(John Hawkes, pictured on the left)1971
What is Lime? What is Time?
The immediate question raised by John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig is to what does the title refer? What is a lime twig? Not too surprisingly, it is a trap, a sticky preparation of holly, mistletoe and other plants, called birdlime1. This is spread on twigs to capture small birds, a lime twig. John Hawkes’s lime twig is not a thing. It is a man, one William Hencher. The captured bird is Michael Banks.
Hencher is sticky, in the sense, that past and present are glued together by his presence. When Hencher attaches himself to Michael and Margaret Banks, he seals their fate as surely as a lime twig would seal the fate of a wren. When Hencher makes his commitment to the Banks and their dream, birds flutter about in association.
Could I not blow smiles onto their nameless lips, could I not force apart those lips with kissing? One of the gulls came round from the kitchen and started beating the glass.2
The gull beating the glass hints of a bird on the edge of a trap, or trapped and beating its wings to escape. From this moment the Banks’ dreams are cemented to Hencher’s memories. “How permanent some transients are at last,”3 says Hencher. Past, present and bird-trap become one. A remembrance of things past warns of Michael bank’s future as Hencher “hears a little bird trying to sing on the ledge where kidney’s used to freeze”.4
The novel begins with Hencher, whose name suggests his role in the story and the theory of time portrayed by Hawkes in the novel. the relationship between the name Hencher and his role as henchman is obvious. He is a henchman in its two meanings: “an associate of crime; a trusted attendant, supporter or follower.”5 The second relationship is subtle. Hencher is close to the word “hence”. Hence is “from this point forward”.6 Hencher is the perpetuator. Hence from his memories of the past he moves into the Banks’ present, and hence, he seals their future.
Here is a working theory of time and consciousness. Time is continuous. Event A leads to Event B to Event C and so forth. But these events are not continuous within any single consciousness. If Hencher’s relationship with his mother is Event A and leads to his relationship with the Banks, Event B which leads to Event C, stealing a race horse, on and on to Event Z, the police discovering Hencher’s body, can be seen as continuous cause and effect in time, tying past to present to future; it is still broken into installments of individual consciousness. Hencher never knows the race’s outcome, Bank’s never knows of Margaret’s fate, the police know nothing of the events surrounding the discovered corpse. In other words, events happen in sequence, but the participants see only parts of the event, like islands in the fog, a fact most obvious in dreams where unrelated memories, fears and facts join to create a continuous, but enigmatic, sequence for the dreamer.
The Fulfilled Dreams
If a problem with The Lime Twig is that unlike most twentieth-century novels, it does not concern men living lives of quiet desperation,7 then it must concern some other way of living. It concerns men living their fulfilled dreams. An advertising blurb states, “you suffer The Lime Twig like a dream”.8 How apropos the use of the word “suffer”. The characters in the novel suffer having their dreams come true.9
Dreams permeate the novel. Hencher says, “a man must take possession of a place if it is to be a home for the waiting out of dreams”.10 Hencher not only takes possession of the Banks’ home, he takes possession of the Banks’ dreams.
“Margaret has been dreaming of a nice picnic.”11 This is the first dream Hencher makes come true. “And not long after -- a month or a fortnight perhaps -- I urged them to take a picnic...”12 But there are other dreams for Hencher to discover. “Behind each silent face was the dream that would collect slack shadows and tissues and muscles into some first need for the day... For a moment the vague restless dreams merely went faster beneath these two faces.”13
Hencher learns that Michael Banks’ “own worst dream, and best, was of a horse”.14 At this point, the past, present and future are forever joined. Hencher can get Banks his horse, but will need help and Hencher knows old wartime associates, now in the underworld, who can help. But Larry, the ex-Captain “dishonorably mustarded from the forces,”15 takes over the situation and turns Hencher into a lime twig.
Hencher has lived out his dream and out lived his use. Margaret and Michael are left to live out their own dream. Margaret has already suffered her worst dream; coming home to find her husband gone.16 Now she must live out her use. And Michael has his horse.
A few moments before Michael gets his horse, he reflects on the fog rolling into shore. he thoughts explain much about the structure of the novel and the relationship between events in time and events in the consciousness.
Yet, whatever was to come his way would come, he knew, like this -- slowly and out of a thick fog. Accidents, meetings unexpected, a figure emerging to put its arms about him; where to discover everything he dreamed of except in a fog. And, thinking of slippery corners, akin suddenly bruised, grappling hooks going blindly through the water: where to lose it all if not in the same white fog.17
And in that single reflection is his apprehension that his dreams fulfilled may not be all he had hoped.
