The Abomination of Desolation
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS&WRITING The Abomination of Desolation By Stanley Edgar Hyman John Hawkes is a remarkable phenomenon in our letters. He has written, and New Directions has published, six short novels...
...The Beetle Leg seems to me the most Faulknerian of Hawkes' novels, in the bad sense of the word: syntax tormented, diction strained, participles dangling...
...Hawkes' new book shows cheerfulness breaking through, but not form...
...The Red Devils sometimes seem human and sometimes seem artificial creatures made of rubber and leather...
...his misery about Cassandra has faded as the tattoo has faded on his tanned chest...
...Now on the tropical island the memory of the rape has diminished as Skipper's naval uniform is reduced to a frayed cap with cockroaches in the sweatband...
...As a consequence of this act, Hencher is kicked to death by the horse, and a racetrack gang wrecks the Banks' flat, kills or nearly kills Margaret, and drives Michael (after granting him a fantastic night of sexual athleticism with the gang's girls) to a spectacular suicide under the horse's hoofs during the big race...
...A dead monkey suddenly screams "Dark is life, dark is death," or two harpies flap by in the Italian air, wings and beaks quivering...
...These do not make the slightest concession to any reader-their vision of life is shattering and their forms are shattered-as a result of which Hawkes is almost unread...
...they are given to crashing through plate glass windows and making sudden invasions of the town's main street...
...The Goose on the Grave is set in Fascist Italy...
...My favorites include: the mayor in The Cannibal betraying Pastor Miller to his death because he is terrified of the red eyes and sharp claws of the American eagle on the colonel's uniform...
...When a dance is held in a deserted asylum, the dancers assemble dutifully: "some with bones broken off-center, some with armpits ringed as black as soot...
...there is a ritual combat between a man and a dog that is like an evil dance...
...the hanging is the occasion for a civic feast...
...The plot involves a couple named Michael and Margaret Banks, whose conventional London middle-class life is transformed when William Hencher, their boarder, persuades Michael to join him in stealing an aged racehorse...
...the prisoner is an innocent man who when captured bore a note reading, in part: "No outmoded punishment should be practiced upon me in the name of the Spirit...
...Skipper (or Sonny) has a child by Catalina Kate, a young Negro girl not addicted to wearing clothes, and this child and a number of bleating calves are the evidences that Skipper has conquered the family death drive...
...Skipper's reaction to these willed deaths is to affirm life...
...After this triumph, Zizendorf is full of grandiose schemes for national liberation, and he prints up illegible manifestoes, but the only practical result is that by the book's end the patients have started to file back into the asylum...
...Hawkes' books are shredded fables, jumbles of apocalyptic visions...
...the council members wear ruffs and have antique gavels of rolled calfskin...
...Hawkes' third book, The Goose on the Grave (1954), contains two short novels, The Owl and The Goose on the Grave...
...I do not enjoy Hawkes' novels or think that they succeed...
...I suspect that Hawkes is trying his hand at the Gospel story: the owl-hangman can be seen as God the Father...
...The Lime Twig (1961) deals with racetrack crime in England...
...The emphasis throughout is on life-denying ceremonial: on the walls are "proclamations hundreds of years old, still readable, still clear and binding...
...The Goose on the Grave's self-destructive insects called "two-heads...
...Jacopo and Edouard, the two men who cultivate the boy Adeppi, have an ambiguous past with each other...
...They would be true novels only if he went through a third stage, recomposing...
...When he captained the U.S.S...
...Nevertheless, some of the individual scenes are remarkable...
...The action consists of an escape by a prisoner about to be hanged, his recapture, and his hanging...
...after the torture and hanging the owl retreats into a tree, and the book ends with the announcement that a new "covenant" has been made...
...At the end of The Lime Twig there is a dreadful suggestion that Margaret is not really dead, but, drained of blood, has become a living zombie...
...Hawkes' first novel, The Cannibal (1949), is perhaps the most depressing and compelling of them all...
...The chronological order of its story seems to have been disarranged at random, as by a shuffle of pages...
...This novel is full of a covert homosexuality that never quite becomes overt...
...in the last scene three of the characters hunt them down with shotguns...
...A flashback reveals that as novices two of the priests once stripped an old woman and sewed her into a hair shirt of raw ratskins...
...Skipper's second skin is more invulnerable, since it is all scar tissue...
...Skipper has always been the victim of the world's cruelty...
...more accurately, they succeed all too well in Hawkes' aims, which I think to be mistaken...
...a man named Nino seems at one point to be confessing to a priest something about himself and Adeppi...
