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by Henderson Kincheloe?
Author: Richard Brautigan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster (New York)
Type of work: Novel
Time: 1902
Locale: Hawaii, San Francisco, and Oregon
An amusing short novel which parodies traditional Western stories, gothic romances, and symbolic tales of good and evil
Principal characters:
Greer and Cameron, two professional killers
Miss Hawkline, a professor's daughter
Magic Child, another Miss Hawkline dressed first as an Indian girl and later like her identical twin sister
The Monster
It's a long, long way from the pages of Bret Harte, Zane Grey, Max Brand, and other Western writers to Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster. The novel contains many of the ingredients that have gone into Western stories for a hundred years or more: San Francisco's Chinatown, two killers for hire, prostitutes, a pretty Indian girl, a traveling salesman, a stagecoach, two frontier towns, a hanged man, a town marshal, a barren landscape, and a lonely house in the hills. But Brautigan's subtitle, A Gothic Western, partly prepares the reader for other ingredients that the early Western writers would scarcely have dreamed of putting into their stories. This novel, for example, has a whorehouse with naked teen-age whores (Bret Harte always used fancy circumlocutions to avoid calling older females of that sort by their professional titles), and an Indian girl who graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe, attended the Sorbonne, and studied medicine at Johns Hopkins, specializing in surgery. It has a former Harvard chemistry professor with an underground laboratory in a huge yellow Victorian mansion isolated in the Dead Hills of eastern Oregon, and mysteriously surrounded for a hundred years by grass that remains frozen even under a hot July sun, and great caves of ice beneath the underground laboratory. It further sports and evil influence "mutated" from a chemical mixture in the laboratory; a man spellbound in the form of a piece of household furniture; another man shrunken after death from a seven-foot giant to a thirty-one-inch dwarf and then returned to life and to giant size after burial in a suitcase; and a number of verbal vulgarisms, one of which is used variously by the author and all of the main characters, including the monster, as verb, present participle, noun, or violent expletive (the monster utters it explosively in large capital letters in the climactic scene of the story).
The Hawkline Monster's plot is wild and simple. Magic Child, an Indian girl, finds Greer and Cameron, two professional killers, in a Portland, Oregon, brothel and interrupts their entertainment with two of the young nude inmates in order to pay them $2,500 each for an unspecified task to be explained to them later by Miss Hawkline. Miss Hawkline, who lives in an enormous, many-gabled Victorian mansion in eastern Oregon, is the identical twin of Magic Child who, divested of her Indian garb and reclothed at home, cannot be distinguished from her sister. Miss Hawkline wishes Greer and Cameron to kill a monster that inhabits immense ice caves beneath a chemical laboratory under the house. The monster apparently murdered Professor Hawkline, the twins's father, who disappeared into the ice caves in pursuit of the monster. Cameron solves the mystery of the monster and destroys it in a fire which burns the mansion and creates a permanent lake when the fire melts the ice in the caves. The destruction of the monster also releases to normal life both Professor Hawkline who, under a mischievous spell, has been serving as an elephant-foot umbrella stand; and Mr. Morgan, the butler, who, after a sudden and mysterious death, shrank from a giant corpse to that of a dwarf before being buried, and who later popped out of his dusty grave in his original seven-foot two-inch, three-hundred-pound form.
The Hawkline Monster combines characteristics of classic Westerns, modern gothic romances, and symbolic takes of good and evil. Brautigan also spoofs all three fictional genres in telling the outlandish story; in the casual and frequently joking presentation of his characters, their language, their thoughts, and their eccentricities; and in his many shifts of style and point of view. He often repeats information for the benefit of rapid or inattentive readers who may have forgotten something of been distracted by the scattered scenes of sexual activity or by minor characters and details introduced without any real reason.
Brautigan throws in occasional figures of speech suited to a coarse folktale. A stagecoach driver has gone upstairs to have "coffee" with a boarding-house keeper, and "The squeaking of the bedsprings shook the house like mechanical rain." A town marshal apologizes for his vulgar speech in the presence of Magic Child: I've got a tongue that was hatched on an outhouse seat." (He should hear her colorful language, picked up from her father, which can sometimes match his.) When Magic Child sees the brass bed on which she will have first Greer and then Cameron, the second while the first is contentedly resting, the bed, reports the author, "shined like a pot of gold beneath the rainbow."
Some speech figures, of a different sort, might well be used to describe a surrealist painting. Over a field of slaughtered sheep, vultures hover "like flesh angels summoned to worship at a large spread-out table." In the barren Dead Hills a road wanders "like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills," and when the end of the road is reached (some pages later) the figure is completed: "The road stopped like a dying man's signature on a last-minute will."
The jacket of The Hawkline Monster announces that it is a major novel, but this claim should be regarded no more seriously than Brautigan obviously considered the book in writing it. Some symbol-conscious young English instructors or their bright students may be tempted to search for profound meanings in passages about the monster representing a force for mischief or evil, and about its shadow desiring to be freed from following it. This would be a waste of time and effort. The novel should be read for fun. This it will provide, if the reader is not repelled by the repeated vulgarisms, or the occasional coarseness.
Masterplots 1975 Annual
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1976. 144-146
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