The Cannibal (2 page)

Almost fourteen years have passed since the above was written, yet I see no need to revise, erase or retract. There is much more that might have been said. Today, too, I might substitute the term “anti-realism” (vague as it is) for “surrealism” and its often misleading connotations. And of course it would now seem absurd to speak of John Hawkes as “promising.” In the years since publication
The Cannibal
never died as so many good first novels do. It kept up its quiet underground life, highly praised from the first by a few, the yellow jacket still present in the serious bookstores where these underground lives occur, the book each year winning new adherents among readers impatient with the cliches and sentimentalities of commercial fiction, or impatient with the loose babblings of the publicized
avant-garde. The Cannibal
was reprinted and read.

There was always the possibility Hawkes had exhausted his particular dark vision in this single book, and would write no more. But during these years (while working full time for the Harvard University Press, then as a teacher at Harvard and Brown), he published three more books:
The Beetle Leg
(1951),
The Goose on the Grave & The Owl
(1954, two short novels), and
The Lime Twig
(1961). Each had its different myth and setting, its landscape of an inward geography projected onto a dry impotent American west, onto fascist Italy and San Marino, onto a damp decrepit England of gangsters and gamblers.

The predicted movement toward realism has occurred, but chiefly in the sense that the later novels are much more orderly and more even in pace, and distinctly less difficult to read. The spatial form and dizzying simultaneity of
The Cannibal
are modified. The imaginative strengths remain, however, and the vivifying distortions: the power to exploit waking nightmare and childhood trauma, to summon pre-conscious anxieties and longings, to symbolize oral fantasies and castration fears—to shadow forth, in a word, our underground selves. And in each of the novels a fine black humor and a nervous beauty of language play against the plot’s impulse to imprison us unpleasantly in the nightmare, to implicate us in these crimes. We are indeed deeply involved. But we are outside too, watching the work of art.

Four slender volumes. The achievement may not seem a large one in this day of voluminous and improvising writers, scornful of the right word. Yet it is an achievement roughly comparable in bulk and in variety of interest to that of Nathanael West. Hawkes has of course not written such an easy or public book
as The Day of the Locust;
perhaps he never will. But he has surely exhibited a power of language and an integrity of imaginative vision that West showed very rarely. Hawkes’s position is an unusual one: that of the
avant-garde
writer who has imitated no one and who has made no personal gestures of defiance. His defiances—the violence and the indignities and the horror, the queer reversals of sympathy—are all in his books. He has been associated, moreover, with none of the publicized groupings.

Yet for all this lack of politics and compromise, his work appears to be about to prevail. It is being published in France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and England; it has been honored with a National Institute of Arts and Letters award; it has been admired by Cela in Spain as well as by curiously diverse American writers and critics: Flannery O’Connor and Andrew Lytle, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud; Paul Engle (one of the first to recognize and praise); Leslie Fiedler, Frederick Hoffmann, Ray West.

The Cannibal
itself no longer seems as willful or eccentric as it did in 1948, nor as difficult to read. This is partly in accord with the law that the highly original artist must create the taste that will eventually applaud him. Time, time and powerful reiteration, at last triumph over ridicule.
The Cannibal
prepares us to read
The Lime Twig;
but, even more obviously,
The Lime Twig
and the others prepare us to reread
The Cannibal
. Beyond this,
The Cannibal
doubtless profits from the drift of the novel generally, away from flat reporting and delusive clarities. Readers are no longer as distrustful as they were in 1948 of imaginative distortion and poetic invention, of macabre humor and reversed sympathies, of violence, transferred from outer to inner world and from inner to outer. The rich playfulness of Nabokov; the verbal pyrotechnics of Lawrence Durrell and his humorous relishing of decay; the wilder energies of Donleavy and Bellow; the great poetic myth-making of Andrew Lytle and the visions of Flannery O’Connor; the structural experiments of the later Faulkner and the broken-record repetitions of Beckett; and, even, the brilliant ingenious
longueurs
of certain French anti-novels— all these (to mention only a few of many) show the extent to which the personal and the experimental have been vindicated; have even won public acclaim. Whatever the quickening anti-realist impulse in the novel signifies—whether transformation or annihilation of a
genre
or even a symbolic foretaste of literal annihilation of the self or of matter, a Byzantine decadence or a created myth of dissolution for our time; or whether, more hopefully, a public awakening to new types of fictional pleasure and suasion— whatever all this adds up to helps define
The Cannibal
as a central rather than peripheral work of art and vision.

A.J.G
.

