by Susan Sontag
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. There was a kind of idealistic or optimistic curiosity in the air. And vagaries of character, and the various war and peace that goes on in the psyche, seemed of the greatest interest and even importance.
To cite the decade—the novel was published in 1940, so the forties had barely begun—puts an additional glaze on the story, investing it with the allure of the untimely; supervening World Events, it’s suggested, have wilted the importance of the “war and peace that goes on in the psyche.” This is to be merely some stuff about private lives, digested in record time: “an afternoon or so” is exactly the duration of the story, for the Cullens arrive after lunch, around two-thirty, and bolt just as an elaborate dinner is about to be served. In these few hours—a good deal less than the entire day and evening of Mrs. Dalloway—a storm of feelings will batter the constraints of gentility, and the ferocious indissoluble union of the Cullens, “their love and their trouble,” will have been subjected to a cunningly thorough examination. “Lightning knowledge”—what kind of knowledge is that?
The novel, still neglected, ever astonishing, is The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott. It belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century American literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view. What’s thought to be typically American is brash, broad, and a little simple, even simpleminded, particularly about such venerable subjects of European discernment as marriage, and The Pilgrim Hawk is anything but simple about marriage.
Of course, American literature has always provided complex performances of the moral imagination, some of which are dramas of intricate psychic violence as observed and mulled over by a witnessing consciousness. The job of the “I” who narrates The Pilgrim Hawk is to watch, to reflect, to understand (which also means to be puzzled by) what is going on. Who are this bluff, fleshy, self-conscious man and this exquisitely dressed woman with a full-grown hooded falcon, or pilgrim hawk, clinging to the rough gauntlet on her wrist? The narrator finds their presence, their derangements, stimulating. He is quick with eloquent summary assessments of their character. These evolve as their turmoil unfolds.
The opening of the novel suggests the uncanny speed at which an omnivorous observer might form “an impression” of two hitherto-unknown people: “you did your best to know them.” It also proposes a masterly vagueness about when this impression was formed: “That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America …” Why would Wescott choose to make the narrator unsure of the year? It could be to mute the import of 1929, the year of the Crash, for such as his two idle-rich American expats—not Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald rich but seriously rich, as in a Henry James novel about Americans “doing” Europe. Or maybe this vagueness is simply the good manners of someone assigned the all too Jamesian name of Alwyn Tower. And good manners may dictate the narrator’s fits of doubt about his own acuity: an Alwyn Tower would not wish to appear to be merely trying to be clever.
Name follows function. Detached, more than that, disabused, and virtually pastless (we don’t learn what has exiled him from loving and being loved; we don’t even learn his last name until nearly halfway through the book, and to divine his first name we have to know that Alwyn Tower is the central figure in Wescott’s early autobiographical novel, The Grandmothers), the narrator is nevertheless not as mysterious as he might seem. In fact, The Pilgrim Hawk’s “I” is a familiar personage, the shadowy bachelor friend of one or more of the principal characters who, in kindred versions, narrates Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, James’s The Sacred Fount, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. All these recessive narrators are abashed to some degree by the more reckless or vital or self-destructive people they observe.
The narrator as spectator is, necessarily, something of a voyeur. Gazing can become snooping, or at least seeing more than one is supposed to see. Coverdale, the creepy narrator of The Blithedale Romance, observes his friends from a treetop mirador and also from his post at a hotel room window where he can see into the windows of a house opposite. The Sacred Fount is the consummate narrator-at-the-peephole novel. The key revelation in The Pilgrim Hawk, Cullen’s hatred of his wife’s creature, comes when Tower happens to look out a window and sees Cullen, stealthily approaching the falcon, who has been removed to the garden after a bloody meal, pulling out a knife, unhooding her, and then slicing through her leash to set her free.
Marriage is the normative tie in this world of couples that includes not only the Cullens and a stormily mated pair of servants but the pseudo-couple formed by Alex Henry and her opaquely sexed, ruminative friend and houseguest. Maybe Tower’s unease with the working of his own understanding proceeds from his awareness of being outside the deep experiences of coupledom, and alone. “Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable.” His is the arid wisdom of a profoundly unmarried consciousness. “Whether or not I finally arrive at a proper understanding of people, I often begin in the way of a vexed, intense superficiality.”
Tower is describing the vagaries of novel writing as much as the pitfalls of understanding. All these valetudinarian narrators are also writers’ self-portraits and exercises in writers’ self-mortification. Coverdale, Hawthorne’s “frosty bachelor,” is a poet. Wescott’s bachelor narrator is still embittered by his failure to become a “literary artist” (“no one warned me that I really did not have talent enough”), which does not stop him from thinking like a novelist, observing like a novelist, flaunting a novelist’s volatility of judgment. “Sometimes I am as sensitive as a woman to others’ temper or temperament; and it is a kind of sensitivity which may turn, almost by chance, for them or against them.”
