The Pilgrim Hawk

GLENWAY WESCOTT (1901–1987) grew up in Wisconsin, but moved to France with his companion Monroe Wheeler in 1925. Wescott's early fiction, notably the stories in
Goodbye, Wisconsin
and the novel
The Grandmothers
(in which Alwyn Tower, the narrator of
The Pilgrim Hawk
, makes his first appearance), were set in his native Midwest. Later work included essays on political, literary, and spiritual subjects, as well as the novels
The Pilgrim Hawk
and
Apartment in Athens
(also available as an NYRB Classic). Wescott's journals, recording his many literary and artistic friendships and offering an intimate view of his life as a gay man, were published posthumously under the title
Continual Lessons
.

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of five novels,
A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours
(which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction),
Specimen Days
, and
By Nightfall
.

THE PILGRIM HAWK

A Love Story

GLENWAY WESCOTT

Introduction by

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

THE PILGRIM HAWK

Copyright and More Information

We may consider Glenway Wescott's
The Pilgrim Hawk
to be a short novel or a long novella, but whatever we choose to call it, it is exactly as long as it needs to be. It is murderously precise and succinct. It contains, in its 108 pages, more levels and layers of experience than many books five times its length.

The book centers on various overlapping triangles among a group of beings who are mostly, but not exclusively, human. It takes place during a single summer afternoon in the late 1920s in a French country house, where Alexandra Henry, the young American heiress who owns it, is entertaining an American house guest named Alwyn Tower, the book's narrator. On this particular afternoon Alexandra and Tower are visited by the Cullens, a wealthy Irish couple who, in their ongoing and rather aimless travels, are en route to Budapest in a Daimler, driven by their young chauffeur. Larry Cullen is, or at least appears to be, the very image of the hale, silly aristocrat. His wife, Madeleine, is an aging beauty who has spent her marriage dragging her husband through one rough devotion after another, most of them involving radical Irish politics or the killing of some wild animal, and who appears at the château with her latest enthusiasm, a hawk she is training to hunt. She has named the hawk Lucy, after the Walter Scott and Donizetti heroine, and she wears it perched on her wrist like a sacred jewel.

At the same time a parallel story transpires in the kitchen, involving Ricketts, the chauffeur, and Alexandra's servants, Jean and Eva, a husband and wife from Morocco. These seven characters—eight if we include the hawk, and we must include the hawk—are the novel's entire population. From this small cast of characters, in the course of what should be an innocuous interlude of cocktails and dinner, Wescott summons a series of revelations that doesn't stop until the book's ambiguous, quietly lethal last lines.

Beyond that, I see no point in a detailed synopsis. Suffice it to say that
The Pilgrim Hawk
is an endlessly intricate meditation on freedom versus captivity and passion versus peace, among other subjects; and that in terms of character and event it is strung throughout with little bombs, some of which explode on contact, some considerably later. Rendered geometrically, the novel's structure might resemble a series of intersecting triangles canted at various angles in space, irregular but perfect, in the way of quartz crystals. With its single bucolic setting and the desperate, strangling wit and manners of its most prominent characters, it owes a good deal to Chekhov. Wescott shares with Chekhov an insistence that the enormous is amply contained within the small; that the ingredients of tragedy can be found in abundance among genteel, indolent people passing an afternoon together in a parlor and a garden.

All that occurs in
The Pilgrim Hawk
takes place within the borders of this miniature world. The action does not extend beyond the house and grounds—even the book's one incident of physical violence takes place outside our range of vision. The whole story could be presented on stage with almost no alterations. Its static quality is, however, by no means accidental. The narrative is restricted in the way that the bird (and the people) are confined. As the story progresses we learn that every domesticated hawk has been captured in the wild, since hawks do not mate or breed in captivity. “They never get over being wild,” as Mrs. Cullen says, and though trained hawks could always choose to fly away when hunting, they do not, she explains, because in captivity “it's a better life, more food and more fun.”

