To the Editors:
Having written a critical introduction to the fiction of John Hawkes, I was interested to discover that I am a member of a “club” of Hawkes’s supporters whose main intention in life is to inflate the fraudulent reputation of this contemporary American novelist. At least that appears to be the opinion of your reviewer, Bruce Bawer, in his shredding of a new Hawkes anthology (Humours of Blood and Skin; New Criterion, December, 1984)—a man who seems to conceive of his task as not discussing the work under review, but as attacking those who might perceive its merits. Of course, the real attack is on John Hawkes, not his critics, but Mr. Bawer seems to prefer the back door to the front, so that he spends a good deal of time and inches ripping critical statements out of context in hopes of proving that there is some kind of conspiracy amongst “us” to promote John Hawkes. But then again, Mr. Bawer apparently specializes in the practice of annihilating context so that he can indulge in his own brand of self-puffery, which smacks of the adolescent schoolboy who lies in wait all semester so that he can catch the teacher out one time. I doubt if any writer, major or minor, could stand up to Mr. Bawer’s idiotic test of snippeting, wherein a few phrases are “gleaned” (in Hawkes’s case) from nine novels in order to “prove” what an insipid writer he is. Such practices point to the insipidity of the critic, not the writer, though I’m hardly astounded to see that such practices are allowed in the pages of The New Criterion, which is rapidly gaining a reputation amongst people of all sensibilities as an outlet for cranks of Mr. Bawer’s ilk. My point here is not to defend Hawkes, who does not need defending, but to protest against Mr. Bawer’s ignorance and deceitfulness in his review of Hawkes’s work.
Example: Mr. Bawer claims that Passions of Blood and Skin is Hawkes’s “thirteenth straight” book from New Directions. While this is technically true, it is misinformed and misinforming. The Passion Artist and Virginie: Her Two Lives, Hawkes’s last two novels, appeared under the imprint of Harper & Row for mass market; a limited edition of each was published simultaneously by New Directions. What is objectional here is Mr. Bawer’s implication: that Hawkes’s work could only be published under the buddy system established between himself, Albert Guerard, and James Laughlin (and then promoted by members of the “club”). Clearly, Mr. Bawer doesn’t know very much about New Directions or any of the parties involved to make such an assumption: I doubt if even your readers are willing to swallow the imputation against, probably, the most enlightened American publisher in the twentieth century in Mr. Bawer’s suggestion that Laughlin published Hawkes in the first place because his “pal,” Albert Guerard, convinced him to do so. Laughlin published Hawkes because he recognized him as an important young writer—a recognition that, in the opinion of a great deal many more readers than is suggested by Mr. Bawer’s conception of “the Hawkes club,” continues to prove itself.
Example: Mr. Bawer harps on the business of Hawkes’s reputation (as if that was what he was supposed to review, rather than the book at hand), suggesting that, somehow, a coterie of critics (mostly stuffy English professor types) have intuitively and magically orchestrated themselves into a single voice whose purpose is to sing Hawkes’s praises and lament his lack of sales. This is only true insofar as any writer attracts his critics, i.e., people who are willing to expend time, effort, and intelligence to comprehend the work of an artist whose importance they are at odds to define and explain. Other than that, Mr. Bawer’s conception of a “Hawkes club” is sheer paranoia, though why he should be paranoid about the reputation of a writer he so thoroughly disdains is a matter for analysis beyond my powers. Of course, Mr. Bawer is concerned to reveal Hawkes’s immorality, and his own morality; to draw the contrast between Hawkes’s artistic fraudulency, and his own critical candor; to convince us of Hawkes’s stylistic excesses, and to confront us with his own analytical acuity. Indeed, Mr. Bawer needs no “club” to defend him, since he is largely engaged, for the purposes of this review, in becoming one unto himself. But do such flagrant and dishonest attempts to justify one’s own existence by attempting to trash the work of an important writer belong in the pages of a national review? Do such obvious misconstruals and deliberate misreadings of an author’s work deserve your space and our attention? Is it paranoia and bitterness you wish to convey, or is it possible that you have not been able to penetrate the very thin veneer of Mr. Bawer’s moralistic rhetoric which covers the self-aggrandizement lying beneath? Such questions would be beneath consideration, were it not that some of your readers might be mislead into the purchase of Mr. Bawer’s “vision” of John Hawkes. Whatever his faults, Hawkes is for many reasons worthy of our observance, and his work does not deserve to be subjected to the nearly unadulterated stupidity Mr. Bawer exhibits in his review. It is necessary to understand what “character” is in fiction before one can begin to comprehend what the rejection of character might mean; it is necessary to understand what “style” is in order to judge its semantics and its efficacy; it is necessary to understand the purposes of repetition and the function of images in fiction in order to charge a work with monotony. I could go on, but I hope it is clear that Mr. Bawer understands none of these things, though he feels perfectly free to comment on all of them in the case of a particular writer. That the writer he chooses authors works of such merit and complexity as to be thoroughly beyond Mr. Bawer’s ken is, also, perfectly clear; what is not clear is why he wants to waste his time writing about what he both dislikes and is not capable of appreciating, or why you want to waste our time by publishing such an elaborate example of critical ineptness and meanness of spirit.
