Sacred days, sacred cows

Debunking historical myths about the United States

Marilyn Lake

While it is entirely possible and even justifiable to make this argument, and to categorise the history of the United States in the world into these four periods, the theoretical basis for it all is uncomfortably teleological and deterministic.

As Mandelbaum sets out the justification for his analysis of American power, he explains international structures and the behaviour of states through the metaphor of the ‘jungle’. Mandelbaum describes an international arena as much like nature, red in tooth and claw – just as occurs in the jungle, states are locked into ‘fierce, deadly competition’. In one particularly off-putting passage, Mandelbaum notes that in the jungle (or is it when states deal with other powers?), ‘predatory mammals do fight others of the same species, for control of territory, access to females, and food’. The cavalier and – for this reader, at least – deeply offensive use of the phrase ‘access to females’ in a passage ostensibly describing the behaviour of powerful states and the human decision makers within them, points to a largely unexamined hyper-masculinist approach to understanding international relations.

Furthermore, this understanding and deployment of the ‘natural’ as a vehicle for explaining the relative power and behaviour of states is deeply unscientific. The simplistic jungle metaphor fails to engage with very different approaches to understanding the ‘natural’ world that see relationships as complex, reciprocal, or symbiotic. It also understands ‘nature’ and its component relationships as fixed and inevitable.

As we know all too well, that is far from the truth. ‘Nature’ is not fixed; systems can and do change rapidly. They are doing so now because of nation states’ behaviour, and one of those states and its foreign policies is more responsible for that change than most others. To take the metaphor further, the ‘predatory mammals’ Mandelbaum describes with such relish do not, generally speaking, consciously destroy the very environment upon which they depend. A less conventional approach to the history of international relations might have acknowledged that the jungle, and the states within it that apparently behave like animals, require a functioning biosphere to survive – even if they are hyperpowers. g

Emma Shortis’s first book, Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s fatal alliance with the United States, was published by Hardie Grant in 2021. She is a Lecturer in the Social and Global Studies Centre at RMIT University.

Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past edited by Kevin

Basic Books

US$32 hb, 391 pp

M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer

All nations are sustained by myth-making, but some myths are more problematic than others. Australia has long taken heart from the myth of Anzac, the story that in their ‘baptism of fire’ at Gallipoli, in 1915, Australian men gave birth to the nation. Notably militarist in orientation, extolling the feats of men at war, extensive government investment has helped render our national creation myth sacrosanct. Thus, when Alan Tudge, a former Coalition minister for Education and Youth, contemplated suggested changes in the national history curriculum in 2021, he declared that the school curriculum must never present Anzac as a ‘contested idea’. Anzac Day was ‘the most sacred day in the Australian calendar’.

The importance of contesting historical myth is precisely the purpose of a new collection of essays about American history, edited by Princeton professors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer. Avowedly political in intention, Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past brings together twenty essays on assorted ‘myths’ relating to a wide variety of subjects, including the American creation myth, the drafting of the Constitution (was Madison really so important or was Washington ‘the man’?), American exceptionalism ( a term invented in the 1920s), the nature of feminism (is it really anti-family?), and ‘the vanishing Indian’ (did indigenous peoples simply disappear or were they dispossessed and destroyed?).

There are also chapters on American socialism, the civil rights movement, the New Deal, immigration (‘they keep on coming’), Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause, voter fraud, and various other topics, but none relating to military history or Americans’ fighting prowess. The War of Independence is ignored in favour of the drafting of the Constitution while the Civil War is mentioned only in terms of its political legacies (‘Confederate Monuments’, ‘The Southern Strategy’). The Vietnam War is discussed, not in relation to its battles but apropos of alleged government betrayal of veterans and the rise of white power movements.

Avowedly engaged in politics, the authors take on ‘lies’, ‘legends’, and ‘myths’ (the terms seemingly used interchangeably), fictions and fables, and ‘ordinary bullshit’ perpetrated by Republican politicians, propagandists, right-wing commentators, libertarian think-tanks and fellow historians, to set the historical record straight. Disturbed by the ways in which historical inaccuracies have been invoked to justify present-day political argument, the writers emphasise the urgency of their task.

Compiled at a time of widespread misinformation, disinformation and a ‘war on truth’, when former President Donald Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen is apparently believed by a majority of Republicans, the timing of the book and its political context are key to its purpose. The ‘current crisis’, the editors write, ‘stands apart both for the degree of disinformation and for the deliberateness with which it has been spread’.

