The Pilgrim Hawk with which Glenway Wescott returns to fiction after a twelve-year absence, is less a story of love than a fable, and it illustrates again, but more steadily and with greater critical weight, his natural inclination toward symbolic and legendary values in narrative. Where once he elaborated the mythic qualities of the pastoral or folk tale, the tribal ritual of the family photograph album, or the local daemon that haunts the country hearsay, superstition, crimes, defeats, and personal legends of his Midwestern homeland, he here reverts to a time and place grown more fabulous than Wisconsin ever could: to postwar France of the expatriates, a fool's paradise now removed to a lunar distance by change and war, its delusions of privilege and emancipation lingering in the memory with the preposterous unreality of life on another planet. He tells of the rich Irish Cullens, whose love, fixed by psychic necessity, is sped to its crisis by Mrs. Cullen's pet falcon, which figures both the husband's enslavement and tormented jealousy and the wife's mastery of her lover. The relations of these three condense the compulsions of love, its warfare, and the long debt it imposes on life, and the drama of marital conflict is given depth by two contrasting images: the animal passion of two French servants and the enervating Platonic sophistication of Alexandra Henry, a rich American in whose house near Paris the story takes place one summer afternoon twelve years ago, and the Mr. Tower who observes the crisis and struggles to grasp and annotate its import.

The art of fable, with its cognates in primitive myth and in the moral or critical allegory of modern times, has become a prepossession of contemporary writers—a means of resisting the pedantry of facts, a corrective of the laming servility of realism, a plea for poetic values in fiction, an inevitable medium of the imagination at a moment when psychic or moral necessities protest the determinism of science and seek fresh contact with the region of essence, where spirit lurks elusive and enigmatic but with the strength of its primary impulses. It has always been an art of great appeal to Americans; the enthusiasm of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, and James has reappeared, enriched by the complex devices and psychic motives used by Mann, Gide, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats, and Kafka, in writers as different as Miss Porter, Miss Boyle, Faulkner, and Hemingway. The radical problem of the art exists in its necessary qualities of ambiguity and allegorical tension: in the degree to which the symbolic motive must remain involuntary to the experience or rooted in the matter of the genre, and in the degree to which that motive may derive from the conscious idea or moral design of the author. The balance of these factors is bound to remain acute and imperative to the authority of any fable. Without it the form either lapses into the static or conventional condition of parable, or becomes forced by the exertions of originality or ulterior intellectual ambition into a stultifying pedantry. To strike the necessary subtlety of balance and analogy requires a supreme instinct for evocation and reference; it needs also the firmest possible integration of idea with dramatic substance and the unobtrusive control of a strong poetic insight. When it has these the fable escapes the excessive didactic calculation of tales like "St. Mawr," "The Gentleman from San Francisco," and most of the works of Gide and takes on the exact authority we get in "Mario and the Magician" and Kafka's "Burrow" or, in more elaborate dramatic terms, in stories as different as "The Turn of the Screw" and "Flowering Judas."

Of Mr. Wescott's story, for all its sensitive insights, deft shaping, and hypnotic suggestive force, it must be said that the balance is never clearly defined or resolved. The dramatic substance of his scenes and characters does not manage to sustain the elaborate commentary he has imposed on it. The annotation becomes too elaborate, strained, ingenious, and self-conscious. A tendency toward a worrying preciosity of inference and analysis is never genuinely subdued to the natural volition of events and personalities, and the result becomes something too patently contrived and at times almost desperately voulu. This is not to minimize the beauty of many of its pages, the great superiority of its style and feeling to the general ruck of fiction, and its always subtly considered, often brilliant observations. The hieratic mystery of the bird, with its suggestions of the fatality of love, of ruthless energy in nature, and of the secret ordeal of art, manages to surmount the elaborate rites of falconry that have been studied and imposed on the tale. At times Mr. Wescott condenses his observation into judgments that express his story's motive with admirable point and ease:

Unrequited passion; romance put asunder by circumstances or mistakes; sexuality pretending to be love—all that is a matter of little consequence, a mere voluntary temporary uneasiness compared with the long course of true love, especially marriage. 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. . . . 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.

He can be reminded how "all pets, all domesticated animals, no matter how ancient or beautiful or strange, show a comic aspect sooner or later; a part of the shame of our humanity that we gradually convey to them," and again of "the absurd position of the artist in the midst of the disorders of those who honor and support him, but who can scarcely be expected to keep quiet around him for art's sake." He can define his personal difficulties and yet overshoot the mark of creative humility: "Again and again I give way to a kind of inexact and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgment in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil in me." Such lucidity of scruple produces a valuable alertness in the conscience of a writer, but it also leads to a serious enervation of tone, force, and unity in his narrative and to the exaggerated preciosity which is the major weakness of this book. The Pilgrim Hawk is by way of being a serious assessment of talent and purpose; in what it does to sublimate the aesthetic inflation and self-regard of Wescott's earlier work it indicates a fresh discipline that may recover the exquisite pastoral lyricism of The Apple of the Eye and direct it to finer uses. The question hangs in suspense. The book indicates a renewal of courage and critical insight in its author, but in itself it tests and exercises, rather than masters, the faculties that have given us the finest examples of modern fable.