Spotlight on … John Hawkes The Lime Twig (1961)

‘In a recent interview, Ben Marcus resisted being called an “experimental writer,” asking rather impatiently, “Does anyone self-identify as experimental? Anyone?” Apparently Marcus is not much aware of his predecessor, John Hawkes, who once told an interviewer, “Of course I think of myself as an experimental writer,” regretting only that “the term ‘experimental’ has been used so often by reviewers as a pejorative label intended to dismiss as eccentric or private or excessively difficult the work in question.” Marcus seemed to be decrying the expectation that he should always be sufficiently experimental, but Hawkes never wavered in his determination to challenge entrenched habits and complacent practices in both the writing and reading of fiction. In the same interview, he asserted that “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.” Hawkes endeavored throughout his career as a writer to validate this assumption, producing a series of novels that do indeed discard the “familiar ways of thinking” and attempt to substitute for them a “totality of vision or structure.”

‘By both articulating a commitment to “experimental fiction” and putting into practice a coherent conception of what such fiction should do, John Hawkes established himself as perhaps the most important experimental writer in the postwar period, perhaps in all of American literature. Furthermore, his novels remain as thematically provocative and aesthetically fresh as they were when published — Hawkes’s first novel, The Cannibal, was published in 1949, while his final novel, Sweet William, was published in 1993, five years before his death at the age of 72. Unfortunately, these novels have largely faded from literary-cultural consciousness, as has Hawkes himself, perhaps precisely because he did make such an effort to create radically varied works, each novel taking experimental fiction in a somewhat different direction (in some cases even critiquing the previous novel) so that no one work can really be identified as a “typical” Hawkes novel — all of them are typical. While any one of the novels provides its own rich and unique experience, to “get” Hawkes might require reading all of them, and perhaps that is more effort than most readers want to make.

‘However, those readers who are willing to devote some time to Hawkes’s work, and to judge the novels on their own terms — since Hawkes himself devoted much effort to establishing those terms — would sure find it a rewarding, if at times also rather disquieting, experience. And although appreciation of Hawkes’s achievement can’t finally rest in singling out his “best” or most “representative” novel, it is possible to focus first on a particularly dynamic period in Hawkes’s career, a period in which Hawkes produced several novels that both illustrate his inveterate experimentation and stand on their own as satisfying works of literary art. The set of novels beginning with The Lime Twig (1961) and including Second Skin (1964), The Blood Oranges (1971), and Travesty (1976) could serve as the foundation of a revival of interest in Hawkes’s fiction. Each of them succeeds in redeeming the ambitions of experimental fiction, while, together, they are as impressive a group of books as any written by a postwar writer.

‘The Lime Twig calls more on “established” strategies than his earlier novels, although it would still be a mistake to expect that the effect of those strategies is a reassuring return to a familiar aesthetic order. In this novel, Hawkes once again employs genre parody, this time of the crime thriller, but The Lime Twig reinforces few if any of the formal or thematic assumptions of the genre. Instead, it explodes those assumptions, turning them back on the reader. As Donald Greiner, who has perhaps offered the most insightful consideration of Hawkes’s work in his book Comic Terror, puts it, “All of the violence, sadism, and general sordidness which we associate with the world of detective fiction are used and mocked” even as Hawkes further “suggests that while outwardly repelled, we subconsciously long for the thrills of violence and possible death which we normally experience vicariously while reading a detective novel.” The Lime Twig offers the reader enough of the recognizable elements of character and plot associated with crime fiction to sustain the possibility it might resolve itself into a conventional “good read,” but along the way it presents an even more violent and disturbing account of the criminal milieu it portrays than the typical crime novel, and ultimately provokes a kind of disgust with the notion that stories of murder and brutality would be the basis of a “good” read in the first place.

