Hawkes, John 1925–1998

(John Clendennin Burne Hawkes, Jr.)

PERSONAL: Born August 17, 1925, in Stamford, CT; died of a stroke May 15, 1998, in Providence, RI; son of John Clendennin Burne and Helen (Ziefle) Hawkes; married Sophie Goode Tazewell, September 5, 1947; children: John Clendennin Burne III, Sophie Tazewell, Calvert Tazewell, Richard Urguhart. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1949.

CAREER: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, assistant to production manager, 1949–55; Harvard University, Cambridge, visiting lecturer, 1955–56, instructor in English, 1956–58; Brown University, Providence, RI, assistant professor, 1958–62, associate professor, 1962–67, professor of English, 1967–88, T.B. Stowell University Professor, beginning 1973, professor emeritus, beginning 1988. Visiting assistant professor of humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1959; leader of novel workshop, Utah Writers' Conference, Salt Lake City, summer, 1962; special guest, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, summer, 1962; staff member, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, summer, 1963, writer in residence, University of Virginia, April, 1965; visiting professor of creative writing, Stanford University, 1966–67; visiting distinguished professor of creative writing, City College of the City University of New York, 1971–72. Member of panel on Educational Innovation, Washington, DC, 1966–67. Military service: American Field Service, 1944–45.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship, 1962–63; American Academy of Arts and Letters award, 1962; Ford Foundation fellowship in theater, 1964–65; Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1966; Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, 1973; Prix Medicis Étranger for best foreign novel translated into French, 1986, for Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade.

WRITINGS:

Fiasco Hall (poems), Harvard University Printing Office, 1949.

(Editor with Albert J. Guerard and others) The Personal Voice: A Contemporary Prose Reader, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1964.

Innocent Party: Four Short Plays (contains The Questions, first produced in Stanford, CA, January 13, 1966; produced by National Broadcasting Company (NBC-TV), 1967; produced Off-Broadway at Players Workshop, January 14, 1972; The Wax Museum, first produced in Boston, MA, April 28, 1966; produced Off-Broadway at Brooklyn Academy of Music, April 4, 1969; The Undertaker, first produced at Theatre Company of Boston, March 28, 1967; and The Innocent Party, first produced at Theatre Company of Boston, February, 1968; produced Off-Broadway at Brooklyn Academy of Music, April 4, 1969), New Directions (New York, NY), 1967.

(Editor with others) The American Literary Anthology I: The First Annual Collection of the Best from the Literary Magazines, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1968.

Lunar Landscapes: Stories and Short Novels, 1949–1963 (includes The Owl, The Goose on the Grave, and Charivari), New Directions (New York, NY), 1969.

The Universal Fears, Lord John Press (Northridge, CA), 1978.

Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader (autobiographical notes), introduction by William H. Gass, New Directions (New York, NY), 1984.

(With others) C.W. Tazewell, editor, Hawkes Scrapbook: A New Taste in Literature, W.S. Dawson (Virginia Beach, VA), 1990.

The Lime Twig; Second Skin; Travesty, Penguin (New York, NY), 1996.

NOVELS

The Cannibal, New Directions (New York, NY), 1949.

The Beetle Leg, New Directions (New York, NY), 1951.

The Goose on the Grave: Two Short Novels (contains The Goose on the Grave and The Owl; also see below), New Directions (New York, NY), 1954.

The Lime Twig, New Directions (New York, NY), 1961.

Second Skin, New Directions (New York, NY), 1964.

The Blood Oranges, New Directions (New York, NY), 1971.

Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, New Directions (New York, NY), 1974.

Travesty, New Directions (New York, NY), 1976.

The Owl, New Directions (New York, NY), 1977.

The Passion Artist, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

Virginie: Her Two Lives, Harper (New York, NY), 1982.

Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1985.

Innocence in Extremis (novella), Burning Deck, 1985.

Whistlejacket, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1988, Dalkey Archive (Normal, IL), 1997.

