The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story

This is an American masterpiece. A must read for any and every true lover of literature. Sonia Meyer

Several years back, I was given the first 100 of the New York Review Books for Christmas (a much-appreciated, very generous gift!). Sad to say, I have read few of them. But yesterday, browsing my bookshelf, I picked out 'The Pilgrim Hawk,' attracted, no doubt, by the slimness of the volume. After reading it, I have to say that it has been a long time since I have been so impressed by a book - it truly is an unknown classic. And, as an aside, the introduction by Michael Cunningham is wonderful! I have no knowledge of Glenway Wescott and his other writing, but the execution of this book is flawless. The narrator is someone who stands a bit outside of life, observing. His detachment contrasts with the self-aborption and high emotion of the main characters of the book, an ever-travelling married couple from Britain (the husband is english, the wife is Irish). The entire book occupies just one afternoon, but it is rife with emotion and intense observations on life and love. And Wescott is a talented writer - I continually found myself admiring his phrasing. Here is a quote, which is admittedly depressing, but delights me none-the-less, in which Wescott describes the unfulfilled bachelor (or bachelorette!): "Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young. Love-life goes on indefinitely, with less and less likelihood of being loved, less and less ability to love, and the stomache-ache of love still sharp as ever."

The plot line of Glenway Wescott's short novel, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, is quite simple; a wealthy Irish couple, Mr. and Mrs. Cullen, spend an afternoon at the French home of an American friend, Alexandra Henry, and her American house guest, Alwyn Tower. The setting is the late 1920s, and Alwyn Tower is telling the story of the Cullens' visit from a supposedly objective distance, in the early 1940s. Clearly what occurred that day with the Cullens seemed so remarkable that Tower is still thinking of them twelve years later. The surrealistic feature of the story (which was so bizarre to this reader as to be at first off-putting) is that Madeleine Cullen has a passion for falconry and is traveling with a full-grown peregrine falcon perched on her wrist, a bird which she must take with her everywhere. The "love" story is a triangle: Larry Cullen is in competition with a feathered being for his wife's affection. Regarding the craft of the novel, the hawk, Lucy, is so palpable on the page that Wescott must have researched hawk behavior and falconry, i.e., hawk-human interaction. But research alone would not have been enough to make any bird a character in a novel; Wescott takes our feathered friends to a higher level of literary metaphor and character. To have the novel work as a whole, the novelist must employ a structure of writing that maximizes the benefit and entertainment that readers expect. The characteristic quality of The Pilgrim Hawk is that the first-person narrator, Alwyn Tower, is so intelligently perceptive that his viewpoint is almost impossible to distinguish from the single, controlling observer, the omniscient narrator. Tower is the most compassionate of narrators as he sees into both Larry Cullen and Madeleine Cullen, the role of Lucy, as well as the household servants. Such an informed and knowledgeable narrator--who also reveals his own sensitive consciousness--makes me suspect that Alwyn Tower is Glenway Wescott himself. Employing the technique of interior monologue, Wescott reveals Tower's epistemological doubts as Tower filters other's dialogue through his single, though ultimately limited, consciousness. And Wescott's sentences are constructed with such care for the English language that one feels Tower is Wescott. The NYRB paperback production makes this novel an edition you will want to own: The cover art, by Nam June Paik, is as sophisticated and enigmatic as the relationships in the novel. Aesthetic production features of other books in the NYRB series have included evocative colors on the inside front covers: magenta, peach orange, and royal purple. The inside cover of The Pilgrim Hawk is a hypnotic turquoise. I have never spent so much time gazing at the inside cover of any book as I have of this one. Informative and insightful introduction by MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, who as the author of The Hours, a work about Virginia Woolf, is certainly qualified to write about Wescott's "hawklike" observations of

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.

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.