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, welclass="underline" 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 serving 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.