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SINCLAIR
LEWIS
THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) Two Reviews by Patrick Killough A. REVIEW for http://www.barnesand noble.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Your Title: The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is how your review will appear on the title page: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), on the trail of sinclair lewis, May 17, 2005, RATING OF THE BOOK: THREE STARS * * * TITLE OF THE REVIEW: Combining work and play on the upward trail Not only are there parallels between the thinking and careers of Sinclair Lewis and Rudyard Kipling but Lewis underlines them. Kipling was 20 years older, won his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, 23 years before Lewis. In novel after novel Lewis mentions Kipling and often quotes or alludes to him. Sinclair Lewis closes his 1915 novel THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK by invoking Kipling's poem 'L'Envoi,' itself a traditional metric way of summing up a prose work, 'The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass, And the deuce knows what we may do-- But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, We're down, hull down on the Old Trail--the trail that is always new.' With Kipling lodged in his imagination, Lewis tells of Norwegian American Carl Ericson, born in the same year as Lewis, 1885. When he was eight years old in Joralemon, Minnesota, Carl ran off on impulse into a cold night with Gertrude ('Gertie') Cowles, three years his senior. Again and again he will run off somewhere new. Occasionally he will long for a return to Joralemon. Years later Lewis's novel ELMER GANTRY will begin, 'Elmer Gantry was drunk.' The tamer TRAIL OF THE HAWK begins, 'Carl Ericson was being naughty.' Where does his naughtiness get Ericson? Does it give him the drive to transcend his boring small town origins? Or is it the local ice-fishing agnostic philosopher Bone Stillman who convinces Carl (Ch. V) that there is always something ahead on the trail that is bigger and you must either never stop until you find it or 'till you can't follow the road any more?' At tiny, second-rate Plato College Carl is attracted 'upwards' by a book-loving fellow-student and a radical professor. Along the way Carl discovers a talent for vehicles and design: automobiles and gliders. Carl defies entrenched authority at Plato and is dismissed for standing up for the radical Professor Frazer who says good things about socialism and evolution. For many, many months Carl wanders from place to place, job to job. He does some acting. Works as a bartender in New York City. Steams down to Panama. In that 1907 tropical paradise sought for all his life, he meets international adventurers who casually 'drawled about strange things which make a man discontented and bring him no good' (Ch. XVI). Carl then wanders through Mexico to California in 1909 where the desire to be a pioneer aviator obsesses him. His first solo at the Bagby flight school is so spectacular that a local Oakland reporter dubs him 'Ericson, the New Hawk of the Birdmen' (Ch. XVIII). For a few years he makes a sensational career in racing and air shows as 'Hawk Ericson' until his luck runs out and he crashes. The crash makes Hawk cautious and careful. He seeks a new trail combining both 'the adventure of business' (as an early designer of a recreational vehicle for an automobile manufacturer) and something entirely new which transcends humdrum routine, 'the adventure of love.' Repeatedly, he seeks a female 'playmate.' He oscillates between his childhood friend Gertie and newly found, in New York City, Ruth Winslow. Playmates play together, are good for each other. They sparkle in conversation. They long together for adventures and travel. Gertie will never run away and play with Hawk. Yet Hawk knows that he must run and soon (Ch. XXX), 'like the guy in Kipling that always got sick of reading the same page too long.' Gertie will not even go for long walks in the snow. But Ruth will. Ruth understands Hawk (Ch. XXXIII). 