(After years of underground existence, this brilliant nove...)
After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life.The Beetle Leg, John Hawkes's second full-length novel, was first published by New Directions in 1951. After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life. As a 'surrealist Western" (Newsweek), and a violent and poetic portrayal of "a landscape of sexual apathy" (Albert J. Guerard), The Beetle Leg is a rich flight into the special vein of comedy that Hawkes had begun to exploit a decade before the popular acceptance of "black humor."
(In England after World War II, a sedate, bored lower-clas...)
In England after World War II, a sedate, bored lower-class couple — Michael and Margaret Banks — are lured into fronting a racehorse scheme. Michael is befriended by William Hencher, a well-meaning but lost soul who fell into association with a ruthless gang during the war. After his mother's death, Hencher wants to repay the Bankses for their allowing him to rent a room in their home, where he had lived with his mother for twenty years.
(The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in ...)
The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949. The novel is divided in three parts. The first and the last are set in 1945, in an imaginary small German town ravaged by the war, Spitzen-on-the-Dein. The second part takes place during the First World War, from 1914 (the title of this part of the novel) to 1918.
(No synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric co...)
No synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power―sinister because of the strength of will Cyril exerts over his wife, his mistress, his wife's reluctant lover; lyric, since he is also a “sex-singer" in the land where music is the food of love. Thus the central theme of John Hawkes's widely acclaimed novel The Blood Oranges is boldly asserted by its narrator, Cyril, the archetypal multisexualist. Likening himself to a white bull on Love's tapestry, he pursues his romantic vision in a primitive Mediterranean landscape. There two couples ― Cyril and Fiona, Hugh and Catherine ― mingle their loves in an "lllyria" that brings to mind the equally timeless countryside of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
(Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchm...)
Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. The author of seven full-length novels, several plays, and numerous short fictions, John Hawkes over the course of two and a half decades has won international acclaim. Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. “It is an exceptionally concise and beautiful work,” writes the novelist-critic Jonathan Baumbach, “delicate, erotic, dreamlike―in all, a luminous novel by the richest prose stylist in American letters since Faulkner.”
(Sunny Deauville's duties as proprietor of the best brothe...)
Sunny Deauville's duties as proprietor of the best brothel in Alaska and her lusty, guilt-free life are counterbalanced by her obsession with finding her father, lost years before in the backcountry wilds.
(The fictional autobiography of a horse named "Old Horse,"...)
The fictional autobiography of a horse named "Old Horse," from his youth through his years on the racetrack of life, to his relationship with Master, the man whose kindness transforms his life.
John Hawkes was an American novelist, whose darkly perverse subject matter has its roots in the fantasies and anxieties of the unconscious mind. He considered a story’s structure his main concern; in one interview he stated that plot, character, and theme are “the true enemies of the novel.”
Background
John Hawkes was born on August 17, 1925 in Stamford, Connecticut, United States, into the family of John C. B. Hawkes and Helen Louise Ziefle. The son of a businessman, Hawkes was an only child. Between the ages of 10 and 15 he lived in Alaska with his family, who then moved to New York City.
Education
John entered Harvard in the early 1940s, but his education was interrupted by a wartime stint as an ambulance driver in Germany and Italy.
Early in his career, John Hawkes was an assistant production manager at Harvard University Press. In 1955 he joined the faculty at the university and taught English until 1958. An assistant professor at Brown University, he rose to the rank of professor of English in 1967. The year 1973 saw him attain the title of T. B. Stowell University Professor; he became professor emeritus in 1988.
Hawkes found time to teach at other schools as well. Included were stints at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the City College of the City University of New York, among others. His first books were published in 1949: one was a volume of verse called "Fiasco Hall" and the other was a novel titled "The Cannibal." He followed with other novels such as "The Lime Twig", "The Blood Oranges", "The Passion Artist", "Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade", "Sweet William: A Novel of an Old Horse", "The Frog", "An Irish Eye", and "Death, Sleep, and the Traveler."
With the publication of "The Cannibal" (1950) and "The Beetle Leg" (1951) Hawkes gained a reputation as an eccentric, avantgarde novelist and a radically innovative stylist. Set in desolate waste lands and full of sadistic violence, these two novels depict the human attempt to impose order on chaotic reality with such things as art, religion, and love. These forces prove powerless, however, against the violence that emerges as the prevailing reality in these novels. Hawkes's theme of the beauty and horror of the human imagination is considered most developed in "The Lime Twig" (1961). Compared to the earlier works, this novel has a more conventional structure, but the prose is still considered experimental even though it is less fragmented and surreal. "Second Skin" (1964) marks Hawkes's more extensive use of artist-heroes and their attempts to enforce their vision upon the world.
He also wrote plays that were collected in "Innocent Party: Four Short Plays." Other collections of Hawkes’ work include "Lunar Landscapes: Stories and Short Novels, 1949 - 1963" and "Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader." Later volumes of short stories included "The Universal Fears" and "Innocence in Extremis." Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
Hawkes was an extraordinary stylist whose primary interest was the psychic and imaginative processes of human beings. His work was difficult and demanding, full of scenes intended to startle and even repel the reader. By "violating" his audience's sense of normalcy and propriety, Hawkes hoped to jar it into new levels of awareness of the beautiful and dangerous capabilities of the human imagination. Hawkes himself described his fiction as travels through the landscape of the psyche. He emphasized its brutal and absurdly comic aspects in order, conversely, to understand what it meant to feel compassion.
Quotations:
"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and - having abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction - totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."
"For me, everything depends on language."
"Like the poem, the experimental fiction is an exclamation of psychic materials which come to the writer all readily distorted, prefigured in that inner schism between the rational and the absurd."
"Everything I have written comes out of nightmare, out of the nightmare of war, I think."
"The writer should always serve as his own angleworm — and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better."
Personality
Hawkes took inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov and considered himself a follower of the Russian-American translingual author. Nabokov's story "Signs and Symbols" was on the reading list for Hawkes' writing students at Brown University.
Interests
Writers
Vladimir Nabokov
Connections
John Hawkes married Sophie Goode Tazewell on September 5, 1947 and they had four children together - John Clendennin Burne III, Sophie Tazewell, Calvert Tazewell, and Richard Urquhart.