The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (New York Review Books Classics)

The plot line of Glenway Wescott's short novel, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, is quite simple; a wealthy Irish couple, Mr. and Mrs. Cullen, spend an afternoon at the French home of an American friend, Alexandra Henry, and her American house guest, Alwyn Tower. The setting is the late 1920s, and Alwyn Tower is telling the story of the Cullens' visit from a supposedly objective distance, in the early 1940s. Clearly what occurred that day with the Cullens seemed so remarkable that Tower is still thinking of them twelve years later.The surrealistic feature of the story (which was so bizarre to this reader as to be at first off-putting) is that Madeleine Cullen has a passion for falconry and is traveling with a full-grown peregrine falcon perched on her wrist, a bird which she must take with her everywhere. The "love" story is a triangle: Larry Cullen is in competition with a feathered being for his wife's affection.Regarding the craft of the novel, the hawk, Lucy, is so palpable on the page that Wescott must have researched hawk behavior and falconry, i.e., hawk-human interaction. But research alone would not have been enough to make any bird a character in a novel; Wescott takes our feathered friends to a higher level of literary metaphor and character.To have the novel work as a whole, the novelist must employ a structure of writing that maximizes the benefit and entertainment that readers expect. The characteristic quality of The Pilgrim Hawk is that the first-person narrator, Alwyn Tower, is so intelligently perceptive that his viewpoint is almost impossible to distinguish from the single, controlling observer, the omniscient narrator. Tower is the most compassionate of narrators as he sees into both Larry Cullen and Madeleine Cullen, the role of Lucy, as well as the household servants. Such an informed and knowledgeable narrator--who also reveals his own sensitive consciousness--makes me suspect that Alwyn Tower is Glenway Wescott himself. Employing the technique of interior monologue, Wescott reveals Tower's epistemological doubts as Tower filters other's dialogue through his single, though ultimately limited, consciousness. And Wescott's sentences are constructed with such care for the English language that one feels Tower is Wescott.The NYRB paperback production makes this novel an edition you will want to own: The cover art, by Nam June Paik, is as sophisticated and enigmatic as the relationships in the novel. Aesthetic production features of other books in the NYRB series have included evocative colors on the inside front covers: magenta, peach orange, and royal purple. The inside cover of The Pilgrim Hawk is a hypnotic turquoise. I have never spent so much time gazing at the inside cover of any book as I have of this one.Informative and insightful introduction by MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, who as the author of The Hours, a work about Virginia Woolf, is certainly qualified to write about Wescott's "hawklike" observations of human behavior. Cunningham writes, "Almost every page contains some small wonder of phrase or insight, some instance of the world keenly observed and reinvented" (xvii).

In 1965 or '66, one of my teachers taught a class that included Six Great Modern Short Novels, published by Dell Paperbacks. I couldn't take the class, but bought the book, finally reading Glenway Westcott's _The Pilgrim Hawk_ in the 1970s. I was drawn to it in part because I was living in my car, a 1968 Ford Falcon, and wondered if Wescott's pilgrim could speak to my pilgrim.The story became an indelible part of my being with this paragraph:"Falconers believe that hunger must be worse for falcons than for other birds and animals, Mrs. Cullen said. It maddens them, with a soreness in every feather .... This painful greed, sick single-mindedness makes it possible to tame them and to perfect the extraordinary technique of falconry, which is more than any other bird can learn. You hear it in their cry -- _aik, aik_ -- as Mrs. Cullen then imitated it for us, ache, ache -- a small flat scream with a bubbling or gargling undertone, as if their mouths were full of scalding water. 'I suppose human beings never feel anything like it.' ”And, if this _aik, aik_ passage was never far from mind, and if I often felt a need to reread _The Pilgrim Hawk_, I kept postponing: "Another time."Recently I noticed that it had been separately published, and wondered if the new edition had any emendations. The time had come.I found no discernible changes, but at about midpoint, perhaps stopping to marvel at the grace and insight of Westcott's prose, I finally glanced at the cover, and was struck by the graphic as a major non sequitur: two seemingly male mannequins in an embrace (_Manikins_ by Paul Cadmus). Since the story concerns the wobbly marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Cullen, and the role Lucy the falcon plays in this failing marriage (with a subplot of a male and female servant attracted to each other), I don't get the mannequin connection.Perhaps the editors decided to hint Westcott's personal life. If so, it's false advertising, having nothing to do with the story within. The suggestion also betrays Westcott's artistry: his quite compassionate glimpse of a crumbling man-woman marriage.It is my hope that _The Piglrim Hawk_ will be blessed with infinite editions, but that the next edition will feature on its cover something to suggest the true nature of this wonderfully haunting story.I might add that a recent viewing of _Blackfish_ -- the story of Tilikum's capture and treatment as killer whale, a toy for human pleasure -- altered my reading of many passages in _The Piglrim Hawk_. Westcott's artistry leaves most responses to Lucy's captivity to our imagination and judgment, but in this reading my empathy for the pain of Lucy's captivity was far greater.

This is a brief intense study of three couples brought together on a single afternoon in a French farmhouse.There is Tower with his unrequited doomed for disappointment love for Alex.There is Jean and Eve the servant couple who are cooking dinner.And there is the Irish couple, full of wild dismay and inner mayhem, pathetic, risible and murderous who dominate and drive this intense lyrical tale to a series of extremities.The Hawk attached to Mrs Cullen's wrist becomes a multi-faceted symbol in turn sublime ridiculous pathetic haunted at the heart of a kind of ongoing meditation on love, desire, attachment, captivity, freedom, jealousy, hate, and more. For example, there is an excellent passage on drunkeness.The superior judgemental and sententious nature of Tower's narration irritated but I accept he was "in character". I also see his frustrated disappointed love as one of the novel's main themes.I am not sure I would accept the very grand claims made by Michael Cunningham in his Introduction. I see this enlarged short story as really a wayward curiosity piece written with a stirring lyricism and a mix of comedy and pathos.Westcott offers some very memorable descriotions... One I particularly liked was a description of the Hawk landing on a post, and gripping it "like an Angel pulling a tall man by the hair"... Short as it is the novella provides an interesting worthwhile and even provoking read.I

Pilgrim Hawk is an involving and interesting short story, well worth anybody's time, but no classic. It has a good deal of attitudinizing about Love and Life, and is a striking and unusual narrative. 'You're no novelist', says the narrator's friend, on the last page, and she may be right.

If someone had told me that a story which included long passages about a bird of prey would absorb me, I should not have believed them.However in the Pilgrim Hawk the author Glenway Wescott uses such a bird to present us with a tale which draws together relationships between three couples who meet together for a short time at a house party in pre war France.This is an amazing book. A love story so well written, tightly written that it is beautiful.

Fascinating study of a complex relationship (and not too cliched about the hawk and freedom...)