for P.D.
IT BEGINS, this great American novel (let’s not call it “this great American short novel”), with the voice of recollection; that is, the voice of uncertainty:
The Cullens were Irish; but it was in France that I met them and was able to form an impression of their love and their trouble. They were on their way to a property they had rented in Hungary; and one afternoon they came to Chancellet to see my great friend Alexandra Henry. That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America, and she met my brother and married him.
Needless to say, the twenties were very different from the thirties, and now the forties have begun. In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship. There was a kind of idealistic or optimistic curiosity in the air. And vagaries of character, and the various war and peace that goes on in the psyche, seemed of the greatest interest and even importance.
To cite the decade—the novel was published in 1940, so the forties had barely begun—puts an additional glaze on the story, investing it with the allure of the untimely; supervening World Events, it’s suggested, have wilted the importance of the “war and peace that goes on in the psyche.” This is to be merely some stuff about private lives, digested in record time: “an afternoon or so” is exactly the duration of the story, for the Cullens arrive after lunch, around two-thirty, and bolt just as an elaborate dinner is about to be served. In these few hours—a good deal less than the entire day and evening of Mrs. Dalloway—a storm of feelings will batter the constraints of gentility, and the ferocious indissoluble union of the Cullens, “their love and their trouble,” will have been subjected to a cunningly thorough examination. “Lightning knowledge”—what kind of knowledge is that?
The novel, still neglected, ever astonishing, is The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott. It belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century American literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view. What’s thought to be typically American is brash, broad, and a little simple, even simpleminded, particularly about such venerable subjects of European discernment as marriage, and The Pilgrim Hawk is anything but simple about marriage.
Of course, American literature has always provided complex performances of the moral imagination, some of which are dramas of intricate psychic violence as observed and mulled over by a witnessing consciousness. The job of the “I” who narrates The Pilgrim Hawk is to watch, to reflect, to understand (which also means to be puzzled by) what is going on. Who are this bluff, fleshy, self-conscious man and this exquisitely dressed woman with a full-grown hooded falcon, or pilgrim hawk, clinging to the rough gauntlet on her wrist? The narrator finds their presence, their derangements, stimulating. He is quick with eloquent summary assessments of their character. These evolve as their turmoil unfolds.
The opening of the novel suggests the uncanny speed at which an
omnivorous observer might form “an impression” of two hitherto-unknown people: “you did your best to know them.” It also proposes a masterly vagueness about when this impression was formed: “That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America …” Why would Wescott choose to make the narrator unsure of the year? It could be to mute the import of 1929, the year of the Crash, for such as his two idle-rich American expats—not Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald rich but seriously rich, as in a Henry James novel about Americans “doing” Europe. Or maybe this vagueness is simply the good manners of someone assigned the all too Jamesian name of Alwyn Tower. And good manners may dictate the narrator’s fits of doubt about his own acuity: an Alwyn Tower would not wish to appear to be merely trying to be clever.
Name follows function. Detached, more than that, disabused, and virtually pastless (we don’t learn what has exiled him from loving and being loved; we don’t even learn his last name until nearly halfway through the book, and to divine his first name we have to know that Alwyn Tower is the central figure in Wescott’s early autobiographical novel, The Grandmothers), the narrator is nevertheless not as mysterious as he might seem. In fact, The Pilgrim Hawk’s “I” is a familiar personage, the shadowy bachelor friend of one or more of the principal characters who, in kindred versions, narrates Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, James’s The Sacred Fount, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. All these recessive narrators are abashed to some degree by the more reckless or vital or self-destructive people they observe.