Stanford, California
April 14, 1962

There is a town in Germany today, I cannot say just where, that has, by a great effort, risen above the misery that falls the lot of defeated communities on the continent. It has been slowly bettering itself now, under my guidance, for three years, and I am very nearly satisfied with the progress we have made in civic organization. It is a garden spot: all of our memories are there, and people continually seek it out. But until now there has been only silence for the outside world concerning this place, since I thought it more appropriate to have my people keep their happiness and ideas of courage to themselves
.

However, I was forced to leave the town for a short time and while away I made a compromise. For I have told our story. The things that remain to be done weigh heavily on my mind, and all the remarkable activity of these foreign cities cannot distract me. At present, even though I enjoy it here, I am waiting, and at the first opportunity I will, of course, return
.

Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare
except for fallen electric poles, was the institution, and it sent its delicate and isolated
buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley. From there, one day in
the early spring, walking with a tree limb as a cane, came Balamir, walking with a shadow
and with a step that was not free, to fall under the eye and hand of Madame Snow. All of
Balamir’s demented brothers, in like manner, had been turned out to wander far from the
gravel paths, to seek anyone who would provide a tin plate or coveted drink. Madame Snow
made room for him, setting him at work digging in the basement, in the
bunker
, and
the black air closed in about the piles of debris and he was homesick. His feeble brothers
were gradually absorbed, whole corps at a time, into the yawning walls, mysteriously into
the empty streets and outlying dark shuttered farms, were reluctantly taken off the streets.
And yet the population had not grown, the same few brown forms prowled in the evening, the
same tatters of wash hung for weeks in the same cold air, and the Census-Taker sprawled,
thin and drunk, blue cap lopsided, behind his desk. The town had not grown but the
institution had become empty, officials and nurses gone for distant lands, their eyes tight
and faces drawn, and over the high narrow buildings no sound could be heard. Every day from
the hill, thin
children looked down on the empty scorpion that was all
that was left of the ordered institution.

A single spire of notched steel hung high above the town, devoid of banners,
un-encased by building walls, sticking up above them all in the cold blue evening. Steel
rungs hung crookedly exposed all the way up the spire, and steel slabs were driven across
the narrow open cellar window where Balamir paused, his white skin wet in the still evening
light. Piles of fallen bricks and mortar were pushed into the gutters like mounds of snow,
smashed walls disappeared into the darkness, and stretching along the empty streets were
rows of empty vendors’ carts. Balamir was unprotected from the cold. He found that the wind
swept around his wide forehead and parched throat, flew bitterly into the open mouth of his
rough upturned stiff collar. He found, in the damp frozen hollow of the cellar, that he
could not unearth the wooden bench, the monstrous curling vase, the moldy bureau, or any of
the frozen pots in uneven jumbled piles, littering the earthen floor and reaching to the
rafters. He found that the earthen padded walls muffled his long howls at night and left the
sound only in his own ears. While he worked, picking with the coal shovel, or sat staring up
at the window, paper-wrapped feet shuffled overhead, and in the inhabited kitchens of the
town the candles flickered, cans of thin soup warmed over flickering coals, and the children
whined. Bookstores and chemist’s shops were smashed and pages from open books beat back and
forth in the wind, while from split sides of decorated paper boxes a shoft cheap powder was
blown along the streets like fine snow. Pâpier-maché candies were trampled underfoot. In
outlying districts, in groups of four and five, Balamir’s
brothers chased
over the rutted and frozen ground after the livestock, angry and cold, their thick arms
wagging, or clustered around the weak fires, laughing and cold. A small number of these men,
after flinging hatchets or raging momentarily in the dark with stained knives, walked back
and forth in the cells of the town jail, beating themselves and damning incoherently. The
rest, including Balamir, did not realize that they were beyond the institution’s high walls.
The population of the town remained the same and thieves from the jail went home to keep the
balance.

Madame Snow, owner of the building, living on the street floor above the
cellar room, would have been a grandmother had not her son’s child died, no bigger than a
bird, in an explosion not a block away. In the still morning air, the frosted fields about
the town had cracked with the infrequent thudding of small explosions, and those that had
discharged in the town had left a short useless whistle in her ears. But the children of
Madame Snow’s sister had survived, to crawl sexless and frightened about bare rooms. Time
after time, for months before Balamir had come, Madame Snow had watched the thin men
climbing down from boiling trucks, waiting to see her son’s return. When he had finally
arrived with his stump and steel canes, with special steel loops circling up about his
wrists for extra support, he had not added even one bare number to the scratched-out roster
of the drunken Census-Taker. He had returned to his wife and rooms in a corner of the moving
picture house, and from then on, worked with the black machine in the hot projection room,
showing each day the same blurred picture to no audience. Madame Snow did not see him after
that.
She busied herself as janitor, arguing with the residents or giving
comfort; or sat in the large gilt chair tying rags together and infrequently pulling the
heads from small fowl. The halls no longer smelled of roasting swine or boiling cabbages, no
longer rang full with heavy laughter, but remained dark and cold, streaked with mud from the
roomers’ boots.

