A Lonely American Eccentric

...Of all the book's protagonists, only Sidney Slyter is without love...

...Christmas Book Issue A Lonely American Eccentric The Pleasures of John Hawkes By Leslie A. Fiedler Even though his fourth novel, The Lime Twig, will be published this winter, John Hawkes remains among the ranks of those first-rate contemporary American authors who are little read and woefully-unrecognized...

...Hawkes' novel makes painfully clear how William Hencher's love for his mother, dead in the fire-bombings of London, brings him back years later to the lodgings they once shared—a fat man with elastic sleeves on his thighs, in whom the encysted small boy cannot leave off remembering and suffering...

...Not only is the writing of really new books a perilous pursuit, but even the reading of such books is beset with dangers...

...In a culture where even terror has been vulgarized by mass entertainers until we can scarcely believe in it any longer, we hunger to be assured that, after all, it really counts...

...I suppose, that readers are secretly grateful to authors content to rewrite the dangerous books of the past...

...In this essay, which New Directions will publish as an introduction to The Lime Twig, Fiedler analyzes Hawkes1 "experimentalism" and his position as a "Gothic novelist...

...he is no more an echoer of other men's revolts than he is a subscriber to the recent drift toward neo-middlebrow sentimentality...

...EVERYONE KNOWS that in our literature an age of experimentalism is over and an age of recapitulation has begun...

...Counterfeits of insanity (automatic writing, the scrawls of the drunk or doped) are finally boring...

...For the sake of art and the truth, he dissolves the rational universe which we are driven, for the sake of sanity and peace, to manufacture out of the chaos of memory, impression...

...But precisely here is the clue to the final triumph of Hawkes' art, his detachment from that long literary tradition which assumes that consciousness is continuous, that experience reaches us in a series of framed and unified scenes, and that—in life as well as books—we can be aware simultaneously of a total context and all of its details...

...In his newest, The Lime Twig, he takes up the Gothic pursuit once more, though this time his lunar landscape is called England...

...IT is NOT so much the fact that love succumbs to terror which obsesses Hawkes as the fact that love breeding terror is itself the final terror...

...It is all, on one level, a little like a thriller, a story, say, by Graham Greene...

...His characters move not from scene to scene but in and out of focus...

...In The Cannibal, The Beetle Leg, The Goose on the Grave, he has pursued through certain lunar landscapes (called variously Germany or the American West or Italy) his vision of horror and baffled passion...

...To be sure, certain details are rendered with a more than normal, an almost painful, clarity (suddenly a white horse dangles before us, vividly defined, or we are gazing, close up, at a pair of speckled buttocks), but the contexts which give them meaning are blurred by alcohol or weariness or the failure of attention...

...and we cling to it more, perhaps, out of piety toward the literature of our past than out of respect for our life in the present...

...For unless the horror we endure is real, there is no point to our lives: and it is to writers like Hawkes that we turn from the wholesale slaughter on TV to be persuaded of the reality of what we most fear...

...Yet Hawkes' new novel finally avoids the treacherous lucidity of the ordinary shocker, the kind of clarity intended to assure a reader that the violence he relives destroys only certain characters in a book, not the fabric of the world he inhabits...

...I found," he says, "her small tube of cosmetic for the lips and, in the lavatory, drew a red circle around each of my eyes...

...Hawkes, however, shares the effeteness of Djuna Barnes' vision of evil no more than he does the piety of Greene's vision of sin...

...Hawkes' "experimentalism" is, however, his own rather than some rehash of yesterday's avant-garde...

...Larry turned slowly round so they could see, and there was the gun's blue butt, the dazzling links of steel, the hairless and swarthy torso...

...nor has his failure to reach a wide audience shaken his faith in his themes...

...The order which retrospectively we impose on our awareness of events (by an effort of the will and imagination so unflagging that we are no more conscious of it than of our breathing) Hawkes decomposes...

...It is all, in short, quite like the life we lead but do not record in books—untidy, half-focused, disarrayed...

...To tout him too widely would be the equivalent of an article in Holiday, a note in the travel section of the Sunday Times, which might turn a private delight into an attraction for everybody...

...It is, indeed, in the interests of truth that he endures seeming in 1960 that unfashionable and suspect stereotype, the "experimental writer...

...but this means one who makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's failure...

...Fiedler, who teaches English at Montana Slate University, is the author of An End to Innocence, Love and Death in the American Novel and No...

...Yet John Hawkes has managed both, and is perhaps (after three books and on the verge of the fourth) the least read novelist of substantial merit in the United States...

...But God knows that of all that list only Hawkes really needs the help of Partisan Review...

...He is a lonely eccentric, a genuine unique—a not uncommon American case, or at least one that used to be not uncommon...

...and in such knowledge there are possibilities not only for poetry and power but for pleasure as well...

...Margaret Banks naked beneath the shreds of a hospital gown and lovingly beaten to death...

...What each of Hawkes' doomed lovers has proposed to himself in fantasy—atrocious pleasure or half-desired indignity—he endures in fact...

...Michael, screwed silly by all his nympholeptic dreams become flesh, throwing himself under the hooves of a field of horses bunched for the final turn and the stretch...

...I recall a year or so ago coming across an ad in Partisan Review in which Hawkes' publisher was decrying one of the exclusions that have typically plagued him...

...In Thunder, published this November...

...But each lover has ultimately yearned for his own death and so ultimately dies...

...Does anybody blame me.' . . . Syb, eyes in a lovely face pressed hard against the smoothest portion of Larry's arm which—her face with auburn hair was just below his shoulder—could take the punches . . ." And even these are bound together in love...

