Elizabeth HardwickSleepless Nights (New York Review Books Classics)

Melancholy suffuses "Sleepless Nights." A collage of memories, ruminations, vignettes, and character sketches, its 150 pages encompass a lifetime of poignant observations by a first-rate writer.The book is most powerful as a remembrance of persons, mostly women, now dead ("They are gone, with all their questions unanswered"). Hardwick recaptures the essence of their lives, examining without compromise "the niceness and the squalor and sorrow." Hardwick's prose is a wonder. She assembles telling details in the service of building a series of fateful narratives. She produces writing that is in the best sense "novelistic" -- even if the resulting book falls outside the category of a novel. The book is beyond category, and is no less rewarding for that fact.Every few pages Hardwick recounts another love story she either participated in or was a wide-eyed witness to. She refers to them as "love affairs with energy and hope." Each affair begins well. For example, she describes a temporary roommate in her Manhattan apartment, a gay man who "was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy." Yet every affair turns tragic, in its own way. These stories are so fully (yet economically) modeled that you'll swear, by the close of the book, that you've read several novels. With Hardwick, the relationships of men and women, of both high and low station, almost always lead to bitter endings. Closest to home, a sad bitterness attaches to Hardwick's own reflections on men, from her earliest encounters (among the "couples, looking into each other's eyes, as if they were safe") to her caustic memory, at the book's end, of "a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off."Hardwick always shows a remarkable empathy for the life journeys of others, especially for the deprived, those she finds "worn down by life." Of a janitor, Hardwick notes: "He was one of those men who acted as if he expected to be shouted at and would not know how to reply." Early in the book she profiles the doomed Billie Holiday, whom Hardwick knew in New York City in the 1940's and 1950's. The author re-envisions the jazz singer's life, starting with a quick sketch of her physicality ("the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean"), moving on to her performances, then offering the lesson of her early death ("she shared the changeling's spectacular destiny and was acquainted with malevolent forces"). A later chapter of the book, Part Nine, stands apart as a remarkable essay about the cleaning women whose lives intersected with Hardwick, as she moved from homes in Maine, Boston, and New York City.The scope of Hardwick's curiosity is wide-ranging, yet three of her interests struck me as noteworthy. One is her fascination, or more accurately her obsession, with people's teeth. She introduces new characters with minimal physical descriptions, yet she invariably notes the person's dental health, as if it were a critical component of moral character. Is this a bit of folk wisdom absorbed in her youth spent in the horse-breeding state of Kentucky? A notable item in her bag of writer's resources is her familiarity with farm animals and their behavior, which she freely applies to people. A Depression-era socialist organizer in rural Kentucky "had the look of a clever turkey." Two city street people, homeless women, "wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for." A final attachment is Hardwick's love/hate relationship with New York City. Early in the book she argues for a clear linkage between person and place: "It is not true that it doesn't matter where you live." Her verdict on Gotham: "This is New York, with its graves next to its banks." And then there's this surprising statement: "A woman's city, New York."I recommend "Sleepless Nights" to writers who want to write better. Hardwick belongs to the elite class of "writers' writer"; come and learn from her. I also recommend the book to anyone fascinated with Manhattan of the post-WWII era, and to anyone who wants to spend a few hours with a companionate teller of women's truths.(Mike Ettner)

My first book of 2021, just 128 pages, was not the kind of story I'm normally drawn to, but it was one that I enjoyed reading. It was written by the author when she was 63 years old and is partially autobiographical.Intro paragraph --"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 that 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 birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street."From her Kentucky childhood, one of nine children to grad school at Columbia in NY we get a feel for the old smoky jazz clubs of NY and long gone hotels of years passed. Traveling to her large summer home in Maine and to stays in Boston, Vermont, Connecticut and Europe we follow her life, her friends, her experiences in an unsentimental sort of way.The story is very visual, the writing excellent, it almost had a dreamlike quality at times. Although the writing style was a bit unconventional, it felt all the more personal to me, like I was an old friend that she was reliving her past experiences with. I'm happy I started the New Years with this book from my shelves. -- quite, reflective, memorable.4.5/5 stars

