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Start Suffering

  • Greg Gerke

    • “You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can’t.”

    – Flannery O’Connor

    ***

    The stakes get raised again. After reading John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig I’m of a mind with Louise Glück lines from “Mock Orange”:

    How can I rest?
    How can I be content
    when there is still
    that odor in the world?

    And ‘odor’ is a very apt word. I’ve never read a book where there were so many scents, so much olfactory maneuvering. Here the narrator speaks of the femme fatales sent to distract the married Michael Banks:

    The smell of women–girlish, matronly–and the smell of meat sauce were the same. As soon as it spread across his plate it went to his nostrils and they might not have bothered with their clothes, with procrastination. (150)
    A recapitulation of the plot is wrong-headed (even the back of the book is mum on what really happens) because Hawkes is about atmosphere. Because his sentences are so unique and slippery, it seems all the action is taking place in slow-motion and indeed the motion of reading Hawkes apes this as one returns and rereads sentences to fully apprehend them. Safe to say there are three main characters: Hencher and the couple, William and Margaret Banks. When Hencher convinces William to steal a race horse, the ‘plot’ is triggered. Things go awry. A gang of ruffians intrudes and the three ‘innocents’ (Hencher narrates the first section of the novel, telling about his caring for his mother during the fire-bombing of London) are innocent no more.

    ***

    A survey of sentences.

    Margaret’s cat while eating:

    …the cat, creature that claws tweed, sits high in the hallway, remains incorrigible upon the death of its mistress, beds itself in the linen or thrusts its enormous head into an alley, now sucked and gagged on the fish as if drawing a peculiar sweetness from the end of a thin bone. (63)
    A strange, whispering man approaching a seemingly incarcerated Michael:
    …behind the spectacles the man had watering eyes, eyes nearly awash in the sockets, and he did not blink. On either side of his nose–bookish–were grains of blood and scratches. When he whispered, the saliva behind his lips, between his teeth, was tinted pink with blood constantly trickling into the throat. (93)
    Margaret’s sobs after being beaten:
    The sobs were not sweet. They were short, moist, lower than contralto, louder than she intended; the moanings of a creature no one could love. (131)
    Michael eating his eggs, which the femme fatale Sybilline insists he do:
    Brown and broken yellow, thick and ovarian, his mouth was running with the eggs and sauce while the whiskey glasses of the women were leaving rings. (150)
    Description of Annie, one of Michael’s local lovers:
    At three o’clock in the morning she was a girl he had seen through windows in several dreams unremembered, unconfessed, the age of twenty that never passes but lingers in the silvering of the trees and rising fogs. Younger than Syb, fingers bereft of rings, she would come carelessly to any door, to any fellow’s door. (155)
    I had a failed 40 page reading encounter with the book a few months ago, but I knew I’d have to return. The book’s obliquity is its honey. A character will have been put into a different situation but one may not know it and though one may not know, the sentences will spell an uncommon dread.  Each Hawkes sentence contains multitudes and Chinese box after Chinese box (he worked on the novel for five years). The sentences cling to the reader’s skin like a horsefly that won’t go away. One wants to keep walking and enjoy the view, but the view is aimed at the base of each sentence. One has to sink into each’s strange music before going on.   Even a toss-off like, “He said only…” is brimming with brio, the ‘only’ making the dialogue that follows (that of the man Thick, who tortures Margaret) all the more grim. As noted critic Leslie Fletcher says in the introduction, “The order which retrospectively we impose on our awareness of events…Hawkes decomposes.” (xiv)

    The Lime Twig is a nightmare. It’s presentation of evil is similar to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, complete with a memorable retinue of rogues. The leader being Larry who “towered…and there was the perfect nose, the black hair plastered into place, the brass knuckles shining on the enormous hand, and the eyes, the eyes devoid of irises.” (157) Compare Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden who was close to seven foot tall and devoid of eyebrows and eyelashes. I feel confident Hawkes is a little responsible for the most feted American author at the moment.

    Still, I can’t think of another great American writer with such a paucity of material on the internet. The best page is the Brown University tribute site–he died in 1998. The Dalkey Archive interview being a great resource.

    He taught some of the best writers of today including Marilynne Robinson, Mary Caponegro, Rick Moody, James Robison, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joanna Scott and Jim Shepard. He served as an ambulance driver during WWII, where the nightmares of the world infected him so:  “For hours I would study rows of burn victims lying swathed in cocoons of gauze on stretchers set up on saw-horses in an abandoned wine factory.” Hawkes once remarked, “”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.”

    Eighteen novels is a wealth. I have only been stretched on the fictional rack once, but I’m ready for more. We have to read Hawkes.

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