GLENWAY WESCOTT (1901–1987) grew up in Wisconsin, but moved to France with his companion Monroe Wheeler in 1925. Wescott’s early fiction, notably the stories in Goodbye, Wisconsin and the novel The Grandmothers (in which Alwyn Tower, the narrator of The Pilgrim Hawk, makes his first appearance), were set in his native Midwest. Later work included essays on political, literary, and spiritual subjects, as well as the novels The Pilgrim Hawk and Apartment in Athens (also available as an NYRB Classic). Wescott’s journals, recording his many literary and artistic friendships and offering an intimate view of his life as a gay man, were published posthumously under the title Continual Lessons.
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of five novels, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall.
THE PILGRIM HAWK
A Love Story
GLENWAY WESCOTT
Introduction by
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
THE PILGRIM HAWK
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
We may consider Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk to be a short novel or a long novella, but whatever we choose to call it, it is exactly as long as it needs to be. It is murderously precise and succinct. It contains, in its 108 pages, more levels and layers of experience than many books five times its length.
The book centers on various overlapping triangles among a group of beings who are mostly, but not exclusively, human. It takes place during a single summer afternoon in the late 1920s in a French country house, where Alexandra Henry, the young American heiress who owns it, is entertaining an American house guest named Alwyn Tower, the book’s narrator. On this particular afternoon Alexandra and Tower are visited by the Cullens, a wealthy Irish couple who, in their ongoing and rather aimless travels, are en route to Budapest in a Daimler, driven by their young chauffeur. Larry Cullen is, or at least appears to be, the very image of the hale, silly aristocrat. His wife, Madeleine, is an aging beauty who has spent her marriage dragging her husband through one rough devotion after another, most of them involving radical Irish politics or the killing of some wild animal, and who appears at the château with her latest enthusiasm, a hawk she is training to hunt. She has named the hawk Lucy, after the Walter Scott and Donizetti heroine, and she wears it perched on her wrist like a sacred jewel.
At the same time a parallel story transpires in the kitchen, involving Ricketts, the chauffeur, and Alexandra’s servants, Jean and Eva, a husband and wife from Morocco. These seven characters—eight if we include the hawk, and we must include the hawk—are the novel’s entire population. From this small cast of characters, in the course of what should be an innocuous interlude of cocktails and dinner, Wescott summons a series of revelations that doesn’t stop until the book’s ambiguous, quietly lethal last lines.
Beyond that, I see no point in a detailed synopsis. Suffice it to say that The Pilgrim Hawk is an endlessly intricate meditation on freedom versus captivity and passion versus peace, among other subjects; and that in terms of character and event it is strung throughout with little bombs, some of which explode on contact, some considerably later. Rendered geometrically, the novel’s structure might resemble a series of intersecting triangles canted at various angles in space, irregular but perfect, in the way of quartz crystals. With its single bucolic setting and the desperate, strangling wit and manners of its most prominent characters, it owes a good deal to Chekhov. Wescott shares with Chekhov an insistence that the enormous is amply contained within the small; that the ingredients of tragedy can be found in abundance among genteel, indolent people passing an afternoon together in a parlor and a garden.
All that occurs in The Pilgrim Hawk takes place within the borders of this miniature world. The action does not extend beyond the house and grounds—even the book’s one incident of physical violence takes place outside our range of vision. The whole story could be presented on stage with almost no alterations. Its static quality is, however, by no means accidental. The narrative is restricted in the way that the bird (and the people) are confined. As the story progresses we learn that every domesticated hawk has been captured in the wild, since hawks do not mate or breed in captivity. “They never get over being wild,” as Mrs. Cullen says, and though trained hawks could always choose to fly away when hunting, they do not, she explains, because in captivity “it’s a better life, more food and more fun.”
Some readers may groan inwardly, as I did, when I first read about the hawk. Oh, I thought, a symbol. And the hawk is, of course, a symbol—hawks are members of a small category of creatures and objects that can’t be anything but symbols when they appear in books. However, if novelists are determined, as they should be, to write about everything in the world, it is just as important to find new life in the old images as it is to invent new ones. Wescott knew what he was up against, what sort of portentousness he flirted with, and it is a measure of his talent that he was able not only to fully engage what might be implied by such a stubbornly meaningful image but also to create a hawk that is, apart from its larger meaning, an entirely convincing, integral member of the story. Wescott was a man who had looked at hawks:
[The hawk’s] body was as long as her mistress’s arm; the wing feathers in repose a little too long, slung across her back like a folded tent.... Her luxurious breast was white, with little tabs or tassels of chestnut. Out of tasseled pantaloons her legs came down straight to the perch with no apparent flesh on them, enameled a greenish yellow.
But her chief beauty was that of expression. It was like a little flame; it caught and compelled your attention like that, although it did not flicker and there was nothing bright about it nor any warmth in it. It is a look that men sometimes have; men of great energy, whose appetite or vocation has kept them absorbed every instant all their lives. They may be good men but they are often mistaken for evil men, and vice versa. In Lucy’s case it appeared chiefly in her eyes, not black but funereally brown, and extravagantly large, set deep in her flattened head.
