eyes aligned almost perfectly … I’m not sure I expected anyone to have such kind eyes, but certainly not him.”
A later scene begins on “the large rock perched on the high point of my back field,” where Fox had snatched and eaten a bluebird “on my precious Precambrian boulder” upon which he perched as he “pushed his face closer to me, dipping his nose downward and staring with round, open eyes. Even if you had never seen a fox, you would have recognized on the fox sitting before me a face so innocent that you would have concluded that he had never stalked a bluebird, let alone dismembered one.”
Lawrence’s Supernatural Side?
Sure that Lawrence would have had mixed feelings about those passages from Fox & I, I went, finally, to his 1922 novella The Fox and the two late-20-something female protagonists: gentle, sisterly Banford and Lawrentian-to-the-core March, who had been “keeping watch over the fowls, which the fox had been eating.” Then, as now, it was “the end of August” when March “looked at it all, saw it all, and did not see it….. She lowered her eyes, and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. Her chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound — she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted.”
No surprise, Lawrence the fox has already made the match, her chin, his eyes, she’s his, he’s hers: “She struggled, confusedly she came to herself, and saw him making off, with slow leaps over some fallen boughs, slow, impudent jumps…. What she would do when she saw him again she did not consider. But she was determined to find him. So she walked abstractedly about on the edge of the wood, with wide, vivid dark eyes, and a faint flush in her cheeks. She did not think. In strange mindlessness she walked hither and thither…. For he had lifted his eyes upon her, and his knowing look seemed to have entered her brain. She did not so much think of him: she was possessed by him. She saw his dark, shrewd, unabashed eye looking into her, knowing her. She felt him invisibly master her spirit….Meanwhile the night fell, and a great moon rose above the pine trees.”
Whether this was what Ford meant by Lawrence’s “supernatural” side, he’s here at length, alive on the page. As for the moon, it belongs to Lawrence after the “Moony” chapter in Women in Love (1920) when Rupert/Lawrence sends it “flying asunder in flakes of white and dangerous fire.”
Songs and Screams
More than once my wife and I have been wakened in the dead of night by an eerie sound from the street — a combination of roar and hiss. There are numerous attempts to describe or explain the sound foxes make at night. You can hear it on YouTube as “the Vixen’s Screech” and “What Fox Screams (Mating Calls) Sound Like.” This is what Lawrence’s March hears: “That night March dreamed vividly. She dreamed she heard a singing outside which she could not understand, a singing that roamed round the house, in the fields, and in the darkness. It moved her so that she felt she must weep. She went out, and suddenly she knew it was the fox singing.”
Taylor’s Version
Since this month of columns began with Taylor Swift’s “August,” I’ve been watching fox-themed videos of two of my favorite songs from 1989 (Taylor’s Version): In “I Know Places,” “They got the cages, they got the boxes, and guns. They are the hunters, we are the foxes, and we run.” In the video for “Out of the Woods,” as Taylor repeats the chorus, “Are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods yet?” and “Are we in the clear yet? Are we in the clear yet? Good,” the woods are deep dark and luminously Lawrentian, with two luminous foxes racing across the top of the screen, and when Taylor sings of “moving the furniture, so we could dance,” two Fox Gods appear on either side of a supernatural globe the author of The Fox and Women in Love might have dreamed beyond the reach of fiction.