‘Numerous commentators have singled out the notion of “design and debris” as perhaps a name for the aesthetic philosophy at work not just in this novel, and not just in Hawkes’s work as a whole, but in the collective practice of “postmodern” experiment in general: the existing conventions of fiction are smashed but this smashing is itself purposeful and amid the debris a new design can be discerned. This is a compelling enough argument, but in the case of The Lime Twig, Travesty, The Blood Oranges, and Second Skin “design and debris” could be applied even more specifically to the effect of Hawkes’s experiments in point of view. Hawkes so thoroughly hollows out the presumptive authority of the first-person narrative that this mode collapses of its own weight. Yet the novels still reveal an “innate design,” partly to be found in the artful way that collapse is effected, through which the dominating “vision” is expressed. And while the terms of that vision are distinctive to each individual work, it is the kind of dark vision one might expect from a writer who believed that fiction should compel readers to confront the realities of human experience, not through the formulas of “realism” but through a kind of experimental writing that doesn’t allow us our own usual evasions.’ — Daniel Green

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Further

John Hawkes @ Wikipedia
All That Remains: On the Fiction of John Hawkes
John Hawkes on Writing, Fiction, Nightmare, and More
A Conversation with John Hawkes By Patrick O’Donnell
The Enemies of the Novel: DG Interview With John Hawkes
John Hawkes @ goodreads
Obituary: John Hawkes
John Hawkes Is Dead at 72; An Experimental Novelist
Remembering John Hawkes
An Appreciation of John Hawkes
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN HAWKES
Practicing Post-Modernism: The Example of John Hawkes
Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews: John Hawkes
‘The Universal Fears’
Buy ‘The Lime Twig’

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Extras

George Plimpton interviews John Hawkes

THE LIME TWIG by John Hawkes

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Interview
from Dalkey Archive

Interviewer: You’ve spoken in several interviews about the geneses of some of your novels—an article on cannibalism that inspired The Cannibal, a newspaper story on horse racing in England that inspired The Lime Twig, a trip to two islands that served as the source for Second Skin. It seems that your novels are motivated by what Henry James called ‘germs”: seemingly small events or snatches of conversation upon which the imagination works, creating an entire fictional world from a corpuscular beginning. Could you talk about these beginnings, for some of your fictions?

John Hawkes: I haven’t said enough about how important horses were to the inception of The Lime Twig. The first draft of the novel was written in one summer, and I remember going to a newsstand in Cambridge and finding a magazine on horse racing—that was, perhaps, my first moment of research. Also, my father’s best friend was a steward for the New York racetrack system, and I knew this man and his family from a very early age. I associate with them memories of handsome engravings of nineteenth-century racehorses, sometimes with jockeys on them, sometimes not. Though I loved horses and was intrigued by the idea of horse racing, I had never actually seen one when I was working on the first draft of The Lime Twig. Then I was at a party where I met the poet, J. V. Cunningham. We were talking, and I mentioned horse racing. Cunningham said that he went down to the Narragansett racetrack all the time, so he invited me to go down with him and bet. He made a lot of money, but he wouldn’t give me any tips, so I lost my two dollars immediately. But the one thing I got out of the experience was going down to the rail of the track, along a turn. By standing next to the rail as the horses went by, I could hear the jockeys talking to each other and thwacking the riding crops against the rumps of the great beasts—that impression is in The Lime Twig.

I: You mentioned that the parody of marriage in Charivari is a result of attitudes you were projecting toward your parents and your own marriage at the time of its writing. Is there any carry-over of this attitude in The Lime Twig in the parody of the Bankses’ marriage?

JH: In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old. The only constant I can see in both sets of characters, starting from the man and woman in Charivari to the pair in The Lime Twig, is that innocence is immediately a dominant theme, along with anxiety and dream. As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

I: I think the greatest gap between publications of your work is that which exists between the appearance of The Owl and The Goose on the Grave in 1954, and The Lime Twig in 1961. Is there any particular reason for the gap? Was the conception or drafting of The Lime Twig especially difficult in any way?

JH: I wrote the first draft of The Lime Twig in 1955, then taught two more years at Harvard, and I was still tinkering with the novel when we came to Brown in 1958. I really can’t explain why it was so difficult to write. As I told you, Guerard did not like the first draft, then Sophie and I worked on it by cutting it apart and making charts, which we had also done with The Beetle Leg. The fact that it took six years before it came out has something to do with very slow revising, going into teaching, being at Harvard and then moving to Brown, which was very disruptive. The reconceiving and revision of The Lime Twig were extensive: I took characters out, I took out scenes, I added Hencher I had to revise it considerably, sentence by sentence. James Laughlin then suggested a gloss for the reader in the novel, which was ironic, because Albert Guerard had thought that The Cannibal needed a gloss, as in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I abandoned that idea but when Laughlin raised it for The Lime Twig quite independently, I thought it was good because it added an extra perspective to the novel, and I could ridicule the speaker, I could mock that narrator. In a sense, that idea, which resulted in the presence of Slyter in the novel, heightened its ironic qualities considerably. The Hencher section of the novel came next to last, then the Sidney Slyter column was written last. I didn’t feel any urgency in writing, and I didn’t feel anything unusual about this novel. I worked on it as I could, and it simply took a long time.

