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BOOKS True Confessions

Two autobiographical books I wish I’d written.
By Jo Brans |

The world is full of good books I don’t wish I’d written. I don’t begrudge Joyce Ulysses or Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook. Those products of exotic minds I can admire without envy. But every once in a while a book takes away my powers of detachment, gets so close to what I want to say and how I want to say it, that I feel scooped. I think damn it, that’s mine, give it back.

To respond that way to two books in one month betokens a nasty nature and makes me fear I’m on a permanent diet of sour grapes. Nevertheless I wish I, not Joan Didion, had written The White Album (Simon and Schuster, $9.95), and if I could rob Elizabeth Hardwick of her Sleepless Nights (Random House, $8.95), I would.

According to the book jackets, Didion has written “essays” and Hardwick, somewhat questionably, “a novel.” To my mind both books are autobiography, dazzling dances of the “I” on the tightrope between hard fact and soft fancy, connecting memory and desire. Aanyone can say “I,” but not everyone can say it with style. These books are triumphs of style, over sickness, betrayal, divorce, death, disasters public and private.

For example, here is Joan Didion, in a manner reminiscent of Montaigne on his kidney stones, describing her lifelong bout with migraine headaches:



Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well.

Tradition holds that migraines afflict the talented and neurotic, and if Didion is talented, she is also a vociferous, selfproclaimed neurotic. Her view of the world is anxious, apocalyptic. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she writes at the opening of The White Album, a collection of her magazine pieces over the past decade. In the title essay Didion reveals to us a time, in the summer of 1968, when she began to doubt the premises of her own stories. She quotes the report from her psychiatrist: “In June of this year patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. . . In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations” – and confides that in the summer of her breakdown the Los Angeles Times named her a “Woman of the Year.” Clearly Didion sees her spiritual malaise as a symbol of the sick world, particularly of her own Southern California.

Periodically, however, she insists on her particularity, as in “In the Islands”: “I am not the society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves.” And indeed Joan Di-dion emerges from her essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and now in The White Album as a fully realized, credibly motivated, and subtly complicated heroine, more sympathetic and persuasive than the female characters in her three novels.

The women in Didion’s fiction tend to be passive victims given to occasional irrational and frenzied spurts of foolhardy action. Didion herself has strong independent judgment. In “The Women’s Movement,” for example, she claims that feminists have propagated the dreams of perpetual adolescents: “The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of . the real generative possibilities |of adult sexual life, somehow ^touches beyond words.” She “concludes “that the movement I is no longer a cause but a symptom” of this wrenching romantic unreality.

Didion has that awareness of language we call wit and the curiosity we call intelligence. On both counts she is merciless with Nancy Reagan:



“Indeed it is,” Nancy Reagan said with spirit. Nancy Reagan says almost everything with spirit, perhaps because she was once an actress and has the beginning actress’s habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on 45th Street in Sacramento. At a Jaycee convention Didion actually listens to the rhetoric.

Wives were lovely and forbearing. Getting together for drinks was having a cocktail reception. Rain was liquid sunshine and the choice of a table for dinner was making an executive decision. They knew that this was a brave new world and they said so.

True, she is sometimes bathetic. She reveals a list that was taped to her closet door to help her pack quickly for reporting assignments during the late Sixties, and laments:

There is on this list one significant omission, one article I needed and never had: a watch. I needed a watch not during the day, when I could turn on the car radio or ask someone, but at night, in the motel. Quite often I would ask the desk for the time every half hour or so, until finally, embarrassed to ask again, 1 would call Los Angeles and ask my husband. In other words I had skirts, jerseys, leotards, pullover sweater, shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tarn-pax, face cream, powder, baby oil, mohair throw, typewriter, legal pads, pens, files, and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was. This may be a parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself. Maybe I’m being a Jaycee, but why, I wonder, didn’t she just buy a watch? Why didn’t her lovely and forbearing husband, waked at three a.m. once too often, buy her one? The confusion is pointless, and the “parable” is too.

But in the revelation of values, Didion is unerring and concrete. In “Many Mansions” she sees Nancy and Ronald Reagan as emblematic of everything wrong in California. Describing the old California Governor’s Mansion, used from 1903 till the Reagans constructed a new one, Didion suggests how a house should be used and ultimately how life should be lived:

The bedrooms are big and private and high-ceilinged and they do not open on the swimming pool and one can imagine reading in one of them, or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner. The bathrooms are big and airy and they do not have bidets but they do have room for hampers, and dressing tables, and chairs on which to sit and read a story to a child in the bathtub. There are hallways wide and narrow, stairs front and back, sewing rooms, ironing rooms, secret rooms. On the gilt mirror in the library there is worked a bust of Shakespeare … In the kitchen there is no trash compactor and there is no “island” with the appliances built in but there are two pantries, and a nice old table with a marble top for rolling out pastry and making divinity fudge and chocolate leaves.

Didion is a conservator of the things we should conserve. When she says that the new mansion built by the Reagans is the kind of house that has a “wet bar” in the “formal living room” and a “refreshment center” in the “recreation room,” and is thus “evocative of the unspeakable,” I know what she means. I only wish I had said it first.

