Darryl Pinckney, "Come Back in September"

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"책 읽는 즐거움 1"  "책 읽는 즐거움 2"  "책 읽는 즐거움 3"에 쓴 대로 동시에 읽기 시작한 세 권의 책 중 먼저 다 읽은 두 책에 이어 이번 주에 Darryl Pinckney의 "Come Back in September"도 끝냈다. 이 회고록에는 주로 Elizabeth Hardwick, 그녀가 두 번째 부인이었던 Robert Lowell, Barbara Epstein, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt에 대한 얘기가 많이 나오는데 Edmund Willson이나 A. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Sterling A. Brown 등에 관한 일화도 여기저기 끼어 있다.

 

National Book Critics Circle 서평

 

L. A. Times 서평

 

 

The young Darryl Pinckney with the wrtier Elizabeth Hardwick in her apartment

(via Dominique Nabokov). 사진: 위 서평에서, 책에도 나온다.

 

 

 

본문에서

 

She'd bolted up one night and had to rush downstairs to see if it was Keats who said 'Sorrow is Knowledge' and Byron who said 'Knowledge is Sorrow' or vice versa. (p.153)

 

She was not very fond of the Brahmins she met.... affluent Indians frowned on tipping waiters, drivers, and the like.... She never wrote about India. She had contempt for people who praised the country's spirituality. They tended to be upper class, she noted. She never got over the suffering children she'd seen. She'd not talked about India when she first returned. She needed to wait and said so. (p. 182)

 

John Leonard:

Elizabeth Hardwick mentioned her admiration for Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. She called it 'a miraculous, perfect work'.... Sleepless Nights, like Rilke's Notebook, is

miraculous and almost perfect. (p. 198)

 

Didion said Sleepless Nights was as evocative and hard to place as Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a work Elizabeth much admired and had written about. Didion likened Hardwick's method to that of the anthropologist, the traveler on the watch for the revealing detail, for the precise observations of strangers. (p. 199)

 

She hated Jackson Pollock; she loved Rothko and Motherwell....

    There were so many provocative phrases in [Robert] Hughes's script ... but she couldn't use any of it, felt there was no textual equivalent to the visual. (p. 317)

 

    Elizabeth said Barbara was always telling her,

    -- You like Susan, but I like Mary better.

    Elizabeth said it wasn't that she liked Susan more, but she found her real and interesting at the moment. She didn't like Mary's life, the dinners, the old couples, her old friend's high-handedness.

    I wasn't sure Elizabeth and Barbara noticed how much they squabbled over Susan.

    I'd heard Barbara complain that Lizzie was mad not to think Susan self-important, but Susan played upto Lizzie and for some reason that really galled Barbara. (p. 365)

 

    She brought up a line from Marianne Moore:

    -- After everything we have loved is lost, then we revive.

    She said she didn't think Marianne Moore was talking about recuperation, recovery. She said it felt to her as though she used 'revive' to mean wisdom. (p. 419, 본문의 끝)