I: A sense of ritual gets into your work, I think, in that it is often, structurally, cyclical or repetitious.

JH: I do see things as cyclical and ordered. I have a powerful associative imagination. What I really want to do is to create things that haven’t been created before, even though life itself seems sometimes totally cyclical and totally coherent. I find it very difficult to cope with the notion of being alive, being human; I’m not able to accept us very easily. I think we are so unaccountable. Life is also a constantly terrifying mystery as well as a beautiful, unpredictable, exfoliating, marvelous thing.

I: Your well-known statement about fiction as a matrix of recurring images and events seem to have something to do with ritual, as well as with the use of what I would call obsessive images in your fiction. One example might be the image of the lighthouse in Second Skin, foreshadowed by the shape of Stella Snow’s house in The Cannibal, the castle in The Owl, the airplane in The Lime Twig. Do you see the psychic contours of life or fiction as a series of recurrences?

JH: It’s terribly hard to say. I may not understand the question. Earlier than my writing The Lime Twig, between 1955 and 1960, I began to get an image of an ocean liner abandoned far out at sea, except that the water is only mid shin high, so that you can walk out to it; you have to walk in low water a mile or so to an enormous black ship lying on its side, with lifeboats dangling from the davits. Such an image is fetal: it is dead but full of potential. Last night, as I was going to sleep, I saw myself on a dark, black sea, at night, with the prow of an enormous ship coming at me. And I had another fleeting image of being on the water and watching the Lusitania on it, going down, with only its stern above the water; there were lights on it, and I was waiting for it to go down. Both of these visions are, of course, related to all of the house-tower images, crashed airplanes–they’re always life/death constructions. Last night, with these two images, I didn’t have any particular emotional reactions, just slight anxiety as the great prow of the ship approached, which to me is a potentially fear-inspiring image. To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening. Somebody once told me that he thought all of these images–airplanes, ships, lighthouses–are images of sexual fear, sexual destruction, the lighthouse in particular being a ruined, gutted phallus. It’s hard to tell whether the ship or airplane–they’re all the same, I’m convinced–is male or female; it may shift back and forth. Obviously an air plane is male from the outside as you see it start to move through the air, but female in its interior, like a whale. Hencher entering the airplane is a uterine experience.

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Book

John Hawkes The Lime Twig
New Directions

‘Many twentieth century writers have written books that read like dreams, often bad dreams. Kafka is the obvious but by no means the only example. These books are typified by having no plot or a non-linear plot, strange often frightening characters, unknown to the narrator/hero, vivid images, distorted landscapes, an unconventional sense of time and, all too often, animals that do not behave as we would like or expect. Hawkes is a prime exponent of this style of writing and this book may be his most successful attempt at it. Indeed, the hero of this book, if hero is the right word, has a dream, which he is able to live, but ends up paying the ultimate price for it.

‘Michael and Margaret Banks live in London. The house they own is where Michael Hencher’s mother lived and died. Hencher now lives in a room of the house as a tenant. Michael Banks has a dream of owning a racehorse and, with Hencher’s connections, becomes involved in a plot to steal a retired race horse and run him in a race. Banks is excited at the prospect of owning the horse; indeed, his excitement can be said to be both sexual (he wants to impress Margaret) and based on the need to put some excitement into his dreary life. However, as in all good dreams, he is somewhat fearful. He has reason to be fearful as the stealing of the horse and the running of the race are under the control of a particularly nasty gang of villains. Of course, he – and Margaret – are unable to deal with the violence from Larry (the leader of the gang), Thick (the heavy) and the others. Michael gets his thrills – including a sexual romp – but the horse – a symbol of sexual power – will kill him as Thick has killed Margaret. Dreams have a way of turning nasty in twentieth century literature.’ — The Modern Novel

