The Spanish literary world still owes an outstanding debt to the recognition of Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), co-founder and director of The New York Review of Books and one of the most distinguished and brilliant writers of the 20th century. The United States owns a unique style with universal reach.
What makes Hardwick so interesting is the variety of areas he covers and the extraordinary way he does it. He wrote novels, memoirs, and the most frank and intelligent literary criticism about politics and current events. Such a wide range of topics is not fashionable today, where writers tend to specialize, with few exceptions. But Hardwick’s exceptionalism allowed him to participate in all literary genres, which he tackled with brilliance and originality.
Now the publishing house Navova wants to contribute to the payment of this debt with the publication of the articles Seduction and Betrayal and her masterful Nights of Insomnia; the second with a foreword by Muñoz Molina.
Seduction and Betrayal, published in 1974, is his most passionate and meticulous work; In this film, she brings a feminist yet critical and courageous vision to the role, depicting the careers of the writers who moved her, as well as the broader issue of women’s presence in literature. In Seduction and Betrayal, Hardwick creates a gallery of portraits of writers she considers indispensable, such as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Carlyle.
To appreciate all that Hardwick’s extraordinary contribution to literature and its various genres entails, nothing is more seductive than Sleepless Nights. In the foreword to this edition of Navona, Antonio Muñoz Molina explains: “It has the air of a memoir, because it covers a large part of his life, but is not subject to any chronology, (…) It is a book of fragments, some of several pages, some only a single chapter.” or consists of two lines, a sentence, a sequence, but since it is multi-part, it also has a perfect unity of tone, rhythm and atmosphere.
In the book, Elizabeth Hardwick similarly follows a middle-aged woman named Elizabeth as she reflects on the relationships she has had throughout her life. These narrative threads, many of which are now finished due to the passing of some people, pass through Lexington, Kentucky, where he was born, Amsterdam, where he lived as a young man, and New England, where he has lived ever since. The novel frames Elizabeth’s memories as a great and important lesson. Sleepless Nights contains many verifiable autobiographical elements: Hardwick was born into a large family in Kentucky. She moved to New York and lived in a white marriage with a young gay man. As a writer, she was at the center of the literary world. In real life, she spent time with singer Billie Holiday and, as is known, lived a hellish life with her poet husband Robert Lowell, who left her after 23 years of marriage.
Throughout her life, Elizabeth travels from her home in Kentucky to New York, Boston, Maine, and then Europe. As expected, there are various relationships with men along the way. We learn that Elizabeth’s first lover, at age eighteen, was a commonplace, romantic figure twelve years her senior. There are other adventures, perhaps most notably involving Alex, a rather arrogant man with a certain charm. Following the end of her long-term relationship with a different lover, Elizabeth reflects on the nature of their bond; In essence, what could this union of a man and a woman mean? “All my life I have always sought the help of a man. He has come many times, and many times he has let me down,” she writes.
One of the book’s most evocative chapters reflects Elizabeth’s memories of her time in New York: the seedy atmosphere of the Schuyler Hotel, where she shared rooms with a friend; the smoky clubs of the city’s jazz clubs, often characterized by rapidly changing owners; and the magnetic presence of Billie Holiday, a woman drawn to self-destruction like moths to a flame. Hardwick was impressed by the tragic personality of the “whimsical goddess” Billie Holiday, her “ruthless talent and flamboyant destruction”. The pages dedicated to the jazz singer are haunting, unique, and depict the singer’s self-destruction throughout his life. “They had relationships with the forces of evil. “He was not of this world, and his magnificent fate confirmed it.”
The narrative is also imbued with a range of perceptions and ideas, particularly regarding women’s status and position relative to men. There are observations about how easily society can define a woman by her relationship with a man, as if a woman has little identity or agency of her own. Elizabeth considers the nature of spinster life and reflects that there can be a form of spinsterhood in marriage, at least for some women. Two extraordinary books.