Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan

Part 1

I made Elizabeth Hardwick laugh when I applied late to get into her creative writing class at Barnard College in the autumn of 1973. Not only could I, a black guy from Columbia across the street, rattle off a couple of middle-period Sylvia Plath poems when she asked me what I was reading—Blacklakeblackboattwoblackcutpaperpeople—I told her that my roommate said we would kidnap her daughter, Harriet, if she didn’t let me into the class. His sister was her daughter’s best friend. I’d met her at a party of his Dalton School friends. I was in.

Where do the black trees go that drink here?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

I walked her to the subway at 116th Street and Broadway. Plath had come around once for her husband’s class when they lived in Boston. Professor Hardwick remembered her as almost docile, nothing like the poems that would make her famous.

Professor Hardwick was fresh and put together. Her soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier. In her walk, she rocked gently, from side to side. She was on the job, in a short black leather coat and green print scarf, carrying a stiff leather satchel with short handles just wide enough for a certain number of student manuscripts. I hadn’t yet seen her bound up from a chair and break free, flinging over her silk shoulder a silver evening bag on its chain, saying to an astonished table of graduate students and free spirits who’d just agreed among themselves that poetry was everywhere,

—I’m sure you’re very nice, but I can’t bear that kind of talk.

And then dancing away from their party because she’d rather be at home looking forward to Saturday night delivery of the Sunday New York Times.

At our first official teacher-student conference in dingy Barnard Hall, I made Professor Hardwick laugh again, because I recited the last paragraph of Lillian Hellman’s memoir An Unfinished Woman:

Although I do have a passing sadness for the self-made foolishness that was, is, and will be …

—That fraud, Professor Hardwick said. She tried to do everything but have me killed.

Six years earlier there had been a Mike Nichols revival of Hellman’s play The Little Foxes at Lincoln Center, and she, Hardwick, had reviewed it for The New York Review of Books, calling it awkward, didactic, and full of cliché. She didn’t believe in the South as an idea, she said.

—Her use of black people, she said. You would die.

Agrarianism was a bore. Had I read Allen Tate? A poet I’d never heard of.

—You don’t need him. Faulkner?

The Bear.

—You do need him. But don’t ever do that again.

—Excuse me?

—Read Lillian. People were cutting me on the street. She got people to write letters. She told them, I’m not used to being attacked by someone who has been a guest in my house. I made up my mind that I didn’t care if I never went to another dinner party at Lillian’s. Dashiell Hammett was always trying to get away from her, for Patricia Neal.

I was discovering so much: Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Baldwin’s essays, Gertrude Stein’s autobiography. Every day, from hour to hour, there was something new, a name to put on my list of names to reckon with. One afternoon I walked by an open door and a guy with long blond hair was at his upright, preparing to play. The music had poignance and a couple of other people also paused. My mother loved the piano, but I had never heard of Erik Satie. Friends and professors had a lot to tell me.

Soon I would commit to memory passages from ‘Writing a Novel,’ the opening chapter of a novel that Professor Hardwick was writing, The Cost of Living. The opening had recently been published in the tenth-anniversary issue of The New York Review of Books.

I first learned of Harriet’s father, Robert Lowell, from his introduction to Plath’s Ariel. And I’d read his latest collection, The Dolphin.

I can’t in my memory figure out how it happened. It happened so fast. I quoted from that first chapter of her novel The Cost of Living, a letter that the first-person narrator begins after suggesting that the reader

Think of yourself as if you were in Apollinaire’s poem:

Here you are in Marseille, surrounded by watermelons.

Here you are in Coblenz at the Hotel du Géant.

Here you are in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree.

Here you are in Amsterdam …

Dearest M: Here I am in Boston, on Marlborough Street, number 239. I am looking out on a snow storm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all struggles to an end.

It is a beautiful moment. She didn’t want to hear herself quoted, but she couldn’t help remembering the pleasure of a technical problem, the transition, solved, just like that.

—I found that and I knew it would work. Nothing is worse than a transition.

The letters to M were written as part of something for Vogue, she explained. She had suddenly asked for them back, the letters addressed to M, even though she didn’t know what she wanted to save them for.

It happened so fast. My going from that letter and saying how good she was at letters to pointing to another example, a letter of hers quoted in a poem in The Dolphin:

You can’t carry your talent with you like a suitcase.

Don’t you dare mail us the love your life denies.

