The Lover of the Hummingbird

Jeffrey Eugenides

Remarks at “Remembering The Passion Artist: John Hawkes Tribute,”
April 13, 1999, Brown University

Twenty years ago I arrived on this campus intent on fulfilling my father’s greatest fear  —while making him pay for it—of having his son ruined by the liberal Eastern Establishment. At the time I didn’t know what the liberal Eastern Establishment was. Its major recommendation lay in my father’s opposition to it. If I’d been asked to describe this group, I would have offered only superficial details: the wrinkled broadcloth shirts, the flood pants, the Latinate vocabulary, the lock-jaw speech.

I had chosen Brown chiefly because of the presence on its faculty of one John Hawkes. Hawkes’s books, which I only dimly understood, had enchanted me ever since I’d pulled my first copy off a high school teacher’s bookshelf when I was fifteen. I don't want to be hyperbolic about the moment but it retains in memory all the annunciatory trumpets of an epiphany.  I can remember reading the words “New Directions” on the spine. I can remember studying the picture on the cover of a muscular, nearly anatomized Caribbean woman posed before a blazing sun. Most of all, I remember the intoxicating effect the prose had on me, like a dangerous throat-burning Scandinavian liqueur. The narrative voice seized me in a way all the noisy art forms of the time (which have only grown noisier since then) somehow didn’t. I felt right away, reading the first paragraph of Second Skin, that I was in the presence of the qualities Nabokov considered the hallmarks of art: curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy.

I set out on my pilgrimage my first day here on College Hill. Consulting my campus map, I located Horace Mann. I studied the directory inside the door. With mounting excitement I climbed the steps.  Everything was old in the way I wanted it to be.  The stairs creaked; the radiators gave off a smell of rust, the smell of the Ivy League, which I inhaled deeply as I searched for the right room. At the end of the hall, in a forlorn office clearly used for perhaps three hours each semester, sat a man with owl-shaped eyeglasses the colour of congealed honey. He looked up at me.

“Are you the lover of the hummingbird?” I asked.

And in that unmistakable voice, putting aside his insistence that you should never confuse a novel’s author with its protagonist (because he could see that such a distinction would have been lost on the kid in his doorway), Professor Hawkes answered in the affirmative.

And so it was that Jack Hawkes became for me the living embodiment of the Liberal Eastern Elite. It turned out they didn’t wear broadcloth shirts. They wore navy blue or white turtlenecks, chinos and tweed jackets. They didn’t speak in lock-jaws but in a voice, well, like Jack’s, something between the cry of an eagle and the whine of a very intelligent bookish asthmatic child . . . you all know the voice, you can hear it now, saying the things Jack used to say. “But what about the character’s eyes? Look how the author describes his eyes. These aren’t eyes. They’re gonads! In Freudian terms the eye is always a gonad!”

Or when he forgot somebody’s name: “It’s the synapses!”

Or regarding literary poseurs: “To glorify not the writing but the writer, to be concerned with the role of the writer in society rather than the work itself, that is something which, I must say, I strongly resist.”

This last remark was delivered to me. Because pretty soon in our dealings with each other Jack realized that my interest in him extended beyond my admiration for his books. One day during my freshman year I came into class and sat next to Jack. I bent over to lay my books on the floor. While I was down there, though, I took the opportunity to stare under Jack’s seat.

In an instant Jack was shouting. “You even want to know what kind of shoes I wear?”

I was horrified at being caught, at having my idolatry exposed. I blushed and sat back in my seat and tried from then on not even to look at Jack’s shoes.

Among my pitiful efforts that first semester in Beginning Fiction, I remember one moment when Jack gave me encouragement, a memory still more dear to me than any subsequent praise or favorable review. We were given an assignment to describe a single mundane moment with utmost dramatic effect. I had described—taxidermied, really—a little girl in the act of turning on a light switch. But generous Jack found some promise.

“I love this little girl,” he shouted. “I want to eat this girl!”

That was a lesson I’ve never forgotten: try to make every page of prose edible.

