Return of Glenway Wescott

The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott. Harper. $2.00

The reviewers of this short novel have been sympathetic toward it and quite unintelligent about it: they have had some sense of its excellence and almost none of its meaning. The reason is simple. Narratives told in the first person usually ignore the problem of point of view; they might just as well be told in the third person. When most writers decide to tell a story from the point of view of an “I” they do so not because they wish to present the experience of the “I” dramatically, with the full force and the devastating limitations of perception which any interestingly special point of view involves, but for “naturalness” or ease or casualness or colloquialism. These are the insufficient reasons of The Sun Also Rises, for example, a story which could be told by any other character in the book (except Romero) or by Hemingway himself with the same effect. Less clearly, perhaps, they are also the insufficient reasons of magazine fiction such as Marquand’s varnished tales of Boston, in all of which a point of view is established only to be constantly violated. But occasionally, as in the first person narratives of Henry James, the point of view is chosen for deliberate dramatic reasons, and unless one recognizes these reasons, the performance is meaningless, or means something very different from what was intended. The Pilgrim Hawk is at least as special in its point of view as The Turn of the Screw; but it is not ambiguous.