Part 1


I made Elizabeth Hardwick laugh when I applied late to get into her creative writing class at Barnard College in the autumn of 1973. Not only could I, a black guy from Columbia across the street, rattle off a couple of middle-period Sylvia Plath poems when she asked me what I was reading—Blacklakeblackboattwoblackcutpaperpeople—I told her that my roommate said we would kidnap her daughter, Harriet, if she didn’t let me into the class. His sister was her daughter’s best friend. I’d met her at a party of his Dalton School friends. I was in.

Where do the black trees go that drink here?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

I walked her to the subway at 116th Street and Broadway. Plath had come around once for her husband’s class when they lived in Boston. Professor Hardwick remembered her as almost docile, nothing like the poems that would make her famous.

Professor Hardwick was fresh and put together. Her soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier. In her walk, she rocked gently, from side to side. She was on the job, in a short black leather coat and green print scarf, carrying a stiff leather satchel with short handles just wide enough for a certain number of student manuscripts. I hadn’t yet seen her bound up from a chair and break free, flinging over her silk shoulder a silver evening bag on its chain, saying to an astonished table of graduate students and free spirits who’d just agreed among themselves that poetry was everywhere,

—I’m sure you’re very nice, but I can’t bear that kind of talk.

And then dancing away from their party because she’d rather be at home looking forward to Saturday night delivery of the Sunday New York Times.

At our first official teacher-student conference in dingy Barnard Hall, I made Professor Hardwick laugh again, because I recited the last paragraph of Lillian Hellman’s memoir An Unfinished Woman:

Although I do have a passing sadness for the self-made foolishness that was, is, and will be …

—That fraud, Professor Hardwick said. She tried to do everything but have me killed.

Six years earlier there had been a Mike Nichols revival of Hellman’s play The Little Foxes at Lincoln Center, and she, Hardwick, had reviewed it for The New York Review of Books, calling it awkward, didactic, and full of cliché. She didn’t believe in the South as an idea, she said.

—Her use of black people, she said. You would die.

Agrarianism was a bore. Had I read Allen Tate? A poet I’d never heard of.

—You don’t need him. Faulkner?

The Bear.

—You do need him. But don’t ever do that again.

—Excuse me?

—Read Lillian. People were cutting me on the street. She got people to write letters. She told them, I’m not used to being attacked by someone who has been a guest in my house. I made up my mind that I didn’t care if I never went to another dinner party at Lillian’s. Dashiell Hammett was always trying to get away from her, for Patricia Neal.

I was discovering so much: Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Baldwin’s essays, Gertrude Stein’s autobiography. Every day, from hour to hour, there was something new, a name to put on my list of names to reckon with. One afternoon I walked by an open door and a guy with long blond hair was at his upright, preparing to play. The music had poignance and a couple of other people also paused. My mother loved the piano, but I had never heard of Erik Satie. Friends and professors had a lot to tell me.

Soon I would commit to memory passages from ‘Writing a Novel,’ the opening chapter of a novel that Professor Hardwick was writing, The Cost of Living. The opening had recently been published in the tenth-anniversary issue of The New York Review of Books.

I first learned of Harriet’s father, Robert Lowell, from his introduction to Plath’s Ariel. And I’d read his latest collection, The Dolphin.

I can’t in my memory figure out how it happened. It happened so fast. I quoted from that first chapter of her novel The Cost of Living, a letter that the first-person narrator begins after suggesting that the reader

Think of yourself as if you were in Apollinaire’s poem:

Here you are in Marseille, surrounded by watermelons.

Here you are in Coblenz at the Hotel du Géant.

Here you are in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree.

Here you are in Amsterdam …

Dearest M: Here I am in Boston, on Marlborough Street, number 239. I am looking out on a snow storm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all struggles to an end.

It is a beautiful moment. She didn’t want to hear herself quoted, but she couldn’t help remembering the pleasure of a technical problem, the transition, solved, just like that.

—I found that and I knew it would work. Nothing is worse than a transition.

The letters to M were written as part of something for Vogue, she explained. She had suddenly asked for them back, the letters addressed to M, even though she didn’t know what she wanted to save them for.

It happened so fast. My going from that letter and saying how good she was at letters to pointing to another example, a letter of hers quoted in a poem in The Dolphin:

You can’t carry your talent with you like a suitcase.


Copyright © 2022 by Darryl Pinckney

Lines from “But sometimes everything I write,” “Dunbarton,” “Man and Wife,” and “Waking Early Sunday Morning” from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

“Christ, / May I die at night” (unpublished version) by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2022 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Robert Lowell Estate.