We are led into a fretting, sleepless mind occupied by its agitated turning, a life expanding and collapsing upon itself so that it’s all playing out at once. “If I want a plot,” Hardwick once commented in a Paris Review interview, “I’d watch Dallas.”Īnd so these layers, transparencies, of the fictional Elizabeth laid atop the real Elizabeth are like the layers of time and place that make up Sleepless Nights. It moves along a poetic circuitry that creates itself, much the way consciousness creates itself. Pathos does not exist in a temporal realty. And pathos itself is what forms Sleepless Nights. Reading Sleepless Nights, we are absorbed, not by the momentum and velocity of story, but rather, by the fascinations of inner life.Īction, Aristotle once wrote, is not plot, but merely the result of pathos.
Incandescent, elliptical, challenging, her language itself is the story, and question of what is true and what is invented, what is fiction and what is memoir –– arguably one of the more tiresome literary questions of our current day –– pale against the excitement of watching Hardwick’s formidable (and at times hilarious) mind at work. As a critic, she was less interested in theory than in what the critic Denis Donoghue called a “working psychology” and this psychology –– the shape of a mind, thinking –– is what shapes Sleepless Nights. Hardwick, one of the great critics and intellectuals of her time, and a founder, along with Lowell, and Jason and Barbara Epstein, of The New York Review of Books, openly defied genre. And slowly the neck thickened, the chest expanded, the muscles of the arms were visible…by enormous effort, he finally succeeded in looking like the others.” (38) Hardwick and her friend spend time with Billie Holiday –– a time she describes in a 1976 essay in The New York Review of Books that contains many descriptions and details, sentences (“One winter she wore a great lynx coat and in it she moved, menacing and handsome as a Cossack, pacing about in the trap of her vitality”) that are identical to the corresponding scene (p 33) that she later wrote as fiction in Sleepless Nights.
But one year he began the recreation of himself in a daily horrible contest with barbells, push-ups and excruciating exercises. “He was quite handsome, but also soft and rounded and as determined against sports as if he had been born with a handicap. Before her marriage, she shares quarters and a tempestuous friendship –– a “mariage blanc” –– in New York City’s Schuyler Hotel with a young homosexual man from Kentucky, as did Hardwick. She is divorced –– “I am alone here in New York, and no longer a we” (51)–– as was Hardwick, who was famously married to, then not married to, then reunited with the poet Robert Lowell just prior to his death. She spends much of her adult life living in an artist’s studio on West Sixty-Seventh Street, and summers in Maine, as did Hardwick. She is a writer, a Southerner, born and bred in Kentucky, as was Hardwick. The novel –– if it can be called a novel –– is the story –– if it can be called a story –– of a woman named Elizabeth. It is impossible to write about Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights without writing about Elizabeth Hardwick. Lost & Found: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights
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