I stopped talking. She reached for her purse. I was saying something as I got up and she said into the tissue that I was to stay. No, I was sorry. So very sorry. I to this day do not know why I did that, how I could have done that, been so unthinking and carried away. Her tears had appeared and then were gone.

—I didn’t write that, she said. Cal used my letters. I don’t think that’s so good.

She meant those lines.

What I trust of my memory of that conference stops here. I don’t remember how much more she went on to tell me that afternoon about The Dolphin, or even if she did say anything more about it then. I sort of think not.

She never held my impertinence against me, my blunder about that book of poems. What happened to the letters she wrote to Lowell when he left and then divorced her was a question that gnawed at her down through the many years in which I knew her, the injustice of having words supposed to be from her letters fitted into those gone-husband’s sonnets. The Dolphin had come out in July, yet I was unaware of what a trial its publication had been, and still was, for her. Harriet and her friends hadn’t spoken of it around me.

We’d ventured into an education of sympathies. I’d become Hardwick’s student when I got into her class, but that afternoon I signed up for the journey and understood that I should listen in a whole new way. ‘You cannot learn unless you fall in love with the source of learning,’ Alfred North Whitehead said. Yes, another classic I would find, this one in Hardwick’s shelves not entirely empty of Lowell’s books in the stylish old apartment where she and Harriet had learned to live without him on West Sixty-seventh Street, just a couple of doors in from Central Park.

I NEVER HEARD Elizabeth Hardwick say, ‘I took a walk in the park.’ What she wanted when she went out were shops, sidewalks, traffic, to be among strangers on Main Street, the small-town girl’s dream. Yet she liked to remember the sound of the great anti–Vietnam War rallies booming down West Sixty-seventh Street from Central Park. Sometimes she sat in her dining room window and listened, she said, not really expecting the noise to become intelligible, but able to feel in the echo excited youth’s will to resist death.

(She wrote about it somewhere. Where? I’m forgetting what I’ve read. Maybe that is why I want to write this now.)

Professor Hardwick was full of admiration for the way Hannah Arendt could footnote from memory passages of Aristotle that she cited in Between Past and Future.

(Have I the right ancient? The right Arendt title?

—Yes, but it was always the same passage she quoted no matter what she was writing, Isaiah Berlin would say.)

Professor Hardwick praised Nadezhda Mandelstam for committing to memory her husband’s endangered and dangerous poetry.

Explain Frances Yates to me, I might have asked. But not of Professor Hardwick. Frances A. Yates, English historian, a pure scholar whom the subject of magic ran away with, and hero to Barbara Epstein, co-editor of The New York Review of Books. They were friends, Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, close friends. They were also neighbors on West Sixty-seventh Street. Barbara lived a few doors west, toward Columbus Avenue. Their apartments were even of the same design, built at the turn of the twentieth century as studio dwellings for artists, in brick buildings of reasonable size with limestone fronts at street level.

Fourteen floors and three apartments per floor. You stepped across the threshold into a tiny entrance, beyond which lay a two-story room, the atelier itself, converted into the living room. The front door looked across some distance to a fireplace. An enormous segmented window that reached almost to the ceiling took up the central wall, the north wall, admitting the artist’s light. The dining room and kitchen were darkly off this one huge room. Facing south, the stairs started close by the front door and led first to a balcony that overlooked the main room and then to bedrooms beyond.

—It’s like a stage set, Professor Hardwick once said. There’s nothing else.

She meant that the living room was imposing, but the rooms in the rest of the apartment were modest in scale.

(Explain Frances Yates to me. What is actually between those columns she said the Romans made visual in their minds when they were learning orations? But I don’t remember asking Barbara the question, either.

I live with a poet, a former classicist.

—It’s Cicero, James Fenton said. Imagine the rooms of a house and make a tour of that house in your mind and attach your arguments to objects in the rooms as you go. The book by Frances Yates is called The Art of Memory. We have it, he, my poet, said. You can look it up.

I must be willing to get up from my unsuitable swivel chair and look at some books if I am going to try to describe the spell cast by these unrepeatable women. I don’t want to make up things. Unless the writer has to, I am on the verge of pretending Elizabeth Hardwick said. Not if it’s supposed to be true, I am as willing to have Barbara Epstein say.)

