by
Cathy Curtis
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Reviewers of Sleepless Nights were tempted to see the woman depicted as the mother of the narrator as the author’s mother. It is likely that “her weight on a stepladder washing windows, her roast and potatoes and fat yeast rolls” and the “peculiar, helpless assertiveness” that reflected “her profound acceptance of the things of life” were true to the facts. In Sleepless Nights, the narrator is perplexed that her mother was “so indifferent to the past. . . . as if she did not know who she was.” But Mary was simply living the life mapped out for her by habit and tradition. (A “relentless finality” haunted Elizabeth’s earlier autobiographical fictional character, Marian Coleman, when she considered the possibility that her life would duplicate her mother’s.)16 By removing herself from the narrative that had been handed to her by family and community, Elizabeth was obliged to reckon with the past and figure out who she really was.
a nice phrase
In Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth wrote that she was reminded of her father by the “handsome” workmen who came to the house she owned in Maine, with their “sunburned faces . . . their strong fingers yellowed by nicotine”—men who awakened “a flirtatiousness” on her part. What, she wondered, “would it be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.” For both her parents, sleeping in their separate beds, “night is good because it leads to the day, to shoes and stockings, to coffee, to drudgery and repetition.” These are people, she is telling us, who do not question their lives or obsess about the past or the future.
alas
Little is known about Elizabeth’s romantic life during these years, other than her decision to break up with a boyfriend when she learned that his father was a coal mine owner. (“I felt they were murderers. He didn’t like me much either.”)56 Another boyfriend may have been the model for the devoted swain in one of Elizabeth’s early short stories, “Yes and No.” Although the narrator describes him as having a “generous, warm nature,” she constantly criticizes him, “from his soul to his clothes.” She thinks of him as her “sweetheart,” yet she never wants to see him when he shows up. Although he is a political science faculty member at the university, “his views seemed to me flat and impersonal.” What keeps her in his thrall is his unshakable affection for her, obliging her to duck his constant proposals of marriage while keeping him on a string. She confesses that his green Chevrolet convertible—in which they drive to taverns where she drinks too much and baits him mercilessly—is one of his major attractions. The kicker, at the end of this short tale, is that she acknowledges “what pleasure we have all received from someone we imagined ‘not quite good enough’ for us.”
omg lol
During these years Elizabeth had a string of lovers in New York—two affairs resulted in abortions, one of which she alluded to in Sleepless Nights61—but none were serious enough for her to contemplate marriage, and some of the men were already married. (The “Alex” of the novel is likely a composite portrait.) An affair was a risky thing for a woman in those days; in addition to the fear of pregnancy, having a male guest in her apartment at night could result in her being thrown out. Elizabeth once recalled how, “if a man left your place at three in the morning you felt quite nervous in case anyone had noticed.”62 Intriguingly, the Sleepless Nights narrator says, “In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it.”63
kind of a relief to hear this lol
In the same “Fiction Chronicle,” Elizabeth also delivered a harsh verdict on a story collection by the “mercilessly pretentious” Anaïs Nin. While granting her “a fierce foolishness that is not without beauty as an act,” Elizabeth snatched away this grudging praise by adding, “it is too bad her performance is never equal to her intentions.”71 The most noteworthy aspect of this review is its discussion of the way Nin’s penchant for using vague, mystical phrases to create a spurious aura of sexual revelation was typical of women writers of the era. They offer “the illusion of having opened the bedroom door without involving the performer in a recognizable scandal.” Elizabeth would have much more to say about sex in women’s novels in future decades.
oooo
Despite the inauspicious street name (Manhattan’s Bowery was a slum district), the apartment offered consolations. It had a private bath, a bonus in those days, and the kitchen—“the center of home life here,” Elizabeth wrote—had a new linoleum floor, a new stove, cabinets, and sink.63 She soon realized that in Iowa City, “the love of the spotless stove and kitchen floor is infectious.” Willing to do her part to maintain appearances, she drew the line at other “native folk ways, such as doing your husband’s shirts.” To Eleanor Taylor, Elizabeth professed being “quite content” with “the calm, sober, quiet life,” though “it is impossible to speak of liking Iowa,” where there were no bohemians.64 The other families in the Lowells’ building were always asking her if she had done “the week’s baking yet and other normal and embarrassing questions.” Even the students—“stolid, dependable people”—were married; husbands hung out at the Laundromat while doing the family wash.