...John Hawkes seems to me to have most impressive talents, hobbled by the mistaken theory that Yvor Winters calls "the fallacy of imitative form" (you must disintegrate your poem to convey disintegration...
...there is a "judgment supper" at which the council of 12 and the hangman dine ceremonially on 13 little fish...
...The novel's' story, if it has a story, tells of the effects that the landslide death of a dam-worker named Mulge Lamson has on various people...
...If this sounds silly in synopsis, it is because it is silly in the novel...
...his alcoholic wife kills herself in a cheap motel...
...If The Beetle Leg is Hawkes' most Faulknerian novel, The Owl is his most Kafkaesque: a dark fable of pointless sacrifice and divine indifference...
...The title comes from the folk belief (which I may have invented) that gooseflesh is a sign that a goose has walked across one's grave...
...It may in fact be a deliberate parody of Faulkner...
...There Skipper and Sonny make their living by the artificial insemination of cows (ah, life...
...in the last pages they burn her...
...she is perhaps the old mother in the novel, who wears a hair shirt so old and worn now that "little punishment remained in it...
...Its title (Hawkes is a wonderful titlist) represents the infinitesimal...
...The Beetle Leg (1951) has been described by Hawkes as "a panoramic and humorous vilification of the American West...
...The Owl is about a city-state, apparently based on San Marino, which is ruled by a hangman, the narrator, who has a great owl and simultaneously is a great owl...
...Leslie Fiedler, whose skill in formulating an issue is matched only by his consistency in choosing the wrong side once the issue has been formulated, writes approvingly in his introduction to The Lime Twig: "The order which retrospectively we impose on our awareness of events Hawkes decomposes.' So he does, but this ordering, form, is the necessary ordering of art...
...The book is one vast surrealist image of what the Bible calls "the abomination of desolation": Germany is seen as a gutted ruin full of well-poisoners and madmen...
...I wish that Hawkes' integrity were in a better cause, and perhaps it will be yet...
...In it a soft fat grandfather called "Skipper" gradually loses all his kin: his father blows out his brains in the bathroom, while the boy plays Brahms on the cello to dissuade him...
...the three naked soldiers lining up to kiss Cassandra in Second Skin...
...and the same priest later imprisons Adeppi naked in his cell...
...Cassandra sadistically had Skipper's chest tattooed with the name of her unfortunate husband...
...After Cassandra's death, he flees from the freezing Maine island to a paradisal tropical island, taking along his Negro friend Sonny...
...What these two novels bound together have in common is a vision of authority as Rack, Noose, and Stake...
...his mother dies incommunicado...
...his beloved daughter Cassandra jumps off a lighthouse because she is pregnant by a repulsive Maine fisherman...
...Nevertheless, his unique role and utter integrity demand serious consideration...
...There are very funny things in the booksurely the Old West will never be the same after we have seen a cowboy stride up to a bullet-scarred bar and bark: "Bowl of chowder and shot of muscatel"but I think that the ultimate effect of The Beetle Leg is less humorous than macabre...
...The novel includes all the properties of Westerns, from a senile sheriff to a licentious Indian girl, as well as one brilliant invention: a group of young nocturnal motorcyclists called the Red Devils...
...It tells of Germany in 1945, with a long flashback to 1914...
...Sometimes Hawkes' supernatural portents chill the blood...
...In what plot the novel has, the narrator, a German nationalist and anti-Semite named Zizendorf, assassinates the sole Allied overseer of the region, an American Jew named Leevey...
...the attack on the car by the enraged rattlesnake in The Beetle Leg...
...The title refers to bird-catching, but "lime" in the book has additional meanings as, for the protagonist, the bitter taste of gastric juices in the mouth, while for his antagonist it symbolizes a tropical paradise...
...a trade practiced in the course of long drowsy mixed picnics, as it might be in the works of Gauguin...
...Hawkes' new novel, Second Skin (New Directions, 210 pp., $4.00), is the first of his books to have a happy ending, and the title is fittingly regenerative...
...when Kate announces her pregnancy by bringing Skipper and Sonny a pound of good old American hot dogs, we are back home in Capoteland...
...Starfish during the war, a mutineer put him over a barrel and raped him...
...his homosexual son-in-law is savagely murdered by some soldiers he has picked up...
...He has written, and New Directions has published, six short novels in five volumes since 1949...
...Hawkes' books are nightmares, grotesque metaphors for our bad times and the timeless human condition, but along with the power they have the shapelessness of nightmare...
...The framework of the book has a beautiful anticlerical simplicity: in the first pages three priests carry off Adeppi's mother...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 7