The hawk’s wonderfully drawn wildness—its profound otherness—slices like a razor through the world of indolent expatriate luxury in which the book is set, some years before the Second World War, which will not only send Alwyn Tower and Alexandra Henry fleeing back to America but will extinguish a certain lazy, genteel optimism; a belief in the relative sanctity of hedges and lawns as well as a more general belief in our collective ability to select and enforce happy endings. The book declares itself at the start to be set in a less difficult past; to be both lit and obscured by wistfulness. We learn, through Mrs. Cullen, that only captive hawks have any chance of living out their natural spans—in the wild they always die of starvation, when they grow too old to hunt—and as we read we pick up stray fragments about the loneliness and failure that await some of the characters as certainly as war awaits the world in which they live. Most significantly we receive, in the opening line, an offhand and all but invisible reference to what the future holds for Tower and Alexandra, though we are not permitted to understand what their futures imply until we reach the story’s end.
Every character proves, by the book’s close, to be more than he or she first seemed to be, just as every relationship turns out to be far more complex and perverse than we might have imagined at the outset. This is most conspicuously true of the Cullens, whom we meet as relatively standard-issue eccentrics, two of the wealthy, outdoorsy people Alexandra has coped with all her privileged life, “self-centered but without any introspection, strenuous but emotionally idle.” By
the end of the quietly calamitous afternoon, superficial Cullen is revealed as a tragic and potentially dangerous figure, driven to extremes by a jealousy broad and deep enough to include a bird. Mrs. Cullen metamorphoses from a chilly matron into a rough, wild Irish girl grown old and, finally, into something like an Amazon. As she tries to retrieve the hawk after it has escaped we see that
French or Italian footwear of hers with three-inch heels not only incapacitated her but flattered her, and disguised her. Now her breasts seemed lower on her torso, out of the way of her nervous arms. Her hips were wide and her back powerful, with that curve from the shoulder blades to the head which you see in the nudes of Ingres. She walked with her legs well apart, one padding footfall after another, as impossible to trip up as a cat.
The book treats the parallel drama among Jean, Eva, and Ricketts as peripheral—they live in the novel as they live in the households of Alexandra and the Cullens: in cars and kitchens, out of the way. They are, of course, captives themselves, and they matter more or less the way wild pets matter: as curiosities, as sources of trouble, and, more obscurely, as subjugated invaders from a realm of frighteningly rampant desires. Wescott chose to depict his vanishing world from the point of view of those who are served, and to let the servers remain as obscure to the reader as they are to their keepers. The story immerses us not only in a world but in a particular way of living in that world. Jean, Eva, and the chauffeur, like the titular hawk, play crucial roles in the stories of the wealthy but exist in a world of their own as well. One imagines they pass through this novel while living out an unwritten novel of their own, one in which they are the central figures, and the commotion created by those people in the parlor is important but secondary.
At the center of the story, omnipresent but also concealed, is Alwyn Tower himself, and he proves to be the darkest and most surprising figure of all. Tower lives within the confines of his own domesticity more or less as the hawk does, for similar reasons—it’s a better life, more food and more fun—and probably at similar cost, though Wescott is too subtle to offer a mere plea, in narrative form, for freedom over captivity. Tower is not yet old but is no longer young. He is trying, and failing, to write novels, and he has been in love twice, though we learn nothing of the particulars in either case. (In one of the book’s many symmetries we are told that trained hawks can only tolerate two consecutive unsuccessful strikes before they despair and fly away, to a freedom that will eventually starve them to death.) Tower is essentially an engine of perception, of exquisitely cruel and precise judgments. Although he has failed at writing he is, in a sense, the very embodiment of the novelist, who must of necessity see more than his characters see, know more about them than they can know about themselves. If this is a requisite virtue in a novelist, however, it is a fatal flaw in a life being lived. Tower sees too much and, in seeing so clearly, wants too little. He could be a character from Greek myth: a man so gifted with vision that he is unable to abandon it and simply, irrationally desire anyone or anything. In the book, Tower is, as he would wish to be, barely perceptible, except through the workings of his exquisite eye.
The same might be said of Wescott the novelist, whose eye is so cold and precise, so hawklike, that the novel itself might suffer from an excess of clarity and a dearth of passion if it weren’t redeemed by its language. Almost every page contains some small wonder of phrase or insight, some instance of the world keenly observed and reinvented. Of hunters near Alexandra’s château, Wescott writes, “We could hear their hunting horns which sounded like a picnic of boy sopranos, lost.” When Mrs. Cullen gives Tower the hawk to hold, briefly, on his wrist, we read, “At the least move her talons pricked the leather and pulled it a bit—as fashionable women’s fingernails do on certain fabrics—though evidently she held them as loose and harmless as she could. Only her grip as a whole was hard, like a pair of tight, heated iron bracelets.” Sentences like that are beauties in themselves, and the fact that they also serve the book’s larger meanings can only be considered with an appreciation bordering on awe.