I’m sure I walked the fifty blocks from Morningside Heights to West Sixty-seventh Street, the first time I went to Professor Hardwick’s house on my own, without the class. She held our last class of the semester in her big living room with the deep red velvet sofa and gilded mirrors and grandfather clock with a yellow moon as its face. That large, not exactly beautiful painting of a dark horse on a red bridge over the entrance to the dining room was by Harriet’s godfather, Frank Parker, her father’s prep school classmate. My fellow aspirants included Daphne Merkin and Tama Janowitz. Professor Hardwick told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers. The tone she took with us in class was just to get us ready, we assumed.

—I’d rather shoot myself than read that again.

That writing could not be taught was clear from the way she shrugged her shoulder and lifted her beautiful eyes after this or that student effort.

—I don’t know why it is we can read Dostoevsky and then go back and write like idiots.

But a passion for reading could be shared, week after week. The only way to learn to write was to read. She brought in Boris Pasternak’s Safe Conduct, translated by Beatrice Scott. She said she hated to do something so pre-Gutenberg and then proceeded to read to us in a voice that was surprisingly high, loud, and suddenly very Southern:

The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had become accustomed to the novelty of spring.

When she got to Pasternak’s line about ‘the black velvet of the talent’ in Mayakovsky, she threw herself back in her chair, light brownish layers of hair answering. Either we got it or we didn’t, but it was clear from the way she struck her breastbone that, for her, to get it was the gift of life.

We had a good time in that class. I tried to get some of us together one more time for a Suicide Party on the eleventh anniversary of Plath’s death, complete with séance. Professor Hardwick said she agreed with Virginia Woolf about the importance of reading poetry before you began working. She had stressed in class how freeing of the mind it could be to read poetry before you wrote prose. Something that had nothing to do with what you were about to do but that somehow opened up the possibilities of language in your head. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the spring semester, shortly after Luc Sante (as Lucy Sante was then, long before she transitioned) and I had taken over The Columbia Review, the moribund campus literary magazine, Professor Hardwick summoned me for dinner on West Sixty-seventh Street.

I knew what it was about. I walked across College Walk to Broadway—Amsterdam Avenue did not hold the same interest—and then down to Seventy-second Street. I had to be told every time I went by the Dakota that that dark, forbidding building was where they’d shot the film Rosemary’s Baby. I headed down Central Park West, home to some of the most famous liberals in the city, to West Sixty-seventh Street. No. 1 meant the black doors of an apartment building, the Hotel des Artistes, a very glamorous address. Professor Hardwick was next door, the entrance of her building a neo-Gothic embellishment of spires. You entered the street doors and as you waited for the doorman to answer the bell to the inner doors up a few steps, you could see three painted panels in the gray stone of the narrow lobby. I can’t remember what they depict.

—Burne-Jones, Professor Hardwick said she once heard someone on the street say of them. It made her laugh. She said,

—I thought, Come again?

I was late. Harriet made coffee and retired. I knew what this conference was about. I had on lots of sweaters and so did Professor Hardwick. She wore as usual her necklace of large amber pieces that she toyed with when she talked to you on the red sofa. Until her fist came down into the cushion. Though our class with her had ended, I’d asked her to read my manuscript of poems. Unfortunately, I can remember even now what title I gave the manuscript and what the poems were like. Harriet was upstairs. Professor Hardwick went stanza by stanza. She scolded, winced, and deplored.

She said, among other things, —You’re the worst poet I’ve ever read. You mustn’t write poetry anymore.

I didn’t destroy the manuscript. Not right away. And I didn’t heed her warning. Not right away. Alas, I would have some new poems that I wanted to lob in the path of a superbly indifferent guy by way of the campus literary magazine. Those poems had not been included in the special edition of said manuscript that I’d given to my mother for Christmas. My mother duly put that gift away in some unknown place. After my parents died, I realized how much I’d longed for them to die so I could find and burn that only existing copy of …

She showed me the notations Lowell made in his copy of the first English edition of Ariel.

—He didn’t know what she meant.

Apparently, to judge from the marks, he was quite taken and surprised. It had appeared out of the blue, she said, from England.

(Ariel was published in 1965.)

—We couldn’t get over it.

Professor Hardwick let me stay and stay. She made dinner that night, the night she told me that I wrote too much poetry and maybe I should try not writing any. It was a Saturday, not Sunday. Dinner on Sunday became our regular appointment and my mother stopped phoning to thank her for feeding me. But this was a Saturday. I was having Scotch with ice that night. What could I have been thinking? I never drank Scotch.