Sweet William: A Novel of Old Horse, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1993.

The Frog, Viking (New York, NY), 1996.

An Irish Eye, Viking (New York, NY), 1997.

OTHER

Contributor to anthologies, including New Directions in Prose and Poetry II; The World of Black Humor: An Introductory Anthology of Selections and Criticism, edited by Douglas M. Davis, 1967; Write and Rewrite: A Story of the Creative Process, edited by John Kuehl, 1967; Flannery O'Connor, edited by Robert E. Reiter; The American Novel since World War II; Writers as Teachers, Teachers as Writers; Montpellier: Centre de'etude et de recherches sur les ecrivains du Sud sur Etats-Unis de L'Universite Paul Valery, edited by Pierre Gault. Contributor of short stories, poems, articles, and reviews to periodicals, including Audience, Voices: A Journal of Poetry, Sewanee Review, Massachusetts Review, and Tri-Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS: American Novelist John Hawkes has most often been characterized as an avantgarde writer. Hawkes's own declarations about his work and methods in an interview for Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature support this assessment: "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained. And structure—verbal and psychological coherence—is still my largest concern as a writer." Hawkes's rejection of traditional novelistic methods resulted in books critics have called nightmarish and dreamlike.

Hawkes's works have been attacked by critics who object to his unconventional methods. Alexander Klein, writing in the New Republic, contended that in The Cannibal "Hawkes presents a 'surrealistic novel' which manages for long stretches to make dullness and surrealism appear practically synonymous. Actually the book is a series of related images (some fresh and sharp) and fragmentary sketches (a few vividly effective), gimcracked together with a semblance of plot and allegory." In like manner, a New Yorker reviewer found that The Lime Twig "is struck through with bright flashes of emotion and imagery, but they do not compensate for the general murkiness of his prose, and they are not well enough balanced with the proportion and perspective that it very badly needs." In the New York Times Book Review, Jack Beatty called Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade "the most accomplished meaningless novel I have ever read."

Despite such criticism, critics have also found both method and purpose in the seeming madness of Hawkes's novels. Robert Scholes noted in his The Fabulators that "Hawkes means to use conscious thought and art to illuminate the unconscious, to show us things about ourselves which may be locked in our own unconscious minds, avoiding the scrutiny of our consciousness." In an interview with Scholes, Hawkes' once remarked about the nightmares evinced in his writing: "We can't deny the essential crippling that is everywhere in life. I don't advocate crippling; I'm an opponent of torture. I deplore the nightmare; I deplore terror; I happen to believe that it is only by traveling those dark tunnels, perhaps not literally but psychically, that one can learn in any sense what it means to be compassionate." "My fiction," Hawkes concluded in the interview, "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 of human sexuality which I have attempted to portray and confront in order to be true to human fear and to human ruthlessness, but also in part to evoke its opposite, the moment of freedom from constriction, constraint, death."

In addition to discussing the psychological elements in his novels, Hawkes also commented on his concern with structure. "My novels are not highly plotted," he observed in Wisconsin Studies, "but they're elaborately structured." In his Comic Terror: The Novels of John Hawkes, Donald J. Greiner pointed out that "structure often holds the key to Hawkes's difficult fiction…. Structure in his work is based upon cross-references, parallels, and contrasts, rather than upon the development of plot and character. It is this technique that enriches the nightmarish overtones of the novels and gives them their poetic quality." Scholes also noted the novels' meticulously wrought structures; The Lime Twig, for example, "which seems so foggy and dreamlike, is actually as neatly put together as the electrical circuitry of the human nervous system." Scholes stressed the careful interweaving of recurring images and verbal patterns.