I have read everything Joan Didion has written, but until Sleepless Nights I had known Elizabeth Hardwick chiefly as a critic in The New York Review of Books and, I blush to say, as the ex-wife of the late poet Robert Lowell. The Lowell/ Hard wick marriage was legendary: an alliance of Boston Brahmin with Kentucky poor white and of two of the finest literary minds in America. After the divorce Lowell published a book of poetry about Hardwick and their daughter, To Lizzie and Harriet. In it and subsequent volumes he made use of the minutiae of their lives, including fragments of her letters to him, a practice which became a cause célèbre among the literati and aroused questions of taste and responsibility rarely directed at a major poet. Lowell remarried, fathered a son, and died in 1977, his relationship with Hardwick still unresolved.

Sleepless Nights, Hardwick’s sixth book, might be the retaliatory work about Lowell, but it isn’t. She has reportedly vowed never to write about him or others central to her life, and there is a Lowell-sized hole in Sleepless Nights. For if the book is not her view of the years with Lowell, neither is it quite the “novel” it purports to be.

What is it then? Brief, difficult, entirely beautiful, Sleepless Nights is a collage of images, stories, reflections which reveals its narrator and heroine to us associative-ly. To a point this heroine is clearly Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Kentucky, educated at Columbia, resident of Manhattan, Maine, Boston’s Marlborough Street, and Amsterdam. But she resists the definition of her life by fact, and claims the right to create poetically her own history: “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.” The methods of revelation Hardwick uses here are those we have come to expect from the personal or confessional poets of our time, of whom Lowell, after Life Studies, was chief.

Sleepless Nights is dedicated to Harriet and “to my friend, Mary McCarthy,” and an organizing principle exists in a series of letters to “M.”: 1954

Dearest M.: Here I am in Boston, on Marlborough Street, number 239. I am looking out on a snowstorm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all simple struggles to an end . . . More or less settled in this handsome house … It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction:

Setting-Boston. The law will be obeyed. The whole book begins with the particular and strains toward the universal. I find the idea of two women friends, Lizzie and Mary, helpful in understanding it. The 151 pages contain one side of the conversation of a sleepless night, or many sleepless nights, with the friend you’ve known longest and trust most: stories, confessions, quiet jokes, reminiscences, insights, all placed in a context of familiar values and sure understanding. In this context the shocking personal bits, such as “Elizabeth’s” abortion-“running from the pale, frightened doctors and their sallow, furious wives in the grimy, curtained offices on West End Avenue. What are you screaming for? I have not even touched you, the doctor said”-become not sensational teasers, but old, worn fear and pain brought up again.

In this context we can see the cryptic references to Lowell as natural and not evasive. These flashes are genius; “he” is caught in detail, in the sound of a voice: He is teasing, smiling, drinking gin after a long day’s work, saying something like this to the air:

The tyranny of the weak is a burdensome thing and yet it is better to be exploited by the weak than by the strong. . . Submission to the strong is a redundancy and very fatiguing and boring in the end. . . Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition. After the break there is a single reference to “him who has left.”

With the same admirable ellipsis and economy, she reveals her own sexual life, in the Forties:

New York: There I lived at the Hotel Schuyler on West 45th Street, lived with a red-cheeked, homosexual young man from Kentucky. We had known each other all our lives. Our friendship was a violent one and we were as obsessive, critical, jealous and cruel as any ordinary couple. The rages, the slamming doors, the silences, the dissembling.

And later, about another man:

I slept with Alex three times and remember each one perfectly. In all three he was agreeably intimidating … In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me-a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation.

Hardwick uses sketches of others as foils for herself. Against her youthful sexual curiosity – sex in the head, Lawrence called it-she sets her mother’s fecundity:

My own affectionate, tireless mother had nine children. This fateful fertility kept her for most of her life under the dominion of nature. It was a thing, a presence, and she seemed to walk about encased in the clear globe of it. It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.

Against Hard wick’s loss of her husband she sets another woman’s loss of her son:

She smokes, drinks a glass of wine, eats a bit of cheese. Drugs? How can you ask? Of course. More like amphetamines than anything else. He looks awful, very thin, a skeleton . . . Almost mute, except when he’s high and then he laughs a lot . . . No, no, beautiful as à little boy. Not dumb either, naturally.

She lowers her eyes. This thing with him is never going to be over, never.

The most brilliant vignette in Sleepless Nights is “Lady,” about Billie Holiday, who becomes a metaphor for the mysterious highs and alien integrity of the artist:

The creamy lips, the oily eyelids, the violent perfume-and in her voice the tropical l’s and r’s. Her presence, her singing created a large, swelling anxiety. Long red fingernails and the sound of electrified guitars. Here was a woman who had never been a Christian . . . And of course the lascivious gardenias, worn like a large, white, beautiful ear, the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean. Sometimes she dyed her hair red and the curls lay flat against her skull, like dried blood . . .

Well, it’s a life. And some always hung about, as there is always someone in the evening leaning against the monument in the park.

A genuine nihilism; genuine, look twice. Infatuated glances saying, beautiful black star, can you love me? The answer: No.

Somehow she had retrieved from darkness the miracle of pure style. To retrieve from darkness the miracle of pure style-the phrase lingers, a fitting description of Hardwick’s own achievement in Sleepless Nights.

At the end of the book she breaks for a moment into unrelieved lament: “Oh, M., when I think of the people I have buried, North and South. Yet, why is it that we cannot keep the note of irony, the jangle of carelessness at a distance? Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone-many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.” But that irony about the self, that light tone from the “I,” that “escape on the wings of adjectives”-these transpose raw experience into art. Thus might the blues singer regret her music.

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