They identify two recent forces propelling the ‘crisis’. The first is the conservative media system, including cable news networks such as Fox News and websites such as Breitbart, augmented by social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Taken together, these venues have given far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans and enabled them to spread lies as well. The second change has been the transformation of the Republican party, its retreat from a ‘commitment to truth’.

As an example of right-wing ideologues rewriting history, the editors cite the example of the ‘Lost Cause’, the argument that Confederates, lovingly commemorated in monuments built in the early twentieth century, weren’t traitors engaged in an attack on the United States, but patriots defending a way of life. But the goal of ‘patriotic education’, the editors insist – in an argument that would outrage former minister Tudge – is ‘inherently at odds with history’. A ‘history that seeks to exalt a nation’s strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn’t history; it’s propaganda’.

Together, the essays in Myth America offer a critical account of American history, one that highlights the centrality of empire, racism, violence, and white supremacy. In ‘The United States Is an Empire’, Daniel Immerwahr begins with a report of a speech by George W. Bush in 1999 in which he stated, ‘America has never been an empire’, adding: ‘We may be the only great power in history that had the chance and refused.’ Like most other presidents, Bill Clinton agreed: ‘Americans never fought for empires, for territory, for dominance.’ One of the country’s most cherished myths is its anti-imperial character, notes Immerwahr, yet it has annexed territory throughout its history and ‘still has five overseas territories, more than five hundred tribal nations within its borders, hundreds of foreign bases and the world’s largest military’.

One national border, the US–Mexican border, looms larger in the American imagination than any other. ‘On the news,’ Geraldo Cadava writes in his chapter on ‘The Border’, ‘we are shown images of migrants piling into government vehicles heading for detention centers, wrapping themselves in Mylar blankets, peering through the slats of the border wall, awaiting their opportunity to cross.’ He criticises both the left and the right for perpetuating these images, if for different political ends. Conservatives focus on the threat posed by unrestricted immigration and dangerous foreigners (‘rapists’, ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’). The left emphasises immigrant rights and American responsibility. Cadava offers a different view. It is a myth, he writes, that ‘the border is only a place of danger, dysfunction, and illegality’. Rather it is ‘even more so a place of creativity, community, cooperation and connection’. The myth of the dangerous border is potent, however, because it speaks to deep national anxieties arising from powerlessness and disillusionment. Cadava’s is one of the more interesting chapters in Myth America in that it seeks to explain the process and power of mythical thinking and not just to correct the record.

‘Myths masquerading as reality do enormous damage,’ writes Carol Anderson, a Professor in African American Studies at Emory University and author of a study of voter suppression in the United States. Accusations of ‘voter fraud’, such as those made by Trump and his followers, might claim to be concerned with electoral integrity, but the long history of voter suppression in the United States, as Anderson shows, has aimed, often explicitly, to disenfranchise racial minorities and to preserve the ascendancy of white men, as was clear in late nineteenth-century Mississippi.

The myth of voter fraud continues today as an excuse to deny whole populations the right to vote.

The major aim of the editors of Myth America is to set the record straight, to call out political lies and to correct misinformation about the past. Their major achievement has been to bring together a collection of interesting essays that demonstrate the complexity and inherently contested nature of history. The authors are keen to ‘bring historical scholarship out of academic circles’ and ‘engage the public’, but historical complexity is not conducive to new political slogans, while politics necessarily thrives on simplistic binaries.

Whether historical scholarship is effective in negating the ‘lies and legends’ of the public domain, and diminishing their potency, is not clear. Certainly, some lies about the past would seem to be easily refuted, but perhaps empirical method is not enough to combat mythic power, when the myths in question speak to our deepest human anxieties, needs, and desires. g

Marilyn Lake is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent book is Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transPacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Nowhere to hide

The ambiguous eye of Janet Malcolm

Georgina Arnott

Still Pictures

by Janet Malcolm Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 170 pp

Janet Malcolm knew the difference between the remembered thing and the thing itself. Her writing life and 1984 masterpiece, In the Freud Archives, explored that crevice, asking: is what really matters how we experience life, not life itself?

This makes the photograph a curious thing: its captured details seem to prove memory. An immaculately groomed, smiling mother cradles her wriggling, blurry one-year-old, her gaze still with love. This photograph of Malcolm and her mother, which opens a chapter in Still Pictures, shows that her mother had an ‘exuberance and vivacity and warmth’. But it disguises the thing which undercut their lives. ‘Her mind was elsewhere. This is what I can’t get hold of.’