Whistlejacket is characteristic of Hawkes' works due to its reliance on structural and thematic parallels. On the surface the novel is a murder mystery; it details the lives of the Van Fleet family, which devotes itself to uppercrust hobbies and trying to hide its dirty secrets. Yet as Patrick McGrath noted in the New York Times Book Review, "Questions of representation, of the layers of meaning that come to light when surfaces are peeled back to expose the dark structures within, are central to Whistlejacket." McGrath called the novel a "brilliantly sustained reflection on surface and depth, illusion and exposure, and the construction of meaning." Not all critics, however, praised the elaborate structures of Hawkes's writing. For John Clute in the Washington Post Book World, Hawkes's Whistlejacket is "like spindrift," written "in a style whose haste too often approaches the slovenly."

Hawkes described in a Massachusetts Review interview the centrality of visual images to his creative method: "I write out of a series of pictures that literally and actually do come to mind, but I've never seen them before. It is perfectly true that I don't know what they mean, but I feel and know that they have meaning. The Cannibal is probably the clearest example of this kind of absolute coherence of vision of anything I have written, when all the photographs do add together or come out of the same black pit."

Another element of Hawkes's work is its humor. As Greiner showed, many reviewers have been disconcerted by Hawkes's "black humor" and the bleakness of his comedy, but other critics see the humor as a central, important part of the novels. Greiner, for instance, found that Hawkes "daringly mixes horror with humor, the grotesque with the heroic, creating a complex tone which some readers find hard to handle." The critic contended that Hawkes rejects traditional comedy, which usually aims to mock aberrant behavior and assert a "benevolent social norm." Hawkes's characters, "while they perform ridiculous acts and reveal absurd personal defects in the manner of traditional comedy, rarely discover their faults in time so as to be safely reestablished with society." In fact, Hawkes dismissed orthodox social norms. Fiction, he said, "should be an act of rebellion against all the constraints of the conventional pedestrian mentality around us. Surely it should destroy conventional morality."

While Hawkes spurns conventional morality, his "contemporary humor," Greiner argued, "maintains faith in the invulnerability of basic values: love, communication, sympathy. Given a world of fragmentation, self-destruction, and absurdity, Hawkes tries to meet the terrors with a saving attitude of laughter so as to defend and celebrate these permanent values." In his 1993 novel Sweet William: A Novel of Old Horse, for instance, Hawkes presents the story of a bright, stubborn pony who achieves fame and accolades as a young racer but whose mature years are spent as a stud and a racer in a decrepit stable. William's comfortable life as a horse is ruined by his own tantrums and pride, which cause him to injure the humans who care for him, but William remains unapologetic for his actions and disdainful of humans to the end.

A similar example of Hawkes's dark humor is his 1996 novel, The Frog, about a young French boy who swallows a frog, only to have the frog—which the boy names Armand—take up residence for good. Armand serves as a friend and companion to his host, even as his host is accused of madness and consigned to a sanatorium not once but twice in his life. In his Massachusetts Review interview, Hawkes insisted on his comic intentions: "I have always thought that my fictions, no matter how diabolical, were comic. I wanted to be very comic—but they have not been treated as comedy. They have been called 'black, obscene visions of the horror of life' and sometimes rejected as such, sometimes highly praised as such."

In addition to considering particular elements in his fiction, in his interview Hawkes examined the relationship between fiction and life: "I think that we read for joy, for pleasure, for excitement, for challenge. It would seem pretty obvious, however, that fiction is its own province. Fiction is a made thing—a manmade thing. It has its own beauties, its own structures, its own delights. Its only good is to please us and to relate to our essential growth. I don't see how we could live without it. It may be that the art of living is no more than to exercise the act of imagination in a more irrevocable way. It may be that to read a fiction is only to explore life's possibilities in a special way. I think that fiction and living are entirely separate and that the one could not exist without the other."

With Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader, a collection of short stories and excerpts from his novels, critics took the opportunity to comment on the body of Hawkes's work. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Arthur C. Danto concluded: "Hawkes has the power to do, gorgeously and as art, what most of us can at best do drably and as dream—transform incident into phantasm. For connoisseurs of this rare craft, the refined rewards are frequent and the pleasures subtle and the charms undeniable." In the volume's introduction, William H. Gass offers this assessment: "I hope that the book which you are holding now will provide … exhilaration, for these lines are alive as few in our literature are; it is a prose of great poetry; it is language linked like things in nature are—by life and by desire; it is exploratory without being in the least haphazard or confused…. [I]t shows me how writing should be written, and also how living should be lived. It is a prose that breathes what it sees."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bellamy, Joe David, editor, The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1974.

Busch, Frederick, Hawkes: A Guide to His Works, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1973.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 27, 1984, Volume 49, 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Ferrari, Rita, Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.

Greiner, Donald J., Comic Terror: The Novels of John Hawkes, Memphis State University Press (Memphis, TN), 1973.

Hawkes, John, Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader, introduction by William H. Gass, New Directions (New York, NY), 1984.

Hryciw, Carol A., John Hawkes: An Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow (Metuchen, NJ), 1977.

Kuehl, John, John Hawkes and the Craft of Conflict, Rutgers University Press (Rutgers, NJ), 1975.

Laniel, Christine, editor, Facing Texts: Encounters between Contemporary Writers and Critics, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1988.

Littlejohn, David, Interruptions, Grossman, 1970.

Malin, Irving, New American Gothic, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1962.

Marx, Lesley, Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Rutherford, NJ), 1997.

Moore, Harry T., editor, Contemporary American Novelists, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1964.

Santore, Anthony C., and Michael Pocalyko, editors, A John Hawkes Symposium: Design and Debris, New Directions (New York, NY), 1977.

Scholes, Robert, The Fabulators, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1967.

Whelan, Michaele, Navigating the Minefield: Hawke's Narratives of Perversion, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, summer, 1965.

Audience, spring, 1960.

Book Week, September 26, 1965.

Chicago Tribune Book World, September 16, 1979.

Commonweal, July 2, 1954.

Contemporary Literature, Volume 2, number 3, 1970.

Critique, Volume 6, number 2, 1963; Volume 14, number 3, 1973.

Daedalus, spring, 1963.

Encounter, June, 1966.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), September 17, 1988.

Harvard Advocate, March, 1950.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1996, p. 468.

Kliatt, January, 1995, p. 8.

Life, September 19, 1969.

Listener, July 18, 1968; May 5, 1970.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 9, 1982.

Massachusetts Review, summer, 1966.

Mediterranean Review, winter, 1972.

Minnesota Review, winter, 1962.

Nation, September 2, 1961; November 16, 1985.

National Observer, June 19, 1971.

New Leader, December 12, 1960; October 30, 1961.

New Republic, March 27, 1950; November 10, 1979; November 18, 1985.

New Statesman, March 11, 1966; November 10, 1967; May 1, 1970.

Newsweek, April 3, 1967.

New Yorker, April 29, 1961.

New York Review of Books, July 13, 1967; June 10, 1982.

New York Times, September 15, 1971.

New York Times Book Review, May 14, 1961; May 29, 1966; September 19, 1971; April 21, 1974; March 28, 1976; September 16, 1979; June 27, 1982; November 25, 1984; September 29, 1985; November 25, 1985; August 7, 1988.

Publishers Weekly, April 15, 1996, p. 47.

Saturday Review, August 9, 1969; October 23, 1971.

Southwest Review, winter, 1965; October 23, 1971.

Time, February 6, 1950; September 24, 1979.

Times Literary Supplement, February 17, 1966; October 15, 1971; February 14, 1975; February 18, 1986; March 31, 1989.

Village Voice, April 10, 1969; May 23, 1974; September 3, 1979; May 18, 1982; September 17, 1985.

Washington Post, October 1, 1969.

Washington Post Book World, October 14, 1979; May 30, 1982, pp. 1-2; September 29, 1985; July 24, 1988, pp. 1, 7.

Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, summer, 1965.