FORMIDABLE HARDWICK! Most writers are quickly forgotten after their deaths. But Elizabeth Hardwick, since her dying in 2007, has achieved a uncommon transfiguration. Having left behind the indignities of mortal life—hangovers, rashes, insomnia, unwritten lectures, misplaced listening to aids—she has been enshrined as an mental totem. Publishers have introduced out not only a Collected Essays, as one would possibly count on, however an Uncollected Essays, foraging by again problems with Mademoiselle and Home & Backyard for each glittering fragment. Different literary productions have whetted, not sated, the readerly urge for food for all issues Hardwickian. The Dolphin Letters, printed in 2019, assembled, amongst different materials, correspondence between Hardwick and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, chronicling their separation. A biography, by Cathy Curtis, introduced out final 12 months, appears destined to be the primary of a number of. Hardwick is quickly turning into established as a basic, to be positioned on the shelf subsequent to Hazlitt. (Not, God forbid, subsequent to Lillian Hellman, who after receiving a nasty overview apparently instructed her buddies to “reduce” Hardwick on the road.)
The resurgence of curiosity in Hardwick may appear shocking. This discovered critic, most at house in basic British and American literature, whose intricate essays assume familiarity with a literary canon that now goes largely unread: It’s she who’s so lauded? A easy clarification could suffice: the tradition desires what it lacks. For proof, have a look at the husband. Lowell, worshipped as a genius in his personal lifetime for his confessional artwork, appears much less outstanding now in a tradition the place unmodulated self-baring has develop into an ordinary literary technique.
Into the breach tumbles Darryl Pinckney, whose memoir Come Again in September is the most recent contribution to the Hardwick revival. Pinckney’s narrative is, in its outlines, the basic literary coming-of-age story. A younger man arrives in New York, hoping to develop into a author. Literature is his faith, and he finds, on the slim island, a metropolis populated by demigods, authors whose phrases he has chanted and memorized, as if Manhattan have been a debased Olympus. He sees that the world of concepts is wider and deeper than he knew. He reads, he writes, he drinks all night time.
He learns that the republic of letters is a coterie, a “scene.” To enter this closed society, he’ll want a information. So, he finds a mentor, a Kentucky-born girl with a regal drawl and fluttering fingers and eyes like “blue gasoline flame.” Who else however Hardwick? She is the nice central solar round which the whole lot on this guide revolves.
The years Pinckney conjures up, the Seventies and early ’80s, cowl probably the most vital interval of Hardwick’s profession. The story begins in 1973, when younger Pinckney meets “Professor Hardwick” as a pupil in her creative-writing class at Barnard. A 12 months later, she publishes Seduction and Betrayal, on girls in literature, broadly thought of her most interesting work of criticism; her virtuosic novel Sleepless Nights adopted not lengthy after, in 1979. In between these two pinnacles of prose there occurred a lot non-public sorrow. Her decades-long entanglement with Lowell resulted in 1977, when he arrived lifeless at her Higher West Aspect condominium, having suffered a coronary heart assault within the taxi on the best way from the airport.
Pinckney data these occasions, and plenty of others from this key section in Hardwick’s life, in intimate element. By recalling snatches of dialog, books learn and sentences written, paths taken by the streets of Manhattan (from School Stroll to Broadway all the way down to the condominium on West Sixty-Seventh Road, the place the blue-eyed sage sipped Bordeaux on her pink couch), Pinckney conveys a way of every day life on this now-vanished literary world. However his guide is emphatically not a biography. He makes this clear early, when he dandyishly declines to examine a truth: “I might perhaps discover out from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell . . . if I bought up from this chair and went in quest of it.” As if plucking a guide from the shelf entailed better exertion than writing the sentences we’re studying! The purpose is the refusal to abide by the protocols of biography, the desire for reminiscence over actual scholarship.
Hardwick would seemingly approve. She steadily bemoaned the banality of biography, a “scrofulous cottage trade” responsible of churning out bloated research in pedestrian prose, whose practitioners, missing in type or imaginative and prescient, fetishized the uncooked materials of the archive like diggers in “beforehand looted pharaonic tombs.” Her favourite life research have been jagged and idiosyncratic: De Quincey on the Lake Poets, Henry James on Hawthorne. “The ‘inaccurate and incomplete’ memoirs so many students spend a lifetime irritably, nervously correcting,” she pronounced, “are among the many treasures of our tradition.” In like spirit, Pinckney has given us an introspective character examine, freewheeling and impressionistic, wherein he performs Boswell to Hardwick’s Johnson.
