책 읽는 즐거움 3: "Come Back in September"

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David Reich의 Who We Are and How We Got Here에 이어 Samantha Power의 The Education of An Idealist: A Memoir와 Darryl Pinckney의 Come Back in September를 끝내기 전에는 다른 책들은 계속 기다리게 할 생각이었는데, 그새 갑자기 나타난 Adam Nagourney의 (비소설) The Times를 중간부터 시작해서 후반부를 다 읽느라, 그리 되지 않았다.

 

Power는 이제 다 읽었다. 당분간은 정말 Pinckney와 The Times 전반부, 그리고 벌써 읽기 시작한, 한인 미국 작가 Juhea Kim의 The Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award (톨스토이 문학상) for Foreign Literature 수상 소설, Beasts Of A Little Land (2021)나 다 읽고 봐야겠다. 처음 4페이지가 무척 재밌게 읽힌, 이스라엘의 'New Historians'에 속하는 Tom Segev의 역사서, One Palestein, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate는 그러고 나서야 펼쳐야 겠다.

 

특히 Come Back in September 에서 이런저런 얘기를 나누는 대사를 읽는 것은 마치 나도 그 자리에서 듣고 있는 것 같은 재미가 있다. 그 얘기의 대상이 나도 조금은 알고 있는 작가나 작품이면 더 그렇다.

 

 

The Education of An Idealist 에서:

 

We also made sure to recognize the extraordinary leadership shown by American partners like Germany and Canada, where Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had boldly welcomed Syrian families in the face of domestic political backlash. (p. 498)

 

I saw how important it is not to shun those with whom we disagree. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, "We must always seek the truth in our opponent's error and the error in our own truth." This is just as important in our domestic politics as in our foreign dealings. (p. 551)

 

 

Come Back in September 에서:

 

Elizabeth said she'd been thinking of those Charles Rosen and Hannah Arendt essays on Walter Benjamin and had noted Susan [Sontag] didn't refer to them.

    -- I love the little hunchback.

    Arendt may have been his mistress.  (p. 142)

 

She changed her mind, for the last time, about whether to use the Hardy poem [The Going] at the end of the novel [Sleepless Nights]. If people thought she was referring to him, then there was nothing she could do about it. (p. 143)

 

When I was her student Professor Hardwick told me about a dinner given in 1964 for Simone de Beauvoir. She said the intellectual also famous for being a girlfriend was stubbornly silent, looking down her nose at all the manhattan wit going on around her. Suddenly she announced.

    -- I want to see Harlem.

    Professor Hardwick said that if Beauvoir and Cartier-Bresson went to Harlem, then I should, too. (p. 148)

 

    Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen were Negro History Week poets i'd grown up with. My father knew as much Hughes as he did Kipling. He would quote on nearly every occasion:

 

        Life for me ain't been no crystal staia.

 

    Professor Hardwick did not think much of Langston Hughes really.

    -- Too simple. (p. 149)

   

 

 

 

Come Back in September 에서.

 

 

 

Darryl Pinckney의 회고록 Come Back in September 는 주로 작가 Elizabeth Hardwick에 대한 '순서 없는' 이야기다, 적어도 여지껏 읽은 것은 그렇다. 그녀는 1949년 시인 Robert Lowell과 결혼, 1972년에 이혼한다. Lowell의 퓰리처 상 수상 시집 The Dolphin에는 Hardwick과의 편지 내용이 인용되어 있다.

 

The Going: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and The Dolphin Letters

  by Meg Schoerke

 

아래는 위 에세이에서

 

Even before she learned that Lowell was making her letters into poems, she was concerned about how selective editing can slant readers’ perspectives.

 

Presciently, Hardwick broaches some of the core questions that critics would raise about Lowell’s handling of her own letters in The Dolphin. Publishing limited quantities of a writer’s letters “preempts the field” by gaining publicity and shaping public opinion. More important, altering the letters, even for the sake of not hurting people’s feelings, is “the great question.” Such omissions misrepresent the original and risk giving readers a false impression: not only of what the writer said—the nuances and range of expression—but also of her character.

 

Because Lowell, and The Dolphin, have helped normalize marital pain—and acrid portrayals of an ex—as common topics for poetry, contemporary readers may not find the 1972 Dolphin as shocking as did its original readers. Lowell himself had already paved the way by publishing confessional Notebook sonnets contrasting the transitory pleasures of his extramarital affairs with the tensions of his marriage. Hardwick had endured his affairs largely because most of them coincided with outbreaks of Lowell’s manic-depressive illness; such behavior, especially at the start of a manic upswing, was beyond his control, and he always went back to Hardwick, who had, during their marriage, supported him through ten major manic episodes. 

 

Incorporating quotations from letters into The Dolphin, Lowell ups the ante by offering multiple perspectives, yet the overall effect is to vindicate his decision to leave Hardwick, by making her appear—even in what seem to be her own words—far less appealing than Blackwood. These contrasts made The Dolphin hard to bear, especially for readers who knew Hardwick. Kunitz, although admiring some parts of the book as “wild, erotic, shattering,” found others painful: “they are too ugly, for being too cruel, too intimately cruel.” Likewise, Bishop chides Lowell for “violating a trust” in changing the letters, and concludes that “art just isn’t worth that much.” “It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way,” she adds, “—it’s cruel.”

 

Lowell’s keen understanding that the book will hurt Hardwick, reigniting the trauma of his leaving her for Blackwood, is difficult to separate from intention.

 

For the rest of her life, Hardwick never wavered from her conviction that bad art just isn’t worth that much: she resented not only Lowell’s appropriation of her letters, but his making of sub-par poems from them.

 

Whereas the “Lizzie character” doesn’t seem like much of a heroine in either version of The Dolphin, Elizabeth Hardwick shines in The Dolphin Letters. In her eventual acceptance of Lowell’s relationship with Blackwood, and also in her own self-renewal—especially her rededication to her writing career—she fits the description she herself gives in “Seduction and Betrayal” of “the betrayed heroine,” who, “unlike the merely betrayed woman, is never under the illusion that love or sex confers rights upon human beings. . . .