The Company She Kept

IT MAY BE that the record of a life, after all, comes down to its detritus--the stubs of train tickets, Circle Line passes, a faded flower pressed in an old book. The artifacts themselves are not so important, of course; rather it is the spinning web of connections made and missed, the spiritual passings and associations that the artifacts bring to mind. Not stirring stuff perhaps, but resolutely, even defiantly individual. And as Elizabeth Hardwick writes in this beautiful and opaque short book, which is certainly not autobiography but not quite fiction:

Is that sufficient--never mind that it is the truth. 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 'I' am a woman.

The cataloguing begins, running from Lexington, Kentucky to the New York of Billie Holiday to Boston to postwar Amsterdam, of books read in the nights when sleep would not come. It is a brilliant record; we are fortunate for it.

The "Elizabeth" of this book has always, she explains, "all of of my life, been looking for help from a man." And so it is a record of the men--Southern intellectuals, and Southern homosexuals transplanted to New York, upper middle-class Amsterdam doctors, Kentucky Communists sustained by faith and New York drifters sustained by disbelief. Standing in the background is the shadowy outline of Robert Lowell, to whom she was married and with whom she shared a house at No. 67 Marlborough St. in Boston.

Just as always he reads and writes all day, here in this house on the top floor, drinks quarts of milk, smokes cigarettes. He hates for me to play my jazz records, but sometimes I do late at night and then he dances around, off the beat, like a bear.

Many of the men are not attractive figures. There is "the man who bought me my first pair of reading glasses, which I did not need." He introduced himself to Elizabeth as she took down a volume of Thomas Mann from a library shelf; he is 30, she is 18, and one day with the same carelessness he brought to their relationship he leapt to his death from a bridge. Or Alex A., working at the Museum of Modern Art, living in his studio, "a snob, a dandy, and a Marxist." An old friend, "very handsome and a little depressed by nature, but anxious to please and in this pleasantness somewhat impersonal. For this reason he was doomed to more fornication than he wished." Other, more working class men follow, and sometimes they are far, far less pleasant. They all receive sympathy; in old age one must take people as one finds them.

But the most resounding parts of this book are about the women who inhabit its pages, and especially the parts about the women in New York--"A woman's city, New York." A roommate in a boarding house near Columbia, Miss Lavore was a secretary, large and homely, and in her late '50s. "Nearly every night of the week she went to Arthur Murray's dancing classes. A framed, autographed portrait of Murray and his wife hung over her bed. It would be florid to say it hung there like a religious icon, but certainly the two secular persons filled Miss Lavore's heart with gratitude." The waltz, Miss Lavore had been known to say, is not as easy as it looks. There are other women--Josette, a fading Boston Brahmin, or Juanita, the daughter of a Lexington trainman and his hardworking wife, who for no apparent reason became a prostitute. Her family does not disown her, turn her out, but continued to love her--what else? --and as venereal disease began to waste her, answered for her. "Juanita is not feeling well today," her mother would say. There are some lots that must be escaped, even if it means turning into a pillar of salt. "Gentlemen," Hardwick reminds us, "do not appeal to all women."

Gentlewomen do not appeal to all women, either.

Part Three of Sleepless Nights is a dusky, beautiful, 20-page evocation of early '40s New York and Billie Holiday: "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." So desperately important to a woman who was trying to forget that she was.

I HAVE ONLY touched on how beautiful this short work is, how well-written and human. She retains her humor and her independence, no matter how many times the man in the Brooks-Brothers suit is revealed to be a Brooks Brothers mannequin. Occasionally, she can be crustily funny about it; traveling across Canada by train, surrounded in the railway car by drunken men, her Elizabeth has the fragile temerity to howl "Canadians, do not vomit on me!" More often she is sincere, direct, touching, with only a trace of the sentimentality of the German romantics she quotes so often. Evil is not in her world, or in men, but in their confluence; the pain and sleepless nights are not in women, or in men, but in their great need for each other. The waltz, she cautions us, is not as easy as it looks, and clumsiness is painful. But to dance like bears, off the beat, around and around--the necessary dance of men and women--is what Elizabeth Hardwick writes about so gracefully and so well. Sleepless Nights is a testament to the dance, a beautiful addition to the record of men and women.