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New York Review Books
0940322560
£7.99
As time passes, we care less about how au courant, how zeigeisty, how 'hip' a work of art was when it first came into view; Bach was thought old-fashioned.
Glenway Wescott's The Pilgrim Hawk was first published in 1940, when most people's minds - in Europe anyway - were on other matters.
'Needless to say, the twenties were very different from the thirties, and now the forties have begun. In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship...'
The book aims for a 'little lightning knowledge'. But that's paragraph two; this is the opening:
'The Cullens were Irish; but it was in France that I met them and was able to form an impression of their love and their trouble. They were on their way to a property they had rented in Hungary; and one afternoon they came to Chancellet to see my great friend Alexandra Henry. That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America, and she met my brother and married him.'
The ghost of the paragraph is F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's there through and through, even crouched in the semi-colons.
But just as time makes us stop fretting over hipness, so indebtedness slowly becomes less of a demerit. With Fitzgerald's position firmly established as an all-time American classic, we can afford to spend a little time exploring his footnotes.
However, there is a temptation - at this point of distance - to overrate the minor for the sake of elevating yet further the major.
Glenway Wescott is minor, and he knows it - in lots of ways, I'd say, being minor is his subject, just as it was for Evelyn Waugh or Philip Larkin. He is also beautiful, subtle, slightly wearying and definitely worth reading.
There is such a thing as an Excuse Writer; that's what I call them, anyway. Their function - one of their functions is to reassure younger scribbling generations that a certain kind of prose-thing is worth doing.
Just as genre writers will look to Conan Doyle, H.G.Wells and Bram Stoker for reassurance, so the literary will gaze hopefully though a little more myopically back at Jack Kerouac, J.D.Salinger, Charles Bukowski. (This is the dominant American ground I'm discussing, as will become clear.)
Excuse Writers don't necessarily make it look easy, but they do make it look do-able.
Other models which could be taken, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Louis Borges, Franz Kafka, make it look impossible. They can be imitated, always badly, but that leads to stopping, stoppage. Excuse Writers flow, and cause flow; imitation of them can be worthwhile.
The Pilgrim Hawk was championed by Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex) in a book called Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost. This edition is introduced by Michael Cunningham (The Hours) and comes with a cover puff from Christopher Isherwood: 'Truly a work of art, of the kind so rarely achieved or attempted nowadays...'
And so we're back to the out-of-dateness:
'Mrs. Cullen came down the left side of the pond, the long way. The sun, muffled all afternoon, was setting brightly. Some of its beams turned back up from the water, broken into a sparkle, through which we could not see her well. There were vague irises and something else up to her ankles; and branches of lilac occasionally hung between us and her. Her face looked to me calm, careless. Her hair still absurdly fell down one cheek; now and then she blew it out of her eyes. Dress disarranged and petticoat showing and stocking-feet and all, she walked back proudly, taking her time; a springy walk that reminded me of Isadora Duncan.'
Without wishing to give any of the plot away, this the high-point of The Pilgrim Hawk - a novella describing one afternoon, taking a hundred pages to do it. Slowness is one of its virtues. Mrs. Cullen is here seen in literary slo-mo; words usually used to deal with weeks or months - 'occasionally', 'now and then' - are used to describe seconds. The prose of this sample paragraph is no longer at all Victorian, formal, school-essayish. Instead it is studiedly relaxed, foppish. It pastiches the laxness of the twenties.
What it is saying, implicitly, is this: 'Don't worry about Modernism; it's over. You're safe again. You can be out-of-date and still triumph.'
Lessons have been learnt from Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and even James Joyce; assimilations have taken place. But, now that the danger has passed, the novel can go on dealing with realistic people, their love and trouble. This is this Glenway Wescott's Excuse - and this is the comfort I see Michael Cunningham and Jeffrey Eugenides and all the dominant American ground taking from him.
The hawk of the title belongs to Mrs. Cullen, who prefers it to her rich, fat, Irish, unfaithful, alcoholic husband. Her bird of prey is described throughout with smug fastidiousness. (Compare this to the eagle-training sections in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.) Even the narrator, a generic wannabe-writer called Alwyn Tower, seems to become a little bored of what he comes to call the 'all-embracing symbolic bird'.
There is something truly original in this exhaustion, this growing self-hatred. It is a very twenties emotion:
'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 judgement in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.'
On one of the very last pages, this door is opened back into the book; unreliability is its redemption.
As Philip Roth puts it in American Pastoral: 'The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again.'
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