The narrator as spectator is, necessarily, something of a voyeur. Gazing can become snooping, or at least seeing more than one is supposed to see. Coverdale, the creepy narrator of The Blithedale Romance, observes his friends from a treetop mirador and also from his post at a hotel room window where he can see into the windows of a house opposite. The Sacred Fount is the consummate narrator-at-the-peephole novel. The key revelation in The Pilgrim Hawk, Cullen’s hatred of his wife’s creature, comes when Tower happens to look out a window and sees Cullen, stealthily approaching the falcon, who has
been removed to the garden after a bloody meal, pulling out a knife, unhooding her, and then slicing through her leash to set her free.
Marriage is the normative tie in this world of couples that includes not only the Cullens and a stormily mated pair of servants but the pseudo-couple formed by Alex Henry and her opaquely sexed, ruminative friend and houseguest. Maybe Tower’s unease with the working of his own understanding proceeds from his awareness of being outside the deep experiences of coupledom, and alone. “Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable.” His is the arid wisdom of a profoundly unmarried consciousness. “Whether or not I finally arrive at a proper understanding of people, I often begin in the way of a vexed, intense superficiality.”
Tower is describing the vagaries of novel writing as much as the pitfalls of understanding. All these valetudinarian narrators are also writers’ self-portraits and exercises in writers’ self-mortification. Coverdale, Hawthorne’s “frosty bachelor,” is a poet. Wescott’s bachelor narrator is still embittered by his failure to become a “literary artist” (“no one warned me that I really did not have talent enough”), which does not stop him from thinking like a novelist, observing like a novelist, flaunting a novelist’s volatility of judgment. “Sometimes I am as sensitive as a woman to others’ temper or temperament; and it is a kind of sensitivity which may turn, almost by chance, for them or against them.”
There is no smugness in Tower’s acknowledgment of a novelist’s ambivalence toward his subject, in contrast to Coverdale’s chilling reflection:
The thought impressed itself upon me, that I had left duties unperformed. With the power, perhaps, to act in the place of destiny, and avert misfortune from my friends, I had resigned them to their fate. That cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people’s passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart.
But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart
is cold or warm. It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard to Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much sympathy, rather than too little.
Tower is able to make his mixed feelings about the couple he is observing more explicit. He feels repelled. He sympathizes, sometimes with the wife, sometimes with the husband—she so driven and sexually vibrant, he so desperate and dejected. The Cullens themselves seem to dissolve and re-form several times as the balance of power between them alters. (The neurasthenic, fragile wife even appears to change body type, becoming robust, coarse, indomitable.) Sometimes Tower seems in arrears of their ever more interesting natures, sometimes he seems to be imposing more complexity on their story than is plausible, and the narration risks becoming a story about him, his tortuous and self-torturing way of seeing—in the manner of late Henry James. But Wescott does not go that far. He is content to stay with the benefits, for the advancement of the story, of so self-conscious a narrator. A novelist with a painful story to tell will want to furnish it with complex characters who reveal themselves only gradually. What more ingenious, economical method than to make the complexity of a character the result of the instability of a first-person narrator’s perceptions? For this purpose Tower could hardly be better suited. His appetite for discovering and repudiating significances is insatiable.
There is only one way for such a narrator to conclude: with yet another recoil from his own knowingness. After the drunken confidences and weeping and shouting and dangerous flirting, after a large revolver has been brandished (and flung into a pond), after nervous farewells have papered over the abyss and the Cullens and the hawk have spun off into the night in the long dark Daimler, after Tower and Alex have wandered into the garden to muse on all this unruly behavior, Tower recalls to himself the visions of rapacity and inhumanity he has mustered throughout the Cullens’ visit—recalls, that is, the book we have been reading:
… and I blushed. Half the time, I am afraid, my opinion of people is just guessing; cartooning. Again and again I give way to a kind of inexact
and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgment in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.
Is this frenetic reflectiveness distinctively American? I think so, without being able to prove it. The only English novel I know with something of these tones—the tormented diffidence and the muffled anguish—is one that plainly served Wescott as a partial inspiration for The Pilgrim Hawk: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). Ford’s novel is also both a story of marital agony breaking through the routines of idleness and a project of recollection undertaken by an American expatriate whiling away his life on the Continent. At the center of the drama is an English couple abroad, friends of a rich American couple. It is the American husband, now a widower—his wife has died since the time of the “sad affair” he is recalling—who tells the story.
