by John Barth
The Passion Artist (tribute to John Hawkes)
Shortly after the author’s death on May 15, 1998, this tribute to John Hawkes was first published in The New York Times Book Review.1
THE DAY AFTER Frank (“The Voice”) Sinatra died in California at age 82, a no less distinctive American voice—in certain quarters even more prized, though in the nature of things less widely known—was stilled in Providence, Rhode Island. With the death at age 72 of John Hawkes—fiction writer, fiction mentor, and fiction live-reader extraordinaire—we lost one of the steadily brightest (and paradoxically darkest) lights of American fiction through our century’s second half: a navigation star for scores of apprentice writers however different their own literary course, and as spellbinding a public reader of his own work as I have ever heard, who have heard many. Passion was this writer’s subject, even when manifested by non-human characters (the narrator/protagonist of his novel Sweet William is a horse; the deuteragonist of The Frog is a very French amphibian); impassioned was his manner as author, teacher, reader, and friend. He was, to echo another of his titles, truly a Passion Artist: for five decades one of our most original literary imaginations and masterful prose stylists.
THE WRITER:
Hawkes’s books number nearly a score, from The Cannibal in 1949 (actually from a privately printed verse-collection in 1943, but the author never returned to poetry except in his prose, which never left it) through An Irish Eye in 1997. Mostly novels, all of modest heft, plus a scarifying story-and-novella collection and a volume of short plays, they have in common a preoccupation with the horrific, suffused with the erotic and redeemed by the comic. One sees affinities with Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor; to mention such affinities, however, is to be reminded of Hawkes’s difference from those compatriots, all of whom he admired. Like theirs, his fiction is in the American-gothic grain, but his material is more cosmopolitan—closer in this respect to that of his bookshelf-neighbor Hawthorne, or to Poe. A Hawkes novel may be set in England, Germany, Maine, Alaska, the Caribbean, “Illyria,” or some Transylvania of the soul; literal places are less important to him than the geographies of passion and language. His imagination, like Kafka’s, is powerfully metaphorical. And dark. And comic.
It has been also one of the most consistent among our contemporaries’, both in quality and in voice. One never knew what Hawkes would write of next—Nepal? Patagonia? The Moon?—but one recognized at once that narrative voice: the sensuous cadences refracting comic-horrific scenes (a boy plays Brahms outside the door of the lavatory where his father is committing suicide; an earnest but hapless male teacher is set upon and all but castrated by his murderous Maenad students in St. Dunster’s Training School for Girls—and comes back for more); the fearsome, unexpected details (a sexually voltaged foursome retrieve from a dark pit in a ruined medieval fortress a rusted, toothed iron chastity belt; a dead horse’s ears are “as unlikely to twitch as two pointed fern leaves etched on glass”); the ubiquitous sensuality and trademark rhetorical questions (“[Did she not] note Seigneur’s unsmiling countenance and his silence and the way he stood at a distance with his feet apart and that strange mechanical staff gripped in a firm hand, its butt in the sand and its small iron beak towering above his head on the end of the staff? Wouldn’t this sight be quite enough to instill in most grown women . . . the first unpleasant taste of apprehension? But it was not so . . .”).
Hawkes-lovers recognize at once that such passages as the above (from Virginie, Her Two Lives) are, among other things, disquietingly comic: neither de Sade played straight nor de Sade played for laughs, but de Sade (and the artist) compassionately, impassionedly satirized. “I deplore . . . nightmare,” Hawkes declared in an interview with Robert Scholes; “I deplore terror. [But] I happen to believe that it is only by traveling those dark tunnels, perhaps not literally but psychically, that one can learn . . . what it means to be compassionate.” What nightmare? Which terror? “My fiction,” he goes on to say, “is generally an evocation of the nightmare or terroristic universe in which sexuality is destroyed by law, by dictum, by human perversity, by contraption, and it is this destruction [that] I have attempted to portray and confront in order to be true to human fear and . . . ruthlessness, but also in part to evoke its opposite, the moment of freedom from constriction, restraint, death.”
