Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 18

THIS IS A FICTIONAL autobiography – an autobiography of just such a scrupulous, reticent, cunning kind as one might expect from Elizabeth Hardwick. All her critic’s experience and discrimination, all her scepticism about making life over into stories and people into characters (‘People do not live their biographies’) has been turned on herself. And the result is an impressively personal book that manages to fit none of the formulas.

In looking back over a life that led from Kentucky (religion and racehorses) to literary/artistic New York, and many worlds between, her point of view is dictated by a sense – a conviction, even – of her own present aloneness. This seems to have worked back on the past so that she recalls other people too as fundamentally and vividly alone, their lifelines broken into fragments.

So the book is populated by isolates, people encapsulated in their own settings and idioms from suave literary bachelors to exhausted Irish cleaning ladies, and from Billie Holiday seen in Harlem to careful, saving senior citizens in country retreats. It is a lone person’s life, outlined through friends, acquaintances and neighbours, the outer circle. As for the inner circle, the attempt to cure loneliness with love, or with marriage – that has slipped away. ‘I was then a “we,”’ she writes, referring to her marriage to Robert Lowell, doubly broken by their divorce and his death – as if to say that the ‘we’ could never have written this book, and so can’t really appear in it.

Homes seem to have turned into hotels, people into hotel-dwellers, ‘undomestic, restless, unreliable, changeable, disloyal’. And yet there is a regard, and a generosity, in her portrayal of them that make even the saddest or most brittle seem possibly heroic. Miss Cramer, for instance, once a music teacher, a snob, a genteel traveller, now a derelict in ‘dreadful freedom’, with her ‘dress of printed silk, soiled here and there with a new pattern of damage and no stockings to cover her bruised, discoloured legs’. Or a survivor of another sort, spoiled, desiccated, once-promising Alex who suddenly ‘is radical again and has the beard of a terrorist. The students like him and the faculty does not. He lives in a dreadful house and mows the lawn – starting over, poor, on time as it were.’ The breaks and new directions in people’s lives don’t at all point one way (there’s a very good section on variegated 1940s Marxists trying to cope with this, in their personal histories). Miss Hardwick is scrupulous always to tell other lives, that add up differently.

Thus, New York’s savage divorces are balanced comically (it’s often a very humorous book) with the way they arrange things in Amsterdam:–

There, first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present.

The care she takes with this salad simile is characteristic too. It’s often said, sometimes rightly, that critics write fiction badly, because they’re hopelessly self-conscious. Elizabeth Hardwick, however, has contrived to turn her critic’s virtues – a generous interest in others, a sharp sense of the boundaries between literature and living – into novelistic assets.

There is a sense of strain in Sleepless Nights, of tight-strung, nervous energy, but that’s essential to its effect of individuality and honesty. It’s also, curiously, a hopeful book, because it suggests that aloneness, the absence or loss of intimacy, doesn’t mean the loss of humanity.