...And the end of it all is sheer terror: Hencher kicked to a pulp in a stable...

...though now, I fear, loneliness has become as difficult to maintain among us as failure...

...Is Partisan,'" that publisher asked, "doing right by its readers when it consistently excludes from its pages the work of such writers as Edward Dahlberg, Kenneth Patchen, Henry Miller, John Hawkes and Kenneth Rexroth...

...and, indeed, there is a tension in Lime Twig absent from Hawkes' earlier work: a pull between the aspiration toward popular narrative (vulgar, humorous, suspenseful) and the dedication to nightmare...

...Yet Hawkes does not abandon all form in his quest of the illusion of formlessness...

...Hawkes may be an unpopular writer but he is not an esoteric one...

...How reassuring to pick up the latest book of the latest young novelist and to discover there familiar themes, familiar techniques—accompanied often by the order of skill available to the beginner when he is able (sometimes even with passionate conviction) to embrace received ideas, exploit established forms...

...Miller has come to seem grandpa to a large part of a generation, while the two Kenneths are surely not without honor and even Dahlberg has his impassioned exponents...

...and it is for this reason...

...It is, however, this absurd affection which finally helps draw Michael Banks out of the drab routine of his life and into crime, helps, that is, to turn a lifetime of erotic daydreaming about horses into the act of stealing a racehorse called Rock Castle...

...for the place he defines is the place in which we all live between sleeping and waking, and the pleasure he affords is the pleasure of returning to that place between waking and sleeping...

...In the world of Hawkes' fiction, however, we are forced to abandon our traditional presumptions and the security we find in hanging on to them...

...A sense of deja vu takes the curse off the whole ticklish enterprise in which the writer engages, mitigates the terror and truth which we seek in his art at the same time we cravenly hope that it is not there...

...and few of us, I suspect, really regret it...

...reflex and fantasy that threatens eternally to engulf us...

...in the random conjunction of reason and madness, blur and focus, he finds occasions for wit and grace...

...and who would be foolish enough in any case to deny to anyone daylight access to those waste places from which no one can be barred at night, which the least subtle visit in darkness and unknowing...

...They cheered, slapping the oxen arms, slapping the flesh, and cheered when the metal vest was returned to him—steel and skin—and the holster was settled again but in an armpit naked now and smelling of scented freshener...

...But, of course, the tourists would never really come...

...only the killers, whose fall guys and victims they become, having wished for the death of others, survive: Syb, the come-on girl, tart and teaser...

...His view avoids the esthetic and the theological alike, since it deals with the mysteries neither of the world of art nor of the spirit—but only with the immitigable mystery of the world of common experience...

...Such a set of assumptions seems scarcely tenable in a post-Freudian and post-Newtonian world...

...John Hawkes neither rewrites nor recapitulates, and, therefore, spares us neither terror nor truth...

...One of the few writers who has raised his voice in support of Hawkes is THE NEW LEADER'S literary critic, Leslie A. Fiedler...

...But in those lodgings he discovers Banks and his wife Margaret, yearns toward them with a second love verging on madness, serves them tea in bed and prowls their apartment in their absence, searching for ways to bind together them, himself, his memories...

...Little Dora, tidily cruel behind an aging schoolmarm's face...

...Hordes of the idly curious might descend on him and us, gaping, pointing—and bringing with them the Coca-Cola sign, the hot-dog stand...

...half dopester of races, half detective, Sidney is at once a spokesman for the novelist and a parody of his function, providing a choral commentary on the action which his own curiosity spurs toward its end...

...If Lime Twig reminds us of Brighton Rock, which in turn reminds us of a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, it is of Brighton Rock recalled in a delirium or by a drowning man—Brighton Rock rewritten by Djuna Barnes...

...while the actual compositions of the insane are in the end merely documents, terrible and depressing...

...and the nightmare through which his terrified protagonists flee reaches its climax at a race track, where gangsters and cops and a stolen horse bring to Michael Banks and his wife the spectacular doom which others of us dream and wake from, relieved, but which they, improbably, live...

...for they swim in a space whose essence is indistinctness, endure in a time which refuses either to begin or end...

...This he neither denies nor conceals, being incapable of the evasions of sentimentality: the writer's capitulation before his audience's desire to be deceived, his own desire to be approved...

...Hawkes gives us neither of these surrenders to unreason but rather reason's last desperate attempt to know what unreason is...

...How comfortable it is to be interested in literature in a time of standard acceptance and standard dissent—when the only thing more conventionalized than convention is revolt...

...Let them leave us Hawkes...

...For twenty years.' shouted Dora again through the smoke opaque as ice, 'for twenty years I've admired that...

...Who, however, reads John Hawkes...

...He is, in short, a Gothic novelist...

...and Larry, the gangster-in-chief and cock-of-the-house, who stands stripped at the novel's end between the two women, indestructible in the midst of the destruction he has planned, a phallic god in brass knuckles and bulletproof vest...

...They've got Ischia now and Mallorca and Walden Pond...

...Each section of the novel opens with a quotation from his newspaper column, "Sidney Slyter Says," in which the jargon of the sports page merges with a kind of surreal poetry, the matter of fact caught at the moment of becoming hallucination...

...Only a very few of us, I fear, tempted to pride by our fewness, and ready in that pride to believe that the recalcitrant rest of the world doesn't deserve Hawkes, that we would do well to keep his pleasures our secret...

...I had their bed to myself while they were gone...