Books |
Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick
By
Published: Dec 10, 2019
Category:
Fiction
GUEST BUTLER RON FRIED is the author of Christmas in Paris, 2002. His play, “Two Mailers,” is scheduled for an Off-Broadway production in the fall. He recently completed a novel about the gangster Frank Costello.
I had been taking a tour of well-received works of fiction by living authors in early middle age when I heard the news of Elizabeth Hardwick’s death. Hardwick was the fierce literary critic and essayist, co-founder of The New York Review of Books, former wife of Robert Lowell, and the author of many collections of essays, a study of Melville, and three novels.
The news prompted me to put aside the rather conventional, recently published 400-plus page volume I’d been lugging around so that I could re-read Hardwick’s brilliant and concise l979 novel,“Sleepless Nights”.
I felt the profound difference immediately: I was now spending time with a deeply serious, highly cultivated adult, rather than a clever adolescent.
I knew her a little bit. Elizabeth Hardwick taught the only organized writing class I ever took. This was in l976, when I was a junior at Columbia and Hardwick taught undergraduates at Barnard. There were fewer than a dozen of us in the class. My unspoken nickname for her was “Elizabeth ‘Devastating’ Hardwick” because she could be sweetly brutal in a southern, entirely feminine way. She dismissed then-stylish literary theorists as “the Yale football team.” She remarked that the only thing she ever learned from a poetry reading concerned the physical condition of the poet on the night of the reading. And I do cherish the memory of her saying with a laugh, “Half the idiots in the world went to Harvard and the other half went to Yale.”
Hardwick wasn’t always devastating. I remember her grabbing my copy of Isaac Babel stories and hugging it to her heart. She often spoke of the pleasure she took from a full day spent reading — or more likely re-reading — a masterpiece. When she discovered that I had not read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”, she seemed disappointed, almost sad for me.
But back to her little big book, back to “Sleepless Nights”.
John Ashbery once remarked that modern art is the leaving out process, and “Sleepless Nights” is an exhilarating — and hugely entertaining — example of that dictum. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
With its formal sophistication, epigrammatic wisdom, and freedom from the conventional demands of the novel, “Sleepless Nights” feels entirely modern, though it also feels like the product of another time — a more ambitious literary moment. Its influences are Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; Peter Handke’s account of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and Renata Adler’s concise l976 novel Speedboat, which Hardwick praised in The New York Review.
There is not much plot in Sleepless Nights, though its 151 pages capture the shapes of many lives. The novel travels from New York jazz clubs in the ’40s to Boston, Amsterdam, Holland and the heights of New York literary society. Along the way, Hardwick distills the essence of her Kentucky childhood and discreetly visits her tumultuous marriage to Robert Lowell. Throughout she displays her fierce eye for “the cemetery of home, education, nerves, heritage and ticks.”
And then there are the sentences — rich, witty, wise sentences that cut deep and sometimes pierce the heart. Early on we read, “The tyranny of the weak is a burdensome thing and yet it is better to be exploited by the weak than the strong. …with the weak something is always happening: improvisation, surprise, suspense, injustice, manipulation, hypochondria, secret drinking, jealousy, lying, crying, hidden in the garden, driving off in the middle of the night.”
“Sleepless Nights” is filled with lists — lists that illuminate the ironies of modern life. Take the “distresses of New Yorkers” as summarized by Hardwick: “Weaknesses discovered, hidden forces unmasked, predictions, what will last and what is doomed, what will start and what will end. Work and love; the idle imagining the pleasure of the working ones. Those who work with their quizzical frowns, which ask: When will something new come to me? After all I am sort of a success.”
Of course the prose is often devastating. We meet a woman named Judith: “Already, in the early spring, she has a suntan, just the lightest brown on her skin. She would like to do something better, something sacramental perhaps, but instead there is only the solitary climb up to the roof, in a sweater, to turn her pale face to the sun.” We meet a young gay man who takes up weight lifting: “By enormous effort, he finally succeeded in looking like others.” About a bored young woman, a “dramatic star of ennui,” we are told: “She will have an apartment, a lover, will take a few drugs, will listen to the phonograph, buy clothes, and something will happen. Perhaps it will be good — or at least what she likes.”
Yes, Hardwick liked to take the long view, and lord knows she could be condescending.
But throughout “Sleepless Nights” there is an abiding understanding of human frailty and failure. Hardwick’s narrator, an “I” named Elizabeth, speaks of her own “prying sympathy for the tendency of lives to obey the laws of gravity and to sink downward, falling as gently and slowly as a kite or violently breaking, smashing.”
Looking over the many haunting sentences I’ve bracketed in pencil over the years makes me want to keep quoting Hardwick again and again. “By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much,” she writes. “You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet.”
As Hardwick put it, “Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of sentences.”
Yes, indeed it is.
