John Hawkes

American postmodern novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and poet.

• Born: August 17, 1925
• Birthplace: Stamford, Connecticut
• Died: May 15, 1998
• Place of death: Providence, Rhode Island

Biography

An "experimental" novelist of remarkable achievement, John Hawkes wrote dark, menacingly comic novels of the grotesque and the gothic. His fiction creates difficulty for the reader who is unwilling to concur in the underlying conviction in Hawkes’s works that beauty is difficult. Although some have accused him of mere indulgence, he strove, through numerous revisions, for coherence, conscious control, and form. His ideal was the creation of a pure vision that did not rely on moral and literary conventions. Hawkes carried the suffocating burden of evil, destruction, putrefaction, and sexual perversion with such success that he could insist: "The product of extreme fictive detachment is extreme fictive sympathy." The creative process itself, he said, "is probably immoral, but its ultimate aim and moral purpose is compassion for every living thing."

John Clendenin Burne Hawkes, Jr., lived in Old Greenwich and in New York City until he was ten, when his family moved to Juneau, Alaska. He attended Trinity School, Pawling, and, after serving a year in Germany with the American Field Service, Harvard College. In Albert Guerard’s creative writing class, he finished two novels, The Cannibal and Charivari. The Cannibal, a nightmare vision of Germany after World War II, evokes the desolation of war-torn Europe and forecasts the repetition of Nazi destruction. When the novel appeared in 1949 (the year of his graduation from Harvard), Hawkes was twenty-three years old, well-read in modern poetry but unacquainted with much contemporary fiction. Although he claimed that his books "came out of a vacuum," comparisons were quickly made with Franz Kafka, Djuna Barnes, Flannery O’Connor, and Nathanael West; later books also show the distinct influence of William Faulkner.

Until 1955, Hawkes was assistant to the production manager at Harvard University Press. During that time, The Beetle Leg and two novellas, The Goose on the Grave and The Owl, appeared. He lectured in creative writing at Harvard for a few years, then was an instructor in English there until 1958. On September 5, 1957, he married Sophie Goode Tazewell. After 1958, he was first assistant and later associate professor at Brown University, where he taught courses in writing; in 1962, he received an MA from Brown University. In 1959, he was visiting assistant professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also taught at Harvard Summer School and at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College, and he served as writer-in-residence at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the University of Virginia, and the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, before returning to Brown.

With the publication of The Lime Twig, Hawkes’s underground reputation emerged. A British film company bought the rights to his novel, a parody of a detective thriller about an innocent couple who get mixed up with gangsters and their plot to steal a famous English racehorse. In 1962, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant; on a sabbatical from Brown, he lived on the island of Grenada in the West Indies and wrote Second Skin. In this work, the narrator, Skipper, reflects on the suicides of his father, his wife, and his daughter as he struggles to reconstruct his "naked history" through the use of imagination to structure experience. A strange comedy of love, it was a leading contender for the 1964 National Book Award.

In the 1970s, Hawkes’s trilogy of sex and the imagination appeared; The Blood Oranges, Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, and Travesty explore the relationship of death, eroticism, and the absurd. Travesty, one of Hawkes’s most accessible novels, is the monologue of a man calmly driving his daughter and his friend toward a fatal car crash. The struggle between generative and degenerative eroticism also continued to occupy Hawkes’s imagination in The Passion Artist and Virginie: Her Two Lives.

The loosely autobiographical novel Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade encapsulates many themes that surface in Hawkes’s earlier work. The protagonist, Sunny Deauville, dedicates herself to hedonism as the madame of Gamelands, an Alaskan whorehouse. Yet she is troubled by haunting dreams about her missing father’s adventures in the 1930s, which force her to revisit scenes from her childhood. In his later novels, Whistlejacket and Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse, Hawkes’s equestrian interest revealed itself in the service of his investigation into the nature of perception and morality. His dark humor is evident in The Frog, about a young boy who swallows a frog, which then lives inside him for the rest of his life. A young orphan girl serves as narrator for An Irish Eye, which evokes the story of Cinderella. Hawkes died in 1998 at the age of seventy-two.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Cannibal, 1949

Charivari, 1950

The Beetle Leg, 1951

The Goose on the Grave: Two Short Novels, 1954 (novellas; includes The Goose on the Grave and The Owl)

The Lime Twig, 1961

Second Skin, 1964

The Blood Oranges, 1971

Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, 1974

Travesty, 1976

The Passion Artist, 1979

Virginie: Her Two Lives, 1982

Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, 1985

Innocence in Extremis, 1985 (novella)

Whistlejacket, 1988

Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse, 1993

The Frog, 1996

An Irish Eye, 1997

Short Fiction:

Lunar Landscapes: Stories and Short Novels, 1949–1963, 1969

Drama:

The Innocent Party: Four Short Plays, pb. 1966

Poetry:

Fiasco Hall, 1943

Miscellaneous:

Humors of Blood and Skin: A John Hawkes Reader, 1984

Bibliography

Berry, Eliot. A Poetry of Force and Darkness: The Fiction of John Hawkes. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1979. Discusses the imaginative art of Hawkes’s writing in the context of the romantic novel, likening it to poetry with its rich language and depth. Compares Hawkes to both William Faulkner and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983. Bradbury places Hawkes in the genre of postmodernism, citing him as a powerfully compelling writer of the "imaginative grotesque" who draws on the tradition of the American Gothic. Discusses his novels up to and including The Passion Artist, noting his increased clarity of technique and greater complexity.

Busch, Frederick. Hawkes: A Guide to His Fictions. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973. Valuable when examining the intricacies of the plots in Hawkes’s fiction, but less so when discussing stylistic and thematic concerns. Analyzes image patterns in his novels through The Blood Oranges, with a helpful discussion on his use of animal imagery.

Greiner, Donald J. Comic Terror: The Novels of John Hawkes. Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press, 1978. Greiner cites Hawkes as one of the few "truly gifted writers of the so-called black humor movement." Discusses his later works and shows how they have modified earlier works. Includes a checklist of primary and secondary sources. An important contribution to Hawkes criticism.

Kuehl, John. John Hawkes and the Craft of Conflict. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975. Treats the relationship between Hawkes’s central themes and his craft, simultaneously tracing the evolution of both. Explores the Eros/Thanatos conflict in his work and is therefore useful to the Hawkes specialist. Also includes an interview with Hawkes.

O’Donnell, Patrick. John Hawkes. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Provides thorough readings of his works and some biographical information of interest. The purpose of this study is to explain to general readers the difficulties of Hawkes’s fiction. Includes a useful selected bibliography.