Boswell was, by the way, one among Hardwick’s touchstones. Though she thought that his lifetime of Johnson was a “miracle,” she expressed ethical skepticism about his technique of composition. There was one thing unsavory about besotted Bozzy inserting himself into literary historical past by greedy the nice man’s coattails. “Dr. Johnson is treasured,” she remarked, “however odium attaches to his giddy memorialist.” Pinckney, who quotes this line, appears conscious of the danger. After he accidently burns down his condominium on the Higher West Aspect, his journals broken within the blaze, Hardwick feedback tartly: “A cheerful occasion. In all probability the whole lot I ever stated.” Pinckney nonetheless musters a wealth of fabric, whether or not retrieved from reminiscence or deciphered from the charred stays. The guide is stuffed with selection quotations from the lapidary woman of letters. On ingesting: “Don’t get drunk except you’ve got cause.” On writing: “My first drafts at all times learn as if they’d been written by a rooster.” On Pinckney, her “expensive little protégé”: “You got here to New York to be what you’re. . . . A mad black queen.”
Regardless of its ambiance of nostalgia, Come Again in September marks a sure maturation for Pinckney. It’s an assured dealing with of themes and strategies he has been working with throughout his profession. He revisits the section of life explored in his quasi-autobiographical novels Excessive Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016). Each of those narratives observe a younger, inventive Black man casting round aimlessly—in New York and Paris in Excessive Cotton; in West Berlin, simply earlier than the autumn of the Wall, in Black Deutschland—halfheartedly trying to make his manner in a world that cares extra about his darkish pores and skin than his meticulously cultivated interiority. These novels comprise some cameo appearances from literary celebrities that now appear newly suggestive. Pinckney’s icons of mental authority are sometimes girls. In Excessive Cotton, his protagonist works as a handyman for an aged Djuna Barnes, frail and cantankerous in her Greenwich Village condominium. In Black Deutschland, his hero meets Susan Sontag in a Berlin file retailer. Pinckney’s sympathy for female genius, richly elaborated on this memoir, runs by his work like a golden thread.
Pinckney has at all times been formally formidable. His fiction may be cryptic. Fastidious on the stage of the sentence, his novels appear to withstand any bigger design. They drift and meander from one intense, compressed scene to the following, plunging into reminiscence at will: literature as montage. Black Deutschland, whose hero-in-exile devotes himself to “soulful walks” by Berlin’s streets and passageways, toggles disorientingly between Berlin and Chicago, current and previous, as if the novel itself is engaged in a type of metaphysical flânerie. In Come Again in September, this formal looseness feels acceptable. Pinckney’s roving type, his impressionist blurring, elevates a society memoir right into a kaleidoscopic portrait of Seventies New York. The solid of characters is massive. His ordinary strategy of surrounding a passive, observant hero with a gallery of vibrant character-portraits is deployed to high quality impact. Jim Jarmusch, Stanley Crouch, and Nan Goldin are only a few of the figures who flit by this amiably populated memoir. Pinckney’s chronological maneuvering, assisted by a whole lot of digressive parentheticals wherein he displays on youth from the vantage level of expertise, makes this work a poignant examine of reminiscence in motion.
What does Pinckney keep in mind? He remembers a literary world dominated by two forces: poetry and gossip. That is, unmistakably, a group wherein poetry is held in larger regard than it’s now. Hardwick and her circle revere poets, commit poetry to coronary heart, recite poems aloud, quote traces in dialog, and skim poetry earlier than writing a line of prose. (Sure, Hardwick knew most of the nice postwar poets personally, by Lowell. However poetry saturated the literary atmosphere in different methods: the New York College was giving readings downtown, and the modernists remained in dwelling reminiscence.) For the writers in younger Pinckney’s orbit—lots of them affiliated with the New York Assessment of Books—evaluations and essays, quite than sonnets or haiku, are the circulating forex of the realm. However poetry is exalted as a template. “Write criticism as fastidiously as you’ll poetry,” Hardwick advises. A blow, then, when she tells Pinckney, after studying his apparently wretched stanzas, that he mustn’t write poetry anymore.
Second solely to poetry is gossip, which this coterie embraces with a marked frankness and depth. Sitting on the pink couch with Hardwick and New York Assessment coeditor Barbara Epstein, Pinckney takes in a stream of denunciation, reward, criticism, judgment, and psychological hypothesis. Fame and charisma are the principle items on this literary economic system, and within the stream of remarks Pinckney discerns who’s up and who’s down. Hardwick on gossip: “Gossip is simply evaluation of the absent individual, Barbara and I at all times say. Then we let the absent individual have it.”
There’s a deep affinity between gossip and literature, as any web page of Jane Austen will present. The swapping of tales, the interpretation of character, the epigrammatic put-down, the scrumptious, revealing element: no surprise writers relish it. Pinckney weaves a tapestry of gossip, stuffed with smatter and chatter. Charismatic Sontag is a frequent goal. “The brand new 12 months started with violent denunciations of Susan Sontag,” he writes. An editor describes the primary draft of a Sontag essay as a “large blob of snot”; Hardwick presents that Sontag has “no ear.” At a studying on the 92nd Road Y, Pinckney observes ungenerously, Sontag’s black trousers make “her rear appear huge.” She is noticed dancing with Fran Lebowitz at a bar known as the Cock Ring.
