The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story is a favorite so far among my students in the “Forgotten Books” class I’m teaching this semester. It is set in the South of France in the late 1920s but was written in 1940, long after its author, Glenway Wescott, had left France. My students and I all agreed that it is a beautiful, unjustly forgotten book. As Michael Cunningham says in the introduction, “It contains, in its 108 pages, more levels and layers of experience than many books five times its length.” The book was in and mostly out of print for decades until republished by NYRB Classics. The series editor, Edwin Frank, recently looked back on the twenty years the series has been republishing lost texts, summing up why great books like this seem to disappear. His comments align perfectly with what we’ve been discussing this semester:
Forgotten works “are those books that don’t fit into a given history of literature or thought or feeling—the books that introduce us to things other than what we know best, that put the question of what a good book is in play or that raise the different but related question of what makes a book timely, however old it may be.” [Source]
Pilgrim Hawk is a book that certainly makes us begin to question what we think a good book is. Because one as thoughtfully and beautifully written as this certainly is a “good” book, but it also unsettles us as we question what the book is ultimately trying to do. It is, in one sentence, the story of a couple whose relationship appears to be unraveling. It takes place in one afternoon and is narrated by someone who has just met the couple, keeping us always at a distance from what appears to be the center of the action. One of the main characters is a fearful but exquisite hawk, which Mrs. Cullen has tamed to some extent and has perched on her arm throughout most of the story. (More about the hawk later.)
We began our class discussion with the comments of one student in his discussion board post: “eyes play such a big role in the book” so Wescott must be “making a specific statement on either the act of looking or the process of being looked at.” This is definitely a book all about looking. Our narrator, Alwyn Tower, is observing and analyzing at every moment in this book. Everything is told through his point of view, and he is explicitly drawing our attention to his act of observation. When the odd couple, the Cullens, arrive, the narrative is set in motion as they take center stage, crowding out Tower and his friend Alex, who become their audience. Tower explains, “Their enthusiasm about themselves and all that exactly appertained to them, always overflowing, exactly playing and bubbling over in mild agitation like a fountain, held your attention and mirrored itself in your mind; little by little you began to bubble with it” (12).
This reminds me very much of Henry James, who was quite fond of such narrators, who remain at a distance and often fail in their comprehension of those they are observing. (Winterbourne in “Daisy Miller” is a classic example. He utterly, and tragically, misreads her.) In the end, we learn more about the narrator himself (however much he may try to conceal himself as the observing eyeball in the text) or more simply about the futility of trying to read the complex psyches and relationships of other people. In the case of The Pilgrim Hawk, I think it’s both. He tells us about his own failure to comprehend the Cullens, which expresses the anxieties he feels as a writer. As another student pointed out, he often changes his mind about Lucy, the hawk, and the other characters during the course of the book. In fact, he shows us how incapable he is of reading the situation when he dismisses what appears to be Mrs. Cullen’s fear of Mr. Cullen doing something dangerous by remarking (to himself), “Love is an exaggeration and very likely to lead to others” (59). In other words, she’s must be a bit hysterical and overreacting. Obviously, she wasn’t. I won’t mention the ending, but let’s just say that her ominous feelings are proven to be warranted.
As this short book winds down, Tower reflects on his failed ability to perceive the Cullens—their feelings and motivations—when Alex tells him he is “such a sober creature [that] you naturally overestimate other people’s intoxication.” He thinks:
“Her saying that made me suddenly unhappy. I thought of the wicked way I had watched him [Mr. Cullen] as he drank, the grandiose theories of drunkenness I had spun for myself meanwhile; and I blushed. Half the time, I am afraid, my opinion of people is just guessing, cartooning. Again and again I give way to a kind of inexact and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgment in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.” (102)
This is a very interesting passage because it suggests there is something inherently immoral—“wicked”—in the act of writing about other people, prying into their psyches and trying to put a label on them, to judge them ultimately (as a way of taking vengeance on them?). Why is it immoral? Is it perhaps the inevitability of failure, which the writer must overlook in order to write a coherent text? In other words, must the author simply pretend to have mastered his characters? And is he thus doing an injustice to the real people on which he has based his fiction? This was a critique often leveled at Hemingway by those who knew him and the people he wrote about. Is this a form of lying, in a sense, the ultimate sin, according to Robert McAlmon? Perhaps the only truly moral art, looked at from this perspective, would be to confine one’s writing to oneself, and making it clear that you are writing only from your point of view. Or, has Wescott ultimately rescued his text from the charge of wickedness by admitting its failures?
Kay Boyle (see my last post) presents another perspective on this conundrum. She was moving away from writing from her own subject position toward writing with empathy from the point of view of others. This became for her the most moral form of art. Somehow that doesn’t seem to be what is motivating Wescott here. (They were friends, by the way, writing to each other until his death in 1987.) Tower says early on that “the Cullens began to puzzle me, to charm me in that sense” (12). In other words, he sees them as a puzzle to figure out, an intriguing game to play. Perhaps this is why he doesn’t portray his characters particularly empathetically. His portrayal of Mr. Cullen is quite humorous—at Mr. Cullen’s expense. For instance: “There Cullen plumply sat in Alex’s softest armchair, his legs more widely spread or loosely crossed than you would expect of a conventional gentleman; licking his lips under his fringy mustache; evidently thinking of his dinner; interrupting his wife’s conversation at regular intervals as if that were his life’s work” (13). Does Tower ever move beyond this kind of mocking observation of him to a point of empathy? I don’t recall having noticed it if he did (and that is the kind of thing I always look for in piece of fiction). He may move away from mockery but only gets more coolly analytical, as in this passage about Mrs. Cullen: “She seemed to me a very passionate woman, but it was a kind of plural passion, all confused or crossed; work and play and sense of beauty, the maternal and the conjugal and the misanthropic, mixed” (50). So perhaps at the end what he is acknowledging is not merely a failure of comprehension but a failure of empathy. For what is empathy but understanding? Instead of true comprehension, he seems to be aiming more for mastery, a kind of victory over his characters, a discovery of their innermost secrets.
