Dull Decay and Exuberant Comedy

...Love weaves its own tapestry, spins its own golden thread, with its own sweet breath breathes into being its mysteries—bucolic, lusty, gentle as the eyes of daisies or thick with pain...

...Free at last, he thinks, from Marilyn and a treadmill of banana peels, Pocock is now Winston Pitt (for two prime ministers), philosopher and Englishman...

...Aside from missing half his right ear (shot off in the War), Pocock "was totally unmemorable...

...Elliott Baker is not merely adept at setting down the platitudes that people exchange in lieu of conversation, at anathematizing Foreign Service wives in London ("Just because 1 love Cezanne the most doesn't mean that I don't love Toulouse-Lautrec...

...That anything less than sexual multiplicity (body upon body, voice on voice) is naive...

...Tempering the wild distortions of transfigured death with the affirmative sobriety of metaphor, Hawkes described in all his books a masterly panorama of carnage and ruin, impotent human beings ground down by the mechanistic imperatives of a world of waste, corruption and murder...

...Eschewing the distortions of time and place that cast a spurious originality over the work of less sure-footed writers, Baker wisely restricts his exuberant ingenuity to a rollercoaster plot that carries his schlemiel, Wendell Pocock, from a dull suburban life in Illinois to happiness on the Sahara...

...Each subsequent Hawkes novel, particularly Second Skin, was compared with Faulkner, Kafka and the arcane priestess of 20th-century American surrealism, Djuna Barnes, and none of the praise seemed excessive...

...And out of its own music creates the flesh of our lives...

...Asked to guess who wrote this overripe peach of a paragraph, any sharp-nosed literary gamesman would probably answer Lawrence Durrell, and that is precisely the trouble...

...In place of the extraordinary visions of hell without heaven that Hawkes' novels have offered us before now (which make the so-called experimentation of younger writers like Donald Barthelme read like a computerized trivia-trove) we now have only a stereotyped experiment with hyperbole of the senses, in pinchbeck prose that struts and preens as though it were authentic coin of the realm...

...Coming to the end of The Cannibal or The Lime Twig was to awake from an artfully wrought dream of evil that carried its melodramatic shudder unsparingly into the calm rituals of day...

...Pocock & Pitt is marvelously funny and strangely moving, for the author's underdone meat loaf ends as a man worth knowing and saving...

...My writing depends on absolute detachment, and the familiar or invented landscape helps me to achieve and maintain this detachment...

...Every writer is entitled to mistakes, but a book-length lapse seems less a false step than a lasting aberration...

...he knows that the catastrophe which often lies at the heart of comedy can be a form of grace...

...The subtitle of Twelfth Night, remember, is What You Will...

...Though his settings were extraordinarily varied?postwar Germany, Renaissance Italy, the squalid late-'40s England of spivs and Teddy boys, South Sea islands, and his own legendary American West—he zeroed in with astonishing vigor on images of desolation and evil, to fulfill with great skill what he believed to be the true purpose of any novel: "to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world...

...Yet Baker is a writer of farce rather than tragedy, and Pocock's release from his familiar stupefactions comes not from the quintet of whores but from a shady Greek who turns up in their place, sells him a British passport, and sends him off to an elocution teacher who will erase the American barbarities from his diction...

...In Second Skin, a fractured realm was held in control through visions and incidents of unspeakable horror—dismembered corpses, iguanas sinking into the skin of a pregnant woman, the suicidal tropism of the narrator's father and children...

...Who knows...

...Toward the end of a trip to Europe with his fat wife Marilyn, Pocock suffers a third heart attack in London...

...Cyril comments: "Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy...

...Occasionally they eat, drink, and even sleep without coupling...

...in his own words—a sagging lump, a flabby mess, an underdone meat loaf of a man...

...Since nothing else about his life seems pleasing, he decides on the best of ways to go—he arranges to take on five whores at once, and have his heart give out in a final burst of priapic glory...

...I want to try to create a world, not represent it...

...Though Hawkes echoes Twelfth Night by naming his backwater Illyria, it is clearly a Greek seacoast village newly invaded by foraging American rentiers—in this case two obsessive voluptuaries, Cyril and his wife Fiona, whose lives are an exquisitely choreographed dedication to sensuality above and instead of everything else...

