Fresh Start

THE PILGRIM HAWK--Glenway Westcott--Harper ($1.50).

By 1928, Glenway Wescott of Wisconsin had lived in France for four years, was one of America's two or three most sensitive stylists and most promising novelists. The Pilgrim Hawk is his first volume of fiction since that year. It marks the end of several paralyzed years during which, work as he might, Wescott was unable to write novels at all. Says he now, "I have a great many stories to tell. If this simple story is as good as I hope, it will be a fresh start."

The Pilgrim Hawk is as good as anyone need hope. It is a superbly turned specimen of that long-short form which Story Editor Whit Burnett likes to call The Novella. "Simple" only in profile and in the manner of its telling, the tale has symbolic and psychological structures that are no simpler than the internal cross-flickerings of a poem.

This smooth, dark story takes place in a house and garden near Paris on a spring afternoon of the late '20s. The human creatures are seven: two Mediterranean servants who rut in the garden, two highly civilized Americans who platonize in the house, an ill-matched Irish couple who come for the afternoon, and their Cockney chauffeur. The true centre is inhuman : it is Lucy, a falcon with "maniacal eyes," who rides the Irishwoman's wrist and devours, from her bloody glove, a new-slain pigeon. While the chauffeur and the servants go backstairs to evolve the cruel jealousies of simple blood, and the Americans maintain their delicately sterile balance, the Irish pair talk. Most of their talk is of the falcon, whom the husband hates to desperation, and to whom the woman is attached as to her own soul. The American narrator identifies the bird now with the husband, now with the wife, shows it as the intense embodiment of captive freedom, of the artist's urge, of love. By the time the day is over, the mutual crucifixion of the Irish marriage is thoroughly clear; the Irishman has made two abject, ambiguous attempts at murder; and Glenway Wescott has wrung a little more than the last drop of slantwise symbolism from the actions and the lore of the bird.

Aside from a somewhat lavender pallor of cheek which no doctor could remove, Wescott's fresh start is clean and real. It also shows that for some young writers their expatriate decade was not wasted.

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