A Winslow cousin of Lowell’s, Devereux Meade, who lived in the building, joined us. Devie was a graduate student. The Elizabethans. Sir Thomas Wyatt told me that love in Kenneth Koch’s Poetry and Form class was no different from love at the Tudor court. I’m sure I was completely drunk. I can hear myself screaming along:

And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’

We were in the dining room. A very dark chandelier of carved wood hung down low over the table. Crimson wallpaper and white trim. Everything in the dining room was dark, the sideboard, the chairs, the end tables, the glass cabinets. These were old Mrs. Lowell’s things, the plates, the china, the silver.

I would come sit at that dining room table of reddish wood for years, decades. She was not a good cook. Recipes, from friends, turned oily or shrank as she spooned juice, with slow shakes of her head that conveyed her doubts, over whatever was drying out in the baking dish. But she had unlimited amounts of Mouton Cadet, red and white, from a secret connection.

O Rose.

Devie, the graduate-student cousin, got Jonathan Swift and Ben Jonson down from the shelves. She spread a book flat in her left hand and let out smoke and waved her cigarette and touched the neck of her blouse or the edges of her sweater as she delighted in the beauty of this line or the subtlety of that meaning, intoning in her soft, sparkling voice.

Go, go, go, seek some other where; importune me no more

Professor Hardwick fetched her Greatest Hits, as she called Marlowe, Chaucer, and Donne, while Devie followed, turning pages.

I was insisting on ‘To His Coy Mistress’ one moment, then ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the next, whatever came into my head, like a party piece. Professor Hardwick said she didn’t understand Keats, laughed, caught Harriet by her hand, and kissed it.

—Isn’t this fun?

The bookshelves on either side of her living room soared. Ladders attached to the top rail rolled from the poetry section that started low on one end above the phonograph table to the thick volumes of The Rise of the Dutch Republic that Lowell had left behind high up on the other end. Opposite was all fiction. Harriet cleared plates.

—Isn’t she dear? God has been so good to me.

Professor Hardwick had had a tender reaction to my appreciation of Randall Jarrell the previous semester. Even Luc Sante was impressed by his essay on Walt Whitman. She said Jarrell’s friends suspected that the troubled poet and critic deliberately put himself in the path of the car that killed him down in Chapel Hill in 1965.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing

cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest …

So on to another one of her recommendations I’d got from the library though she of course had it in her shelves: Which was she in Philip Rahv’s scheme of high vs. popular literature, Paleface or Redskin? Stunned by Rahv’s news that Henry James and Whitman could not abide with each other, that they, closet case and bear, represented irreconcilable traditions, I meant to stick to the high road when talking about Philip Rahv, engaged critic and editor of Partisan Review when Elizabeth Hardwick was starting out as a writer in the 1940s. But it was she who stepped off into the personal, sighing over how unhappy he’d been in his last years.

—Poor Philip.

—Dying is an art.

Professor Hardwick slammed her glass on the table.

—I hate that line. Dying is not an art.

It all seems to belong to this one night, denouncing Plath and showing, at my insistence, photographs of Cal, —Mr. Lowell, as I said like some darky or family retainer. Across from the red sofa, against the wall between the entrance to the dining room and a narrow passage that led to the kitchen, on top of a broad wooden desk, a Cartier-Bresson of a young Harriet on her father’s shoulders.

—He’s gorgeous, Harriet.

We weren’t drunk; we were enchanted, and I was swaying in the door and trying to say

Mothers of America let your children go to the movies!

as my good night.

The New York School was all tone and John Ashbery was the undisputed master of it, Professor Hardwick said, but she liked Frank O’Hara for his speed and sharpness. We’d forgot to ring for the elevator.

Allen Ginsberg with his harmonium, chanting for peace at the Sundial on campus, let you know that you were in the right place. Over here is where Jack Kerouac smiled. Every week your idols were reading downtown in the East Village at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Most of David Shapiro’s class would turn up. As a professor, Shapiro was scarcely older than his students. His photograph appeared in Life magazine in 1968 showing him smoking a cigar in the president’s chair during the student takeover at Columbia. (Lucy told me not long ago that the pose copied a scene from Eisenstein.) Shapiro invited us everywhere and showed us everything. I told John Ashbery I was born in Boston on Pinckney Street. (I could put that in a self-forgiving context: Drunk as Hart Crane about to jump overboard, I…)

