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

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In memory of Barbara Epstein

Im here on the edge of metamorphosis.

Aim Csaire

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 readingBlacklakeblackboattwoblackcutpaperpeopleI told her that my roommate said we would kidnap her daughter, Harriet, if she didnt let me into the class. His sister was her daughters best friend. Id 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 husbands 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 hadnt 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 whod just agreed among themselves that poetry was everywhere,

Im sure youre very nice, but I cant bear that kind of talk.

And then dancing away from their party because shed 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 Hellmans 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 Hellmans 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 clich. She didnt 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 Id never heard of.

You dont need him. Faulkner?

The Bear.

You do need him. But dont ever do that again.

Excuse me?

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

I was discovering so much: Rimbaud, Frank OHara, Baldwins essays, Gertrude Steins 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 Harriets father, Robert Lowell, from his introduction to Plaths Ariel. And Id read his latest collection, The Dolphin.

I cant 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 Apollinaires poem:

Here you are in Marseille, surrounded by watermelons.

Here you are in Coblenz at the Hotel du Gant.

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 didnt want to hear herself quoted, but she couldnt 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 didnt 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 cant carry your talent with you like a suitcase.

Dont 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 didnt write that, she said. Cal used my letters. I dont think thats so good.

She meant those lines.

What I trust of my memory of that conference stops here. I dont 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-husbands 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 hadnt spoken of it around me.

Wed ventured into an education of sympathies. Id become Hardwicks 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 Hardwicks shelves not entirely empty of Lowells 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.