Both in fiction and in autobiography, first-person narrating generally needs a pretext—also known as a justification—to begin. To talk about oneself used to be considered unseemly: the classic autobiographies and the classic novels that pretend to be somebody’s memoir all begin by offering extenuating reasons for doing something so egotistical. Even now, when self-centeredness hardly requires an apology, a book of self-examination, a novel cast as a personal recollection, continues to invite a self-justifying explanation. It’s useful to others. It’s all I know how to do. It’s all that’s left for me to do. There is something I don’t understand, and I want to understand. I’m not really talking about myself but about them.
The Good Soldier starts with its deracinated narrator explaining that he sits down “today” in order “to puzzle out” what he lamentably did not understand when it was happening. “My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.” Not to know then—by the rules of fiction, where (unlike life) something has to happen—is to know now. The narrator may restate his bewilderment, fret from time to time over his inability to describe properly, worry that
he has not got some fact quite right. There is no way for readers to take these avowals of deficient understanding other than as evidence that he sees—or, rather, allows us to see—the doomed Captain Ashburnham all too well.
MARRIAGES ARE CENTRAL MATERIAL in most great novels and are likely to activate the generalizing impulse. In novels recounted in the third person, a good place to sound the trumpet call of a generalization is right at the beginning.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Who is saying this? The author, sarcastically. And the denizens of the small world in which Austen sets her story actually think it—which makes this maxim something less than “a truth universally acknowledged.”
And who is saying “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”? Again, the author. Or, if you will, the book. There’s only a touch of irony in the opening line of Tolstoy’s synoptic marriage novel. But does anyone, inside or outside the novel, actually think this? No.
The authority of the renowned first sentences of Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina depends on their floating free from any particular speaker, as if it were the nature of wisdom to be impersonal, oracular, anonymous, overbearing. Neither assertion is actually true. Both seem unchallengeably mature and pertinent as impatient observations about the cruelties of the marriage market and the despair of a naïve wife upon discovering her husband’s infidelity. This is a strong hand with which to open a novel, some axiom about human behavior offered preemptively or ironically as an eternal verity. (“It is a truth …” “All happy families are …”) Knowingness about human nature, old-style, is always in the present tense.
Wisdom in the contemporary novel is more likely to be retrospective, intimate-sounding. The vulnerable, self-doubting voice is more appealing and seems to be more trustworthy. Readers crave the display—the intrusion—of personality; that is, of weakness. Objectivity is suspect; it’s thought to be bogus or cold. Generalizations
can be proposed, but wryly. (Pathos and self-doubt are always welcome flavors.) Certitude seems like arrogance. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” is the famous opening sentence of The Good Soldier. Sad stories exude signs, like sweat, which a squeamish narrator voice will undertake, with many hesitations and doubts, to decipher.
While a narration conducted in the third person can create the illusion of a story happening now, freshly told, a first-person narrator’s story is inevitably one from the past. Telling is retelling. And where there is self-conscious retelling, witnessing, there is always the possibility—no, the likelihood—of error. A first-person novel with anything to mourn on its mind will be a feast of reflection on what makes that backward look so error-prone: the fallibility of memory, the impenetrability of the human heart, the obscuring distance between past and present.
Evoking that distance at the start of a novel narrated in the first person is a strong new opening move. Thus The Pilgrim Hawk gives us a blur of a year, “May of 1928 or 1929,” since which so much has changed, and follows that with a bit of decade-mongering: the twenties, which were, “needless to say,” very different from the thirties and the “now” of the forties. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights (1979) opens with another tease of a time-marker:
It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is—this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an apathetic battle—that is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door, the bird-song of rough, grinding trucks in the street.
