The Cavalier daily :: Tuesday, February, 15, 1972 :: University of Virginia Library

John Hawkes has a rather
special vision of things,
compulsively original and
relentless in its own terms. A
lesser writer would be hard
pressed to find words adequate
for its expression; but his
readers well know that Hawkes
has shown himself far and
away the most accomplished
literary craftsman today
writing in English.

Such a vision—whose form
follows in the tradition of the
nouveau roman—presents some
challenging difficulties. But not
without rewards: as sonorous
and mysteriously evocative as
Faulkner's, more poetically
intense than Lawrence
Durrell's, Hawkes's lyrical
energy in The Blood Oranges
conveys in prose more than the
feeling of poetry—in fact, there
are whole passages rendered
metrically. One or two even
contain rhymes.

It is, ultimately, in
attempting to distinguish
Hawkes's vision (and its moral
implications) from his
ambitious method (with its
technical complexities) that
one runs into the greatest
difficulty. The Blood Oranges
too much begs to be called
either a masterpiece or a
skillful put-on; I am not sure
which. For the risk lies in
praising the book for the
wrong reasons, or in rejecting it
because Hawkes's
style—deliberately, I believe—
tends to cloud the moral issues
any serious novelist is obliged
to face.

A chief drawback attaching
itself to Hawkes's first-person
narrative technique rests with
none other than his narrator,
Cyril, who (as one gathers
early one) is the archetypal
"multisexualist." Through
Cyril's eyes—his center of
consciousness—the reader
surveys obliquely a "tapestry
of love." The Arcadian setting
is as timeless as it is detached
from the quotidian world or
mortals—or so Cyril believes:
"In Illyria there are no
seasons."

Cyril's "relics are circular,"
and his undisguised highest
obligation has become the
gratification of his own senses.
he and his beautiful
wife, Fiona, cannot be content
with each other alone. Instead
they require the
complementary presence and
attention of Hugh and
Catherine if their "successful'
marriage is to go on working.

We broke, we ran, we
scattered on the face of
our favorite hill like birds
or like children, and
because I was last in line,
lowest figure in that
bright pattern, and was
holding back as usual
(tail of the kite,
conscience and
consciousness or our little
group), I found myself
generalizing the visceral
experience of the
moment itself, found
myself thinking that our
days were idylls, our
nights dreams, our
mornings slow-starting
songs of love.

Indeed, Cyril's
single-minded pursuit of
pleasure—matched by Fiona's
overwhelming (yet apparently
insufficient) sensuality—and
the almost grotesque

Photo By John Buescher

immersion they seek in sex are
fully compatible with the
claims of the setting. But the
resulting demands are so
intense, the sex esthetic so
jealous of other considerations
(such as the urge to live decent
lives instead of envious or
exploitative half-lives), that the
very passage moralise becomes
finally, for all but Cyril, more
nearly that of hell than of
heaven. Most of the elements
which might arrange
themselves in a really fine
novel are present. But Cyril,
whose commentary proves
vital, is an arrogant, humorless
cad, and his worst qualities
conspire to weaken or even
destroy the novel's power.

Were it not for the skill with
which Hawkes handles his
language, the presence of so
many potentially heavy-handed
symbols would be intolerable.
If the tapestry metaphor
provides a unifying principle,
the images betray an artificial
sense of indeterminacy:
church icons, an eagle, the color
orange, the children, a
shepherdess, and a shepherd, the
fortress and the arbor, all these
comprise a fabric of
pretentious love and
meaningless hatred. On a note
of tragedy the tapestry grows
sordid, but Cyril is so
consistently enervated even the
tragic sensation becomes a
cheat.

The book's failure shows
itself not in Cyril's character,
as such, but in his flaw as an
unreliable narrator. Not only
does his insensitive greed
provoke a climate for disaster
(with High's death in a fatal
game of masturbatory
coupe-corde, and Catherine's
descent into madness), but his
absolute self-preoccupation
and infuriating blindness
deprive the story of its tragic
force. Crushing Hawkes'
poetry is the dead weight of
what he contrives as Cyril's
stupid prose:

And in the midst of it
I reminded myself that
Fiona knew full well that
the physical exercise I
had undertaken
throughout our married
life surely guaranteed the
muscle development of
my thick arms.

Or even worse:

I waited, and beneath
my two hands now
clasped around one heavy
knee....felt like some
living prehistoric bone
full of solidity, aesthetic
richness, latent
athleticism.

Such stuff turns back the
most attentive and sympathetic
efforts to see things Cyril's
way, which is unfortunately
the only way Hawkes provides.
Motives and individual fates
sink under the trumped-up
fetishes, and the vision is
hopelessly blurred.

And the vision, because it is
lunancy and so much depends
on our willingness to accept its
terms, proves a dangerous basis
for the novel: style outpaces
content until even Cyril's
pleasure principle is
violated-inadvertently. So one
finally believes that John
Hawkes has the over-fat soul of
a child. No matter how
precocious, he is unable or
unwilling to match his obvious
talent with any sort of serious
moral statement. Instead,
Hawkes has cast himself (and
his book) into a state of
unresolved fantastic formalism.

It works; and yet it doesn't,
the book exudes freely without
quite giving of itself and hints
at cloudy meanings without
any apparent obligation to
follow through on them. The
Blood Oranges, like anything
wholly out of time, can never
grow. Like ripe fruit and sweet
erotic fiction (which it is), it
can only shrink and fade when
we finally flee Illyria (which
we must) and retreat into the
more familiar haunts of life
itself.