Concealment functioned as a survival strategy within this otherwise ‘happy’ family, Malcolm explains. She was five when they migrated to New York from Czechoslovakia in 1939, but only after the war was she told that she was Jewish.

Still Pictures is the last of thirteen books Malcolm wrote before her death in 2021 at the age of eighty-six. Twenty-six pieces –each stimulated by a photograph – follow her friend Ian Frazier’s Introduction, written in shock ten weeks after Malcolm’s death: ‘my sense of carrying on an interrupted conversation … remains so strong’. An Afterword from the author’s daughter Anne Malcolm sits in place of a final chapter, its wisdom and steady pace so like her mother’s, indeed like Malcolm’s own mother’s, it is clear that Malcolm’s death was no annulment of life, on or off the page.

The photographs come from Malcolm’s personal collection and feature family members, a teacher, a school friend, and a smiling middle-aged couple who animate the Czech Jewish sense of ‘American alienness’.

‘Lovesick’ opens with a blurry teenage group shot. Malcolm likens this to the least prepossessing of dreams, which, psychoanalysis tells us, reveal the most meaning, ‘if stared at long enough’. She stares in this chapter at Sigmund Freud himself, carried from this unremarkable image to the founder of psychoanalysis by the theme of ‘chronic longing’ and what Freud called ‘transference love’. Malcolm reads Freud closely – his language, slips, evasions – giving him credit for honesty (something he rarely gave others).

A photograph of Malcolm, middle-aged, cautious, confident, launches an account of the coaching she received for the second trial for libel occasioned by the publication of In the Freud Archives. Malcolm realised only after the first trial that the mode of presentation she had cultivated at the New Yorker – reticent, self-deprecating, witty – conveyed to the court a woman who was ‘arrogant, truculent, and incompetent’. ‘Not many of us get second chances’: Malcolm’s subjects, including herself, do. It is a fascinating postscript to the libel case: the ‘gentle correction of my self-presentation … took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge’.

Malcolm, who began her career as a photojournalist, has much to offer on the subject of the photograph’s frame – after all, its epistemological cropping was the theme of her writing life. Malcolm was also a visual artist and an art critic. Her essays on photography in Diana & Nikon (1980) gave depth to experiments such as the avant-garde home snapshot moment, recalled in the chapter titled ‘A Work of Art’, which opens with a seemingly unposed photograph of a couple on a tennis court, their backs turned. Malcolm explains that, in an absurdist act, her second husband Gardner Bosford kept it on his desk, though he had no idea who the couple were. Once in Diana & Nikon, it became art. Here Malcolm uses the word ‘mischief’, and her account of the photograph’s unlikely prominence (reinscribed here) reads like a belly laugh.

A writer for The New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, Malcolm is often remembered for her critique of the kind of narrative non-fiction those publications helped pioneer. A 1989 two-part article titled ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ contended that journalism was ‘morally indefensible’ because the truth was never simple, yet column inches and the readers’ desire forced it so. Her innovative biography The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1993), contemplated the genre’s ‘voyeurism and busybodyism’. In 2010, Malcolm said that autobiography was compromised by the desire to make oneself appear interesting. Reviewers of Still Pictures have described Malcolm’s decision to turn her ‘gimlet’ eye onto family members and herself as striking, inconsistent, possibly the compromise of an ageing mind. For me, Malcolm has found a way to make the biographical humble, in the best sense of that word, allowing nuance, uncertainty, and association, not conviction, to drive her telling of human lives. Generously, she guides the reader in this register.

In ‘The Apartment’, she writes about Botsford, an editor for The New Yorker, in a mere thousand words, a radical cropping, choosing to remember their adultery in a New York apartment. She recalls the crockery she bought for their lunches – a fashionable Italian style – and the fantasy they gestured towards. The narrative drama is clearly moving towards the collapse of their marriages, the couple’s emergence from the apartment, and perhaps, as the story goes, the eventual loss of that fantasy in a domestic American life of cups and saucers.

