Cataloguing as Literature

...Otherwise, his review, like all the others I have read, is a rave...

...the temptation is to view it either as some sort of gratuitous free association or as an attempt to impress with erudition, arcaneness, the ability to see connections so far beyond the reader's vision as the hearing of a dog stretches beyond the human ear...

...What, besides desperate straining after lyrical sensitivity and gnomic utterance, does this mean...

...It should be noted that this segment does not hook on to the one preceding it, and has the most arbitrary and tenuous connection to what follows...

...if the latter, Thomas Mann is just window dressing...

...Leconte de Lisle spoke enviously of Victor Hugo as having the 'stupidity of the Himalayas.' The muderous German girl with her alpenstock, her hiking boots, calls to the old architect, higher, higher...

...imtlarly , just before this segment, we get a somewhat longer, equally unilluminating episode about Elizabeth having to share a Canadian train ride with a group of raucous men, presumably salesmen returning from a convention...

...some chance encounters, particularly with lowly, touching people and wrenching failures (as does Malte...

...And always there are the devices out of Malte Laurids Brigge (in fact, there is a reference, albeit an insignificant one, to the book itself): There are passages purporting to be letters to unidentified friends...

...But the translation is so unpoetic that, except to the initiate, it suggests neither poetry nor help...

...Try this segment: "It is almost seven...

...The very syntax is confused and ob-fuscatory: is that "adjective" in apposition to the "word" over which the man's curiosity flamed...

...A person neither carries such integumenta to an assignation, nor has time to write them there...

...Has she truly been there, even in her imagination...

...She will have an apartment, a lover, will take a few drugs, will listen to the phonograph, buy clothes, and something will happen...

...some memories of famous or obscure friends and acquaintances (as does Malte...

...if they do, these documents must get tossed into quite different wastebaskets—in kitchens of stagnant housewives, say —unless, as is more likely, they are preserved hidden among the pages of old schoolbooks...

...And what, exactly, was seductive: that Elizabeth went in for such heavy reading as Thomas Mann, or her graceful movement in lifting the book off the shelf...

...there are lists of names of obscure people dimly resonating in the memory—in this case various servant women...

...Hardwick's next observation is a non se-quitur...

...there are introductory sentences where the scene is set with the verb deliberately omitted: "At our high school dances in the winter, small, cheap local events...

...the wastebaskets fill up with much more mundane articles...

...How, by the way, does an adjective flame...

...Everything washed in a harsh, hard light"—surely "washed in light" is a platitude, and "harsh, hard" facile word-mongering comparable to the jingle "the blank glare of square bungalows" a page earlier...

...The pattern is promptly repeated: "Tickets, migrations, worries, property, debts...

...I can cite some better passages, too, like this one about living in a cheap Manhattan hotel: "No star was to be seen in the heavens, but the sky was always bright with the flicker of distant lights...

...Large parts of the description are crude bits of list-making: "I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech...

...Here, in contrast, is a typical one-paragraph segment from Steep-lessNights: "Pasternak's line: To live a life is not to cross a field...

...Ibsen was not a happy man...

...The book disintegrates even more because it misses the cunning, hidden structure of Malte, where the veiled autobiography of the hero gathers unto itself exemplary lives, historical anecdotes, meditations on art to convey the strategies of an existence crumbling under the brunt of poverty, illness and excessive sensitivity unbolstered by creative potency (one model for Malte was the prematurely deceased Norwegian "decadent" poet-novelist Sigbj«Srn Obstfelder...

...If the former, the shelves are supererogatory...

...How do we get from filing cabinets and tags to a microscope...

...Furthermore, it is simply not true, as the passage implies, that old Ibsen took his young groupies in stride...

...Perhaps it will be good—or at least what she likes...

...soon the panoply of pretension engulfs them...

...to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope...

...This Elizabeth is—despite partial denials by Miss Hardwick in interviews—the author, but the author in search of fictional characters because, I presume, she considers fiction more safe than autobiography: If you allow an ostensible piece of fiction to lapse into autobiography, that tends to be called candor, even though it is merely a failure of the imagination...

...On the preceding page, we got two other forays into the art of cataloguing: "With the weak something is always happening: improvisation, surprise, suspense, injustice, manipulation, hypochondria, secret drinking, jealousy, lying, crying, hiding in the garden, driving off in the middle of the night...

...So we are left to wonder what—aside from a few platitudes, irrelevant eso-terica, and misinterpretations of a great play and playwright —this entire independent segment has to offer...

...Envy is not the vice of the frozen intellectual...

...She is talking here about a homosexual friend's passion for jazz, and about his difficulties in resolving what popular music meant to him: "What was it...