The building slanted crookedly and silent in a row of black stained fronts
and the canal drained past the back fence; on the corner where the side street met the empty
thoroughfare was the rising jumble of the steel spire. When a boy with black peaked martial
cap, leather braces and short trousers walked past the drawn curtains, Madame Snow would
peer hungrily out and then go back to the darkness. On the third floor of the house was the
apartment of the Census-Taker, who left his dripping cape flung in the downstairs hall. Herr
Stintz, a one-eyed school teacher, lived on the fourth floor, and above him, with her
children and bleached plants, lived Jutta, the sister of Madame Snow. Herr Stintz, ex-member
of the band, played his tuba late into the night, and the notes fell on the cobblestones,
recalling the sound of fat marching feet. But the roomer who lived on the second floor was
out.

“Come,” said Madame Snow to Balamir, “come in. The room gives no heat
really, but off with your coat. You’re at home.” Balamir knew he was not at home. He looked
at the small table with the rows of playing cards and single gilt chair, looked at the
bright figures where Madame Snow played alone. He carefully looked about the room of court
and puzzled about the oaken whorls above the curtained door and the highness of the spidery
black ceiling. “Sit down,” said Madame Snow, afraid to touch
his arm, “sit
down, please.” But he would not. He would never sit when anyone could see him. So he stood
in the middle of the floor and a dwarfed cat rubbed against his leg. The attendant, hat
pulled over his face and rubbers thick and too large, gave a sheaf of worn papers to Madame
Snow and left like a shadow.

“Will you drink tea?” He looked into his hands, saw steaming water and
watched a single star-shaped leaf turning slowly around near the bottom of the cup. He saw a
pale color slowly spread, creeping up the china towards his fingers, watched the star turn
and the cup dip like the moon. But he would not drink. The little woman watched him from the
side of her eye, the light almost gone. His hair was rough and shaggy and he would not drink
her tea. Down in the cellar Balamir put the coat on again, standing until she hurried back
up the stone steps, for he could feel the cold. “Good night,” she said and turned the brass
key.

Jutta’s child, shoes undone and lips white, ran along a path through the
rubble, stumbled over stones, passed overhanging iron ledges and shattered windows, tried to
weep, and fled on. A man followed, swinging a cane, craning into the darkness. The child
passed a wall spattered with holes and the fingers of a dead defender, and behind him, the
man coughed.

A butcher shop was closing and a few cold strands of flesh hung unsold from
hooks, the plucked skin and crawling veins uninspected, hanging, but without official
sanction. Wire caught the child’s knee.

The town, roosting on charred earth, no longer ancient, the legs and head
lopped from its only horse statue, gorged itself on straggling beggars and remained gaunt
beneath an evil cloaked moon. Rattling
trains turned back at the sight of
the curling rails blossoming in the raw spring on the edge of town opposite the hill, and
fields, plummeted with cannon balls, grew stained with the solitary need of beasts and men.
As the old families returned to scrub again on the banks of the canal or walk singly dressed
in black, the prisoners filed out over the hills, either as names on a ticket, or if the
ticket had been lost, simply as uncounted numbers. When an old man was gripped dying in a
terrible cough, Jutta was betraying her lost husband and bearing child again. The town,
without its walls and barricades, though still a camp-site of a thousand years, was as
shriveled in structure and as decomposed as an ox tongue black with ants.

The Signalman, girded with a blanket in a wicker chair, smoking a pipe like
a porridge bowl, commanding the railway station and a view of empty benches, no longer
raised the red arm or pulled down the yellow, and no more lights blinked before his fat eyes
to disturb his memories of the war of 1914. He had nothing to eat and nothing to say, and
black men in large hats and capes were painted all over the walls of his station. Relics of
silver daggers were looted from the nunnery and stored in trunks with photographs, or taken
off to foreign lands. The bells never rang out. Fires burning along the curbs and dung heaps
smoldering on the farms filled the air and alleys, the empty shops and larders with a
pungent smell of mold.