Joking to the Clarks that she figured The New Yorker had bought her two stories “merely as an income tax deduction,” she was pleased that one was about to be published.108 “A Season’s Romance” is about Adele, an earnest and impecunious art history graduate student who is swept off her feet by Matt, a brassy, middle-aged, twice-divorced American ad man who treats her to the luxe life in Europe. Back in New York, she feels disconnected from her friends and unable to continue her studies, but she can’t marry her lover because his office is moving him to Texas. Elizabeth mined her own experience as an impoverished graduate student with increasing distaste for her studies coupled with a desperate need to remain in New York. Once again the story features a man in a “cheap bachelor apartment,” but no lovemaking takes place there. (In contrast to Mary McCarthy’s graphic stories about young women’s involvements with older men, Elizabeth always avoided describing the mechanics of sex.) “A Season’s Romance” is curiously bloodless, more like a sociological case study than a persuasive narrative. During these years, Elizabeth seemed wedded to a detached, observational approach. Katharine White queried her about several aspects of the initial draft, including a certain peculiarity about “the romance itself.” It struck her that Matt “behaves with so much respect and tenderness, as if he were merely a suitor.” While the couple seemed to have been living together in Europe, they didn’t appear to be intimate in New York, “where only nightclubs and taxis are mentioned.”109 The published version has Matt telling Adele that he feels uncomfortable having such a well-bred woman as his mistress: riddle solved. And yet the reader is hard put to discover a true connection between the couple, perhaps because we see the affair only from Adele’s point of view.
oooo
In December, she received a “first reading agreement” from The New Yorker; the magazine would have first refusal rights for her submissions, which would be paid by the word, plus an extra 25 percent and an annual cost-of-living increase. Money was always on Elizabeth’s mind. Although she regretted having bought a “monstrous” TV on sale—she and Cal were now ignoring it in favor of their classical FM radio station and phonograph records—she felt “a sort of nagging obligation to the beastly TV [sic], merely because I paid money for it.”117 To friends (who would have understood the implicit comparison with radio), she explained that the problem with TV was that “it involved a surrender of one’s sight. . . . the total self goes into a TV program; and they are grotesquely bad. . . . Worst of all . . . no matter how big your house is, one TV set ruins its charm, just as if you had a built in odor of some kind.”118
wow wish those still existed
But she did summon energy for entertaining luminaries of the literary world. Recalling a visit to the Lowells, the playwright and poet William Alfred said, “I’d never talked to people who cared that much about words. It was absolutely electric.”15 Edmund Wilson often dropped by when visiting his dentist in Boston. “A drink seems to dry his tears and his blood,” Elizabeth remarked. “He is . . . of inexhaustible interest to us because his interest in things seems inexhaustible.” Adrienne Rich often visited on Sundays with her husband and children. Elizabeth would remember her as “so alert, so intelligent, so witty.”16 Sixty-nine-year-old T. S. Eliot, now married to a woman less than half his age, was supposed to be the guest of honor at the Lowells’ dinner for eight in May, but a night of dancing with her gave him heart palpitations. He did come to dinner the following autumn, gracing a table of other major literary figures that included Wilson and his wife, Elena, and the critic I. A. Richards—a wearying evening for Elizabeth as hostess.
lmao
Barely two weeks later, in October, Cal wrote to Elizabeth that he felt “torn apart,” but that state was preferable to being obliged to make a decision.14 “After all I have done, can I go back to you and Harriet?” He didn’t think so. He could not “weigh the dear, troubled past . . . in which you saved everything” against a future with Caroline. And yet, he wrote, “allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind.” He planned to visit New York at Christmas with his new love, comparing his feeling for her to his feeling for Elizabeth when they were at Yaddo. She wrote to Blair that she didn’t believe Caroline would come with him (“This is his fantasy”), and that he was probably afraid to leave without her, because “she might not be there when he got back.”15 He did not seem to realize that he would never see Elizabeth again after this visit, when he needed to “settle up things, make arrangements and then leave forever.” (In a phone conversation, Elizabeth had told Blair that if Caroline accompanied Cal on this trip, she planned to leave town.) But maybe he wouldn’t come after all. “In all the months he has been gone,” she confided, “I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything . . . except himself.” What especially irritated her, she told Mary, was “that terrible breeziness and casualness about the deepest feelings of your own life, and also of his own.”16 She described him as “such a childish torturer—that little side look of malice he gives you—and so spooky, more and more.”17
robert lowell might actually be the perfect exemplar of my theory about men putting more energy into immortalizing their moral conundrums in their art than in fixing them in real life