"My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano"
About this Quote
Hawkes compresses a small family history into the cadence of longing. The double pulse of she wanted and most of all sets up a hierarchy of desire that feels at once ordinary and quietly tragic. Tennis suggests the sociable grace of a public life, a court where skill meets visibility. Singing and piano turn inward toward the arts of voice and discipline, a craft undertaken in rooms, with hours of practice, and the hope of an audience that hears and understands. The sentence implies not just tastes but thresholds that were never crossed.
Born in 1925, John Hawkes came of age in a world where many mothers carried ambitions that the era, money, or gender roles kept in abeyance. The wish to play tennis echoes middle-class aspiration and access, while the wish to be a singer and pianist reaches for a trained, public artistry. The wording makes yearning the subject and the mother its emblem, revealing a personal source for Hawkes’s sensitivity to frustrated dreams, the drift between inner life and outer circumstance that haunts his fiction.
Hawkes often wrote with a musical ear, arranging sentences by rhythm and tonal dissonance as much as by plot. It is easy to hear, in the mother who wanted to be a singer, an origin for that devotion to sound. The piano, with its strict scales and complex harmonies, mirrors his own practiced subversions of form; the voice suggests the naked exposure of confession that his novels resist and yet skirt. Even tennis, with its solitary duels and sudden shifts of momentum, has an analogue in his narratives of pursuit and evasive motion.
The tenderness here is unmistakable. He names the desires without bitterness, preserving them as possibilities his mother held and perhaps transmitted. The artist’s inheritance becomes not achievement but hunger, a sense of what might have been that turns into the creative engine of what can be made.
Born in 1925, John Hawkes came of age in a world where many mothers carried ambitions that the era, money, or gender roles kept in abeyance. The wish to play tennis echoes middle-class aspiration and access, while the wish to be a singer and pianist reaches for a trained, public artistry. The wording makes yearning the subject and the mother its emblem, revealing a personal source for Hawkes’s sensitivity to frustrated dreams, the drift between inner life and outer circumstance that haunts his fiction.
Hawkes often wrote with a musical ear, arranging sentences by rhythm and tonal dissonance as much as by plot. It is easy to hear, in the mother who wanted to be a singer, an origin for that devotion to sound. The piano, with its strict scales and complex harmonies, mirrors his own practiced subversions of form; the voice suggests the naked exposure of confession that his novels resist and yet skirt. Even tennis, with its solitary duels and sudden shifts of momentum, has an analogue in his narratives of pursuit and evasive motion.
The tenderness here is unmistakable. He names the desires without bitterness, preserving them as possibilities his mother held and perhaps transmitted. The artist’s inheritance becomes not achievement but hunger, a sense of what might have been that turns into the creative engine of what can be made.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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