Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period. Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope."

I am wondering why Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights (1979) is classified as a novel. Probably for business reasons: the publishers are likely to believe that non-novels do not sell. Well, here's a spoiler: Ms. Hardwick's work is certainly not a novel. While some might call it autobiography, it is not that either. Somewhere I have seen a reasonably fitting term - "scrapbook of memories," but then are those really "memories"? How do we know which passages are "real" and which are "fictional", if we put aside the question what the terms "real" and "fictional" mean in literature? Maybe it is a collection of stories connected with the author's past? Nah, none of the passages are proper stories: they do not begin and they do not end. They just suddenly arise from a tangle of words and they dissolve in another tangle. I would like to call Sleepless Nights a set of poetic impressions about life. About people, about places, and about passing.

People come alive from the pages: The brilliant passages about Billie Holiday dazzle with the power of observation and literary virtuosity as do the impressions about Josette and her sister, and about an unnamed man from the narrator's youth and the "warning word disgrace [she] carried with [her] for years and years." The "red-cheeked homosexual young man from Kentucky", the narrator's long-time friend, is the subject of another scintillating portrait.

Places: Kentucky (the author was born in Lexington, in 1916), New York and the West 67th Street, the jazz clubs and the streets. Then Maine. But also Holland. To me, Part Eight, about the narrator's (and presumably the author's) time in the Netherlands is one of the highpoints of the book. Ms. Hardwick captures the literary aspect of Europeanness:

"Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long you seemed to hear the turning of pages, pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars."

The short chapter about Holland made me remember Nicolas Freeling and his many books about that country. How similar the prose is, how Ms. Hardwick's and Mr. Freeling's cadences evoke the same images and feelings.

Passage of time: The brief visit that each of us pays to the realm of the living. Ms. Hardwick writes, beautifully:

"Where is my life? he seemed to be saying. My plates of pickled mussels, the slices of cheese, the tumblers of lemon gin?

Sleepless Nights is also about women. How they are the subjects of human history, rather than just being filed away as memory objects (cf. the epigraph). The characterization of the narrator's physical relationship with a certain Alex is masterful and so different from the way men usually describe the relationship.

An excellent, mature read, a book to remember. In addition to all the previously mentioned good stuff, the ending is strong and we can find a most wonderful fragment of Hölderlin's poem - in a beautiful translation - that I quote after the rating.

Four and a quarter stars.

"Alas for me, where shall I get the flowers when it is winter and where the sunshine and shadow of earth? The walls stand speechless and cold, the weather vanes rattle in the wind."
(Friedrich Hölderlin, "Hälfte des Lebens", translated, presumably, by Elizabeth Hardwick)

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