She has chronicled again and again the undertow of family life, the awesome torment of being a daughter - an observer in the household, a constant reader of the domestic text - the anarchy of sex. "Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature." It colored both of her early novels, "The Ghostly Lover" in 1945 and "The Simple Truth" in 1955, as well as many of the essays collected in 1962 as "A View of My Own" and all of those published in 1974 as That he returns, incessantly." In certain ways, the mysterious and somnambulistic "difference" of being a woman has been, over 35 years, Elizabeth Hardwick's great subject, the tropic to which she has returned incessantly: By way of suggesting his own intention, Levi-Strauss quoted Chateaubriand: "Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved, and it is to this world This strikes an interesting note, a balance of Oriental diffidence and exquisite contempt, of irony and direct statement, that exactly expresses the sensibility at work in "Sleepless Nights." "But after all, 'I' am a woman." Master on the dock and signed up for the journey. The author observes of her enigmatic narrative: "It certainly hasn't the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate The result is less a "story about" or "of" a life than a shattered meditation on it, a work as evocativeĪnd difficult to place as Claude Levi-Strauss's "Tristes Tropiques," which it oddly recalls. We are presented the entire itinerary, shown all the punched tickets and transfers. We study in another light the rainyĪfternoons and dyed satin shoes and high-school drunkenness of the Kentucky adolescence, the thin coats and yearnings toward home of the graduate years at Columbia, the households in Maine and Europe and on Marlborough Street in BostonĪnd West 67th Street in New York. Is entirely and deliberately the author: we recognize the events and addresses of Elizabeth Hardwick's life not only from her earlier work, but from the poems of her husband, the late Robert Lowell.
"Sleepless Nights" is a novel, but it is a novel in which the subject is memory and to which the "I" whose memories are in question "It has come many times and many more than not. Have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man," we are told near the beginning of Elizabeth Hardwick's subtle newīook.
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