If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps. One can would be marked Rand Avenue in Kentucky …
The weird specificity of a month, June, minus the year; the statement of the project (“transformed and even distorted memory”); the inventory of homely comforting objects (clock and bedspread) followed by the plunge into the world of the disfavored (the broken old woman in the nursing home), a foretaste of much of the book’s raw feeling and unease; the brave assumption of possibly erroneous subjectivity (“that is what I see”); the return to the comforts enjoyed by the narrator with a more sophisticated inventory (books, magazines, the Times at the door); the worry about knowing what to attempt to retrieve, in memory, from the past; and, finally, the wistful stipulativeness of the venture (“this is what I have decided to do with my life just now”)—such incomparably rapid modulations of tone and tale are a signature aspect of Hardwick’s method as a writer.
Like The Pilgrim Hawk, Sleepless Nights is a book of judgments about human relations, with special attention to marriage, and, like Wescott’s novel, is told by a somewhat veiled first-person narrator who is (what else?) a writer. Hardwick’s feat is to make that narrator—a version of herself—both the protagonist of the book and the voice of detached, brilliant spectatorship. In Sleepless Nights there is not one narrative but many, and the “I” is not at the center but to the side of most of the stories she chooses to retell—conjuring up, talking to, reproving, grieving over ghosts.
“Back to the ‘long ago.’” Trawling through the past, memory makes a narrow, arbitrary-seeming selection of what to relate (“You can take it down like a can from a shelf”), then, guided by the steady streaming and fitful damming up of associations, makes a montage of that. There is remembering for remembering’s sake. You can even remember for others. (“Dear old Alex: I will remember this for you.”) To remember is to voice—to cast memories into language—and is, always, a form of address. There is more invocation of others than self-description, and none of the usual appetite in autobiographical fiction for the describing of injury to the self. The injuries described—and there are many—are those borne by others.
Many of the memories are discomfiting; some reek of spent painfulness. In contrast to what understanding accomplishes in The Pilgrim Hawk, the awareness garnered in Sleepless Nights is cathartic. It is felt
and it is composed, written down, wrung out, speeded up. In The Pilgrim Hawk, the narrator has only himself to talk to, a self—one has the impression—he doesn’t really like (or at any rate upon whom he is reluctant to seem to be bestowing any kind of approval). In Sleepless Nights, the narrator has the gallery of all the people who are remembered, fondly or ruefully, to talk to, and the wry magnanimity she extends to most of those she describes she extends to herself as well. Some memories are brought to life and quickly dismissed, while others are allowed to dilate and fill many pages. Everything is there to be questioned; everything, in retrospect, is drenched with poignancy. Not a breath of complaint (and there is much to complain of): whatever it was, it’s gone now, part of the past, the nothing-to-be-done, the was-it-really-like-that, all retold in a voice that is both absorbed by and indifferent to self. (“Can it be that I am the subject?”) The doubts and the pungent astuteness complement each other.
When the commenting, summing-up observer is impervious to doubts, the register inevitably shifts to the comic. Take that most assured of fictional people-watchers, the “I” voice of Randall Jarrell’s awesomely witty Pictures from an Institution (1914). It starts by being unidentified, although, as cultural conventions would have it, a voice that is so attractively superior—reflective, learned, cheeky—would be assumed to be that of a man. All we do come to know is that he (and it is a he) is on the faculty of Benton College, a “progressive” college for women not far from New York City, where the famous novelist Gertrude Johnson has arrived to teach for a semester, and that he is married.
It’s even a while before we realize there is a first-person narrator, someone with a small role in the story. Recounting matters that only an omniscient narrator could know, the novel’s first seven pages point irrefutably in the other direction. Then, speeding through a hilarious riff on the vanity and presumption of his writer-monster, Jarrell delivers a little surprise:
Gertrude thought Europe overrated, too; she voyaged there, voyaged back, and told her friends; they listened, awed, uneasy somehow. She had a wonderful theory that Europeans are mere children to us Americans, who are the oldest of men—why I once knew: because our political
institutions are older, or because Europeans skipped some stage of their development, or because Gertrude was an American—I forget.