Instead, Malcolm’s camera turns to Botsford’s memory of another rendezvous (this time in Paris), with another attractive woman, with whom he conversed little in another apartment. The reader knows where this is going – the word ‘schmuck’ hovers – when Malcolm’s aperture adjusts, lets in more light. This Paris affair was the work of his mind alone; a balm for shocking memories created by war, including liberating a concentration camp. The reader does a second take: cue curtain call. Malcolm’s writing leaves nowhere to hide, yet her subjects – even at their worst – are held in her profoundly humanistic gaze, as still as a picture. g

Georgina Arnott is Assistant Editor of ABR.

Pinckney in Manhattan

On the couch with Elizabeth Hardwick

Peter Rose

Come Back in September: A literary education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan

by Darryl Pinckney riverrun

$69.99 hb, 419 pp

‘If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember.’

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Ifirst went to New York City in January 1975. It was wonderfully dilapidated. There was a blizzard of sorts, but I had the light jacket I had bought in Athens. If it was cold, I didn’t notice. The morning I arrived, there was a particularly gory pack murder on the subway. I read about it in the Times. So I avoided the subway and walked everywhere, through the sludge. We all knew what happened if you strayed into Central Park. Folks in Columbus, Ohio, where I had been staying with friends, had implored me not to visit New York. They couldn’t imagine why a nice young boy from somewhere called Melbourne – anarchically long hair and freakish wardrobe notwithstanding – wanted to visit that sinful city. (Still missing Nixon, they spoke of sin and sodomy.) I stayed in Midtown, in a grungy hotel soon to be demolished. The old black-and-white TV was on a constant loop, but I followed The Dick Cavett Show as best I could. The louvred door to my room cast terrifying shadows over my bed whenever anyone passed my room. Each night I dreamt that an ogre was on his way from Wall Street to stab me to death. In the morning I had breakfast for 99 cents – or, if I was hungry, $1.99. Then I didn’t eat for the rest of the day. I haunted the grand old bookshops that lined Fifth Avenue in those days. I visited the Metropolitan Museum for the warmth, but I didn’t know about the Frick. Velvet Underground wasn’t playing at the Metropolitan Opera, so I skipped that. During my stay in New York I didn’t speak to a soul, which suited me fine. It was the purpose of my visit.

It is unlikely that Darryl Pinckney – twenty-one then, still relatively new to Manhattan himself, an outsider because of his race and sexuality – ever went for more than fifteen minutes without conversing with someone of consequence, whether literary, artistic, theatrical, bohemian (he moved in all these spheres). Often it was Elizabeth Hardwick, as he relates in this tender, quirky memoir of their unlikely friendship.

It began in 1973 when Pinckney, a student at Columbia raised in Indiana, joined Hardwick’s creative writing course at Barnard College. During his interview he had confided that his roommate had threatened to kidnap Harriet, Hardwick’s daughter with Robert Lowell, if she didn’t enrol him. Somehow it worked.

Pinckney, though gauche, tried to be formal at first. ‘Professor Hardwick was fresh and put together. Her soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier.’ He ventured into ‘an education of sympathies’ – first as her student, then as a visitor to her apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street, dogsbody, reader of drafts, emptier of the dishwasher, companion, secretary, fact-checker, drinking partner, walker, fellow gossip – even shrink in a way.

Pinckney, a willing pupil, had much to learn. Shocked by what he had not read (he had no idea Melville wrote poetry), Hardwick plied him with books. ‘School and refuge was West Sixty-Seventh Street,’ Pinckney recalls. Nothing if not candid and sometimes tactless herself, Hardwick told him that he was the worst poet she had ever read and that on no account should he write more poems.

Hardwick, then approaching sixty, expected Pinckney to know more than he did. ‘She didn’t let you say just anything, even if you were tipsy.’ He stored up all her aphorisms. There were only two reasons to write – ‘desperation or revenge’. Some of the advice is sage, motherly: ‘Never talk about someone you know very well to someone you know less well.’

Like many New Yorkers, Pinckney is conscious of status, titles. Robert Silvers (co-founder of The New York Review of Books, principal publisher of Hardwick’s essays) has many names – ‘Bob’, ‘Robert’, ‘Mr Silvers’ – but Barbara Epstein (the other founder) is always ‘Barbara’, formidably so. Young Pinckney is intimidated by her; she may have doubted his motives or disapproved of his friendship with Hardwick, who is mainly ‘Elizabeth’, sometimes ‘Mrs Lowell’, seldom ‘Lizzie’. When he remarks how well she looks, Epstein says: ‘I just have Jewish hair.’ It takes years before she relents, but then her affection for him – and reliance on him –are as deep as Hardwick’s.