There is no smugness in Tower’s acknowledgment of a novelist’s ambivalence toward his subject, in contrast to Coverdale’s chilling reflection:
The thought impressed itself upon me, that I had left duties unperformed. With the power, perhaps, to act in the place of destiny, and avert misfortune from my friends, I had resigned them to their fate. That cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people’s passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart.
But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is cold or warm. It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard to Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much sympathy, rather than too little.
Tower is able to make his mixed feelings about the couple he is observing more explicit. He feels repelled. He sympathizes, sometimes with the wife, sometimes with the husband—she so driven and sexually vibrant, he so desperate and dejected. The Cullens themselves seem to dissolve and re-form several times as the balance of power between them alters. (The neurasthenic, fragile wife even appears to change body type, becoming robust, coarse, indomitable.) Sometimes Tower seems in arrears of their ever more interesting natures, sometimes he seems to be imposing more complexity on their story than is plausible, and the narration risks becoming a story about him, his tortuous and self-torturing way of seeing—in the manner of late Henry James. But Wescott does not go that far. He is content to stay with the benefits, for the advancement of the story, of so self-conscious a narrator. A novelist with a painful story to tell will want to furnish it with complex characters who reveal themselves only gradually. What more ingenious, economical method than to make the complexity of a character the result of the instability of a first-person narrator’s perceptions? For this purp
ose Tower could hardly be better suited. His appetite for discovering and repudiating significances is insatiable.
There is only one way for such a narrator to conclude: with yet another recoil from his own knowingness. After the drunken confidences and weeping and shouting and dangerous flirting, after a large revolver has been brandished (and flung into a pond), after nervous farewells have papered over the abyss and the Cullens and the hawk have spun off into the night in the long dark Daimler, after Tower and Alex have wandered into the garden to muse on all this unruly behavior, Tower recalls to himself the visions of rapacity and inhumanity he has mustered throughout the Cullens’ visit—recalls, that is, the book we have been reading:
… and I blushed. 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 judgment in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.
Is this frenetic reflectiveness distinctively American? I think so, without being able to prove it. The only English novel I know with something of these tones—the tormented diffidence and the muffled anguish—is one that plainly served Wescott as a partial inspiration for The Pilgrim Hawk: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). Ford’s novel is also both a story of marital agony breaking through the routines of idleness and a project of recollection undertaken by an American expatriate whiling away his life on the Continent. At the center of the drama is an English couple abroad, friends of a rich American couple. It is the American husband, now a widower—his wife has died since the time of the “sad affair” he is recalling—who tells the story.
Both in fiction and in autobiography, first-person narrating generally needs a pretext—also known as a justification—to begin. To talk about oneself used to be considered unseemly: the classic autobiographies and the classic novels that pretend to be somebody’s memoir all begin by offering extenuating reasons for doing something so egotistical. Even now, when self-centeredness hardly requires an apology, a book of self-examination, a novel cast as a personal recollection, continues to invite a self-justifying explanation. It’s useful to others. It’s all I know how to do. It’s all that’s left for me to do. There is something I don’t understand, and I want to understand. I’m not really talking about myself but about them.
The Good Soldier starts with its deracinated narrator explaining that he sits down “today” in order “to puzzle out” what he lamentably did not understand when it was happening. “My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.” Not to know then—by the rules of fiction, where (unlike life) something has to happen—is to know now. The narrator may restate his bewilderment, fret from time to time over his inability to describe properly, worry that he has not got some fact quite right. There is no way for readers to take these avowals of deficient understanding other than as evidence that he sees—or, rather, allows us to see—the doomed Captain Ashburnham all too well.
MARRIAGES ARE CENTRAL MATERIAL in most great novels and are likely to activate the generalizing impulse. In novels recounted in the third person, a good place to sound the trumpet call of a generalization is right at the beginning.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Who is saying this? The author, sarcastically. And the denizens of the small world in which Austen sets her story actually think it—which makes this maxim something less than “a truth universally acknowledged.”
And who is saying “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”? Again, the author. Or, if you will, the book. There’s only a touch of irony in the opening line of Tolstoy’s synoptic marriage novel. But does anyone, inside or outside the novel, actually think this? No.