Who is this “I” who once knew, who forgets? Not someone worried about his memory lapses. Though the first-person voice of Pictures from an Institution pipes up belatedly, it is in canonical fashion, with an avowal of incertitude. But this is a mock avowal, surely, by a nimble and self-possessed mind. We wouldn’t expect the narrator to recall every one of Gertrude’s glib pronouncements; to have forgotten some is rather to his credit. In the world of Jarrell’s novel, genuinely doubt-ridden narrators need not apply.
Only the tragic—or the bleak—can accommodate, even promote, incertitude. Comedy depends on certitude, the certitude about what is foolish and what is not, and on characters who are “characters,” that is, types. In Pictures from an Institution they come in pairs (for this, too, is a marriage novel): Gertrude and her husband; the composer, the sociologist, the college’s professionally boyish president, and their amusingly discontented or complacent spouses—all in residence at this school of fools and apt targets, all, for the narrator’s genial, inspired mockery. To poke fun at everyone might have made Jarrell seem churlish. He obviously preferred to risk being sentimental, and added to the mix a paragon of sincerity and niceness by the name of Constance. No bashfulness about showing himself to be feverishly erudite, proteanly intelligent, terminally droll, and a wizard phrase-maker. On the contrary (autre temps, autres mœurs), these were clearly glorious assets. But perhaps there was a shade of anxiety about being, or being thought to be, too mordant. An adorable, tenderhearted young woman who is first glimpsed working in the office of the president, Constance sees generously what the narrator sees fiercely. Her indulgence allows him to go on.
The true plot of Jarrell’s novel, such as it is, consists of the flow of coruscating descriptions of characters—above all, the inexhaustibly fascinating, appalling Gertrude. Characters need to be described over and over, not because they ever act “out of character” and so surprise us, or because the narrator, like Tower in The Pilgrim Hawk, changes his mind about them. (The characters in Wescott’s novel can’t be types:
it’s precisely the function of the narrator’s attention to them to make them ever more complicated.) In Pictures from an Institution, the “I” keeps on describing his characters because he continues to devise new, ingenious, giddy, ever more hyperbolic phrases to sum them up. They keep on being foolish, and he—the narrative voice—keeps on being inventive. His restlessness is lexical, or rhetorical, not psychological or ethical. Is there yet one more way to pin these follies down verbally? Forward!
HOW TO CIRCUMSCRIBE and refine a story and how to open up a story are two sides of the same task.
To explain, to inform, to amplify, to connect, to color in—think of the essayistic digressions in Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Egoist, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain. Such pursuit of completeness plumps out a novel. Is there a verb “to encyclopedize”? There has to be.
To condense, to pare away, to speed up, pile up, to be ready to renounce, to distill, to leap ahead, to conclude (even if one intends to conclude again and again)—think of the aphoristic glitter of The Pilgrim Hawk, Pictures from an Institution, Sleepless Nights. Such pursuit of celerity brings a novel’s weight and length down drastically. Novels driven by the need to summarize, to intensify inexorably, tend to be single-voiced, short, and often not novels at all in the conventional sense. Occasionally, they will go after the deadpan, mock smoothness of an allegory or fable, as does Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father. Is there a verb “to angularize”? Or “to ellipsify”? There ought to be.
Compressed first-person narrations don’t tell any kind of story; they tend to project a few distinctive moods. A surfeit of experiences that bring worldly wisdom (and, usually, disenchantment) is often intimated. It’s hard to imagine a naïve narrator with a penchant for trenchant summary. Such moods color the whole span of the narration, which can darken but does not, strictly speaking, develop. In fictions narrated by a resident observer the end lies much closer to the beginning than in fictions enhanced by digressions. Not just because the novel is shorter but because the look is retrospective and the tale one
whose end is known from the beginning. However straightforward the narration tries to be, it can’t help registering a few tremors of anticipated pathos: the pathos of the already known, and the not prevented. The beginning will be an early variant on the end, the end a late, somewhat deflating variant on the beginning.