The Novel of Apprehension
It has been said that novel’s are told from someone’s memories.18 If this is so, in The Lime Twig it is so in a different manner than other novels. There is an immediacy to the narrative, making the reader feel things are happening as he reads, that the past has just happened while he was engaged with some other present, and that things are going to happen which he would rather did not, but cannot be stopped.
It is all noise of people wanting a look at the world and a smell of the sea, and the woman was midships with her basket, soon in the shadow of the bow anchor she would be trying to find a safe spot for her folding chair.19
Referring to the woman in the future tense, “she would be trying’, gives a feeling of a narrative speaking in the present, the exact moment when the Artemis20 prepares to depart, with his reference to “it was all noise of people” being in the immediate past. This type of narration continues throughout the novel.
This adds to the apprehension always present in the novel and causes a constant tension for the reader. It is like taking a dangerous trip down a dangerous road we have seen in pictures but never traveled. We know of the curves ahead, we fear them, but the curves will come and come and come. The reader feels he knows the events to come in the novel, but nonetheless, they come and come and come.
Apprehension begins with the first ironic prediction of Sidney Slyter, “...and with your young woman go off to a fancy flutter at the races”.21 As Sidney states in his last column this prediction comes true, but Banks’ fancy flutter is not “good fun for our morality”.22 “Alone amidst women [Banks went] off to a fancy flutter at the races,”23 but it is in an opposite sense than Sidney intended.
Apprehension of death hangs over the novel.24 Hencher apprehends his own death while sitting in a crushed bomber wearing the pilot’s flying helmet. “My bloody coronet in place at last,”25 he says. later we find Hencher killed when a horse kicks in his head, giving him a real coronet of blood.. This apprehension is even clearer in light of the second meaning of the word coronet, the part of the horse just above the hoof”.26 If Hencher did not realize what his death would be, he did realize he “wasn’t destined to die with a fat brass finger in his belly”.27
Margaret, beaten and bleeding, recalls the woman she had known who was run over by a bus and died. Margaret feels that she too could die.28
Michael Banks is always surrounded by apprehension. Sidney Slyter, being at a different perspective from Michael, constantly interprets Banks’ life in ironic terms. Banks’ predicts his own future while waiting in an evening fog: “Accidents, meetings unexpected, a figure emerging to put its arm about him”.29 The use of the words “its arms about him” suggests the figure of death embracing him. And finally, the most apprehensive statement in the novel: “It was 2 A.M. of the last night he spent alive”.30
It is surprising how suspenseful the novel is considering it gives warning of everything that happens, but perhaps that is part of the terror, knowing what will happen, but hoping it won’t.
There is another level to the novel where apprehension becomes reflection. This is a reflection of the war between good and evil for the Kingdom of heaven. In the novel when all seems lost, Michael triumphs.
The Battle for Heaven and Other Gothic Themes
In Christian tradition, Michael is the leader of the angels and led them in triumph over the angels of Hell.31 Is it only coincidence that banks is named Michael and his opponent, Larry, is described as an “angel of Heaven or Hell, surely...time stuck safely like a revolver in his pocket”?32 there is no doubt Larry is an angel of hell when it is known he is in league with Sibylline, whose name means “witch’33 and witches are in league with the devil.
In the end, Michael triumphs over Larry by stopping the race.34 This is Banks’ redemption. “And redeemed he has been redeemed -- for there is no pathetic fun or mournful frolic like our desire, the consummation of the sparrow’s wing...”35
In Banks’ consummation the book’s cycle is complete. But in the continuum of time there is no completion. Hence the body of Hencher is discovered by the police and new events begin.
There are gothic overtones in the novel. Angels of Hell and Heaven, witches, and the sense of nightmare surrounded by tableaus of horror: a man kicked to death by a horse36, a throat slit in a bathhouse,37 a woman beaten to death,38 a child shot through the stomach,39 a twisted jumble of horse and men.40 The Lime Twig is what Leslie A. Fiedler tags the higher level of Gothic. “From the time of Poe, two possibilities have been open in the gothic: the pursuit of genuine terror...or the evocation of sham terror.:41 What is terrifying about The Lime Twig is the reality of its events, found in any evening newspaper, and their possibility of happening to anyone.