We chose ‘Prufrock’ over The Waste Land. Why? And although Ginsberg would give a public reading with Lowell (I heard the literary critic Morris Dickstein say that reading the Beats got Lowell to relax his verse), there was no question that Thomas Stearns Eliot and Robert Traill Spence Lowell were the establishment and they, gay and straight sons of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and French literature, not the classics, were free. But I’d finally read The Armies of the Night. Robert Lowell was the nation’s conscience, our poet laureate, the successor to Robert Frost. He had been on the cover of Time magazine. I’d also by this time gone through Life Studies, the volume that unreadable books on American poetry said had inaugurated the confessional school. I kept to myself my guilty feeling about his poem ‘Man and Wife.’ I shouldn’t be eavesdropping; I shouldn’t find in his example so much permission to be a mess.

… still all air and nerve:

you were in your twenties, and I,

once hand on glass

and heart in mouth,

outdrank the Rahvs in the heat

of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—

too boiled and shy

and poker-faced to make a pass,

while the shrill verve

of your invective scorched the traditional South.

WHEN I SAW her again, Professor Hardwick had rolled down to Rio, was writing about Lévi-Strauss, and Thomas Pynchon had been denied the Pulitzer Prize by the Pulitzer’s board, though Gravity’s Rainbow was the choice of the critics’ jury, of which she had been one. She was not in the mood to find it ironic that both she and Nixon had attacked the Pulitzer’s board.

(Gravity’s Rainbow was a book I wanted to be seen with, but I took my time before I opened it.

—What are you waiting for. It’s funny.

She was immediately curious about what found its way into her hands. Even a bad book told her something. She stuck with most everything to the end, for hours, though a few books she was relieved to have an excuse not to finish. She stayed away from academic criticism, theory, analytical philosophy.)

I’d seen Barbara Epstein for the second time, this time in the chaotic offices of The New York Review of Books. They were on the fourteenth (thirteenth?) floor in the faintly ratty Fisk Building, on the corner of West Fifty-seventh Street and Broadway. A girl I’d become friends with when she was Professor Hardwick’s lodger worked there in the charged silence. One evening a petite figure, Barbara Epstein, crossed the main room to her office. She advanced chin-first. She wore black pants. She carried papers and was chewing gum. She’d quit smoking, it was whispered. One story had Robert Silvers setting fire to the hair of an editorial assistant who happened to lean over his desk just as he moved forward in his chair with his burning brown Sherman.

And Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature had been published, Professor Hardwick’s first book in more than a decade. The dedication:

To my friend Barbara Epstein, with love

It would take me a while to understand this collection as an act of self-rescue. Divorce, a prism that rayed her understanding of being a woman, a state she and Barbara would talk from probably more than they talked about.

When I came over to say goodbye for the summer, Professor Hardwick and Harriet were dressed for a dinner Jason Epstein was giving for them.

—An old fox in the book publishing business, said in the dry voice Professor Hardwick used when she wanted you to know that she was quoting someone. She’d lower her head and raise her eyes at you to signal mischief.

He was her editor. He had a letter from Mary McCarthy about Seduction and Betrayal that Professor Hardwick was proud of. She was wearing her favorite pair of shoes, bought in Rome years before, burgundy suede heels with large rhinestone butterflies on the toes.

I’d brought as a present an album of late Billie Holiday recordings. On ‘My Man,’ Professor Hardwick grimaced and clutched her head. Then she was stricken with a pain in her chest.

—Like sandpaper or a bruise, she described it.

She was in such pain but refused to call a doctor or lie down.

—Why can’t you lie down?

—I don’t know why. I just can’t. I can’t explain it.

Hannah Arendt had just had a heart attack. The phone calls about it hadn’t stopped.

—But I’m not sick. This is just a pain I’m having.

Harriet said she’d been traveling a lot recently and needed to slow down. Maybe she should pass on going out to that East Side restaurant. She made her mother call her doctor, Annie Baumann, who wasn’t in. Everyone was frightened of Dr. Baumann, she said.

After a while, the pain subsided, and Professor Hardwick felt well enough to have a drink and laugh at the news about Watergate. I remember that Devie arrived, looking beautiful, and I put them in a taxi, saying that I’d miss them, thanking her for everything.

—Professor Hardwick. That’s cute. I’m no more a professor than I am an M.D.