"Sleepless Nights," (thank you, NYRB Publications, for making this book, and many others, available to the "general," Borders-shopping reader -- "Sleepless Nights," the near-forgotten dark whimsies of Walser and Wilson's "Memoirs of Hecate County, to mention only a very few) may be Hardwick's supreme fictional achievement -- a book almost impossible to pin down, encapsulate, domesticate & make pliant to the reading public. it's varying tone -- hardore, here-and-now realism; unsentimental remembrance; and ofen dark wit -- sets it apart from almost every American book i've read of its genre, ie. speaking loosely, the autobiographical novel (even the term "genre" must be used cautiously here, since Hardwick/"S.N." stubbornly, even willfully defies categorization): it's almost a mind-expanding collaboration of Sylvia Plath and Mark Twain. (in fact, the writer whom "Sleepless Nights" brings to my mind, strongly and forcefully, and even a bit ruefully, is Goethe.) it balances that fine line between descriptive realism and the near-hallucinatory. and while doing this, it shows, with gentle melancholy, how even the most important, even loving people in our lives can somehow simply fade away. i've read it 3 times, and it never ceases to enchant, mystify, and remind me of the unavoidable melancholy of our human lives. easily, i think, Hardwick's masterpiece. and we can't forget NYRB Publication's other gifts to the reading public, including, along with the titles i've mentioned, Glenway Westcott's "The Pilgrim Hawk" -- sadness, loneliness, ambivalence, satire, confusion, crisis, all within the short space of 120 pp. or so. another nearly and unfairly ignored classic. (i use that word even though it's come to make my skin crawl -- i mean, "Classic Coke"? and i'm NOT a snob -- i've read my Stephen King, love "Jeopardy!" & have read "Valley of the Dolls" four times -- trash MUST be given its due: it can be entertaining and fun. but thanks to NYRB Books for giving back to us "Borders shoppers" such amazing and, to some, near-forgotten, even unknown books. and, BTW, it's also a very entertaining book -- even, if you're so inclined, a fine "beach book." among its other fine qualities, it tells a very good story -- while, of course, giving us much, much more.)

She lived a rough life, in parlous times, and is talented in imparting rough feelings to the reader.But, withal, an artist with the pen.Recommended ... IF you are an aspiring writer. Otherwise: ¡Cuidado!

"The stranger, thin as the elegant crane outside the window, casts a shadow because she has arrived when I was thinking about the transformations of memory." It is this pattern of thought that dominates this short novel. The writing, like the crane is elegant and precise. The memories may, or may not, reflect that which is recalled. The style dominates the substance and demands that this book is read at a pace that would confine most novels to oblivion. This is rumination on perception, its distortion, selectivity, and the nature of character, and of humanity. It is a constantly sad farewell to that which is bygone. It could be thought of as a book for young people, but only because the old, such as myself, may find it rather hard to take. It cuts too deep with its effort to avoid the superficiality that many need just to get through the day! Very easy to admire for the well-crafted prose and, as far as one can tell, the clarity of judgement, it remains one singular view of a specific past. This reader's empathy was not up to the task of consistent appreciation, perhaps because I know little of the author's life. "American Fictions", a collection of Hardwick's thoughtful essays on many 20th Century novelists is excellent and enjoyable.

I would recommend this book to anyone who values the careful choice of words,. Hardwick is writing in the grief of being abandoned by the poet Robert Lowell. What she writes about is everything else in her life.

Elizabeth Hardwick is a very underrated author. This book is short but rich with meaning. It’s as if she took the deepest insights from her life and wrote them down in the most concise manner. She is one of the rare breed of writers with the talent of being able to say the unsayable. And that also in a few words.

These stories can be read in any order. My personal favourite would be the eighth chapter- the story of the odd Dutch couple will be haunting me for some time.