This obsession with observing, as if the narrator is not even part of the action, unnerved some of my students, who said they preferred to have him play a role in the story. I can certainly see that. Here, Wescott (as James did before him) shows us the isolation of the artist, who must stand apart from the group enough to see it clearly and transform the lived experience into art. But Tower is not really playing the part that Whitman does as a poet, does he? He is not really “in and out of the game”—he seems to stand firmly on the outside looking in. What would his participation in the game look like? The main way would be as a lover of one of the characters, right? Of Alex (a female friend)? Or Mrs. Cullen? Or the chauffeur? Yet he seems to express no desire for any anyone else. On pages 6-7, his description of Mrs. Cullen’s beauty is rather removed and cold. He describes her as a writer would rather than a lover—her makeup “was better than you would have expected of a lady falconer,” and her ankle is straight and white. He concludes, “No doubt these fine points were enough to entitle her to a certain enchantment and disturbance of the opposite sex: her husband for one” (7). But clearly not the narrator. This sort of cool detachment in describing women’s beauty was typical of James as well. Wescott was openly gay (in his life if not in his writing), and was married in all but name for nearly 69 years to the publisher Monroe Wheeler. Hemingway also based a gay character on him in The Sun Also Rises, displaying his own homophobia in the process. James was not open about his sexuality in his writing or his life. But most critics now see the traces it left on his fiction. The same approach could be taken with Wescott’s fiction as well.
One student perceptively wrote on our discussion board, “While reading it, I thought that it was a story about the Cullens’ love (obsessive, or misguided, or lacking) for each other, as viewed by an outsider. Perhaps it is. But now, after the reading is finished, it’s more of a story about the narrator’s view of love.” This was useful, I think, for the students who were confused about what the “love story” of the subtitle was supposed to be. It’s not, in a typical sense, a love story. It’s a love-obsession-hate-triangle-jealousy story, maybe—but Tower has no part in it. In fact, Tower disavows desire altogether when he says in one of the few self-revelatory passages: “how I hate desire, how I need pleasure, how I adore love” (43). Desire is unsettling to him. It creates the opportunity for the desired to control the desiring, which is the relationship he is observing between Mrs. Cullen and the hawk—Lucy desires food, and Mrs. Cullen controls her access to it in order to control her. This, to me, seems to be the basic metaphor of the bird as animal desire. Love is something more complicated but obviously related to desire and therefore messy and perhaps to be avoided. He says at one point that he had been in love twice before. And near the end he reflects on how much pain is wrapped up with love:
“Unrequited passion; romance put asunder by circumstances or mistakes; sexuality pretending to be love—all that is a matter of little consequence, a mere voluntary temporary uneasiness, compared with the long course of true love, especially marriage. In marriage, insult arises again and again; and pain has not only to be endured, but consented to; and the amount of forgiveness that it necessitates is incredible and exhausting. When love has given satisfaction, then you discover how large a part of the rest of life is only payment for it, installment after installment . . . That was the one definite lesson which these petty scenes of the Cullens illustrated. Early in life I had learned it for myself well enough. It was on Alex’s account that I minded. To see the cost of love before one has felt what it is worth is a pity; one may never have the courage again.” (89-90)
So even if he doesn’t exactly figure out the Cullens, he does come to some conclusions about love itself. But, as this passage suggests, love isn’t what he’s after. He is after the artist’s understanding, which will keep him outside the action, in the safe position of observer.
Another way of thinking about the hawk Lucy is not so much that the author is using her as a big symbol for us to decode but that the characters (especially the narrator and Mrs. Cullen) are trying to make sense of themselves and their worlds through Lucy. So there is a real metatextual element as we watch the characters make meaning out of Lucy, whom they read like a text.
I also think it’s interesting how Tower and Mrs. Cullen draw a parallel between how women watch men and how they watch Lucy. Mrs. Cullen describes the signs she sees in Lucy when she is getting hungry or is about to bate. “Sometimes I can prevent her independent fits. The way a governess gets to know a child, and can see its tantrums beginning and distract it somehow.” Tower reflects, “Time after time her transitions like this—from hawk to human, objective to subjective—startled me. To be sure, any woman greatly in love must know how a flattery in time saves trouble, how the illusion of superiority counteracts the illusion of inferiority, as well as any governess” (27). In other words, Tower has noticed how women have to be particularly perceptive to pick up on men’s moods and try to steer them toward safer shores, and women can use their powers of perception to their own advantage, as a source of power in their unequal relationships with men. In this sense then, perception is also a form of mastery, another corollary that expresses Tower’s (and Wescott’s?) unease with the writer’s powers of perception.