I’d seen those rhinestone-topped heels before. It must have been a month or so earlier. I could maybe find out from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell exactly when he was in New York in the spring of 1974, if I got up from this chair and went in search of it. But Professor Hardwick was wearing them the evening Robert Lowell came for a visit. They went with a purple skirt, heavy, odd, and floor length. It was finished in pennants, a hem of downward facing triangles.

Professor Hardwick was nervous. Harriet was cool. They had an argument about the SLA, the Symbionese Liberation Army. The daughter propped her feet up on the furniture and provoked the mother by using words like ‘pig,’ ‘trash,’ and ‘waste them.’ Harriet’s best friend from the Dalton School was late, which made me nervous, because the atmosphere hinted that I was intruding. Where was Devie?

Robert Silvers’s office called. Lowell had taken a later plane than expected and Professor Hardwick thought maybe I should come back when he wasn’t so tired. Was he coming from Harvard? Then she decided I should stay and gave me another drink, trying to tell me what to expect.

—Well, he’s mad. You’ll see.

Harriet leapt to his defense.

Professor Hardwick returned with plates.

—Well, not mad, honey. I didn’t mean he was … Yes I did. Papa’s mad.

We listened for footsteps, for the elevator, and talked in short sentences.

I remember how he dropped his suitcases and zeroed in on Harriet, this large balding man with long white fringe, a father in thick glasses aiming his eyes at his daughter. He hugged her. He and Hardwick brushed hands. I don’t remember if he ate. His leg is crossed high over his knee and he is fingering a glass of milk and muttering in the gathering dark in the direction he last saw Harriet sitting.

(I wish I’d written down more about that evening and that parts of what I did write down, like what he had said about Bacon, hadn’t got destroyed. When the journals from your student days burn up and years later you open a sooty box of remains, the burned pages are the size and shape of Ping-Pong paddles. They are stiff, browned, flaking at the black edges. They still smell of that fire. I can see how many different handwritings I had.

James said, —This is why you’re making up your idiom as you go.

Luc used to throw a strand of spaghetti against his wall. If it stuck, then it was ready. Friends used to read to friends. Jim, Phil, Suzanne, coming over with something that truly impressed them. One night, Luc read aloud in its entirety Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay ‘Memoirs, Conversations, Diaries,’ from that early collection, A View of My Own:

Dr. Johnson is treasured, but odium attaches to his giddy memorialist. Grateful as readers have always been for the book, they cannot imagine themselves stooping to this peculiar method of composition.

Luc was into it:

There is no doubt that the diarist is the most egotistical of beings; he quite before our eyes ceases to take himself with that grain of salt which alone makes clever people bearable.

What Valéry said to Mallarmé; what Mallarmé’s pipe smoke said to Valéry. Self-regarding Gide; Pepys, the amateur; De Quincey overawed by Wordsworth; the Goncourts freaking out that soft-boiled egg, Henry James.

‘Gorky’s reminiscences of Tolstoy—a masterpiece,’ she said toward the end of her essay.)

I remember Lowell chiding Hardwick for not liking Ezra Pound. The Pound Question: whether to forgive his wartime fascism and was that in fact fascism or the early onslaught of madness. The answer divided along gender lines, as far as I could tell. On one side of Broadway, at Columbia, Kenneth Koch recommended Pound’s ABC of Reading and David Shapiro excised The Pisan Cantos for us, like a big brother who’d removed a harmful thorn. On the other side of Broadway, however, at Barnard, where I read The Golden Notebook as if in secret with Catharine R. Stimpson in order to get away from so much grain-by-grain analysis of Beckett, Professor Hardwick was clear that Pound’s poetry was just the randomness of

—a little old idea monger at a machine.

She said when Lowell went to see Pound at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., where he was confined after the war, she flatly refused to accompany him.

(In Italy, after Pound was arrested and transferred to Pisa, he was held in a cage and guarded by black soldiers. Or was it that he was the only white prisoner?)

One minute her butterflies were up on the coffee table while Lowell was a ways off, huddled over a photo album with the girls. The next minute Professor Hardwick was in her magic shoes, saying that she had to go to Barnard in the morning and he was going to Saratoga. She handed him his keys to the studio downstairs. They said good night and he made one last comment about her essay on Sylvia Plath, reprinted in Seduction and Betrayal.

—You’ve ruined Plath for everyone.