...What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period...

...Even in her aphorisms Miss Hardwick fails to achieve the ring of truth...

...The existence of the appalling in every particle of the air...

...and a good many literary allusions and reflections (as does Malte...

...Moreover, what kills Solness has nothing to do with Ibsen's "disgust with the giddiness up there, or the assumption of up there" —whether "assumption" in the alternative explanation means "taking possession" or "notion...

...No tree was to be seen, but as if by miracle little heaps of twigs and blown leaves gathered in the gutters...

...Work all day, more than a little schnapps in the evening, and back home at the hotel, the resort, the pension there was his strong wife who after she had little Sigurd Ibsen said: That's it, that's enough...

...it is Miss Hardwick's sensibility and prose that do so—extraordinarily...

...As for the conclusion, Susanna Ibsen's "That's it, that's enough," its inclusion here seems to derive from the "Ich mag nichtmehr" of Rilke's Ingeborg in Malte, but the line is much more moving coming from a deathbed than, as here, from a childbed...

...Surely "a scar of longing never satisfied" and "a wound of feeling" are too close in meaning for both to be needed...

...Eros has a thousand friends...

...What, then, does this Elizabeth share with us...

...I doubt whether Miss Hardwick could have imagined her book without the Rilkean model, and I am quite sure that it would not have been published had it been signed Smith or Jones...

...Notice that, as in the list above, after a number of one-word items comes a pair of more elaborate ones...

...And doesn't Eros have a thousand sources or accomplices, rather than "friends...

...In any case, what does all this tell us about Alex, Elizabeth, or their relationship...

...Secondly, her collection of more or less random jottings, in segments varying in length from a couple of lines to a couple of pages, is even less novelistic than Malte, where a kind of plot line evolves from an emotional progression...

...Pasternak's line," by the way, is a Russian proverb incorporated verbatim into one of Yuri Zhivago's poems...

...And cells under a microscope do not quiver ordinarily...

...The work is in truth a collaboration between Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge of which Sleepless Nights is an almost shameless imitation, and Elizabeth Lowell, the prestigious former wife of Robert Lowell and longtime associate editor of the prestigious New York Review of Books, who just happens to use Hardwick as her nom de plume...

...There is, to be sure, a narrator of sort—Elizabeth—and we are treated to splinters of her consciousness, recollection, philosophizing in whirling snippets of prose suffering from delusions of poetry...

...she might as well have said life is not spelunking or tobogganing, except that that would not have led into the equally irrelevant but impressive quotation from Leconte de Lisle...

...Something about her family, especially about her mother (as does Malte in Malte Laurids Brigge...

...the sea itself, or youth alone...

...In her native Lexington, Kentucky, she recalls, for instance, "two sensual hotels where the wastebas-kets contained memorandums of assignations and the hyperbolic, misshapen proseof illicit love letters...

...but, then, Hardwick's writing is often murderously opaque...

...In his review of Sleepless Nights, John Leonard also latched on to this utterance, and to the parallels it suggests...

...The imagery is still more chaotic...

...The anonymous personages and the one named celebrity, Billie Holiday, in Hardwick do not add up to a significant design, any more than Elizabeth and her apercus compose themselves into an identifiable view of life or artistic vision...

...Or take this: "The music seemed to cut into his flesh, leaving a sort of scar of longing never satisfied, almost a wound of feeling...

...These lines have visual acuity, good rhythm and unattitudinizing truthfulness to recommend them, yet such felicities are relatively rare...

...I could match Miss Hardwick's lifetime royalties on all her books—past, present and future—if someone would offer me a nickel for every envious intellectual I could scare up, in and out of the academy...

...if Hardwick means her probable real-life prototype, Emilie Bardach, she was not German either—she was Viennese (a very different thing), and not at all murderous...

...What is that historic raincoat whose loops are made of ideas, and buttons out of the period...

...How can it seize the mind when boredom arrives before it, always ahead of time, ready...

...She can write of a party: "No person of talent had brought along a new, beautiful young girl, who being new and not knowing all the names would seem rude and superior, thus sending arrows of pain into the flesh of the older people who were known for something...

...This corresponds in Malte to things like: "DieExis-tenz des Entsetzlichen in jedem Bestandteil derLuft...

...T> JL ^^epeatedly, as well, Miss Hardwick makes us doubt the veracity of her statements...

...Even the grammar is a mess here: If "women" is the antecedent, "she" has to read "they...

...It's no good being able to write felicitously "his long yellow teeth emerged like fog lights out of the taciturn lips," if you lapse forthwith into "And then a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off...

...Within walking distance of all those places one never walked to...

