After his silence of the Thirties, Wescott produced two more long works of fiction, The Pilgrim Hawk ( 1940) and Apartment in Athens (1945). The former, a novella, is perhaps his most nearly perfect work—taut, subtle, and exquisitely ordered. It takes place on a single afternoon in May of 1928 or 1929—the narrator, Alwyn Tower, can't quite remember which, since so many years have passed—in a house at Chancellet, outside of Paris, where he then lived with his "great friend Alexandra Henry," also known as Alex, who would later marry his brother. On that May afternoon some friends of Alex's, a rich, foolish Irish couple named Larry and Madeleine Cullen, come to visit, bringing with them Mrs. Cullen's new pilgrim hawk, Lucy. Mrs. Cullen's affection for, treatment of, and remarks about Lucy (particularly her hunger) cause Alwyn to think about, and to see the hawk as a symbol of, a variety of things. For instance, Mrs. Cullen's observation that falcons feel hunger more intensely than people makes Alwyn reflect that "[a]lthough I had been a poor boy, on a Wisconsin farm and in a slum in Chicago and in Germany in 1922, I could not recollect any exact sensation of hunger, that is to say, hunger of the stomach." But he thinks of the other hungers he has known:

For example, my own undertaking in early manhood to be a literary artist. No one warned me that I really did not have talent enough. Therefore my hope of becoming a very good artist turned bitter, hot and nerve-racking; and it would get worse as I grew older. The unsuccessful artist also ends in apathy, too proud and vexed to fly again, waiting upon withheld inspiration, bored to death.

He thinks about sexual hunger, too, about the fact that "[y]outhfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young. Lovelife goes on indefinitely, with less and less likelihood of being loved, less and less ability to love, and the stomach-ache of love still as sharp as ever. The old bachelor is like an old hawk." And as Alwyn continues to observe the hawk, his sense of identity with it intensifies, his emotions sharpen: "old bachelor hungry bird," he thinks, "aging-hungry-man-bird, and how I hate desire, how I need pleasure, how I adore love, how difficult middle age must be!"

And how difficult marriage. The novella is largely about the Cullens's marriage and about Alwyn's attitude toward it. It is not a perfect marriage, for although they are very much in love, Larry resents the hawk enormously; it's a terrible nuisance and an embarrassment, he tells Alwyn, and often comes between them in the most hurtful ways. Consequently, when Madeleine puts Lucy out in Alex's garden, Larry covertly cuts its leash, removes its hood, and lets it fly away. And yet, after the bird has enjoyed a few moments of freedom, it returns willingly to Mrs. Cullen—for it is still hungry. Alwyn, having been thrilled by the bird's freedom, equally enjoys "the little spectacle of her capture or surrender," and is surprised at himself for this. His reaction makes him aware "of my really not wanting Larry Cullen to escape from Mrs. Cullen either, or vice versa. Perhaps I do not believe in liberty, or I regard it as only episodic in life; a circumstance that one must be able to bear and profit by when it occurs; a kind of necessary evil. When love itself is at stake, love of liberty as a rule is only fear of captivity."

What happens in The Pilgrim Hawk, in short, is that Alwyn Tower, now fortyish, remembers a day in his late twenties—the twilight of his youth—when the visit of a troubled married couple with a hungry hawk caused him to think about his own hungers, and to see clearly the future ahead of him: no marriage, no writing. But much remains unspoken in the novella. What, for instance, is the relationship between Alex and Alwyn? Apparently they lived together for a considerable length of time—Alwyn, after all, can't remember what year it was in which the Cullens visited—but, judging from the way they talk to each other about sex and love, there is no romance between them, no physical relationship. They are not lovers but Doppelgängern, two seemingly carefree young unmarrieds who in truth find themselves rather envying even a very troubled and tacky married couple and who fear a lonely, unproductive future full of unsatisfied longings. (Their likeness is symbolized, incidently, by the similarity of their names.) The difference between them, however, is that Alex will eventually marry and Alwyn will not. As in The Apple of the Eye and The Grandmothers, the unmentioned subject here is homosexuality: it is not absolutely necessary, to be sure, that one assume Alwyn to be homosexual, but it makes his certainty about his increasingly lonely, marriageless future far more understandable.

The Pilgrim Hawk was not Wescott's first work to deal with marriage. The short stories that he published in Good-Bye, Wisconsin in 1928 are full of weddings, which invariably symbolize an end to possibility and the beginning of captivity. In a story called "The Wedding March," for instance, the wedding bell, in the mind of a young groom, becomes "a death knell," and the walls of the church in which the wedding takes place are described as being "the color of a tomb." Similarly, at the end of "The Whistling Swan," the story's young protagonist, who has been planning to go to Paris and become a great composer, decides instead to stay in Wisconsin and (probably) to "hold his peace—a dumb, wholesome, personal peace. Talk about Paris, who cared, who cared? . . . That night he accepted the offer of the college in the south of the state, and agreed with Muriel to be married at once." To marry, in these youthful stories, is to deny oneself, to repeat the mistakes of one's forebears, to head down the same bleak, well-worn, unsurprising path. In The Pilgrim Hawk Alwyn recognizes that, for all the grotesqueries and limitations of marriage, it may not, in truth, be the grimmest of all possible fates. The things he avoided marriage in order to pursue—his writing, his love life—seem to him to have little future in them, and what will he have when they're gone completely? For the first time, perhaps, Alwyn sees that he will not win all.

The Pilgrim Hawk is an exemplary novella in the classic tradition, its manner stately and elliptical, its characters subtly and ironically etched. Wescott weaves together his various themes—art and love, freedom and captivity, desire and satiation—with great elegance. And yet, in this work that may represent the height of his achievement, he essentially accuses himself of having little talent and hints that his awareness of this failing is responsible not only for the preceding eight-year dry spell but for the dry spells that will follow. (Interestingly, in his entry in Twentieth Century Authors, published two years after The Pilgrim Hawk, Wescott echoed this self-evaluation: "I have had good luck in every respect but one; my talent has not seemed equal to my opportunities or proportionate to my ideas and ideals. . . .") William H. Rueckert, in his Twayne-series study of Wescott, even goes so far as to say that The Pilgrim Hawk is "Wescott's goodbye to fiction and to himself as a novelist."

Though Wescott was to publish one more novel after The Pilgrim Hawk, in a sense it does represent a leave-taking, for it was his last major fictional work in which the protagonist is plainly a variation on the author.