What if she were alive? Professor Hardwick in her essay on Plath made the effort to read the poems as if she’d failed to kill herself or had changed her mind:

Her poems have, read differently, the overcharged preoccupation with death and release found in religious poetry. For indeed she saw eternity the other night, also; she cries out No end? as Herbert does.

Professor Hardwick went upstairs, right hand on banister, inches of skirt balled in her left fingers.

Later, Mr. Lowell read to us some new poems about Harriet’s half brother. Then I was carrying his bags downstairs, one floor below. I was saucy for a reaction to Babu, or Babo, depending on whether I was from Melville’s short story ‘Benito Cereno’ or from Lowell’s adaptation of it for the stage. The American captain boards the Spanish ship and doesn’t realize that the unctuous black servant is actually the chief slave rebel. But Lowell knew perfectly well who I was.

COME SEPTEMBER, CLASSES were again in session. Life was new, a do-over, which meant that I was across the street from campus, back in a side booth in the West End Café. Luc and I had had a feud and hadn’t written to each other all summer. But here we were, and the West End was our office. The drinking age was eighteen, and soon he was lamenting that by the time Rimbaud was his age he’d stopped writing.

I was reading Quentin Bell. The birds were speaking Greek. Bloomsbury was British, gay, and upper class, everything a black American queer could want. I worshipped Virginia Woolf, foolishly sent her into battle against Joyce, failed to get Strachey’s humor, and didn’t understand Keynes really or G. E. Moore at all. I had a professor who talked about Bloomsbury and androgyny, and that professor had lost me immediately. I liked my Bloomsbury butch-bewildered, with female sacrifices, like a Columbia senior seminar before the undergraduate college went coed. I found symbols, myth, masculine-feminine conflict, and a theory of latent class war inside the pleasure of Howards End. Professor Hardwick shocked me by suggesting that E. M. Forster could be read twice, but not a Virginia Woolf novel.

Meanwhile, I was deep into my own private suicide cult, reciting The Waves while up all night on clinical speed. My clacking tongue misremembered:

—Against thee I will fling myself O death!

English literature was one thing, the British themselves very much another.

—How revolting, Elizabeth Hardwick said when I confessed my reverence for Elizabeth II. She also had no interest in Bess of Hardwick, the Tudor widow who got richer with each dead husband.

She remembered a visit to the Eliots years ago. Mrs. Eliot asked,

—Now Elizabeth, would you like to see our bed?

For the most part, she found the British unbearable. They did not like her. They did not get her.

—The feeling is richly reciprocated, she said.

She’d been unhappy at a London lunch, seated next to someone who had no idea who she was and didn’t care to find out.

—John Bayley was filthy. Absolutely filthy.

This was weird: to care about a snub didn’t fit my idea of her, she who faced down the woman Dashiell Hammett had been unable to stand up to.

In the West End Café, I could subject my completely straight best friend Luc to performances of bits from Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays, the way an old dear back in my home state of Indiana after we’d shared two pitchers of vodka gimlets used to treat me to extracts from Tennessee Williams or Somerset Maugham. From Hardwick’s essay on Bloomsbury:

Certain peripheral names scratch the mind. To see the word ‘Ottoline’ on a page, in a letter, gives me the sense of continual defeat, as if I had gone to a party and found an enemy attending the bar.

The source of her dislike of upper-class Britishness, including Bloomsbury, was probably obvious to her friends, but was not to me. England meant Caroline Blackwood, the writer whom Lowell fell for in London in 1970. The woman he switched countries for. Did Professor Hardwick suspect everyone she met over there? Everyone in literary London had known about the affair that she, the American wife, did not.

An abandoned stable of white brick stood across from Hardwick’s kitchen and dining room windows on West Sixty-seventh Street. Did horses go up ramps or in elevators? She said she hated to think of Thoroughbreds raced to death, lashed with whips and kicked with spurs. She was from Lexington, Kentucky, but the bit in a horse’s mouth seemed to her cruel.

Lowell gave her the name Old Campaigner. To call her Old Campaigner never failed to bring forth a smile. Maybe Lowell thought of that nickname for her because she and her father had held hands in front of the radio and cried the night in 1937 when Joe Louis lost to Max Schmeling.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

The whole campus was drunk. I heard my cousin leading the chant on Columbia’s Law School Terrace laid over Amsterdam Avenue. I admired my cousin and felt myself a homo scandal to him, to his Talented Tenth fraternity, the whole black firmament of bright, gleaming male