Pinckney seems at times very young. On the eleventh anniversary of Plath’s death, he hosts a Suicide Party. The narrative throughout is low-key, note-like, confidential but desultory (‘Is this when we talked about Berryman and Mr. Bones?’). Part 6 opens in medias res: ‘She asked me to get her a copy of Lolita.’ Apropos of nothing, we are told that Maria Callas died the day of Robert Lowell’s funeral. It is interesting for a while, then it is not.

The style is idiosyncratic, the syntax sly and venturesome. There are no quote marks, just dashes – a concession or confession of sorts. Pinckney would have drawn on the early journals (those precious tête-à-têtes), but they were burnt in one of several apartment fires he seems to have haphazardly caused.

It is a distinctly New York kind of book. Pinckney admits to being seduced by the city at an early age. When he passes the Dakota, he must remind us that it was the setting for Rosemary’s Baby. When the Lowells take Pinckney to a Fassbinder film they bump into the Alfred Kazins in the lobby. ‘We walked slowly.’ (Hemingway must have crashed the party.) His first funeral is that of James Baldwin, where he finds Epstein in conversation with Claire Bloom and Philip Roth.

Everyone seems permanently hungover. It is always cocktail time – ‘the moment for which all of New York lies, exercises, hurries, dresses’, as Hardwick wrote in Sleepless Nights. Later, Pinckney alludes to his own alcoholism, his secret drug life (NYRB paid for his rehab). From a recent essay of his, we know that he no longer drinks or walks on the wild side. He lives in England with his long-time partner, the poet James Fenton, who chips in now and then with editorial advice and references to the Homintern (‘The Love That Won’t Shut Up’, as Epstein dubs it). Everyone in this book has a Wikipedia entry.

(Reference to the toll of AIDS casualties is frequent but always succinct, parenthesised, too grave for biography.)

When Pinckney meets Hardwick, she is on her own again, Robert Lowell having left her for Caroline Blackwood, a Guinness heiress and former wife of Lucian Freud. Lowell had just published, with a kind of manic audacity, The Dolphin (1973), a sonnet sequence based on the letters Hardwick wrote him during this wrenching split. Hardwick, though incredulous, seems to have been unusually forgiving. She even tolerated the mercurial Blackwood, whom Lowell described as his ‘Aphrodite and ruin’.

The stuff on Lowell – the early years, the separation, the rapprochement of sorts – is fascinating. Gradually, chastened, Lowell returns to Hardwick, even moves in with her. Pinckney observes them closely, socialises with them. Hardwick is cleareyed, inured to the poet’s tempests. When Harriet, a great friend of Pinckney’s, defends her father, her mother (like a wayward parent in What Maisie Knew) says: ‘Well, not mad, honey. I didn’t mean he was … Yes I did. Papa’s mad.’

Then Lowell dies of course, just sixty – a heart attack in a cab on his way back to Hardwick. He is clutching Freud’s portrait of Blackwood, so tightly that hospital staff have to sever his fingers to release the painting.

On his death in 1977, Lowell was the commanding figure in American poetry. Only Elizabeth Bishop came close. Interestingly, Hardwick’s profile soars now as her husband’s recedes. (Cathy Curtis published a major biography in 2021 – A Splendid Intelligence.) Michael Hofmann (Lowell’s most eloquent devotee) remarked on this in his review of The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (ABR, September 2022). Still, Lowell – hardly read, perhaps untaught – continues to fascinate in light of Saskia Hamilton’s edition of The Dolphin Letters: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and their circle (2019), which records his reckless use of Hardwick’s letters.

Lowell aside, the first half of Come Back in September is shadowed by the novel that would become Sleepless Nights, that great book written during the collapse of her marriage and in the wake of his death – ‘an alchemical tour de force’, as Geoffrey O’Brien describes it in the welcome new NYR Books reissue. Hardwick herself described this unconventional novel as ‘a shortwave autobiography’. When it appeared in 1979, the reception was encomiastic (‘Warren Beatty told Bob Silvers that he loved Sleepless Nights’), but Hardwick was hurt and distressed when she learned that her sole surviving sister disapproved of her depiction of their family. Despite plans, it would be her last novel.