...Nobody comes fully alive in this book—not Billie Holiday, for instance, or Alex, an ex-lover who reappears in Elizabeth's life...

...Or did the flaming curiosity become a kind of adjective hung, like a fiery festoon, over Elizabeth...

...He concluded by declaring Sleepless Nights, "like Rilke's Notebook . . . miraculous and almost perfect...

...For himself, he adjusted his rimless spectacles and the corners of his mouth turned down when fervent young girls thought he was dumber than he was...

...yet assuming the trope worked, it would still be coarse...

...But such pointillistic virtues—like hitting a small nail neatly on the head with a tiny but precise hammer—are canceled out, again and again, by the aforementioned preciosities, pretensions and platitudes...

...Such an anticlimactic string of cliches cannot etch Louisa into our minds...

...But, unlike Rilke, Miss Hardwick tells us very little about the protagonist's current life as a toiler in literature, and there are merely obscure references to lovers and very scant ones to a husband...

...Should Alex walk in the door as a type, a genre...

...The Himalayas, though, suggest height—even if the statement is really about stupidity—bringing us to Master Builder Solness falling off his hubristic steeple...

...He falls to his death and this is Ibsen's disgust with the giddiness up there, or the assumption of up there...

...It is not to climb a mountain either...

...His curiosity flamed over a word, an adjective over the seductiveness of the fact that I was taking down a volume of Thomas Mann from the library shelves...

...To return to the Canadian salesmen, their evocation is suddenly interrupted by the following segment: "Borges asks the question: 'Are not the fervent Shakespeareans who give themselves over to a line of Shakespeare, are they not, literally, Shakespeare?'" There is no earthly way to devine the connection between this insert and the segments about the Canadian loudmouths that surround it...

...I doubt that the Lexington horse traders write any memorandums of assignations or many illicit love letters in however misshapen prose...

...Let me start with the last proposition...

...Thus Miss Hardwick will toss in a prose translation of the second stanza of Hblderlin's Halfte desLebens without any more explanation or identification than the casual remark, "He [an amorous doctor] called upon the help of European poetry...

...In an interview, Miss Hardwick, citing some of her reading, spoke of " The Notebooks of Malte Brigge [sic]—miraculous, perfect work...

...Finally, though Hardwick's work may be the product of many sleepless nights, it has almost no bearing on actual insomnia or any other theme or topic that would give it cohesion, to say nothing of unity...

...Not bad at all—particularly those "older people who were known for something," with that "something" truly sealing their doom...

...if, somehow, they are not redundant, Hardwick fails to show how the latter expands on the former...

...Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe quite the opposite...

...Now that is perfectly miraculous, with no "almost" about it...

...Nevertheless, side by side with this kind of nonsense, Hardwick is perfectly capable of good, homely observations laced with ladylike bitchiness when she does not set her stylistic, philosophical and poetic sights too high...

...J.S.] That, I am afraid, is schoolgirl drivel at its most pitifully grandiose...

...but "themselves," to be correct, would also have to read "they," making the sentence inscrutable...

...When Malte, for example, meditates on Henrik Ibsen, we get not only a splendid evocation of an artist's success and failure, but also a portrait of genius as it verges on madness and confirms Malte's own frustrations and neuroses...

...Yet the book (Random House, 151 pp., $8.95) has little or nothing to do with sleepless nights, is certainly not a novel, and was not really written by Elizabeth Hardwick...

...At least he had the decency of slipping in that, "almost...

...But Hilda Wangel, the heroine of The Master Builder, is Norwegian...

...Or consider how Hardwick lets one of her characters, Louisa, peter out: "She will not do too much nor [correctly: or] too little and this is what is wanted...

...her writing lacks the authority that either the truly lived or the authentically envisioned confers...

...Ellipsis the author's...

...I doubt whether they came from reading many books, but they surely come together for the making of this dubious tome...

...Perhaps that effort is a mistake...

...but if you allow autobiography to trail off into fiction, it cannot be construed as anything but lies...

...Incidentally, after The Sensual Woman, The Sensual Man and The Sensual Couple, can a responsible writer still commit the words "sensual hotels" to serious print...

...Consider now a couple of sentences about an ex-lover meeting Elizabeth near (or at) the hometown library...

...To live in the obscuring jungle in the midst of things: close to?what...

...She evokes them with some sharpness, but without the sympathy, wit or insight that would justify their presence in the book...

...and the statement that he "was not a happy man" is a vulgar truism about any advanced artist, especially a tormented genius like Ibsen, and tritely expressed...

...changes of name and changes back once more: these came about from reading many books...

...Surely it is not the mound that does the climbing...