Yes, well: also, one might add, to provoke the cathartic laughter at sexual and fictive “contraption” afforded by that hard but pleasurably won freedom. So charged with Eros is just about everything in a typical Hawkes fiction that my private ground-rule for him was No literal sex ever to be described, Jack—a rule that I neglected to inform him of until after its brief infraction in a couple of the later novels, but to which he gratifyingly returns in the last ones.
The last ones—that’s not easily said. Hawkes’s fiction has been widely admired from the start by literary critics and his fellow writers: His book-jackets are garlanded with enthusiastic testimonials from the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, Donald Barthelme, Leslie Fiedler. But his standing, alas, has ever surpassed his following, and that’s a pity, for he’s no more for connoisseurs only than is an excellent wine. For those unfamiliar with his fiction, a fine first taste is Humors of the Blood & Skin, A John Hawkes Reader: a self-assembled degustation with autobiographical notes by the author and a beautiful introduction by William H. Gass.2 But really, one can begin anywhere: The voice is all of a piece.
THE TEACHER:
Whatever one thinks of the post-World-War-Two American phenomenon of poets and novelists as professors in creative writing programs, it has most certainly afforded a generation of aspiring writers and students of literature close access to practitioners of the art; in the best cases, to masters of the art, impassioned (that word again) about their coaching and their coachees as well as about their own congress with the muse. By all accounts, John Hawkes was among the chiefest of these. After a stint driving ambulances in Italy and Germany in the closing months of World War II, he married his indispensable, sine qua non Sophie (who with their four grown children survives him), graduated from Harvard and published his first novel in 1949, worked for six years at his alma mater’s university press, began teaching there as an instructor in English, and in 1958 shifted to Brown, where he anchored the graduate writing program until succeeded upon his retirement by his close friend and distinguished writer-comrade Robert Coover. I too am a beneficiary of that post-war phenomenon, and inasmuch as a certain number of apprentice writers have gypsied between Brown and Johns Hopkins, we have over the decades had a number of alumni in common, every one of whom revered Hawkes as an intense, convivial, time-generous, impassioned mentor/coach as well as an inspired, inspiring artist. “Plus,” the writer Mary Robison once said, concluding her introduction of him to an audience in Baltimore, “he wears the most adorable clothes, and anybody who doesn’t think so can go straight to hell!”
Jack inspired that kind of fierce admiration. The least pedagogical of pedagogues, for a time in the latter 1960s he nevertheless involved himself—passionately, of course—with an innovative program called the Voice Project, meant to reform the teaching of writing in American schools as the New Math was meant to reform that discipline. Federal start-up funding forthcame, and at Hawkes’s urging a considerable number of us writer-teachers convened at Sarah Lawrence College to learn about and perhaps help launch the project. We sat through a day of presentations by not-always-inspiring educationists; during one particularly sententious holding-forth, Susan Sontag asked me sotto voce, “Doesn’t the guy realize that we’re all here only for Jack Hawkes’s sake?” Toward the end of that long day, I confessed to Donald Barthelme that I, for one, still didn’t quite grasp what exactly the project-organizers meant by “Voice.” “Neither do I,” admitted Donald; “but Jack does, so it’s probably all right.”
Jack did—enough to devote a trial year to the project at Stanford while serv
ing on a federal Panel on Educational Innovation. What became of the Voice Project I have no idea; but as one of my own undergraduate professors once observed, “a fine teacher is likely to teach well regardless of what educational theories he or she may suffer from.” Hawkes’s teaching voice—discerning, engaged, compassionate, impassioned—was pedagogy more eloquent and effective than any educative theory.