Different literary luminaries take punches, too. At James Baldwin’s funeral service, Toni Morrison speaks “largely about herself.” Mary McCarthy’s work in progress is “appalling.” “You’d assume Mary had by no means learn Sartre’s Les mots and even Simone de Beauvoir,” Hardwick says, aghast. Not even the kids are spared. Again in Boston, Hardwick reveals, Adrienne Wealthy’s younger sons would hit Hardwick’s daughter whereas the kids performed collectively within the park—the poet-mother’s denunciations of the patriarchy be damned.
Pinckney escorts us right into a homosexual bar and picks up fragments of speak together with his roving microphone: “Nobody reads the Eclogues however queers.” “Sylvia Miles would go to the opening of a fridge.” “Somerset Maugham fucked me from behind.”
His story ends earlier than the AIDS epidemic actually begins: “It was the final summer time earlier than we believed within the plague.” This guide captures a world, then, that’s irrevocably misplaced. This city inventive subculture was devastated. Most of the younger males we meet in these pages, filled with promise and vitality, would quickly perish. In dozens of parentheticals (“he died of AIDS . . . he died of AIDS . . . he died of AIDS . . .”), Pinckney pays tribute to the lifeless.
His queerness doesn’t defend Hardwick from vicious hypothesis about what “this previous white Southern girl” is doing “with a black boy in his twenties.” “She had place and I none,” he remembers. “But the vulnerability was hers, not mine.” He turns into acquainted with Hardwick’s vulnerabilities in different methods, too: her medical worries, her ingesting, her sorrow over Lowell. He resembles a personality in a Henry James story who, upon befriending an older author, finds that the revered idol wants safety—that the duty of artwork is, in brief, precarious, and the literary lion secretly nurses a wounded paw.
But perhaps the vulnerabilities have been Pinckney’s in any case. Hardwick warns him in opposition to “imitating her, which, she might guarantee me, was a lifeless finish.” She cautions him in opposition to being too “literary.” “I believe the worst factor that ever occurred to you was assembly me,” she laughs. Writers study by imitating. Emulation is a well-tested path to invention. However charismatic affect can corrupt originality. Pinckney appears to surprise, in these passages, if he has lingered an excessive amount of in Hardwick’s shadow.
In Come Again in September, Pinckney transforms mentor into muse. It’s a loving portrait, however not a hagiographic one. He quotes Hardwick saying, for instance, that she wouldn’t need her daughter to marry a Black man (“due to the issues the kids would have”), and that “white girls with black males have been inferior Desdemona varieties and black males with white girls weren’t critical.”
Hardwick was recognized for her good dialog and her wealthy, fluid, drawling voice. However right here she comes alive most dazzlingly in moments of silence. She cherished the picture, in De Quincey’s guide on the Lake Poets, of Wordsworth at tea, reducing open the pages of a guide with a greasy butter knife. Pinckney, like De Quincey, has a high quality eye for gesture. He reveals us Hardwick throwing herself again in her chair after studying a line from Pasternak, “gentle brownish layers of hair answering”; shaking her head, uncertain, as she spoons juice over a baking dish; fiddling along with her amber necklace; putting her toes, clad in suede heels with rhinestone butterflies on the toes, up on the espresso desk; lifting her goblet of vodka to carry forth about “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In these expressive actions we really feel the thrust of a persona that’s energetic, embodied, not but frozen into crystalline prose.
Within the Hardwick period, poetry and gossip are inseparable. Pinckney’s memoir presents us a poetics of gossip: the clever association of intimate element. His intention is, in Hardwick’s phrases, “evaluation of the absent individual.” And he offers, within the memoir’s ultimate part, an indirect reply to The Dolphin, the book-length poem into which Lowell inserted, and altered, Hardwick’s pained letters. Pinckney, too, inserts letters from Hardwick, written from throughout the Atlantic. Like Lowell, he mines her phrases for materials. This previous technique of betrayal is remodeled, made benign, as if Pinckney is making an attempt to restore the previous harm, ease the sting of a wound inflicted way back.
Maybe it’s the secret dream of each devoted reader to go into literature, to develop into one with the printed phrases on the web page. By way of the power of her studying, Hardwick achieved this, successful a posthumous existence as each creator and character. She elected to play an uncommon and tough function: the critic as artist. Pinckney’s portrait asks us to share his admiration for a author who noticed the essay, even the guide overview, not as a disposable type of journalism however as a chance for literary creation.
Charlie Tyson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard. His writing has appeared within the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Baffler, and different publications.
