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Summary: Make Your Way to "The Pilgrim Hawk"
Review: A rediscovered classic currently being championed by Michael Cunningham (who wrote the introduction) and Susan Sontag (who wrote a lengthy New Yorker piece about it, as well as its forgotten author), this is a remarkably good short novel, full of wonderful writing and terrific perceptions. It's a thoughtful and profound study of the nature of marriage and attachments; I'm sure it's going to linger a great while in my memory. For those who care about serious fiction, this is well worth the time.
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Summary: "The old bachelor is like an old hawk."
Review: In "The Pilgrim Hawk" American writer, Alwyn Towers, relates the events of one strange afternoon in the late 1920s. Towers is visiting a friend, Alexandra May, at her country home in France when the Cullens, a wealthy married Irish couple, arrive unannounced. The Cullens are "self centered without any introspection, strenuous but emotionally idle." Towers notes that during the twenties, one often came across "foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you ... and you did your best to know them in an afternoon." Towers certainly does 'get to know' the Cullens who are "mere passers of time" during this brief afternoon, and Towers is able to observe and analyze the strange relationship between the seemingly frivolous Madeleine and her half-inebriated husband.
Madeleine Cullen sports a captive and crippled Pilgrim Hawk--which she wears attached to her wrist. At first, the hawk, named Lucy, seems to be a fetish object for Madeleine. Lucy wears a feathered hood that matches Madeleine's hat, and the manner in which the Cullens demand accommodations for the hawk is rather peculiar. Madeleine, for example, is eager to show off the bird and expects that special arrangements should be made for the bird's dinner. But soon it becomes obvious that the hawk is more than just a fetish object for Madeleine. Madeleine and the hawk are practically inseparable--a fact that Mr. Cullen finds both irritating and nauseating. Is he merely jealous of the attention the hawk receives, or does Cullen's hatred for the hawk have another origin?
Towers relates the events of the lazy afternoon as "something a little sour and dark" creeps into the conversation, and through Tower's observant eyes, it becomes apparent that the hawk represents many things. It is as if Lucy is the third participant in a bizarre love triangle, for she is Madeleine's beloved, and Larry Cullen despises the hawk for this. Just as Lucy is a captive in her relationship with Madeleine, the Cullens are also captive in their unhappy marriage: "when love has given satisfaction, then you discover how large a part of the rest of your life is only payment for it, installment after installment." The Cullens' unhappy marriage seems to fester around the hawk, and as Larry Cullen drinks the afternoon away, simmering resentments develop into a spiteful and desperate act.
"The Pilgrim Hawk" is a short novel, and it is utterly exquisite. Author, Glenway Wescott focuses on the incidents that take place during a few hours, and he reconstructs the afternoon with perfection and skilled descriptive power. The narrator's initial reaction to the Cullens and his subsequent curiosity about their marriage conveys a very personal recollection that is shared between the narrator and the reader. Consequently, one feels as though the narrator, telling the tale 20 years later, has never forgotten the incidents of that one afternoon, and he shares that peculiar and lasting memory with us--displacedhuman
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Summary: Upstairs, Downstairs in miniature
Review: This is an odd little book. The events take place in a single afternoon at the home of an American woman in France between the First and Second World Wars. The narrator, Alwyn Tower, and his hostess, Alexandra Henry, are visited by the Cullens, a middle-aged Irish couple. Mrs. Cullen has brought along her pet hawk Lucy whose presence dominates the remainder of the story (both symbolically and as another character). With its hood on, the hawk seems to represent the blindness of a class of wealthy internationals who live for food and fun, and who have made an uneasy peace with their captivity and lack of freedom.Meanwhile, a trio of servants (Jean and Eva, the cooks; and Ricketts, the Cullens' chauffeur) plays yang to the aristocats' yin. For them, flirtation, jealousy, and passion are the defining mainstays of their existence. And they don't even need to turn to alcohol to release these life forces. It's hard to know how seriously we are to take the narrator, a novelist twice failed in love. He is an astute observer and chronicler of the events, but his self-acknowledged failures as a writer certainly seem to justify the uncomfortable feelings he has toward Mrs. Cullen's captive carnivore. Although we know from page one that the Americans Alexandra and Alwyn would eventually return to America when tensions increase in Europe, at the novel's end it seems somewhat doubtful that either one will ever muster the energy needed to leave their perches in Alexandra's parlor. This short novel has some of the biting class insights of Saki's better stories. Other than that, I find it hard to compare this book to any other I have ever read. Interesting in spite of and because of its brevity. Worth reading and rereading.
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Summary: Crystalline beauty
Review: Westcott's short novel has been for years something of a cult work among novelists for its structural perfection. The interlocking erotic and sympathetic triangles among the characters, and the novel's complex explosion of the meaning of the eponymous peregrine (which is pushed as far as symbolic meanings go to the level of either Hawthorne's scarlet letter or James's golden bowl) is absolutely dazzling, and shows the tremednous talent within Westcott that never received its full due. However, the novel does remain somewhat chilly: it's hard to warm to any of the major characters, whose purposeful shallowness can seem somewhat off-putting.
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