the pilgrim hawk

The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Most books appear to have been written; they bear their authors’ fingerprints, their blood and sweat and tears, on every page. This is not a bad thing, and can be a very good thing, for after all what makes a work of art unique is the singularity of its creator. And yet there are other works of art that seem not to have been created at all, but to have always existed, or to have dropped, fully and perfectly formed, by the gods from the sky. The Pilgrim Hawk, Glenway Wescott’s classic short novel is, I think, such a work. Like the statues of Michelangelo, The Pilgrim Hawk is perfect in form and shape and, like the plate glass window through which much of the action is viewed, flawlessly and utterly transparent. Even though the author is at the very center of the book in the guise of Towers, the first-person narrator (Glenway Wescott’s friend Barbara Harrison, upon whom the character of Alexandra Henry is based, married Lloyd Wescott, Glenway’s brother, exactly as is related in the book’s first paragraph), Towers tells a story that is not his own: he is more observer than character, and this absence, this distance (for the reader knows almost nothing about him) allows the story to unfold with a startling, almost cruel, clarity. Towers is even less involved in the action and more dispassionate than The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, the ultimate tangential narrator. The Pilgrim Hawk is full of clean, cool, reflective surface: that huge window in Alexandra’s living room, the copper-top surface of her glamorous bar, the pond in the garden she views but does not own. And since the story completes itself in a single afternoon, it is never obscured by shadow or darkness; everything – everyone – is is observed with a relentless sunlit clarity.

The Pilgrim Hawk is a short book – some would call it short story, or a novella – but like many exquisitely crafted miniatures, it has a peculiar richness and relevancy. What makes it so special? I believe it owes much of its effect to the extraordinary couple at its center: Madeleine Cullen and her Pilgrim Hawk. They are both wonderfully complex and exciting creations. Mrs. Cullen is one of those indelible, unforgettable characters. Towers tells us she “was the most talkative woman I ever met,” but it is her magnificent physical presence, tripping across the parquet floors in her very high heels, that the reader best remembers. I have always pictured her as rather like the Duchess of Windsor: a woman with a formidable presence, almost ugly, but who grooms and carries herself with a rigor and pride that transfixes all around her. It is rare, and rather wonderful, to encounter a female character in fiction who possesses such a strong, commanding physical presence. And then of course there is the bird, Lucy, whom Wescott manages to make both utterly real and fantastically symbolic. In Lucy the narrator sees the embodiment of everything humans obsess about and despair over: love, hunger, sex, power, freedom, trust. And because the story is told at a decade’s remove – and there have been few decades more bifurcating than the 1930s – we are allowed to see the story in both the present and the past, immediately and upon reflection. Towers is both callow and wise, and this duality of vision allows the bird to become almost preposterously symbolic, but it is the preposterousness of great art. How wonderful to re-read The Pilgrim Hawk at different times in one’s life – every decade, perhaps. It is a work of genius, forever throwing off light and ideas through its miraculous prism of words.

[This entry was originally written for, and published in, Adelphiana: 1963-2013, a book commemorating the 50th anniversary of Adelphi Edizioni, my Italian publisher.]