SOURCE: "The Whisper of the Devil," in The Nation, Vol. 151, No. 25, December 21, 1940, pp. 636-37.

Below, Zabel claims that The Pilgrim Hawk, with "its sensitive insights, deft shaping, and hypnotic suggestive force," ultimately fails as a fable because the "dramatic substance of his scenes and characters does not manage to sustain the elaborate commentary he has imposed on it. "

The Pilgrim Hawk with which Glenway Wescott returns to fiction after a twelve-year absence, is less a story of love than a fable, and it illustrates again, but more steadily and with greater critical weight, his natural inclination toward symbolic and legendary values in narrative. Where once he elaborated the mythic qualities of the pastoral or folk tale, the tribal ritual of the family photograph album, or the local daemon that haunts the country hearsay, superstition, crimes, defeats, and personal legends of his Midwestern homeland, he here reverts to a...