“Who Knows What Evil Lurks?”42
Early in The Lime Twig, Hencher tells of a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield being run over by a fire truck.43 In The Vicar of Wakefield a man and his wife fall victim to a series of unbelievable catastrophes, which are happily resolved in the end.44 But John Hawkes knows this is not real life. The terror of The Lime Twig is believable, and the end not happy in any traditional sense.
John Hawkes know that too often dreams turn to nightmares. He knows that a man’s dreams are a personal thing, but when they begin coming true they mix with other men’s dreams and go beyond the dreamer’s control.
John Hawkes knows the evil in the hearts of men. he knows “the weed of crime bears bitter fruit”.45 There is another type of lime, the fruit. It smells sweet, but it tastes bitter. Michael Banks, like all men, is lured by the sweet smell, but when he gets a taste, it is bitter indeed.46
NOTES: JOHN HAWKES KNOWS
1 The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition (New York: Random House, 1969) under birdlime, hereafter cited as Dictionary.
2 John Hawkes, The Lime Twig (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1961) p. 26, hereafter cited as Hawkes.
3 Hawkes, p. 27.
4 Hawkes, p. 28, also note Michael’s association with the Oven tit on page 159.
5 Dictionary, under henchman.
6 Dictionary, under hence.
7 Dr. R. F. Marler, “Lecture on Modern Novel” (Philadelphia: Temple University, Nov. 3, 1971) hereafter cited as Lecture.
8 Flannery O’Connor, advertising blurb for The Lime Twig by John Hawkes (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961) back cover.
9 With the possible exception of the criminals who may not dream.
10 Hawkes, p. 27.
11 Hawkes, p. 26.
12 Hawkes, p. 27.
13 Hawkes, p. 26.
14 Hawkes, p. 33.
15 Hawkes, p. 11.
16 Hawkes, p. 33.
17 Hawkes, pp. 44-45.
18 Lecture (Oct. 28, 1971); I do not think that memory on part of the author means the novel must be memory.
19 Hawkes, p. 37.
20 Hawkes, p. 34, Artemis is on the moon, times of dreams.
21 Hawkes, p. 3.
22 Hawkes, pp. 3 and 163.
23 Hawkes, p. a63.
24 I think it could be shown that Larry is the angel of death.
25 Hawkes, p. 23.
26 Dictionary, under coronet.
27 Hawkes, p. 10.
28 Hawkes, p. 130.
29 Hawkes, pp. 44-45.
30 Hawkes, p. 111.
31 Rev. Hugo Hoever, Lives of the Saints (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co, 1961) pp. 381-82, hereafter cited as Hoever.
32 Hawkes, p. 139.
33 Dictionary, under Sibyl. Sybilline’s last name is Laval, and under Laval in the dictionary is the name Pierre Laval, a French premier executed for treason in 1943. Sybilline is a traitor and according to Dante, traitors are in the deepest section of Hell.
34 Hoever, pp. 320-21. Margaret Banks, like St. Margaret, is on her deathbed as her husband dies in battle. See Hawkes, pp. 172-72, for proof that Margaret was still alive when Michael was killed.
35 Hawkes, p. 163.
37 Hawkes, p. 116.
38 Hawkes, pp. 127-30
39 Hawkes, p. 161.
40 Hawkes, p. 171.
41 Leslie A. Fielder, Love and Death in the American Novel, 2nd ed. (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 503.
42 Jim Harmon, The Great Radio Heroes (New York: Ace books, 1967), p. 48, hereafter cited as Harmon.
43 Hawkes, p. 11.
44 Collier’s Encyclopedia, 1963, under “Goldsmith, Oliver”, Vol. 11, pp. 206-07.
45 Harmon, p. 60.
46 Hawkes, pp. 54 and 107.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fiedler, Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel, 2nd ed., New York: Dell, 1966.
“Goldsmith, Oliver,” Collier’s Encyclopedia. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1963, vol. 11, pp. 206-07.
Harmon, Jim, The Great Radio Heroes. New York: Ace Books, 1967, pp. 48-64.
Hawkes, John, The Lime Twig. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1961.
Hoever, Rev. Hugo, Lives of the Saints. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co, 1961, pp. 320-21, 381-82.
Marler, Dr. R. F., “Lectures on Modern Novel”. Philadelphia: Temple University, 1971.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Random House, 1968, pp. 13236, 301, 617, 758, 1221.
For more on John Hawkes, click on the title of this post.
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