To my mind, The Pilgrim Hawk stands unembarrassed beside Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers.” Those particular titles come to mind because they are all stories about disastrously intense passions and desires, narrated by someone untroubled by either, or, at best, by passions and desires that prove disastrously easy to manage. Each book offers, in one way or another, a narrative keyhole through which the reader is invited to peer at scandalous and salacious acts, and each implies that whatever cannot be seen through the keyhole is at least as significant as what can. Finally, each shares the conviction that, as far as human affairs are concerned, it may be better to live hugely and tragically, even in the service of some grand, ardent mistake, than submit to the seductions of mildness, reason, and order.
It is James, however, whom Wescott most nearly resembles. Ford and Fitzgerald produce their internal combustions at least in part by subjecting cosseted characters to ordained accidents, by creating collisions between comfort and chaos, but Wescott, like James, produces all his sparks from within: what fascinates him are devastating events that spring directly from character. The Pilgrim Hawk could be the work of a particularly brilliant clockmaker—a clockmaker capable of creating a mechanism of gears, springs, and pulleys that, when set in motion, obeys every known law of cause and effect but results, ultimately, in chaos. There is a sense, in Wescott as in James, that the mechanism requires no outside intervention: no matter how many times we wind the clock it will always tick along, with flawless precision, toward the same undoing.
The Pilgrim Hawk is, in short, a work of brilliance, and brilliance is not a word one often gets to apply to obscure books more than sixty years old. It was Wescott’s second novel, following his well-received book The Grandmothers. He would publish one more, Apartment in Athens, in 1945, and then live another forty years publishing only essays and journals. There is, to my knowledge, little information about why he stopped writing fiction, though I tend to believe that writers who stop writing do so for reasons as ultimately mysterious as those that drove them to attempt writing in the first place. Whether the general neglect of Wescott’s book stems from his long period of relative silence, or from the book’s foreignness (it is a profoundly European book written by an American, and difficult to categorize), its stern and rather drab title (one wonders what would have happened to The Great Gatsby if Fitzgerald had obeyed his early inclination to call it The High-Bouncing Lover), or some more fundamental flaw in the world’s ability to keep track of its gifts and glories, I can’t help but believe that it will not only survive but, ultimately, prosper. Those of us who love books, as well as those of us who write them, are sometimes called upon for prodigious acts of patience.
—Michael Cunningham
THE PILGRIM HAWK
For Nelson
March to July, 1940;
Stone-blossom and New York
THE CULLENS WERE Irish; but it was in France that I met them and was able to form an impression of their love and their trouble. They were on their way to a property they had rented in Hungary; and one afternoon they came to Chancellet to see my great friend Alexandra Henry. That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America, and she met my brother and married him.
Needless to say, the twenties were very different from the thirties, and now the forties have begun. In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship. There was a kind of idealistic or optimistic curiosity in the air. And vagaries of character, and the various war and peace that goes on in the psyche, seemed of the greatest interest and even importance.
Chancellet must be a painful place in the forties, although one of the least changed in France, I suppose, because it i
s unimportant. As I remember, there was a school of what is now romantically called celestial navigation, with a modest flying field and a few hangars, two or three kilometers away, at Pelors; but if that is in use now the foreigners must have it. In our day, day in and day out, the old Duchesse de Challot and her poor relations and friends in tight coats on wind-broken mounts used to hunt in the forest of Pelors. We could hear their hunting horns which sounded like a picnic of boy sopranos, lost. Meanwhile perhaps there have been anti-aircraft guns for the defense of Paris embedded all amid the earths of foxes: angry radio stammering in the well-kept branches. Now at least the foxes and the thrushes can come back. The old ex-cabinet-minister whose château and little park adjoined Alex’s garden is dead.
Her house was just a section of the village street: two small dwellings and a large horse-stable combined and rebuilt and expensively furnished in the plain modern style. She or her architect made a mistake in the planning of the ground floor. The dining room and the chief guest-room were on the street, which is also the highway to Orléans and the tourist country of the Loire; so that the reckless French traffic practically brushed the walls, and heavy trucks alarmed one all night. Not only Alex’s bedroom but the kitchen and pantry opened into the spacious and quiet garden. This delighted the new servants whom Alex had brought up from Morocco, a romantic pair named Jean and Eva. They promptly took a far corner of it under some plane trees for their own use; and all spring they passed every spare moment there, quarreling and occasionally weeping during the day, but like clockwork making peace and sealing it with kisses in the twilight or moonlight . . .I mention this odd location of the servants’ quarters because, that afternoon of the Cullens’ visit, I went to speak to Jean and happened to look out the kitchen window and saw Cullen in the garden, futilely giving way to his awful jealousy, emancipated from love for a few minutes.
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