Hallie Atwell

Hallie Atwell

English 1110.01, MWF 9:10—10:05

Professor: Cathy Ryan

Assignment: Dalkey Archive

February 20, 2017

John Hawkes

            John Hawkes was a postmodern American novelist who received his education from Harvard University. In his interview with Patrick O’Donnell, he talked about meeting the teacher from this college who soon became his “mentor-teacher” and “mentor-publisher,” Albert Guerard. With this teacher, Hawkes completed his first work of fiction The Cannibal.  Although this was his first published novel, it was The Lime Twig, published twelve years later, that turned peoples’ attention to the author. However, Hawkes first began his writing career as an inexperienced poet, with a couple his poems published in The Harvard Advocate; he mainly wrote his poems about romantic notions of World War II in response to his fear of dying in the war. Soon thereafter, he shifted from writing poetry to fiction upon finding his passion for prose literature and the ability to write fiction better than the authors whom his wife influenced him to read. After hearing much debate at the time, Hawkes believed that fiction had taken over much of the function of poetry.

John Hawkes most popular works include:

This website, John Hawkes, provides a brief overview of these popular works of the author listed above, along with a portrait of the author and a link to online websites where these works can be bought or rented. I chose to write about John Hawkes because his interview with Patrick O’Donnell depicted him as different from some of the other authors. It first stuck out to me that he was a writer of fiction, the most appealing and interesting genre that I enjoy to read. He also mentioned an exercise in his freshman year of English at Harvard that he continued to use for years; this exercise was the “character sketch” that our class was able to experience in the beginning of the semester. This connection to John Hawkes was the deciding factor of the subject of my Dalkey essay.

If I had the opportunity to interview John Hawkes, I would first ask him what made him become a writer if he was not a model student to begin with. In his interview, Hawkes states that “life is a constantly terrifying mystery as well as a beautiful, unpredictable, marvelous thing.” Therefore, I believe his response would have been that fiction allowed him to create life in his own point of view with his powerful imagination in ways that have never been seen before. Also in his interview Hawkes states that upon reading a book his wife suggested, he “didn’t like it, and suddenly thought [he] could write something better.” With this, I would have been curious as to why he thought so and asked him. I predict his response would have been similar to this: His strong creativity and constant fear of life, mentioned in the interview, led him to become quizzical and skeptic and therefore a strong factor in his composition. Combined with his fear of dying and the inability to accept the idea of being humans and alive, Hawkes completed his works with these vexatious thoughts in mind; this allowed his works to be compelling and intense, breaking away from the traditional limitations of fiction and portraying his answers to the questions that frequently crossed his mind.

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *