The Lady Sings The Blues

By R.Z. Sheppard

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS by Elizabeth Hardwick Random House; 151 pages; $8.95

"Very few women writers can resist the temptation of feminine sensibility; it is there to be used, as a crutch, and the reliance upon it is expected and generally admired."

Much has changed since Elizabeth Hardwick wrote those words nearly a generation ago. "Feminine" has toughened to "feminism." "Sensibility," a blandishment of the literary critic, has become "consciousness," a cliche of the cultural revolutionary. But her view still holds; as an essayist and a power in New York literary circles, Hardwick has kept her distance from trendy tastes. There are books and there is literature, she told a gathering of writers and publishers last year, adding that she had never met anyone who bought a book on the bestseller lists.

That is not the statement of a Boston Brahmin but of a Kentuckian, born 62 years ago in Lexington, a daughter of a small businessman. Hardwick's fugitive group was not that of Southern Poet-Critics John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. Hers included the restless young intellectuals who headed north to freedom from regionalism. She studied literature at Columbia, wrote fiction under a Guggenheim fellowship, married Poet Robert Lowell in 1949 (they were divorced in 1972), contributed to the Partisan Review and The New Yorker, became a founding fixture at the New York

Review of Books and a frequent literary panelist and judge.

As an essayist, Hardwick fashioned an authoritative style out of liberal commitment and sharp sense. As a fiction writer, she has turned the crutch of feminine sensibility into a dangerous weapon: "Actually Louisa, the young girl visitor, has just gotten quite a good job. She knows a few things and a few people. She went out early, but not too early, in black pants and a black leather coat. She put on a scarf with the name of a French designer displayed with such prominence it might have been he who was the applicant."

Sleepless Nights tosses and turns on such hard, solitary judgments. Mary McCarthy comes to mind and, oddly, so does the Ernest Hemingway of A Moveable Feast, who said that his book could be regarded as fiction though it also might throw light on autobiographical fact. Hardwick provides a similar safeguard when Elizabeth, her novel's unaltered ego, says to herself, "Why didn't you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when all of it is not."

Readers who expect "My Life with Robert Lowell" will be disappointed.

He is only one of many characters gracefully projected on the page like shadow puppets. The unnamed husband of Elizabeth muses on the genteel oppressions of his native Boston. Later he is mentioned as a man who reads and writes all day, has "the preoccupied look of a secret agent" and free-associates about Goethe with his psychiatrist. The author seems to have measured elements of Lowell very carefully, knowing that his specific gravity could easily upset the delicate balance of her fiction.

On the other hand, Hardwick makes full use of the legendary self-destructiveness of Billie Holiday. There is the suggestion of a 1940s acquaintanceship with the great blues singer. Hardwick, the prudent observer, is fascinated by the abandon with which Holiday burned talent and life. There is a tendency to mythologize her excesses and her presence: "The lascivious gardenias, worn like a large, white, beautiful ear, the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean."

As a Manhattanite--someone from somewhere else--Hardwick seems at home with homelessness. She also has an untiring eye for worms in the Big Apple.

Young successful couples throw themselves into town-house renovations in the East 90s only to discover that the strain and the cost drive them to separation.

"The streets," observes the author, "are called Death Row."

Sleepless Nights may be short on liveliness but it is long on artfulness: "Everyone dreams of a servant when the ego is bruised . . . Envy is not the vice of the frozen intellectual. How can it seize the mind when boredom arrives before it?"

Throughout, Hardwick demonstrates that she can certainly sing the blues, though her tone is more akin to the stoic captions on classical tombstones than to the bandstand. Her epigrams are the winding sheets of memory.

--R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.