The Mayor, with his faded red sash, was too blind to tend the chronicles of
history, and went hungry like the rest with memory obliterated from his doorstep. Their
powerful horses of bony Belgian stock, dull-eyed monsters of old force, had been
commandeered
from the acre farms for ammunition trucks, and all were gone
but one grey beast who cropped up and down the stone streets, unowned, nuzzling the gutters.
He frightened the Mayor on black nights and trampled, unshod, in the bare garden, growing
thinner each day, and more wild. Children took rides on the horse’s tail and roamed in small
bands, wearing pasteboard Teutonic helmets, over the small confines of the town, their faces
scratched and nails long. The undertaker had no more fluid for his corpses; the town nurse
grew old and fat on no food at all. By mistake, some drank from poisoned wells. Banners were
in the mud, no scrolls of figured words flowed from the linotype, and the voice of the town
at night sounded weakly only from Herr Stintz’s tuba. Bucketfuls of sand kicked up by minor
grey duds had splattered against flaking walls and trickled onto worn doorsteps where
chickens left frightened tracks. Rotting sandbags killed the weeds, filled the air with the
must of burlap, and when they fell to nothing, left white blotches over the ground.

The townspeople had watched the bands of men march off and later come back
with venereal diseases or their ears chopped from their skulls. One night startled eyes
watched the coat of arms on the castle wall go up in smoke and flame as if an omen that they
were expected to rally round for their sons or weep bitter tears. The Mayor lost at cards,
had witnessed executions with his eyes closed, and in the marrow of his thick bones, the
town shrank. All bartering was done by hand, the flowing script was chipped from the fat
walls of the bank and the barred windows of the institution grew dense with cobwebs. An
overturned tank on the north road still
crawled with ghosts who left it
at night and hung over the canal walls for drink.

The Signalman, his mouth clamped shut, sitting behind the postered window of
the station, saw the boy dashing over the torn rails and saw the man with the cane coming
behind, his shadow lengthening in the station’s candle light. Jutta waited with her hungry
little girl bouncing up and down, riding her knee. The damp smell of the river rolled over
soldiers’ leggings and trousers that had been left in doorways, and a cow lying dead in a
field looked like marble. In the tenuous light of day, Madame Snow hunched over her cards,
and the silver platters, goblets and huge bowls grew black with tarnish and thick with dust.
The merciless light showed each house a clear red or flat sand color and long burned beams
and ashen barns were black. The green of cabbages had turned to white, and small
automobiles, stalled and punctured to the side of the road, were blood red. Everyone wore
grey, and over their shoulders were hitched empty cartridge belts. They begged while queuing
for food and pounded their foreheads with their fists.

Throughout these winters Madame Snow could not believe that the worst would
come. All her faith was in the knuckle bones of a worthless currency, in the right of the
victorious, a coinage covered with the heads of high-spirited men. Bits of gauze were pushed
into the clay and women wore coats with epaulettes and brass buttons. In the early days when
the patients had rioted at the institution, it was the women who beat them down with clubs,
while girls with spirited eyes and bare knees lured officers to a night of round-the-world.
Arms and armies and silver blades were gone, the black had come out of the
realm of kings, and butterflies and grass were left for children. Freight trains were
hit and burned and no more came, and the keys of all machines were welded together.
Wohin gehen Sie?
cried the devils, and the clatter of boots died out of the
barracks.

Balamir came eventually to think of himself as Madame Snow’s Prince. But for
a long while he worked by himself, still smelling drugs and fighting with the terrible
shapes that leaped from drawers. He longed to be in the mountains, to leap from crag to
crag, fly about the snow fields and find gold at the foot of stunted trees. He longed to
tend the sheep and be a gangling black dog racing at the herd over green slopes. He longed
to live in a cave. Icicles hung between the slats of the cellar window at night, and Balamir
began to think of the jewels hanging from the ears of Madame Snow, began to listen for the
turning of the key. He listened for the only accordion in the town and the notes traveled
down the rain pipe, over the slate, but no voices sang to the crashing of the steins. There
was nowhere to eat in
Spitzen-on-the-Dein
, and tables were piled on one another,
chipped with bullet-holes. Sometimes Balamir heard sleigh bells that jingled in the valleys
of the Alps, and he flung himself on piles of cold rubbish and earth as on a snow heap. He
slept on an army cot, longed for the fir trees, and as he grunted and threw his weight every
day into the frozen articles of chairs, springs and picture frames, he felt that his
strength was falling away. He remembered photographs of the vicious tigers and the days when
all men wore spats or silver braids, and from the mountains to the
Brauhaus
, camps
and meeting halls sprang up, precision glasses were trained. He thought of a pigtailed
donkey and the bones of men ground
into food. But now the guardhouse was
empty, his father, who had been the Kaiser, was dead, and the nurses had been taken from the
institution as corporals. He began to sit at the top of the stairs waiting for the door to
open.