Among the most edible pages in our literature surely are those written by John Hawkes. Open any book, anywhere, and the feast is laid out before you. I’ve always agreed with Proust’s insistence that you can measure a writer’s talent from any paragraph in any book. Just for fun, in preparing these remarks, I opened a few of Jack’s books at random. From The Cannibal:  “And old Herman, fully awake, touched the soft fur with his mouth, and felt the wings through the cotton dress, while in the far end of town, a brigade of men passed shallow buckets of water to quench a small fire.” From The Blood Oranges: “I swayed, I listened, I shaded my eyes, knowing that Catherine was indeed asleep and that Fiona’s haste was justified but futile and that the light itself had turned to wind or that the wind had somehow assumed the properties of the dawn light.” From Sweet William:  “There I was, standing on racing turf at last. Through the shredding curtains of that brisk dawn mirage, a fusion of fog and filmy light and dark shadows, I was able to make out the quarters of the track, as well as the darkened shape of the grandstand, which was like an abandoned ship on its side.”

Not only was Jack a wonderful writer; he was a truly first-rate hypochondriac. “Nobody has a cold, do they?” was his usual greeting to our class. If a sufferer were identified, Jack quarantined the poor student in a remote armchair before administering himself the booster vaccine of a glass of Soave Folonari. Of course Jack had had asthma since childhood and needed to guard against flus and colds.  And, having done some teaching now myself, I understand the temptation to view students less as presidential material than viral. Nevertheless, one of the strangest things I ever learned about Jack, and something that impressed upon me the mysteriousness of human character (another literary lesson, I suppose), was the following. One of the last times I saw Jack, at a lunch with Rick Moody, Jack, a man who had fled the slightest cough or sniffle, calmly mentioned over a rich dessert that doctors had just determined that his main cardiac arteries were occluded by eighty or ninety percent. He seemed—and again I have only that one afternoon to go on—almost fascinated with the diagnosis, as though the heart condition in question was something he was thinking about giving to one of his characters. And so, to all the other qualities I admired about Jack Hawkes, I had to add another: courage.

That final lunch was not without its sadder aspects. Jack was concerned about his book, The Frog, which had come out that year. He was afraid it wasn’t doing well enough to suit his publisher and he asked Rick and me if we thought there was anything we could do, down in New York, to give the book some added attention. It was an uncomfortable moment, which I can only compare, in my own experience, to the time my own father, late in life, asked to borrow money.  It went against the natural order of things. And we were standing in the middle of a gravel parking lot, in Providence, which is always a sad thing, and Jack looked frail in the harsh light. But no sooner had this unease descended on us than Jack, synapses still intact, summed up the entire situation and, waving his hand, dismissed the whole idea.

In retrospect, I think he was stripping from himself the last shreds of the mantle I had forced on his shoulders so many years ago when I barged into his office quoting Second Skin. He was telling me that he was a writer and, like any writer, he worried about the fate of his books in the world. He was telling me, now that I was old enough to understand, exactly what kind of shoes he wore. And what kind of shoes, in emulating him, I had squeezed myself into.

It was my good fortune to study with the great cantankerous Hawkes and to know him as a teacher and as a friend, to enjoy his kindness and humour, his histrionic self-dramatizing, his pagan vitality, and to hear from his own lips the natural flow of his eloquence and the utterly original workings of his fine and incomparable mind.

When I graduated, I wrote a note of thanks to Jack, most of which I’ve forgotten. The last line, however, comes back to me. “I will always begin with what you taught me.” That is as true today, as we gather here to celebrate the man and his work, as it was in 1983. I want to say, God Bless John Hawkes, but it doesn’t feel right. Jack was an existentialist. He told me once that he liked the idea that we create our work out of the void. So rather than address Jack in heaven, I’ll end by saluting the god he spoke of most often, the imagination, specifically the imagination of John Hawkes, which bodied forth from the void his many brilliant books.

“The Lover of the Hummingbird” ran in Brick 65/66.

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