On this side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth Hardwick tends to live in the shadow of her husband, Robert Lowell.In America, however, she is seen as a major literary figure in her own right.Born in Kentucky, she decided early on that New York was the place to develop a career that encompassed the creation of the New York Review of Books, teaching at Columbia, and three novels, including the peerless, semi-autobiographical Sleepless Nights. Hardwick also published four collections of sometimes acerbic essays on literary topics as well as on people and places, including Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife, Marina, and Mick Jagger at Altamont. She became part of the Manhattan glitterati and was described as ‘a Blanche Dubois with a steely will’.
Her marriage to Lowell seems to have reduced her need, or opportunity, to produce fiction, and there was a twenty-four gap between her second novel The Simple Truth and Sleepless Nights which was written after Lowell’s death, in 1977. In this book there is a twenty-one year gap between ‘The Purchase’ published in 1959 and ‘Cross-Town’ published in 1980. Between the earlier and late fiction, the style changes from a stringent free indirect speech accompanied by piercingly precise description, to a much warmer style in which reflection is buoyed up in the syntax rather than meeting the reader on the surface of the writing.
In the earlier stories, the characters can seem like birds fluttering in cages of their own making, displaced from their own experience; their ‘too many inward, hypochodriacal reveries’. In ‘Yes or No’, the female narrator reflects on her youthful relationship with Edgar who has adored her and been, damningly, ‘kind, considerate and honest’. We can see that the narrator’s attempt at shrewdness about Edgar masks a deluded solipsism. The story is framed by her regret at the loss of Edgar, but the reader is left to wonder whether it was the young woman or Edgar who ended the relationship. Russell, in ‘The Final Conflict’, manages a dusty, disorderly antique shop and falls into a relationship with Marianne, who comes into the shop one day. Marianne is the first person Russell has ever met who has been successful; she has won a scholarship to study fashion design, although she rather ambivalently views New York as the only destination for a fashion designer. As Marianne’s attachment to Russell grows, so his peevish, complacent distain grows too. ‘The dreadful quiet, that was what Russell meant by hard work.’
The later stories placed in the final third of the book take on a more post-modern hue; none more so than ‘Cross-town’ in which a series of seeming epiphanies coalesce oddly and magically around the decision of a couple to sell up and move to Manhattan. But character studies run through the heart of the book: Roger, the eponymous ‘Bookseller’ drifts in relationships with women, and writes constantly rejected novels. At the same time, he keeps his shop going, amiably and unpretentiously with ‘his great stars, Kafka, Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Joyce, Akhmatova – all of these shine on and on and on’. The book ends with the marvellous ‘Shot: A New York Story’, in which the attachments a group of quite disparate people have to their cleaner, Zona’, are revealed through pitch-perfect dialogue when Zona’s nephew comes to collect money to have her body taken back to her home in the south: Zona has been shot in a New York taxi.
Ian Pople