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! The new SCAB is great, impeccable, wilder than ever! Amazing, major kudos. I loved everything. I’m going to read through it again now that I’m resettled and can be more specific then. Thank you, master! Stockholm went really well, and my birth certificate is supposed to arrive today, fingers crossed. Love’s Norwegian portion awarding SCAB the Nobel Anti-Peace Prize, G. ** fish, Hi. All the escort texts and photos are found on escort advertising sites. I don’t write them. I sometimes edit the texts a little and mix and match with the photos, locations, etc. but they’re all real. I hope your mood has upswung since you commented. And obviously you’re powerful even when you’re down, and not every down person can say that. xo. ** kenley, Hi. Right, right. Stockholm was good. I don’t think I had either of those Swedish things, at least under that name, but the greatest ramen place in the world that I know of is there, and I did feast on that. How have you been? ** Uday, How did you do with the thesis deadline, he asked hopefully? ** Bill, Stockholm was a quickie, but it went really well. Oh, right, Basel is everywhere. Here too, although not at the moment. Good in the sense that Basel, the city itself, is not very exciting. Hope you’re finding stuff. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ah, nice. I was just reading about that Danny Dyer guy. Not sure the French will see that film as French friendly enough to release, but who knows. ** LC, Hi, LC. Cool. The Stockholm portion of my week went pretty A-okay. Now I have to make Friday live up to it, I guess. Enjoy the blooming. I guess things are probably blooming here too. I have to go look at the park. ** Steve, Hi. The screening went very well. And the blog’s own Mans hosted and did the Q&A, and he was masterful. Mm, the questions don’t really change based on the location, I don’t think. Other than there being many more queries about what home haunts are outside the US. It’s really just what the inquisitor themself is curious about. Saw some of Stockholm, strolled about, hit the ABBA Museum, and a few other things. We only had one day there. ** jay, Hey! We did go to the ABBA Museum. It’s pretty fun, lots of interactive stuff, but, unsurprisingly, it isn’t exactly deep. My faint hopes that it might get into how ABBA’s work got darker and darker in their later years was utterly ignored. It was ‘fun, fun, fun’ top to bottom. You’re near the end of Proust? Wow. Do you feel the utter transformation of your thinking and perceiving faculties that Proust fanatics claim is the novel readers’ destiny? I’m very long overdue a trip to the little manga store street here in Paris, and I’ll see if those two are on sale. Thanks! Best of the bestest! ** Carsten, Thanks. It was a really good screening, excellent large crowd and much appreciation expressed. When the film was first rolling out we did cover our expenses in some cases because it was important to be there, but that was a struggle, and now we only travel if the expenses are covered. That said, we did cover the Stockhom trip because that’s been in the works for at least half a year. A cultural grant would be most welcome and very helpful, but, other than for the films a couple times, I have never gotten a grant in my life. There’s always someone on every committee who’s, like, ‘Dennis Cooper? No fucking way’. I think the ‘tricky’ part of your post was set up adequately. I’ll write to you about the post’s timing shortly. ** Steeqhen, Hi. Stockholm was good. Hm, I didn’t notice anyone there being especially drunk or drinking, but I don’t know. Everyone was super friendly. Hoping the therapy start will add that last ingredient you want. And luck with the book proposal. I was invited ages ago by the 33 1/3 series to do the book on ‘Bee Thousand’, but I decided it needed someone with much better non-fiction skills. ** Malik, Hi. Oh, nice, I know all of those drummers you mentioned. I’ve had my free jazz wormhole phases. I can’t remember his name, but the guy who drummed in Cecil Taylor’s trio was un-fucking-believable when I used to go see him live. Right, I was so excited to see ‘Escape from Tomorrow’, and was so disappointed other than, like you said, watching and imagining how it was shot. Curious about the follow-up obviously or anyway. Happy almost weekend. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Stockholm went really well, great response, we were happy. I love your piece in SCAB. It’s really impressive. I’m excited to reread it now that I’m not reading it on an airplane, not that it didn’t work perfectly well there. I hope good health is hugging you like a beast again. When that point hits me when I’m working on something, I always put it away and think about anything but that for a while. That works for me, but I imagine one could also power through the snag. ** Okay. Back in the early 80s, a lot of my smartest friends were really into John Hawkes. I tried and tried with him, but I couldn’t get what the deal was. But I randomly picked up his novel ‘The Lime Twig’ recently, and I was seriously into it and thought it was excellent. So I pass that new opinion onto you, blog people. See you tomorrow.