Stories kept lean by ellipsis and refined judgments rather than fattened by essayistic expansiveness may look like a quicker read. They’re not. Even with sentences that are fired like bullets, attention can wander. Every exquisite linguistic moment (or incisive insight) is a moment of stasis, a potential ending. Aphoristic finalities sap forward momentum, which thrives on more loosely woven sentences. Sleepless Nights —a novel of mental weather—enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash. It has no shape in the usual novelistic sense. It has no shape as the weather has no shape. Like the weather, it arrives and departs, rather than, in the usual structured way, begins and ends.
A first-person voice devoted to looking and reflecting is likely to be drawn to reporting its displacements, as if that were mainly what a solitary consciousness does with its time. These fictions with melancholy or frankly superior narrators are often travelers’ tales, stories of a wandering of some sort, or a halt in that wandering. The Pilgrim Hawk takes place among the peripatetic rich. The staid academic village depicted in Pictures from an Institution is full of successful professionals coming from or on their way to somewhere else. Such well-oiled travels are about as dramatic as the story gets. Perhaps the fictions that condense have to be relatively plotless, large brawling events being better accommodated in fat books.
Many displacements are recorded in Sleepless Nights, none unconnected with a lifetime of incessant reading, fat books and thin:
From Kentucky to New York, to Boston to Maine, to Europe, carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian—all consumed in a sedentary sleeplessness. Is that sufficient—never mind that it is the truth.
The voyaging of the bookish, undoubtedly a source of many keen pleasures, is nevertheless an occasion for irony, as if one’s life had failed to meet an agreed standard of interest. A career of mental traveling, illustrated by a fair bit of real traveling in safety and relative comfort, doesn’t make for a very exciting plot. “It certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all”—best to name the formidable constraint unknown to other representatively brilliant first-person narrators—“‘I’” am a woman.”
COMPARED WITH BEGINNINGS, endings of novels are less likely to resound, to have an aphoristic snap. What they convey is the permission for tensions to subside. They are more like an effect than a statement.
The Pilgrim Hawk starts with the Cullens’ arrival and must go on until they leave and stop very soon after they do. Pictures from an Institution also draws to a close with a departure, actually two departures. To the joy of all, Gertrude and her husband are on the train back to New York City the moment the spring term ends. Then we learn that the narrator himself, having accepted the offer of a better job at another college, will be leaving Benton soon, with some regret and more than a little relief.
The Pilgrim Hawk signs off with an ambiguous reflection about marriage. Tower claims to be worrying about the effect on Alex of the spectacle of the Cullens’ torment:
“You’ll never marry, dear,” I said, to tease Alex … “You’ll be afraid to, after this fantastic bad luck.”
“What bad luck, if you please?” she inquired, smiling to show that my mockery was welcome.
“Fantastic bad object lessons.”
“You’re no novelist,” she said, to tease me. “I envy the Cullens, didn’t you know?” And I concluded from the look on her face that she herself did not quite know whether she meant it.
For last lines, Wescott’s novel confects a flurry of doubts about what is meant and what is felt, an exchange of teasing untruths: “You’ll never marry.” “You’re no novelist.” To readers who have retained a piece of information dropped into the very first paragraph (Alex will soon meet and marry the narrator’s brother) and to those still gripped by the histrionic misery of the Cullens as parsed by the joyless narrator, the ending may seem light; perhaps too light. Or too neatly da capo.