...With an almost furious indifference to conventional fictional forms, indeed to all prevailing literary fashion, Hawkes doggedly pursued the creation and scrutiny of "a totally new and necessary fictional landscape...

...Because Baker is sympathetic, he can be savage without being spiteful...

...More to the point, why bother, since Durrell is not taken seriously enough by anyone these days to be worth the effort of parody...

...Instead of the imaginary but desperately credible landscapes of his previous books, where even place-names like Germany, England, Italy seemed part of the metaphoric riddle of a suprageographical reality, Hawkes now drops us into a travelogue Mediterranean village, every cypress and mimosa neatly rooted in tiresome euphuistic position...

...In college he wanted to become a professor of philosophy, but now he is an assistant sales training manager for Rose Dale Foods...

...If the birds sing, the nudes are not far off...

...AFTER THE suffocatingly self-conscious lyricism of Blood Oranges, Elliott Baker's Pocock & Pitt (Putnam, 285 pp., $6.95) is splendid comic relief, as dis-armingly matter-of-fact about its extravagant shifts of plot and character as Hawkes' novel is detached and portentously vague...

...In expiation of this sin against the holy orifice, Hugh commits suicide, Catherine goes mad, Fiona takes off with the abandoned children, and Cyril lives on in a decaying house to weave his elegantly ruminative hosannas to sex...

...But since the signs of solemnity are everywhere, I prefer to take Hawkes' narcissistic pleasure in his inflatedly gorgeous language at face value, and lament the absence of any sharp edges to this swoon of sex...

...writer & Writing DULL DECAY AND EXUBERANT COMEDY BY PEARL K. BELL IN THE MORE THAN 20 years since the appearance of John Hawkes' powerfully original first novel, The Cannibal, a brilliantly projected hallucinatory nightmare of postwar Germany, he sustained a consistent reputation for experimental daring that he shares with no other novelist of his generation (he is 46...

...Even the dialogue of the frogs is rapturous...

...In the course of one seemingly unremarkable adventure, however, their hedonist alliance is destroyed...

...A billion years of suffering—all to produce the glob and glue that was him...

...There is no feeling in this book, only the insufficient approximations of language...

...Through a wildly improbable chain of coincidences and pratfalls, Pocock-Pitt escapes his pursuers and his past, winding up in a tent with the beautiful Alethea Snow, who intends to hold back the Sahara by planting 8,000 young trees along its edge...

...That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood...

...What seems an infinite extension of sexual possibility to the insatiable Cyril and Fiona is an agony of lonely, jealous inhibition for Hugh...

...Is The Blood Oranges in truth a parody of Durrell's "poetic" quasi-pornography—as Hawkes' The Lime Twig was on one level a superb parody of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock...

...In the one scene of the book that even begins to suggest the horrific power of Second Skin and The Cannibal, Cyril, making love to Catherine, is appalled to find her encased in a rusty old chastity belt that Hugh had clamped around her loins...

...Hugh's suicide is just a convenient way of bringing Hawkes* novelistic orgasm to an abrupt end, not the brutally inevitable result cf what he is, and what his wife and friends have done to him...

...But neither of them does work of any kind—I would never have raised such prosaic standards of verisimilitude against the "unreality" of Hawkes' other novels—for sex is their consuming vocation and devotion...

...How, then, is one supposed to take Hawkes' lapidary but soporific new novel, The Blood Oranges (New Directions, 271 pp., $6.95...

...This, too, is disconcertingly similar to Durrell's exhausted narrator, Darnley, in the first two volumes of The Alexandria Quartet, piecing together the technicolor memories of a ruined soul in a crumbling Mediterranean house...

...he knows what he loves with the same fierce clarity that he sheds on what he detests...

...Instead of contemplation, though, his metamorphosis catapults him into blowing up a road-construction site to save some ancient trees, working in a lab that cuts up dead bodies for an organ-transplant depository, and being pursued by two spies...

...For both Cyril and Fiona, adultery, no matter what others may want of it, is the food of their pleasure in each other, the staff of their sexual vitality, in fact the obsession of their every waking moment...

...A new family comes to live in the neighboring villa—Catherine, the large placid wife of a tortured, puritanical, one-armed photographer, Hugh, and their three difficult children...