Harrowing Sex

By Paul Gray

THE PASSION ARTIST by John Hawkes

Harper & Row; 185 pages; $9.95

Novelist John Hawkes, 54, is a writer who has been read too little and interpreted too much. This is partly his own doing. His first two books came out of a writing class that he took at Harvard in the late 1940s, and his fiction has continued to radiate qualities dear to the hearts of academic critics: fractured narrative lines, surrealistic landscapes surrounded by the chiaroscuro of despair, irony, symbols galore and, most important, a self-conscious sense of being difficult. Small wonder that so much of his work has seemed to move straight from printing press to college syllabus. Yet it has never been necessary to go to school to acquire a taste for Hawkes. At its best his writing is vividly accessible, and almost always disturbing. His recurrent subject is the eruption of some dark, violent passion into the turmoil of mental ife, and his prose strains not only to describe this event but to re-create it. Hawkes at peak intensity is the literary equivalent of delirium.

The passion that has increasingly dominated Hawkes' recent books (The Blood Oranges, Travesty) is sex; The Passion Artist, his eighth novel, dwells still more obsessively on this subject. The title begins in irony. Konrad Vost is neither passionate nor an artist but rather an epitome of timid rationality. Hawkes stresses his hero's stylized anonymity, his "small perfectly round gold-rimmed spectacles, his two ill-fitting suits of black serge, his black turtleneck shirts, his pointed shoes that were always worn at the heels and covered with a faint dusting of powdered concrete from the walls of unfinished buildings ..." Vost dwells in a characterless (and imaginary) European town, works as "a mere clerk in a dismal pharmacy" and plays doting father to his teen-age daughter Mirabelle. Two other women dominate his thoughts: his late wife Claire and his mother Eva, an inmate of La Violaine, the town's prison for women.

So far, so Kafkaesque. But Vost's prissy, virginal middle age is soon disrupted. He accidentally learns that his daughter is a prostitute; catatonically, he submits to the ministrations of one of Mirabelle's schoolmates before going off to report his daughter to the police. When the women of La Violaine stage a revolt, Vost is among the volunteers who enter the prison, armed with long sticks, and try to beat the women into submission. They fail, and Vost embarks on a nightmare journey over the terrain of lust.

At this point Hawkes runs into some problems. His prose, ordinarily under careful control, heats up to match the fevered imagination of his aroused hero. Vost meets a policeman with a dog: "The beast was straining so fiercely on its leash that its front feet were free of the ground and its snarling jaws were not a hand's length from the center of his own body where lay the living entrails the animal clearly wished to rip and masticate while still steaming in the heat of his blood." Phantasmagoric or no, purple prose is still purple prose. The instructive side of Vest's experiences nearly gets lost in this din. He is supposed to be harrowing the deepest regions of sex, well beneath its paradoxes: procreative and anarchic, ethereal and brutal. But Vost seems remarkably ill-equipped for such a job, and much of the evidence he discovers (sex is "a bed of stars ... a bed of hot coals") seems hardly worth the effort.

The Passion Artist is not quite an allegory; its literal plane is too lush and fully realized. Nor can it simply be taken literally; Hawkes is too clearly up to something behind the scenes. Its meaning is thus thrown somewhere in the middle distance, where the vistas are murky and the visibility slight. As a result, the novel finally stirs without satisfying; it does not so much explore sex as mime its mysteries.

-- Paul Gray

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