Sunday book pick: A hawk is an elegant metaphor for a disintegrating marriage in ‘The Pilgrim Hawk’

“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. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable.”

Glenway Wescott created a respectable volume of fiction over 20 years of his writing career. In addition to short stories and poetry, Wescott wrote four novels: The Apple of the Eye (1924), The Grandmothers (1927), The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (1940), and Apartment in Athens (1945). After this, until his death in 1987, Wescott would publish no more work of fiction. In the intermediate years, he wrote essays and worked as an editor.

The character Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is said to have been modelled after Wescott.

Wescott was also among the rare openly gay writers of his time. His relationship with Monroe Wheeler lasted from 1919 until Wescott’s death. Wheeler died the following year. They are buried next to each other in a farm that Wescott had acquired.

The hawk perches

Wescott’s penultimate novel, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, is narrated by Alwyn Tower, an American writer-in-the-waiting visiting his friend Alex in Paris. Madeleine and Larry Cullen, a middle-aged Irish couple, drop by one day. The husband is clumsy and flustered while the wife is energetic and...

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