THE VOICE:
I heard him read publicly from his fiction many times: as a visiting writer at my home campus, at literary festivals round about our republic, on shared platforms at such venues as New York’s 92nd St. Poetry Center, and most memorably through an extended reading-tour of Germany in 1979 with William Gass and myself and our spouses—a sort of American Postmodernist road show sponsored by the USIA and local universities. None of us three, I venture, was an inept speaker of our fiction, though we all understood that print-prose is not theater, but an essentially silent transaction between its author and individual readers. One need not have heard Jack read his stuff in order to savor its distinctive, compelling “voice”—but in his readings above all, the intensity, dark humor, and passion were unforgettably on display. Indeed, his fiction, his letters, his telephone and table-talk were all of a register; I hear that voice as I write these lines, as stirringly as I heard it in Tübingen, Berlin, Providence, Palo Alto, Buffalo, Baltimore. Unimaginable, that in the terabyte twilight of the terrible Twentieth one will hear it now only in memory!
WELL: THAT OTHER Voice, Sinatra’s, will endure in its recorded performances for as long as his presently living fans remain interested, and perhaps even somewhat beyond their lifetimes; recorded music is itself so young a medium that we have no way of knowing whether pop singers of the longer past—P. T. Barnum’s “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, for example—would still be listened to with pleasure today. In the venerable and more stable medium of the printed word, it is another matter: For any who had the privilege of hearing him, the so-memorable living voice of John Hawkes rings out in stereophonic high fidelity from every line of his fiction; his written voice, however, is there for the much longer haul—perhaps, in Archibald MacLeish’s words, for “as long . . . as the iron of English rings from a tongue”;3 most certainly for as long as the passionate few still read printed literature.
The Accidental Mentor (homage to Leslie Fiedler)
This tribute to Leslie Fiedler was written early in 1997 for a Festschrift intended to celebrate the distinguished critic/professor’s upcoming 80th birthday in March of that year. Alas, however, by the time of the volume’s much-delayed publication in 2003,1 the tributee had “changed tenses” (as Samuel Beckett was fond of putting it) at age 85. Adieu, colleague, friend, and accidental mentor.
IN 1956, A certain American first novel was blessed by a prevailingly favorable review from a certain noted American critic, who characterized it as a specimen of “provincial American existentialism” that committed its author to nothing and left him free to do whatever next thing he might choose. At the time, fresh out of graduate school, this interested reader of that review had no very expert notion of what Existentialism was. Intrigued by that critic’s remark, like a good provincial American Johns Hopkins alumnus I set about re-reading Sartre and Camus (Heidegger was beyond me) and soon decided that all parts of the proposition applied: The book was provincial, American, and Existentialist, and its author was free to sing whatever next tunes his muse might call.
Which I did. 40 years later, I’m gratified to report, that novel, that novelist, and that noted critic are all still actively with us,2 and Leslie Fiedler’s instructive characterization of my Floating Opera still strikes me as altogether valid.
Not long after writing that review, the author of Love and Death in the American Novel and other notorious iconoclasms made a lecture-visit to Penn State, where I was then employed, and there began an acquaintanceship that over the years ripened into friendship and colleaguehood; that affected in large and small ways my professional trajectory; and that I remain the ongoing beneficiary of. I have counted those ways elsewhere and will gratefully here recount just a few of them:
IN THE MID-1960S, Fiedler recruited me to join Albert Cook’s bustling new English department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, whereto he himself had lately shifted after his long tenure in Montana. More than any other single factor, it was Leslie’s presence there that tipped my scales Buffaloward, and for the seven years following we were near neighbors. In retrospect, the lively intellectual /artistic/political atmosphere of that place in that turbulent time seems to me as much centered at the Fiedlerhaus as at the rambunctious university campus and the pop-artful Albright-Knox Museum, both nearby. A Buffalo book-reviewer recently opined, in the course of noticing a new book of mine, that its author had done “his most lasting work at Penn State, his most interesting work at Buffalo, and his most fatuous work since returning to Johns Hopkins.” While I don’t necessarily agree with any of those three propositions and would heatedly contest the last of them, I know what the chap means by that second one. It’s the High-Sixties Buffalo Zeitgeist that I associate with the story-series Lost in the Funhouse (1968), the novella-triad Chimera (1972), and the intricated ground-plan of the novel LETTERS (finally completed and published in 1979); and it is Leslie Fiedler, more than any other single figure, who for me embodies that so-spirited place and time.