Pictures from an Institution finishes as do the great comedies, with a celebration of marriage. It’s the no-name narrator, until now the most revved up of observers, who has the becalmed last scene of the novel all to himself. Summer vacation has started; the campus is deserted; he has been in his office going through books and papers (“I worked hard for the rest of the afternoon: I threw away and threw away and threw away …”). Then he leaves:
When at last I went downstairs everything was hollow and silent; my steps echoed along the corridor, as I walked down it looking at the sunlight in the trees outside. There was nobody in the building—nobody, I felt, in all the buildings of Benton. I stood in the telephone-booth on the first floor, dialed the number of my house, and my wife’s hello was small and far-off in the silence; I said, “Can you come get me now, darling?” She answered, “Of course I can. I’ll be right over.”
For all that we know virtually nothing of the narrator, still less about his entirely notional wife, it seems appropriate that this novel about comic and pathetic (but never tragic) marriages ends as it does, with that italicized Of course, which evokes, with exquisite economy, the shelter and rightness of a true marriage.
And here are the last lines of Sleepless Nights, which, having no single story to tell, has no obvious place to end. The Pilgrim Hawk and Pictures from an Institution move forward in an announced, framed length of time: an afternoon and early evening; a spring semester. Sleepless Nights stretches over decades, darting backward and forward in time, its gallantly de-married narrator accumulating solitudes. Best to affirm solitude—writing, the work of memory—while also acknowledging the longing to reach out, to write letters, to telephone.
Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance to memory.
Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for. Public assistance, beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.
So Sleepless Nights ends with a departure, too. It ends by leaving—that is, delicately excluding—the reader (“I love to be known by those I care for”), who is presumed to read intrusively, looking for the concordance of truth about a “real life.”
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION in the guise of a journal (Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), a memoir in poet’s prose (Pasternak’s Safe Conduct), and a volume of stories (Isherwood’s Berlin Stories) have all been mentioned by Hardwick as books she found em boldening when she came to write the genre-buster that is Sleepless Nights.
To be sure, fiction of all kinds has always fed on writers’ lives. Every detail in a work of fiction was once an observation or a memory or a wish, or is a sincere homage to a reality independent of the self. That both the pretentious novelist and the pretentious women’s college in Pictures from an Institution have well-known models illustrates familiar practices of fiction. (In a satire this is the norm: it would be surprising if Jarrell did not have a real novelist, a real college, in mind.) And authors of first-person narratives will often be discovered to have lent to that voice a few stray bio-facts. For instance, it helps explain the end of The Pilgrim Hawk to recall having been told that Alex Henry will marry. But that she will marry the narrator’s brother, of whom nothing is ever said in the novel, seems like noodling. It’s not. The great friend who inspired the character Alex, a rich 1920s-era American expatriate with a house near Paris in fashionable Rambouillet (the village renamed Chancellet), did, after returning home, marry Wescott’s brother.
Many first-person narrators are endowed with enough traits to make a pleasantly self-regarding resemblance to their authors. Others are there-but-for-the-grace-of-God creations, what the author believes (or hopes) he or she has escaped being. Wescott, though not—like Tower—a failed writer, often reproached himself for being a lazy one, and it is odd that someone capable of a book as marvelous as The Pilgrim Hawk would only once in a long life write at the top of his form. Hawthorne was always wrestling with the Coverdale in himself. Writing to Sophia Peabody in 1841 from Brook Farm, the model for the cooperative community depicted in The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne blesses his future wife for imparting a sense of life’s “reality” and keeping “a feeling of coldness and strangeness” from creeping into his heart; in other words, for rescuing him from being someone like Coverdale.
But what about when the “I” and the author bear the same name or have identical life circumstances, as in Sleepless Nights, or in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo? How much fact from the author’s life can be sponged up without our becoming reluctant to call the book a novel? Sebald is the writer who plays most daringly with this project now. His narratives of mental haunting, which he wants to be regarded as fiction, are related by an emotionally distressed alter ego who presses the claim of solemn factuality to the point of including photographs of himself among the many photographs that annotate his books. Of course, almost everything that would normally be disclosed in an autobiographical work is absent from Sebald’s books.
