Darryl Pinckney’s coming-of-literary-age memoir, Come Back in September, is mainly a reclamation project for his mentor Elizabeth Hardwick. Which may seem odd on its face: since her death in 2007, Hardwick has enjoyed a shelf life, esteem, and currency well beyond the expectations of most literary critics. But Pinckney’s goal is to show not just how influential Hardwick’s authority was (and is), but how hard she fought within herself to achieve it. As the book opens, Hardwick is weathering the impact of Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, her ex-husband’s 1973 poetry cycle about their dying marriage. Lowell’s use of her letters did harm; Pinckney, by contract, wants to use Hardwick’s private words to redeem and clarify her. He’s written a remarkable work of emotional and intellectual balance — Pinckney pinpoints Hardwick’s forcefulness as a critic while elevating the vulnerability that was essential to it.
In the process, it is also a book about Pinckney’s own emotional and intellectual development. He entered her circle as a student of hers at Columbia, where her company was a dazzling set of peers: New York Review of Books editors Bob Silvers and Barbara Peters, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, and more. New to this world, he was eager to protect Hardwick from the aftermath of The Dolphin, “the injustice of having words supposed to be from her letters fitted into those gone-husband’s sonnets.” But how? Gaining entry doesn’t necessarily mean he has a voice, and Pinckney — gay, Black, Midwestern — has all sorts of reasons to feel like he won’t fit in. All he can offer Hardwick is his attention and devotion, which he demonstrates by reading bound back issues of the Review and accepting her advice without complaint. “She told me that I wrote too much poetry and maybe I should try not writing any,” he recalls, and so much for poetry.
That devotion, he begins to recognize, is a bit much: a friend teases that “I’d only read the Monarch Notes about everything because I was too busy memorizing [Hardwick’s 1974 essay collection] Seduction and Betrayal.” But embarrassment isn’t the only reason he eases up. His own intellectual circle is slowly forming in late 70s New York: scenes at Hardwick’s apartment and the Review offices are interwoven with meetings and parties with musician Felice Rosser, writer Lucy (then Luc) Sante, filmmakers Howard Brookner and Jim Jarmusch, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and others. They weren’t in opposition to Hardwick’s group — Sante and Pinckney would become Review contributors themselves. But shows at the Mudd Club and art galleries provided a social and cultural counterpoint, an arrow toward the future.
Hardwick gave Pinckney her blessing on this — she wanted an intellectual sparring partner, not a clone. (Mostly. Confessing an ignorance of Nabokov, she retorts: “You don’t know Speak, Memory? Come again? What have you and Luc been doing?”) So the arc of Come Back in September is Pinckney’s coming into himself, recalling his experience inside and outside Hardwick’s world; the circles of the Venn diagram separate but never quite detach.
How do we become who we are? Some form of holding on and letting go is involved, a combination of what we remember and how we shape our memory, the advice we took and the advice we didn’t. (The book is thick with parentheticals in which Pinckney in the present reconsiders a memory, or makes an addendum to it.) Come Back in September is entertaining because it’s rich with New York intellectual gossip and Hardwick’s tart lines. Of reviewing, she says, “The only joy in these things is thinking how miserable you’d be if you weren’t doing them.” Of Lowell’s biographer, she snaps: “I’m not going to compete with Caroline [Blackwood, Lowell’s third wife] for the corpse.” But the book also works because it evokes Pinckney’s process of maturity; its form shows how coming into ourselves is thesis and antithesis, trial and error. That was true for Hardwick as well. Her struggle for much of the book is her 1979 novel Sleepless Nights, a source of satisfaction for Hardwick in itself, but something in which Pinckney sees an effort to reinvent herself in the wake of Lowell’s betrayal and death. Similarly, her 1981 Review essay “Back Issues,” her memoir of reading, was evidence of her effort to escape her unhappiness through words — literature would be her escape and redemption. It’s touching when Pickney informs her that Sante loved the piece and she responds, “I was afraid to ask you,” she tells him. “She was happy,” he recalls.
Pinckney’s growth is a function of his understanding the limitations of the circle that’s invited him in — its intellectual distance from the crises they write about, its interpersonal dramas, its whiteness. The poet Sterling Brown goads him: “Man, you are so influenced by those white intellectuals,” and into the 80s he starts to feel that “contemporary black literature was moving on the barge downriver while I waved from the plantation jetty.” He and Hardwick would argue more often: “I’d whine that she wasn’t listening, and she’d shriek that I was not making any sense, the knuckles of her open hand hitting the red cushion beside her in exasperation.”
Memoirs are so often focused on the “I” that Come Back in September’s shape and structure offer surprises. Hardwick is on the cover, not Pinckney; it’s his story, but woven around the influence of others. It’s a memoir of “we” and “they,” or, to be more specific, “she.” Pinckney’s epiphany in the book is that having gone through the wringer with Hardwick and the Review, he’s practically back where he started — but better, because he recognizes how a writer isn’t made in isolation. That a writer needs a community, a sense of oneself outside the self. “I learned from books that that in which we were to find so much of ourselves also excluded so much of the selves we most cared for,” he writes. It’s a timeless, perfect line, summarizing the reasons we write and why writing is so impossible. That’s perhaps why Hardwick likened essay writing as both pleasurable and Sisyphean — the only joy in it is in doing it again, trying to get it right.. “Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to honor the literature she cared for,” he notes, which is a melancholy and beautiful thing. Writing about your love for literature is wonderful and difficult. But if you demonstrate your devotion well enough, it might even love you back.
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on October 25, 2022, 432 pp., $32 hardcover]