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.

Don’t you dare mail us the love your life denies.

I stopped talking. She reached for her purse. I was saying something as I got up and she said into the tissue that I was to stay. No, I was sorry. So very sorry. I to this day do not know why I did that, how I could have done that, been so unthinking and carried away. Her tears had appeared and then were gone.

—I didn’t write that, she said. Cal used my letters. I don’t think that’s so good.

She meant those lines.

What I trust of my memory of that conference stops here. I don’t remember how much more she went on to tell me that afternoon about The Dolphin, or even if she did say anything more about it then. I sort of think not.

She never held my impertinence against me, my blunder about that book of poems. What happened to the letters she wrote to Lowell when he left and then divorced her was a question that gnawed at her down through the many years in which I knew her, the injustice of having words supposed to be from her letters fitted into those gone-husband’s sonnets. The Dolphin had come out in July, yet I was unaware of what a trial its publication had been, and still was, for her. Harriet and her friends hadn’t spoken of it around me.

We’d ventured into an education of sympathies. I’d become Hardwick’s student when I got into her class, but that afternoon I signed up for the journey and understood that I should listen in a whole new way. ‘You cannot learn unless you fall in love with the source of learning,’ Alfred North Whitehead said. Yes, another classic I would find, this one in Hardwick’s shelves not entirely empty of Lowell’s books in the stylish old apartment where she and Harriet had learned to live without him on West Sixty-seventh Street, just a couple of doors in from Central Park.

* * *

I NEVER HEARD Elizabeth Hardwick say, ‘I took a walk in the park.’ What she wanted when she went out were shops, sidewalks, traffic, to be among strangers on Main Street, the small-town girl’s dream. Yet she liked to remember the sound of the great anti–Vietnam War rallies booming down West Sixty-seventh Street from Central Park. Sometimes she sat in her dining room window and listened, she said, not really expecting the noise to become intelligible, but able to feel in the echo excited youth’s will to resist death.

(She wrote about it somewhere. Where? I’m forgetting what I’ve read. Maybe that is why I want to write this now.)

Professor Hardwick was full of admiration for the way Hannah Arendt could footnote from memory passages of Aristotle that she cited in Between Past and Future.

(Have I the right ancient? The right Arendt title?

—Yes, but it was always the same passage she quoted no matter what she was writing, Isaiah Berlin would say.)

Professor Hardwick praised Nadezhda Mandelstam for committing to memory her husband’s endangered and dangerous poetry.

Explain Frances Yates to me, I might have asked. But not of Professor Hardwick. Frances A. Yates, English historian, a pure scholar whom the subject of magic ran away with, and hero to Barbara Epstein, co-editor of The New York Review of Books. They were friends, Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, close friends. They were also neighbors on West Sixty-seventh Street. Barbara lived a few doors west, toward Columbus Avenue. Their apartments were even of the same design, built at the turn of the twentieth century as studio dwellings for artists, in brick buildings of reasonable size with limestone fronts at street level.

Fourteen floors and three apartments per floor. You stepped across the threshold into a tiny entrance, beyond which lay a two-story room, the atelier itself, converted into the living room. The front door looked across some distance to a fireplace. An enormous segmented window that reached almost to the ceiling took up the central wall, the north wall, admitting the artist’s light. The dining room and kitchen were darkly off this one huge room. Facing south, the stairs started close by the front door and led first to a balcony that overlooked the main room and then to bedrooms beyond.

—It’s like a stage set, Professor Hardwick once said. There’s nothing else.

She meant that the living room was imposing, but the rooms in the rest of the apartment were modest in scale.

(Explain Frances Yates to me. What is actually between those columns she said the Romans made visual in their minds when they were learning orations? But I don’t remember asking Barbara the question, either.

I live with a poet, a former classicist.

—It’s Cicero, James Fenton said. Imagine the rooms of a house and make a tour of that house in your mind and attach your arguments to objects in the rooms as you go. The book by Frances Yates is called The Art of Memory. We have it, he, my poet, said. You can look it up.

I must be willing to get up from my unsuitable swivel chair and look at some books if I am going to try to describe the spell cast by these unrepeatable women. I don’t want to make up things. Unless the writer has to, I am on the verge of pretending Elizabeth Hardwick said. Not if it’s supposed to be true, I am as willing to have Barbara Epstein say.)

I’m sure I walked the fifty blocks from Morningside Heights to West Sixty-seventh Street, the first time I went to Professor Hardwick’s house on my own, without the class. She held our last class of the semester in her big living room with the deep red velvet sofa and gilded mirrors and grandfather clock with a yellow moon as its face. That large, not exactly beautiful painting of a dark horse on a red bridge over the entrance to the dining room was by Harriet’s godfather, Frank Parker, her father’s prep school classmate. My fellow aspirants included Daphne Merkin and Tama Janowitz. Professor Hardwick told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers. The tone she took with us in class was just to get us ready, we assumed.

—I’d rather shoot myself than read that again.

That writing could not be taught was clear from the way she shrugged her shoulder and lifted her beautiful eyes after this or that student effort.

—I don’t know why it is we can read Dostoevsky and then go back and write like idiots.

But a passion for reading could be shared, week after week. The only way to learn to write was to read. She brought in Boris Pasternak’s Safe Conduct, translated by Beatrice Scott. She said she hated to do something so pre-Gutenberg and then proceeded to read to us in a voice that was surprisingly high, loud, and suddenly very Southern:

The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had become accustomed to the novelty of spring.

When she got to Pasternak’s line about ‘the black velvet of the talent’ in Mayakovsky, she threw herself back in her chair, light brownish layers of hair answering. Either we got it or we didn’t, but it was clear from the way she struck her breastbone that, for her, to get it was the gift of life.

We had a good time in that class. I tried to get some of us together one more time for a Suicide Party on the eleventh anniversary of Plath’s death, complete with séance. Professor Hardwick said she agreed with Virginia Woolf about the importance of reading poetry before you began working. She had stressed in class how freeing of the mind it could be to read poetry before you wrote prose. Something that had nothing to do with what you were about to do but that somehow opened up the possibilities of language in your head. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the spring semester, shortly after Luc Sante (as Lucy Sante was then, long before she transitioned) and I had taken over The Columbia Review, the moribund campus literary magazine, Professor Hardwick summoned me for dinner on West Sixty-seventh Street.

I knew what it was about. I walked across College Walk to Broadway—Amsterdam Avenue did not hold the same interest—and then down to Seventy-second Street. I had to be told every time I went by the Dakota that that dark, forbidding building was where they’d shot the film Rosemary’s Baby. I headed down Central Park West, home to some of the most famous liberals in the city, to West Sixty-seventh Street. No. 1 meant the black doors of an apartment building, the Hotel des Artistes, a very glamorous address. Professor Hardwick was next door, the entrance of her building a neo-Gothic embellishment of spires. You entered the street doors and as you waited for the doorman to answer the bell to the inner doors up a few steps, you could see three painted panels in the gray stone of the narrow lobby. I can’t remember what they depict.


Copyright © 2022 by Darryl Pinckney

Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell