In novels like The Grandmothers, Wescott anticipated by a decade our current pious preoccupation with the American past. For some reason, however, he has avoided native materials in The Pilgrim Hawk, which is his first story in several years. Perhaps the familiar nostalgic principle operates in Wescott's case: for his most ardently American tales were written, I believe, in Europe; while The Pilgrim Hawk, which is laid in France, comes out of a long stay at home.

But the nationalism, if we may call it that, of his earlier books was really incidental to another emotion: his passion for involvement in normal affairs. The intimate routines of the family, love's power to survive its own abuses, to arrest the flux and establish continuity, filled the younger Wescott with frank wonder and curiosity. And he used to astonish the sophisticated twenties by exhibiting all this the stuff of average human experience, as something very rare, almost a mystery. He was the poet of the family album; a repentant Ishmael, to whom his artist's exclusion from the tribe had become a burden. But what distinguished him from the Europeans (Mann, Kafka) who treated the same theme was the fact that he approached it in the spirit not of speculation but of simple yearning and prayer. A post-romantic in his demand for stability and tradition, he was a romantic still in his idealizing and lyrical attitudes.

Now in The Pilgrim Hawk he attempts something a little different. It was easy to transfigure love and marriage in terms of a far-off pioneer past; in The Pilgrim Hawk, however, the conjugal drama is enacted by sophisticated, almost Huxleyan, people. And the author's own role in his fiction has changed accordingly. He used to identify himself with such adolescent characters as Alwyn Tower of The Grandmothers and Dan of The Apple of the Eye—young men who were preparing to leave Wisconsin and become writers. But Wescott the emergent artist has become Wescott the mature spectator, coolly ironic where he used to be impassioned and devout. Clearly he has set out to transcend the nostalgic lyricism of his early work and to bring to bear upon his favorite themes a more complex experience and a more objective method.

The Pilgrim Hawk is merely an anecdote of an afternoon spent with some puzzling people in a French country house during the pre-depression years. The Cullens are rich sporting folk, "mere passers of time," and altogether banal—or so they seem at first. But before Wescott has finished, he has turned them into veritable emblems of the marital passion. Mrs. Cullen carries on her gloved wrist a great live falcon, of which her husband is oddly resentful.

The afternoon wears on in conversation about falconry; there is a drinking party, and at the end a flash of melodrama. The real suspense, however, arises from the author's efforts to decipher the Cullens and evaluate their lives. Is Cullen jealous of the hawk or does he detest the creature because it seems to exemplify the captive state in which he himself is maintained by his wife? Is Mrs. Cullen petty or grand in her possessiveness? Is the author in the presence of great issues or trivialities? There is something of Henry James's The Sacred Fount in this tale of a writer prying into the mysteries of the married and at the same time taking himself to task for his excessive fascination. But Wescott's irony is less equivocal than James's and his affirmations are more emphatic. There is plainly a lesson in the Cullens: "In marriage, insult arises again and again and again; and pain has to be not only endured, but consented to; and the amount of forgiveness that it necessitates is incredible and exhausting. When love has given satisfaction, then you discover how large a part of the rest of life is only payment for it, instalment after instalment. . . . To see the cost of love before one has felt what it is worth, is a pity; one may never have the courage to begin."

Wescott has come through the ordeal of adolescence which proves fatal to so many American writers. The Pilgrim Hawk may seem a slighter performance than several novels of his earlier phase, but it is a fresh start and in many ways a good one. His writing is as supple as ever, and has acquired, besides, a certain witty poeticality which may be of French inspiration but which is entirely native in idiom. His portraits are excellent: in addition to the Cullens there is their hostess, Alexandra Henry, an American girl who feels overshadowed by her fine French house and artistic Paris friends, and who surprises the author by her enthusiasm for the Cullens, "a type of humanity which she no longer quite respected or trusted, but evidently still enjoyed." As a reminiscence of France in the twenties, indeed, the book is suggestive and charming; and one wishes that Wescott had made more of the temporal, less of the symbolic, side of his story. One hopes, too, that he will not permit his newly acquired irony to dissipate the intensity and peculiar visionary idealism which have always been his strength.