Old notebooks

Elizabeth Hardwick and the birth of something or other

I have been doing some clearing out, and found a whole bunch of little notebooks that I have used over the years for ideas. There are, I note regretfully, a lot of blank pages in all of them.

Very few of them contain notes that might turn into something one day in the future. None of them say things like, you know, “The Great Gatsby - but set in the Paleolithic period!!!!!”. (Budding writers - you can have that one for free.)

The little scribbles are mostly about things I was in the middle of, or about to seriously engage with. So far I have found a list of a few matches I was thinking of including in Fever Pitch, and a summary of the pitch I wanted to make to Reese Witherspoon when I was invited to talk about the adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. There is a lyric for a song Ben Folds and I didn’t complete for the Lonely Avenue album, and an attempt to sketch out an ending for my novel How To Be Good. There are brief character sketches of the four characters in A Long Way Down (then, apparently, called The Blues.) There are notes on a movie I didn’t end up writing for Adam Sandler.

These notes are short - aides-memoires, rather than anything substantial. Reading them again, it’s hard to see why I was afraid of forgetting them; I can’t imagine that they helped a piece of work to become more real. But maybe they stopped it from disappearing. Maybe, at the time, they functioned something like a bath plug: as long as this is securely in place, then I can turn the taps on. (There was and still is much more danger of the water trickling out through the bottom than there is of a flood coming over the top.) And anyway, I am now looking at them from the perspective of having written them, or some of them. Maybe what seems obvious now was some kind of revelation to me then.

And one of these was - still is, I suppose - the very beginning of a commonplace book. I was going to write down in longhand (and actually, I had neither a typewriter nor a computer when I started it.) It contains exactly three quotes, two of them from the same book. My handwriting was so neat! I can’t write like that any more!

The book was Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, published in 1979. I was probably 21 or 22 when I read it. I didn’t know anything about the author - didn’t know she co-founded the NYRB, didn’t know she was married to Robert Lowell, had never read any Robert Lowell. I found it on a grown-up’s bookshelf in a house where I was staying, and I am pretty sure the grown-up in question never read it. Or rather, it would have been out of character if they had. (The book, a first edition hardcover, has been in my possession ever since, and nobody ever asked for it back.) I seem to remember finding the book difficult - it’s a patchwork of memories, dreams, reflections etc, some of which are clearly autobiographical. So I wasn’t sure it was for me, until I came across this passage:

“The music seemed to cut into his flesh, leaving a sort of scar of longing never satisfied, almost a wound of feeling. Like all passions it was isolating because there was so much he did not admire that others would, to his fury, press upon him. And then he always said that it could be distressing to listen to jazz when one was troubled or with the ‘wrong’ person. At times he would think of giving it up altogether, so difficult was it to define, even for himself, what popular music and certain ways of doing it were all about. What was it…the sea itself, or youth alone?”

What the actual fuck? That was me! How did this woman, born in 1916, know me? Was I a type? I must have been. Who knew? But then again, if I was a type, there weren’t millions of me. If there were, the character that Hardwick is describing here - a gay man that the author or narrator knew in 1940s NYC - wouldn’t have felt so isolated. I had never had the experience of being seen in a work of literature before. I had studied English at university - although mostly what I had done. during my three years, was ignore literature and allowed my music to cut into my flesh. I had liked pieces of writing, and admired them, and. very occasionally had enjoyed the moderately pleasurable experience of understanding them better through listening to someone clever explaining them to me. But this was something else: a hitherto private, completely unarticulated, barely understood but deeply embedded part of me, precisely and thrillingly anatomised in a work of art. It made me think about everything differently - or at least, everything to do with my cultural appetite. (As you of all people know, dear Substackers, Hardwick’s passage can be as easily applied to a passion for art, opera, books, movies, food, sex or origami.)

One commonplace book, begun before I’d even thought much about becoming a writer, and fifteen or twenty ideas books. Making this little pile and opening the books at random, it’s suddenly perfectly clear that the first helped to beget the others. If Elizabeth Hardwick could help me understand myself, or at least help me understand that people like me existed, even before I did, then…Well, it’s not like I thought I could do that for others. But clearly that was a legitimate goal, and despite my education, nobody had ever told me that before.

I will leave the commonplace book as it is, three pages long. For a start, there’s the handwriting problem. But it seems like a good way of paying tribute to Elizabeth Hardwick: there was that paragraph, and then a ton of half-baked jottings, some of which led me towards her line of work.