'All his life he had been seeking a girl who would, without apologetic explanation, begin a story with herself and him for its characters.' But even the best of playmates quarrel and Hawk is drawn back in spirit to Joralemon,, Minnesota and to Gertie. For Ruth's family seems too aristocratic to accept him, until a youngster in her family demands an autograph of the famous one- time aviator. Hawk Ericson realizes that he is a vagabond who needs a vagabond playmate. But can the higher, freer life of a vagabond survive marriage? Ruth has trouble imagining life with a poor man, with herself having to cook and clean clothes. The onset of World War One in August 1914 propels Hawk and Ruth to agree to marry and run off to the tropics (Ch. XLII). Their joint vocation would be 'keeping clear of vocations.' So the novel ends as Hawk and Ruth sail off in February 1915 for Buenos Aires where for not enough pay Hawk will manage the Argentine market for vehicles of the Van Zile Motor Corporation. When will their Argentine adventure end? As soon as making a living interferes with living. What will happen after Buenos Aires? They have no idea. They will just take the advice of Bone Stillman and Rudyard Kipling and keep on hoping for something grand somewhere up the trail. *** -OOO- Also recommended: Sinclair Lewis:Our Mr. Wrenn, Free Air, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry -OOO- 05/17/2005 ====-=-=-=-=-=-=-- B. REVIEW for http://www.amazon.com Here is your review the way it will appear: TITLE OF BOOK REVIEWED: Sinclair Lewis, THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK (1915) RATING OF THE BOOK: THREE STARS * * * TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Can Eden be re-entered after the Fall? May 18, 2005 Reviewer: T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) Carl Ericson, born in the same 1885 and in the same small town Minnesota as Sinclair Lewis, is the hero of Lewis's second novel, THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK (1915). Early on, mentors at home and in college convince Carl that there is something better than routine, conformity and merely making a living. Somewhere out on a long trail, possibly a trail with no end, there is a goal, a state of being, that will leave anyone contented, happy and living at the outermost limit of his talents. Carl Ericson has a bent for mechanical things: automobiles, gliders. After being expelled from mediocre Plato College for defending an unorthodox teacher, he wanders for many months through countries and occupations. Nothing holds him for long until, in California, he senses that he was meant to be a pilot. He proves one of the best of the flying pioneers, is called a "Hawk of the Birdmen" and is transformed into Hawk Ericson, hero to rich and poor, to common people and aristocrats. All but inevitably, however, in those dangerous early days of racing and barnstorming monoplanes and biplanes, the Hawk crashes and goes into hospital. Prudence damps down his soaring. He finds a job with an automobile manufacturer, invests his flying winnings in the company's efforts to create an early "RV," and proves a solid craftsman and leader of men doing important work. But Carl was now "a dethroned prince. He had been accustomed to a more than royal court of admirers. Now he was a nobody the moment he went twenty freet from his desk" (Ch. XXIV). Was there anything that would prevent Hawk from bolting once again from on the job humdrum? From hitting the trail all alone once more yearning for something higher and better? It might be that love of the right woman would give him excitement off the job. He had several choices, Gertie, his old boyhood pal, soft, plump, stable or Ruth, a thin aristocratic friend made in New York. Ruth sparkles, is amusing and shares with Hawk the heart of a carefree vagabond. Gertie is unwilling even to walk out into the snow with Hawk. Ruth, by contrast, is willing to run off with him to the South Seas. Ruth, in the end, becomes the female "playmate" that Carl has always needed. One kiss (Ch.XXXIX) "and Carl knew that life's real adventure is not adventuring, but finding the playmate with whom to quest life's meaning." The coming of World War One in August 1914 overcomes the rich girl's doubts about living what may be a life of privation and Hawk and Ruth wed. They have a vocation they can clearly share, "keeping clear of vocations" (Ch XLII). They sail in February 1915 for Argentina aboard the S.S. Sangrael (Holy Grail). In Buenos Aires, Hawk will sell American automobiles, at least for a while. After that, Hawk and Ruth Ericson will hit the upward trail together and stay on it as long as they can, spreading "Madness among the Respectable." In Carl (Hawk) Ericson there is presented the recurring Sinclair Lewis male hero who is never content for long where he is, who must always roam "somewhere else," to "greener pastures." Only once does a Lewis protagonist, Dr. Arrowsmith, find something close to paradise and that only by renouncing ordinary human man-woman love for life in an ascetic community of celibate males. Contentment is not something likely to be found on this earth or in anything this world offers. -OOO- Wednesday May 18, 2005 Black Mountain, NC TPK http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/sinclairlewis_trail-hawk.html |