Actually, secretiveness—which might be called reticence, or discretion, or withholding—is essential to keeping these anomalous works of fiction from tipping over into autobiography or memoir. You can use your life, but only a little, and at an oblique angle. We know the narrator of Sleepless Nights draws on a real life. Kentucky is the birthplace of the writer named Elizabeth Hardwick, who did meet Billie Holiday soon after coming to live in Manhattan in the 1940s, did spend a year in Holland in the early 1950s, did have a great friend named M—, did live in Boston, has had a house in Maine, has lived for many years on the
West Side of Manhattan, and so on. All this figures in her novel, as glimpses—the telling designed as much to conceal, to put readers off the track, as to reveal.
To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified with your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it that way, too. This can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).
There is more freedom to be elliptical and to abridge when the memories are not set down in chronological order. The memories—fragments of memories, transformed—emerge as chains of luxuriant notations that wind around, and conceal, the kernel of story. And Hardwick’s art of acute compression and decentering is simply too fast-paced to tell only a single story at a time; too fast, sometimes, to relate any story at all, especially where one is expected. For instance, there is much about marriage, notably a long-running soap opera starring the philandering husband in a Dutch couple, friends of the narrator and her then husband when they lived in Holland. Her own marriage is announced thus on the fifth page: “I was then a ‘we’ … Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition.” The ensuing silence about the “we”—a declaration of independence that has to be intrinsic to the fashioning of the authoritative, questing “I” capable of writing Sleepless Nights—lasts until a sentence some fifty pages later: “I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. Years, decades even, have passed.” Maybe books devoted to exalted standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers enough.
But it’s not an autobiography, not even of this “Elizabeth,” who is made out of materials harvested from, but not identical with, Elizabeth Hardwick. It’s about what “Elizabeth” saw, what she thought about others. Its power is linked with its refusals, and its distinctive palette of sympathies. Her assessments of long-term sufferers in lousy marriages are pitiless, but she is kind to Main Street, touched by inept wrongdoers and class traitors and self-important failures. Memory conjures up a procession of injured souls: foolish, deceiving, needy men, some briefly lovers, who have been much indulged (by themselves and by women)
and come to no good end, and humble, courteous, simple women in archaic roles who have known only hard times and been indulged by nobody. There are desperately loving evocations of the narrator’s mother, and several meanderingly sustained, Melanctha-like portraits of women who are invoked like muses:
When I think of cleaning women with unfair diseases I think of you, Josette. When I must iron or use a heavy pot for cooking, I think of you, Ida. When I think of deafness, heart disease and languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela. Great washtubs full of sheets remind me of more than one.
The work of memory, this memory, is choosing, most emphatically, to think about women, especially women serving out lives of hard labor, those whom exquisitely written books customarily ignore. Justice requires that they be remembered. Pictured. Summoned to the feast of the imagination and of language.
Of course, you summon ghosts at your peril. The sufferings of others can bleed into your soul. You try to protect yourself. Memory is inventive. Memory is a performance. Memory invites itself, and is hard to turn away. Hence the ravishing insight that gives the book its title: that remembering is intimately connected with insomnia. Memories are what make it hard for you to sleep. Memories procreate. And the uninvited memories always seem to the point. (As in fiction: whatever is included is connected.) The boldness and virtuosity of Hardwick’s associativeness intoxicate.
On the last page, in the peroration with which Sleepless Nights concludes, the narrator observes, in a final summative delirium:
Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy faces, so gray, of the intense church ladies. And then a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.
The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.
Nothing new except language, the ever found. Cauterizing the torment of personal relations with hot lexical choices, jumpy punctuation, mercurial sentence rhythms. Devising more subtle, more engorged ways of knowing, of sympathizing, of keeping at hay. It’s a matter of adjectives. It’s where the stress falls.
[2001]