A WRITER'S WIT
Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.
--The Pilgrim Hawk
Glenway Wescott
Born April 11, 1901
Boxed In
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Grant Cornett, Photograph
Wescott at 113
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Rosco makes clear that Glenway Wescott was a writer who wrote because he loved to, not because he felt he should make a living from it. A contemporary of Isherwood, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Wescott was befriended by most of these people (except for Hemingway who, in a homophobic fit, used Wescott as a model for a character in one of his novels).
Protagonist Alwyn Tower speaking: “Indeed, it was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue” (39).
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Short but piercing novel set entirely in one afternoon in 1940, one that turns out to be quite a charade. A woman “owns” a hawk as a pet, and it sets up obvious symbolism of control, freedom, but also a more subtle symbol for her marriage.