Some readers may groan inwardly, as I did, when I first read about the hawk. Oh, I thought, a symbol. And the hawk is, of course, a symbol—hawks are members of a small category of creatures and objects that can't be anything but symbols when they appear in books. However, if novelists are determined, as they should be, to write about everything in the world, it is just as important to find new life in the old images as it is to invent new ones. Wescott knew what he was up against, what sort of portentousness he flirted with, and it is a measure of his talent that he was able not only to fully engage what might be implied by such a stubbornly meaningful image but also to create a hawk that is, apart from its larger meaning, an entirely convincing, integral member of the story. Wescott was a man who had
looked
at hawks:

The hawk's wonderfully drawn wildness—its profound otherness—slices like a razor through the world of indolent expatriate luxury in which the book is set, some years before the Second World War, which will not only send Alwyn Tower and Alexandra Henry fleeing back to America but will extinguish a certain lazy, genteel optimism; a belief in the relative sanctity of hedges and lawns as well as a more general belief in our collective ability to select and enforce happy endings. The book declares itself at the start to be set in a less difficult past; to be both lit and obscured by wistfulness. We learn, through Mrs. Cullen, that only captive hawks have any chance of living out their natural spans—in the wild they always die of starvation, when they grow too old to hunt—and as we read we pick up stray fragments about the loneliness and failure that await some of the characters as certainly as war awaits the world in which they live. Most significantly we receive, in the opening line, an offhand and all but invisible reference to what the future holds for Tower and Alexandra, though we are not permitted to understand what their futures imply until we reach the story's end.

Every character proves, by the book's close, to be more than he or she first seemed to be, just as every relationship turns out to be far more complex and perverse than we might have imagined at the outset. This is most conspicuously true of the Cullens, whom we meet as relatively standard-issue eccentrics, two of the wealthy, outdoorsy people Alexandra has coped with all her privileged life, “self-centered but without any introspection, strenuous but emotionally idle.” By the end of the quietly calamitous afternoon, superficial Cullen is revealed as a tragic and potentially dangerous figure, driven to extremes by a jealousy broad and deep enough to include a bird. Mrs. Cullen metamorphoses from a chilly matron into a rough, wild Irish girl grown old and, finally, into something like an Amazon. As she tries to retrieve the hawk after it has escaped we see that

The book treats the parallel drama among Jean, Eva, and Ricketts as peripheral—they live in the novel as they live in the households of Alexandra and the Cullens: in cars and kitchens, out of the way. They are, of course, captives themselves, and they matter more or less the way wild pets matter: as curiosities, as sources of trouble, and, more obscurely, as subjugated invaders from a realm of frighteningly rampant desires. Wescott chose to depict his vanishing world from the point of view of those who are served, and to let the servers remain as obscure to the reader as they are to their keepers. The story immerses us not only in a world but in a particular way of living in that world. Jean, Eva, and the chauffeur, like the titular hawk, play crucial roles in the stories of the wealthy but exist in a world of their own as well. One imagines they pass through this novel while living out an unwritten novel of their own, one in which they are the central figures, and the commotion created by those people in the parlor is important but secondary.

At the center of the story, omnipresent but also concealed, is Alwyn Tower himself, and he proves to be the darkest and most surprising figure of all. Tower lives within the confines of his own domesticity more or less as the hawk does, for similar reasons—it's a better life, more food and more fun—and probably at similar cost, though Wescott is too subtle to offer a mere plea, in narrative form, for freedom over captivity. Tower is not yet old but is no longer young. He is trying, and failing, to write novels, and he has been in love twice, though we learn nothing of the particulars in either case. (In one of the book's many symmetries we are told that trained hawks can only tolerate two consecutive unsuccessful strikes before they despair and fly away, to a freedom that will eventually starve them to death.) Tower is essentially an engine of perception, of exquisitely cruel and precise judgments. Although he has failed at writing he is, in a sense, the very embodiment of the novelist, who must of necessity see more than his characters see, know more about them than they can know about themselves. If this is a requisite virtue in a novelist, however, it is a fatal flaw in a life being lived. Tower sees too much and, in seeing so clearly, wants too little. He could be a character from Greek myth: a man so gifted with vision that he is unable to abandon it and simply, irrationally desire anyone or anything. In the book, Tower is, as he would wish to be, barely perceptible, except through the workings of his exquisite eye.

The same might be said of Wescott the novelist, whose eye is so cold and precise, so hawklike, that the novel itself might suffer from an excess of clarity and a dearth of passion if it weren't redeemed by its language. Almost every page contains some small wonder of phrase or insight, some instance of the world keenly observed and reinvented. Of hunters near Alexandra's château, Wescott writes, “We could hear their hunting horns which sounded like a picnic of boy sopranos, lost.” When Mrs. Cullen gives Tower the hawk to hold, briefly, on his wrist, we read, “At the least move her talons pricked the leather and pulled it a bit—as fashionable women's fingernails do on certain fabrics—though evidently she held them as loose and harmless as she could. Only her grip as a whole was hard, like a pair of tight, heated iron bracelets.” Sentences like that are beauties in themselves, and the fact that they also serve the book's larger meanings can only be considered with an appreciation bordering on awe.