Humors of Blood and Skin: A John Hawkes Reader[1]—the author’s thirteenth straight book from New Directions—contains just about what you’d expect: four short stories, excerpts from all nine novels, a fragment of a novel-in-progress, brief autobiographical prefaces to each of the selections. A fair enough overview. But the book’s primary purpose, one senses, is not so much to pro vide the reading public with snippets from twenty-year-old novels as it is simply to exist, and by existing to get us all a little bit more used to the idea that John Hawkes is an important writer, a modern classic, an Author for the Ages. Indeed, William Gass’s introduction stops just short of proclaiming Hawkes’s divinity—and the man even signs himself “William H. Gass, Washington University, St. Louis,” as if this were a scholarly document of sorts, which in a way it is; for though Hawkes has achieved literary eminence in the great world beyond the campus gates, the hotbed of Hawkesianism is, was, and ever shall be the English department.
In fact, the Hawkes phenomenon was bornin the English department—in English J, to be specific, a creative writing course taught by Professor Albert J. Guerard at Harvard in the autumn of 1947. Hawkes, an undergraduate, was a student in English J who had somehow discovered—quite on his own, apparently—that plot, character, setting, and theme got in the way of “totality of vision” and were therefore “the true enemies of the novel.” Guerard was so