THE LIME TWIG

Norfolk: New Directions, 1961. First Edition. 8vo, bound in the original red cloth, lettered in black on the spine panel. xiv, 175 pp. A clean and tight copy.. FIRST EDITION. 'The work is told in a framed narrative, with the commentary of the sports writer Sidney Slyter prefacing each chapter (at the request of Hawkes' publisher New Directions, who feared that the novella would be too confusing otherwise). Hencher narrates the first chapter, which concerns his recollections of life with his mother during World War II. The other chapters are all presented in a third-person limited style with a focus on the banal inner lives of Michael and Margaret Banks. The style is one of broken, dreamlike sequences, which suspend time in a quintessentially postmodern fashion. The novella's accumulation of events acts as wish fulfillment run amok for Michael and Margaret, both of whom become helplessly entrapped in fantasies that turn into nightmares. Hawkes underscores the theme of entrapment imagistically, with fleeting references to a sparrow attacked by a hive of bees, a wasp trapped between panes of glass, and so on. The title of the novel itself refers to the old practice of catching birds by spreading lime on a twig, the master trope of the narrative.'