Revaluation: John Hawkes and the Bridge Barely Curved

"Here," Sylvan Karchmer said, handing me a thin paperback. "How about this one?"

We were in the campus bookstore at the University of Oregon in the fall of 1966. With my newly minted MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in hand, I was a rookie assistant professor of English and creative writing, and Karchmer was my senior colleague, helping me select the books I would need for a survey course I was scheduled to teach in the American novel. This one, encased in its distinctive black-and-gray New Directions cover, was John Hawkes's The Lime Twig.

I barely knew who John Hawkes was. My teachers at Iowa, among them Richard Yates, Vance Bourjaily, and R. V. Cassill, were excellent teachers; but their views on what constituted good writing was much more middle of the road than Hawkes. They were of the realist-naturalist school, the Madame Bovary school; but Hawkes, most decidedly, was not. Not wanting to bridle against Sylvan Karchmer's wishes, however—it was he, after all, who had been responsible, as I understood it, for having me hired—I decided to take a flyer on The Lime Twig. And thus was I introduced to one of the oddest, and in many ways sublimest, works in the modern American canon.

Sylvan Karchmer is long dead now, but I still have the copy of The Lime Twig he handed me that day; its cover has come loose from its spine and its pages have yellowed at the edges, but it is otherwise intact. I also still have my notes for the course I would be teaching, some of them written in ballpoint pen on the blank front pages of the novel and some on a half sheet of paper I keep folded inside the book. "Michael's night of lust," one of the lecture notes says, "balanced by Margaret's night of terror." Another says simply, "How Michael redeems himself partially: discuss."

It was the era of the New Criticism: close reading was the order of the day, and The Lime Twig is a close reader's delight. It's the story of a non-descript English couple, Michael and Margaret Banks, who find themselves involved with a gang of hoodlums who have stolen a storied purebred horse and plan to enter it under false colors in the Golden Bowl derby at Aldington, a famous racetrack outside London. Michael, like many dull timid men, enjoys a rich fantasy life filled with willing women and ample adventure. He ends up fulfilling his every erotic desire in a nightlong tryst with one of the gang's molls, the fetching Sybilline, as Margaret, his wife, is being tortured and finally killed in an adjacent room by the gang's chief enforcer, a loathsome wretch named Thick. The story is told in lush phantasmagoric prose employing lots of half-scenes and artfully withheld information. It was written early in Hawkes's career when he was obviously still much under the influence of William Faulkner—the Faulkner of Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying. The setting is immediately postwar London, and the cold and damp of the city, its fog and its grime, contribute to the nightmarish mood.

Flannery O'Connor was a great fan of The Lime Twig. She and Jack Hawkes were pen pals; and although O'Connor didn't ordinarily write blurbs, she made an exception for this one. "You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream," she wrote. "It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can't. The reader even has that slight feeling of suffocation that you have when you can't wake up and some evil is being worked on you. This . . . I might have been dreaming myself."

Another fan of the book was Leslie Fiedler, the most popular critic of the 1960s, who wrote an enthusiastic introduction for The Lime Twig in which he writes that the places Hawkes "defines are the places in which we all live between waking and sleeping, and the pleasures he affords are the pleasures of...