John Hawkes: The Cannibal

There the Merchant, without thoughts of trade, dressed in grey, still fat, had died on his first day at the front and was wedged, standing upright, between two beams, his face knocked backwards, angry, disturbed. In his open mouth there rested a large cocoon, protruding and white, which moved sometimes as if it were alive. The trousers, dropped about his ankles, were filled with rust and tufts of hair.

The line between the fantasy of an Edward Lear and that actual creation of another universe which the best surrealism attempts is a hard one to draw … the line, shall we say, between two aspects of Coleridge’s “fancy.” Where else do the “monumental dogs found in the land of the tumbleweed, glorified for their private melancholy and lazy high song” belong — unless in the pages of Lear? And yet the German dogs to which they are compared are fully as remarkable; and become both real dogs running beside the train in which the invalided Ernie lies, and perhaps also recollections of childhood fear; and some pages later, vague symbols of defeat and death:

Those were certainly dogs that howled. His face pressed against the glass, he heard the cantering of their feet, the yelps and panting that came between the howls. For unlike the monumental dogs found in the land of the tumbleweed, glorified for their private melancholy and lazy high song, always seen resting on their haunches, resting and baying, these dogs ran with the train, nipped at the tie rods, snapped at the lantern from the caboose, and carrying on conversation with the running wheels, begged to be let into the common parlor. They would lap a platter of milk or a bone that appeared dry and scraped to the human eye without soiling the well-worn corridors of rug, and under the green light they would not chew the periodicals or claw the conductor’s heels. As paying passengers, they would eat and doze and leap finally back from the unguarded open platforms between cars into the night and the pack.

The temptation to quote from The Cannibal is enormous. But no doubt this passage, and the dogs’ progressive irresistible taking over of the train and the paragraph, is enough to suggest the author’s delight in grotesque distortion — and to suggest the dangers and promises implicit in an imagination so uninhibited and so incorrigibly visual, immediate, obsessed.

How far John Hawkes will go as a writer must obviously depend on how far he consents to impose some page-by-page and chapter-by-chapter consecutive understanding on his astonishing creative energy; on how richly he exploits his ability to achieve truth through distortion; on how well he continues to uncover and use childhood images and fears. Of the larger distortion of The Cannibal —of its total reading of life and vision of desolation as terrible as that of Melville’s Encantadas —there is no need to speak at length. The historic fact of our present effort to reconstruct German pride and nationalism is rather more absurd than the negligent withdrawal pictured by Hawkes. And yet his few “scenes of occupation life” may someday tell us more of the underlying historical truth than the newspapers of 1945 will tell us: the trial and execution of the pastor Miller for having changed his views under the Nazis (the present Mayor betraying him in terror of the curled claws and sharp hooked nose and red terrifying eyes of the eagle on the Colonel’s shoulder); the snarling lovemaking of the American overseer Leevey and his diseased German mistress; and the “overseeing” Leevey at work … hurtling on his motorcycle through the third of the nation he controls, absorbed in an historical process which transcends any human intention and which he has no hope of understanding. John Hawkes, who saw wartime Germany briefly as a driver for the American Field Service, has written an unpolitical book but not an unhistorical one. As Kafka achieved a truth about his society through perhaps unintentional claustrophobic images and impressions, so Hawkes — abnormally aware of physical disabilities and indignities and degradations — has achieved some truth about his. This is a Germany of men with claws for hands, of women with reddened flesh, of children with braces to support their stumps or their heads. It is a world without food, without hope, without energy … reduced for its pleasures to impotent mechanical ruttings bereft of all desire. I think it can be understood that this is more than post-war Germany, whatever the author intended; that this is, to some degree, our modern world. At the end of the novel the liberation of Germany has occurred; or, perhaps, our old world is renewed. This, to be sure, may be looked at in several ways. The insane asylum in Spitzen-on-the-Dein is reopened on the next to last page. “At the top of the hill he saw the long lines that were already filing back into the institution, revived already with the public spirit.”

ALBERT J. GUERARD

Cambridge, Massachusetts

November 29, 1948

* I understand that Mr. Hawkes had all but finished The Cannibal before reading Kafka, Faulkner and Djuna Barnes. His earlier reading of modern experimental literature was largely confined to poetry.

† Published in New Directions 11 anthology.

Almost fourteen years have passed since the above was written, yet I see no need to revise, erase or retract. There is much more that might have been said. Today, too, I might substitute the term “anti-realism” (vague as it is) for “surrealism” and its often misleading connotations. And of course it would now seem absurd to speak of John Hawkes as “promising.” In the years since publication The Cannibal never died as so many good first novels do. It kept up its quiet underground life, highly praised from the first by a few, the yellow jacket still present in the serious bookstores where these underground lives occur, the book each year winning new adherents among readers impatient with the cliches and sentimentalities of commercial fiction, or impatient with the loose babblings of the publicized avant-garde. The Cannibal was reprinted and read.

There was always the possibility Hawkes had exhausted his particular dark vision in this single book, and would write no more. But during these years (while working full time for the Harvard University Press, then as a teacher at Harvard and Brown), he published three more books: The Beetle Leg (1951), The Goose on the Grave & The Owl (1954, two short novels), and The Lime Twig (1961). Each had its different myth and setting, its landscape of an inward geography projected onto a dry impotent American west, onto fascist Italy and San Marino, onto a damp decrepit England of gangsters and gamblers.

The predicted movement toward realism has occurred, but chiefly in the sense that the later novels are much more orderly and more even in pace, and distinctly less difficult to read. The spatial form and dizzying simultaneity of The Cannibal are modified. The imaginative strengths remain, however, and the vivifying distortions: the power to exploit waking nightmare and childhood trauma, to summon pre-conscious anxieties and longings, to symbolize oral fantasies and castration fears — to shadow forth, in a word, our underground selves. And in each of the novels a fine black humor and a nervous beauty of language play against the plot’s impulse to imprison us unpleasantly in the nightmare, to implicate us in these crimes. We are indeed deeply involved. But we are outside too, watching the work of art.

Four slender volumes. The achievement may not seem a large one in this day of voluminous and improvising writers, scornful of the right word. Yet it is an achievement roughly comparable in bulk and in variety of interest to that of Nathanael West. Hawkes has of course not written such an easy or public book as The Day of the Locust; perhaps he never will. But he has surely exhibited a power of language and an integrity of imaginative vision that West showed very rarely. Hawkes’s position is an unusual one: that of the avant-garde writer who has imitated no one and who has made no personal gestures of defiance. His defiances — the violence and the indignities and the horror, the queer reversals of sympathy — are all in his books. He has been associated, moreover, with none of the publicized groupings.