The Blood Oranges is my favorite of these three. I kept the other two partly because I love their appearance. Their wonderful New Directions covers have a nice patina–worn but not quite shabby. Also, DST and Travesty are skinny and don’t take up much shelf space. The Blood Oranges is thicker and for me also more interesting. The story is said to take place in Illyria, which is the name that the classical Greeks used to refer to the relatively remote and uncivilized lands on the east coast of the Adriatic, which today would include parts of Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia. Hawkes once said that he “wanted to try to create a world, not represent it.” Like Nabokov, Hawkes is not writing directly about this world; the worlds of his novels are artistic creations. Hawkes calls his setting Illyria not because he wants to describe the east coast of the Adriatic for the benefit of potential tourists in the late twentieth century, but rather because he wants to evoke a classical Greek vision of a wild place, a strange place where strange things might happen. Shakespeare was doing the same thing when he used Illyria as the setting for Twelfth Night.
John Hawkes was born in Connecticut, graduated from Harvard, and spent most of his working life as an English professor at Brown. The three of his novels that I own were all published when he was in his late forties and early fifties and all of them feature sexual love triangles and quadrangles. The characters are mostly what we might call leisure class; their backgrounds and last names are usually unspecified. The stories feature twentieth century technologies–cars, cameras, and ocean liners–but there is no trace of contemporary history, politics, or popular culture.
The storyline of The Blood Oranges begins like this. A childless couple, Cyril and Fiona, are spending time in a rented a villa on a hill above the sea somewhere on the Illyrian coast. The weather is mostly kind and the existence idyllic. One day five more travelers arrive in the town: Hugh, Catherine and their three daughters. They rent a nearby villa and the two couples become friends. As they spend time together, a certain amount of sexual attraction begins to arise. One of the strengths of the novel is that the place from which the critical events begin–the jumping off point–is not all that strange; it’s not even unfamiliar. Hawkes knows this, of course. But he is creating, not representing, and this is Illyria, not Montenegro. So even at the beginning of their story, the atmosphere is not quite as simple as it sounds. What would happen, Hawkes is asking, if the four people involved were maybe a little different from you and most of the people you know? What if they were like Fiona and Hugh and Catherine and Cyril, all them interesting characters who have their own peculiarities?
It took me a long time to realize something that should be obvious, which is that Cyril, who is the first-person narrator of the story, has a sly but surely deliberate resemblance to the Greek god Pan.
Pan was the libidinous god of rustic music, of shepherds and flocks, and of wild mountain places. His instrument is a pipe made of reeds, called today a pan flute. Although Cyril doesn’t play an instrument, he often talks about how his way of life and the way he interacts with others is itself a kind of music. He says that it is a song that he sings. And then there are those odd references to his “thick” thighs, as well as the fact that he is certainly libidinous. And what better place to find Pan than in Illyria? And if Cyril evokes Pan, might Hugh evoke Hephaestus, the lame god who is the blacksmith and forger of weapons in the Greek pantheon? Maybe. In any case, this is the kind of story Hawkes wants to tell.
The language of the book is dense and poetic, languid and beautiful. There are no chapter or section headings. The book consists of dozens of self-contained passages of first-person reporting. Some are quite long; some are just a page or two. Taken all together they tell a story, but they are not presented in chronological order and the reader is left to figure out exactly where in the overall narrative the current passage fits. That’s a little difficult in the beginning, and two readings of The Blood Oranges are better than one. But the novel is in fact carefully structured and eventually all is revealed–all, that is, that can be revealed or known in the kind of world that the author creates.
The novel is infused with sex, but there are no depictions of it, no ‘sex scenes’ as we call them now. It is also deeply intellectual, but there is nothing muddy or difficult about it. There is a clarity of emotion, a generosity of viewpoint, an acceptance of both joy and pain. Hawkes presents us with a vision of the power and the beauty of sexual love and of the ugly and destructive forces that are sometimes inseparable from it. There is no simple moral to the story; we have to make of it what we will.