The authority of the renowned first sentences of Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina depends on their floating free from any particular speaker, as if it were the nature of wisdom to be impersonal, oracular, anonymous, overbearing. Neither assertion is actually true. Both seem unchallengeably mature and pertinent as impatient observations about the cruelties of the marriage market and the despair of a naïve wife upon discovering her husband’s infidelity. This is a strong hand with which to open a novel, some axiom about human behavior offered preemptively or ironically as an eternal verity. (“It is a truth …” “All happy families are …”) Knowingness about human nature, old-style, is always in the present tense.
Wisdom in the contemporary novel is more likely to be retrospective, intimate-sounding. The vulnerable, self-doubting voice is more appealing and seems to be more trustworthy. Readers crave the display—the intrusion—of personality; that is, of weakness. Objectivity is suspect; it’s thought to be bogus or cold. Generalizations can be proposed, but wryly. (Pathos and self-doubt are always welcome flavors.) Certitude seems like arrogance. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” is the famous opening sentence of The Good Soldier. Sad stories exude signs, like sweat, which a squeamish narrator voice will undertake, with many hesitations and doubts, to decipher.
While a narration conducted in the third person can create the illusion of a story happening now, freshly told, a first-person narrator’s story is inevitably one from the past. Telling is retelling. And where there is self-conscious retelling, witnessing, there is always the possibility—no, the likelihood—of error. A first-person novel with anything to mourn on its mind will be a feast of reflection on what makes that backward look so error-prone: the fallibility of memory, the impenetrability of the human heart, the obscuring distance between past and present.
Evoking that distance at the start of a novel narrated in the first person is a strong new opening move. Thus The Pilgrim Hawk gives us a blur of a year, “May of 1928 or 1929,” since which so much has changed, and follows that with a bit of decade-mongering: the twenties, which were, “needless to say,” very different from the thirties and the “now” of the forties. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights (1979) opens with another tease of a time-marker:
It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is—this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an apathetic battle—that is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door, the bird-song of rough, grinding trucks in the street.
If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps. One can would be marked Rand Avenue in Kentucky …
The weird specificity of a month, June, minus the year; the statement of the project (“transformed and even distorted memory”); the inventory of homely comforting objects (clock and bedspread) followed by the plunge into the world of the disfavored (the broken old woman in the nursing home), a foretaste of much of the book’s raw feeling and unease; the brave assumption of possibly erroneous subjectivity (“that is what I see”); the return to the comforts enjoyed by the narrator with a more sophisticated inventory (books, magazines, the Times at the door); the worry about knowing what to attempt to retrieve, in memory, from the past; and, finally, the wistful stipulativeness of the venture (“this is what I have decided to do with my life just now”)—such incomparably rapid modulations of tone and tale are a signature aspect of Hardwick’s method as a writer.
Like The Pilgrim Hawk, Sleepless Nights is a book of judgments about human relations, with special attention to marriage, and, like Wescott’s novel, is told
by a somewhat veiled first-person narrator who is (what else?) a writer. Hardwick’s feat is to make that narrator—a version of herself—both the protagonist of the book and the voice of detached, brilliant spectatorship. In Sleepless Nights there is not one narrative but many, and the “I” is not at the center but to the side of most of the stories she chooses to retell—conjuring up, talking to, reproving, grieving over ghosts.
“Back to the ‘long ago.’” Trawling through the past, memory makes a narrow, arbitrary-seeming selection of what to relate (“You can take it down like a can from a shelf”), then, guided by the steady streaming and fitful damming up of associations, makes a montage of that. There is remembering for remembering’s sake. You can even remember for others. (“Dear old Alex: I will remember this for you.”) To remember is to voice—to cast memories into language—and is, always, a form of address. There is more invocation of others than self-description, and none of the usual appetite in autobiographical fiction for the describing of injury to the self. The injuries described—and there are many—are those borne by others.
Many of the memories are discomfiting; some reek of spent painfulness. In contrast to what understanding accomplishes in The Pilgrim Hawk, the awareness garnered in Sleepless Nights is cathartic. It is felt and it is composed, written down, wrung out, speeded up. In The Pilgrim Hawk, the narrator has only himself to talk to, a self—one has the impression—he doesn’t really like (or at any rate upon whom he is reluctant to seem to be bestowing any kind of approval). In Sleepless Nights, the narrator has the gallery of all the people who are remembered, fondly or ruefully, to talk to, and the wry magnanimity she extends to most of those she describes she extends to herself as well. Some memories are brought to life and quickly dismissed, while others are allowed to dilate and fill many pages. Everything is there to be questioned; everything, in retrospect, is drenched with poignancy. Not a breath of complaint (and there is much to complain of): whatever it was, it’s gone now, part of the past, the nothing-to-be-done, the was-it-really-like-that, all retold in a voice that is both absorbed by and indifferent to self. (“Can it be that I am the subject?”) The doubts and the pungent astuteness complement each other.
