The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Then, I lamented to myself, if your judgment is poor you fall in love with those who could not possibly love you. If romance of the past has done you any harm, you will not be able to hold on to love when you do attain it; your grasp of it will be out of alignment. Or pity or self-pity may have blunted your hand so that it makes no mark. Back you fly to your perch, ashamed as well as frustrated. Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb.

An unsuccessful American writer, Alwyn Tower, is visiting his cousin Alexandra at her house in France. Without warning, two additional visitors arrive, an Irish couple named Larry and Madeleine Cullen. Alwyn takes an immediate interest in this mercurial pair, who seem fairly unhappy with each other. Larry is a large and oafish man who resents his wife's many passions; we learn over the course of an abortive dinner that they have no fixed abode, but travel around indulging in Madeleine's interests, one of which seems to be funding violent Irish rebels. Another is the peregrine falcon--a pilgrim hawk, in the terminology of the time--that sits on her arm.

Alwyn is as fascinated by the bird, whose name is Lucy, as he is by the Cullens. He watches intently as the bird struggles against the jessups that keep it tied to her wrist, as it's hooded to keep it from seeing, as it feeds on half a pigeon provided by Alex's servant. Larry, for one, openly hates the bird, and after a drinking binge, Alwyn watches as he sneaks out into the garden and cuts its leash as it feeds, hoping, perhaps, it will fly away forever. (Seeing Larry flash a pocketknife, Alwyn thinks he is about to witness bird murder.) Alwyn, with a writer's eye for detail, sees the way in which Lucy has become the focal point for the stresses and tensions that lie beneath the surface of the Cullens' marriage.

In his introduction to the book, novelist Michael Cunningham unpacks the way the bird acts as symbol of wildness and captivity, the way that the Cullens have domesticated each other in violation, perhaps, of some natural inclination or passion that is caged by the orthodoxies of marriage and polite society. To me, though, The Pilgrim Hawk is a book about the folly of symbolism and the failure of analogy. No sooner does Alwyn make one "reading" of the falcon, and thus of the Cullens, than he is surprised by some unseen facet of their character he'd yet to notice. But the bird is only a bird, it does what birds do, and its nature is wholly unconnected to the character of its owners. As Alwyn makes more and more writerly judgments, it seems to me that his whole project--an investigation into this mysterious couple, which seems borne out of boredom more than anything else--is suspect, and that true knowledge of people is, if not impossible, difficult and painstaking to obtain. The bird can't really act as a key. It acts as a bird.

My February project is to read only short books--books under 200 pages. The Pilgrim Hawk is barely a novel; maybe it stretches the definition of a novella. Though it ends with a bit of flash, and skirts the possibility of violence, it's really not much more than an amusing anecdote. I found myself interested, like Alwyn, in the bird, but not so much in the couple, whose eccentricities and conflicts are, by the very nature of the book, occluded from view.