From whom if not him did I learn, back then, that the USA had changed “from a whiskey culture into a drug culture”—just when I was learning to appreciate good wine? Who first alarmed me with the prophecy3 that “if narrative has any future at all, it’s up there on the big screen, not down here on the page”? In those pioneer days of Black Studies and Women’s Studies, who puckishly (and illuminatingly, as always) offered counter-courses in White Studies and Male Studies? Whose prevailingly apocalyptic prognoses for literature (expanded to book-length in What Was Literature?)4 would one take only half seriously, had one not seen heresy after heresy of Fiedler’s turn into prescience?
The list goes on: He is a mentor from whom this incidental, often skeptical, sometimes reluctant mentee has never failed to learn, most frequently in that period of our closest association.
TOWARD THE END whereof—while I was visiting-professoring in Boston and deciding to return to Baltimore (though not, I trust, to blissful literary fatuity)—the fellow did me another significant service, a sort of bookend to his having recruited me to Buffalo in the first place. One would prefer to imagine that whatever official recognition one’s writings earn, they earn purely on their literary merits. The world, however, is what it is, and so it did not escape my notice that the five National Book Award jurors in fiction for 1972 included two (Leslie Fiedler and William H. Gass) who had not only spoken favorably of my fiction, but had become personal friends of mine as well, together with one (Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post) who had consistently trashed me, and two with whose literary-critical opinions I was unacquainted (the novelists Evan Connell and Walker Percy). I readily and thankfully assumed that it was owing to Fiedler and/or Gass that my Chimera-book was among that year’s nominees; with equal readiness I assumed that that would be that: victory enough to have been a finalist, as had been my bridesmaid fortune twice before. Leslie even telephoned me in Boston from New York to assure me that I hadn’t a prayer, inasmuch as “the other three” judges had favorite candidates of their own. Not long after, news came that Chimera had won the thing after all (more precisely, a divided jury divided the prize).
How so?
“You had two for you and two against you,” Leslie cheerfully confided to me later, “and I drank the swing-vote under the table.”
Owe you one there, pal. Owe you, rather, yet another.
“As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy” (80th birthday salute to William H. Gass)
Another birthday-Festschrift tribute,1 this one to the eminent fictionist, critic, scholar, and teacher William H. Gass, who turned 80 in July 2004. Until his academic retirement
in 1999, Gass was Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also founded and directed the International Writers Center (now renamed the Center for Humanities). Unlike the preceding tributee, Leslie Fiedler, he is as of this writing still very much alive and busy at his art. Two of his essay collections have won National Book Critics Circle awards; the most recent, A Temple of Texts, won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for literary criticism.
NEARLY 40 YEARS ago, in 1966, his then-publisher sent me bound galleys of his first novel, as publishers will, in hopes of testimonial: Omensetter’s Luck, by one William H. Gass.
Never heard of the chap, although I should have: His fiction had already been included in The Best American Short Stories in 1959, 1961, and 1962. Anyhow, my vows to the muse prohibit, among other things, the blurbing of blurbs except for first books by my former students. All the same, I opened the thing (in the middle, unfairly), scanned a page or two in each direction, and found—in a passage describing a midwestern country picnic—these images: “All kinds of containers sat about the table in sullen disconnection. Some steamed despite the hot day; others enclosed pools of green brine where pickles drowsed like crocodiles.”
Well, now, I thought: Imagine a professor of philosophy (so the jacket-note identified the author) who can write pickles drowsed like crocodiles. I was impressed enough to rebegin at the beginning and read the novel right through, more and more wowed as I went along. Wrote the author a fan letter, even, in lieu of blurb. Turned out he liked my stuff, too—some of it, anyhow—and there ensued a decades-long cordial comradeship-in-literary-arms. Membership in the dimly-defined ranks of our peaceable platoon was a matter less of voluntary enlistment than of assignment by reviewers and critics praising, blaming, or merely tabulating the Usual Suspects of “Postmodernism,” “Metafiction,” or whatever, and having thus been called to one another’s attention, we-all most often enjoyed and admired one another’s writings.