Patrick O’Donnell
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Bruce Bawer replies:
I’d like to thank Mr. O’Donnell for providing the readers of The New Criterion with a perfect example of the type of “criticism” that I described in my piece on Hawkes and his critics (which appeared, by the way, in the November, not the December, issue). As I pointed out in that piece, it is something of a time-honored tradition among true-blue, knee-jerk Hawkesians to break into name-calling whenever a freethinking critic dares to examine the work of John Hawkes and find it wanting. O’Donnell is, as it happens, a very junior member of the Hawkes fan club—his Twayne-series study of Hawkes appeared two years ago, and is apparently his only significant publication—but he has obviously learned how to play the fan-club game, and not by halves either: his letter is probably the longest unbroken stretch of name-calling that I have ever seen. He accuses me of “sheer paranoia,” “unadulterated stupidity,” “ignorance,” “deceitfulness,” and just about everything else but grand theft, yet manages all the while (his flaunting of the word example notwithstanding) to avoid supporting these accusations; in fact, he appears to reject the very notion of substantiation, one of the charges he hurls at me being that I have the nerve to bolster my arguments by quoting illustrative passages from Hawkes, a process he refers to as “idiotic .. . snippeting.” The plain truth is that, if O’Donnell had done any “snippeting” from my piece, he would have proven to the reader that there is no substance to his complaints. But—and it is hardly necessary for me to say this—he is not really interested in substance. His letter fails completely to address the issue I raised in my piece: the literary merit of John Hawkes’s fiction.
He ignores this issue, of course, because to him, and to the rest of the fan club—as his own words make clear—Hawkes’s literary merit is beyond question. Hawkes “does not need defending”; his “importance” (as O’Donnell puts it) is taken for granted. The hapless critic who foolishly fails to join in the hosannas is not, by the fan club’s lights, exercising independence .of thought but is, rather, defacing a public monument with his mean-spirited “misconstruals” (sic). One would think that a primary purpose of Hawkes criticism would be to decide exactly how “important” Hawkes really is, but one would be dead wrong: for it is this very process of objective, uninhibited critical inquiry that the fan club—to which the ideal critic, apparently, is little more than a tenured press agent (or, as O’Donnell’s metaphor suggests, an obedient schoolboy to Hawkes’s teacher)—is at pains to suppress.
And suppress is precisely the right word. Given the history of the fan club’s treatment of dissident critics, I knew when I sat down to write about Humors of Blood and Skin (the title of which this sworn enemy of “misinformation” succeeds in getting wrong not once but twice) that I could probably expect a rejoinder on the order of what O’Donnell has provided. What O’Donnell would naturally prefer not to see discussed in print is that it is manifestly the vocal zealotry of a few, and not the admiration of the many, that has sustained Hawkes’s reputation through an endless series of numbingly unimaginative novels. And why is this handful of zealous academic fans so devoted? O’Donnell himself tells us why in his Twayne study: novels offer “an embarrassment of interpretative riches” to the critic. They’re so ambiguous, that is, that you can make anything you wish out of them. Just like Play-Doh!
This is why I took the firm stand I did in my piece: I was, and am, tired of seeing the reputation of one mediocre writer after another inflated artificially because some symbol-hunting, tenure-obsessed “scholars,” having no real love or feeling for literature, choose to spend their careers insisting to the world that the literary territories they have staked out are not barren plots of tundra but stretches of Amazonian jungle, full of mystery and beauty and inexhaustible natural wealth. Hawkes, thanks to the “interpretive riches” of his work, has few competitors when it comes to attracting this kind of attention. Whether reviewing for The New Criterion or for other journals, I consider it part of my purpose—and, I should think, it is the responsibility of every critic—to attempt to straighten out some of the twisted views that have gained currency as a result of such reprehensible methods.
Speaking of twisted views, there’s one that I’d like to straighten out right now. O’Donnell chooses, in his letter, to construe some remarks of mine as constituting an attack upon James Laughlin, whom he thereupon proceeds to defend with heart-stirring eloquence. In connection with this, let me say that I am second to none in my gratitude to Mr. Laughlin, one of the great figures of modern American publishing, for shepherding into print the works of such writers as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. But Hawkes, not Laughlin, was the subject of my piece, and the plain fact is that I consider Laughlin’s devotion to the works of John Hawkes—to the extent of publishing thirteen bad books by him, and one absolutely ridiculous one about him—to be terribly misplaced. O’Donnell professes shock at the notion that Laughlin’s decision to publish Hawkes could have been influenced by the enthusiasm of Laughlin’s friend, Albert J. Guerard, for Hawkes’s work; but my remarks on this score merely reflect the common-sensical awareness that Laughlin can hardly be much different from anyone else in publishing, in which, as in any other business, such recommendations have been known to make all the difference. (The most notable recent demonstration of this principle is the case of William Kennedy, who needed a testimonial from Saul Bellow, no less, to secure publication of Ironweed.) O’Donnell, in treating this sensible view as a veritable act of sacrilege, is simply being disingenuous.
One more thing: O’Donnell refers to me and to unnamed other New Criterion writers as “cranks.” Judging by what I read in The New Criterion, crank is, in O’Donnell’s lexicon, a word used to describe a critic who has (1) a low threshold of tolerance for pseudo-literary flummery; (2) a sense of allegiance to no writer, but only to a good solid set of aesthetic criteria; and (3) a tendency to be irritated by “critics” who act like publicists. I plead guilty.