|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
This powerful short novel describes the events of a single
afternoon. Alwyn Tower, an American expatriate and sometime
novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a
well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in--with Lucy, their
trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence.
Lunch is prepared, drink flows. A masquerade, at once harrowing and
farcical, begins.
A work of classical elegance and concision, The Pilgrim Hawk stands
with Faulkner's The Bear as one of the finest American short novels:
a beautifully crafted story that is also a poignant evocation of
the implacable power of love.
Just as E. M. Forster's novel of gay love, Maurice, remained
unpublished throughout his lifetime, Glenway Wescott's long story
""A Visit to Priapus"" was also destined to be a posthumous work,
buried from 1938 until this century in Wescott's massive archive of
manuscripts, journals, notebooks, and letters. The autobiographical
story is about a literary man, frustrated in love, who puts aside
his pride and makes a date with a young artist in Maine. Lavishly
rendered in Wescott's elegant prose, the tale is explicit where it
needs to be, but-as is typical of Wescott-it is filled with
descriptive beauty and introspective lessons about sex and
sexuality, love and creativity. Previously published in anthology
form in the United Kingdom, ""A Visit to Priapus"" is presented for
the first time in book form in America, containing previously
uncollected stories, including three never before published. The
result is a candid portrayal of the gifted but enigmatic writer who
was famous in youth and remained a perceptive and compassionate
voice throughout his long life. Drawn together from midcentury
literary journals and magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as
from Wescott's papers, the stories were inspired by his life, from
childhood to old age, from Wisconsin farm country to New York,
London, Germany, and Paris.
Glenway Wescott's poignant story of nineteenth-century Wisconsin
was first published in 1927 as the winner of the prestigious Harper
Prize. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Wescott left
the Midwest behind to live as a writer in 1920s Paris. In this
novel, based on Wescott's own life and family, the young Alwyn
Tower leaves Wisconsin to travel in Europe, but finds himself
haunted by a family of long-dead spirits--his grandparents and
great-uncles and aunts, a generation whose young adulthood was
shattered by the Civil War. Their images were preserved in fading
family albums of daguerreotypes and in his own fragmented memories
of stories told to him by his strong and enduring grandmothers. To
disinter and finally lay to rest the family secrets that lingered
insistently in his mind, Wescott writes, Alwyn was "obliged to live
in imagination many lives already at an end." The Grandmothers is
the chronicle of Alwyn's ancestors: the bitter Henry Tower, who
returned from Civil War battlefields to find his beautiful wife
Serena lost in a fatal fever; Rose Hamilton, robust and eager, who
yearned to leave the cabin of her bearded, squirrel-hunting
brothers for the company of courteous Leander Tower; the
boy-soldier Hilary Tower, whose worship of his brother made him
desperate; fastidious Nancy Tower, whose love for her husband Jesse
Davis could not overcome her disgust with the dirt under his
fingernails; Ursula Duff, proud and silent, maligned among her
neighbors by her venal husband; Alwyn's parents, Ralph Tower and
Marianne Duff, whose happiness is brought about only by the
intervention of a determined spinster.
|
|