The portrait of Hardwick is intriguing throughout, and Pinckney is never less than captivated, even when he takes himself off to Germany, to avoid temptation. We learn that Hardwick was badly burnt as a child. The recovery took six months, the scars longer to fade. Pinckney writes: ‘[S]he’d felt discoloured, a freak, all her life. Self-consciousness made her physically shy.’ We follow Hardwick’s daily life, her scatty routines. She gains a new hairdresser (‘no longer Kenneth’s’) and her curls are much extolled. She tries to diet and to moderate her drinking. Like one of Woody Allen’s heroines, she dislikes nature, deeming it ‘too vast’. She is too ‘urbanised’ to fathom the Grand Canyon. Her dislike of the English is intensified by Lowell’s affair, which was the talk of London long before she heard about it. She confides in Pinckney about her own liaisons in the 1940s with ‘two extremely handsome black men’; tells him about her abortion in Harlem, with a black doctor who smoked during the procedure – a detail she used in her Billie Holiday story.

Hardwick is a great phrasemaker. She likens Holiday’s late recordings to ‘sandpaper, or a bruise’. She can be very funny. ‘The purpose of writing classes,’ she tells Pinckney, ‘is to employ writers.’ Later: ‘I can imagine being the queen of England but I can’t imagine being Lillian Hellman.’ During a performance of La Cage aux Folles, she exclaims, ‘Oh, I have a blouse like that. It’s Italian’ – and the audience laughs. It’s such an intensely theatrical city. When a waiter calls her an actress, Hardwick says: ‘Yes, I have a supporting role in the continuing farce of my life.’

The gossip is constant. When the Lowells (pre-Blackwood) visit the Eliots, Valerie says: ‘Now, Elizabeth, would you like to see our bed?’ Hardwick recalls that everything in Hannah Arendt’s Riverside Drive apartment was beige, including the food. George Steiner, at a dinner, is outraged because Charles Rosen – another lion of NYRB – fails to acknowledge his recent essay on Walter Benjamin. When Steiner upbraids him, Rosen says he hadn’t mentioned the essay because it was terrible. Beauvoir attends a dinner in New York in 1964, looks down her nose at the Manhattan wits, and suddenly declares, ‘I want to see Harlem.’

Then there is Gore Vidal. When someone asks him if the first person he slept with was a man or a woman, he replies: ‘I thought at the time it would be rude to ask.’

Most remarkable about Hardwick, apart from her instinctive discernment, is her ear, the trademark epithets. Michael Hofmann has spoken of her natural eloquence and ‘well-aired vocabulary’: ‘these are not dictionary words … Each one is complex, fought over, delicately assertive. Wine words, not lager or lemonade words.’ Open any page at random and you will note examples of her individual style. Who else would risk a gem of a sentence like this: ‘Little called to mind the pitiful sweetness of a young girl’ (from Sleepless Nights)? If they did, rest assured that some righteous editor would rearrange it.

Apropos of editors, Hardwick had the best, as she well knew. The sections on NYRB are choice. From the beginning, Pinckney is entranced by everything about the paper. ‘The Review’s tables of contents were glamorous: they listed writers I’d seen on The Dick Cavett Show.’ He meets the editors, works in the mailroom. Robert Silvers, prompted by Hardwick, sends him a review copy with a note ‘asking if I’d maybe see what could be done’. When he files his article Silvers sends him a three-page letter full of changes. But Silvers, though famously bad-tempered, never abuses Pinckney, such is his reverence for Hardwick.

The forty-three-year partnership of Silvers and Epstein (who launched NYRB because of a strike at the Times) is recalled in fascinating detail. They scheme, they bicker, they conceal proofs to delay publication. ‘They were like a married couple, only worse,’ Pinckney writes. He notes that when the editors leave the office for the same party they never share a taxi. ‘It was like a contest: who arrived at the party later than the other.’ And yet, remarkably, the pact endured: they never published an article without full agreement from both of them.

Hardwick is typically dry about literary journalism. There is a classic quip about publishing: ‘The only joy in these things is thinking how miserable you’d be if you weren’t doing them.’ She estimates that NYRB pays her about two cents an hour. Still, despite the squabbles, the jealousies, the jockeying, there is real jeu d’esprit. When Hardwick embarks on her mighty essay ‘Bartleby in Manhattan’, Epstein encourages her: ‘Give it a whirl, girl’.

Susan Sontag pops up now and then, ever self-conscious. She tells Hardwick that some mornings she is unsure whether she is smart enough to write. Early on, Sontag craves the older woman’s approval with what Pinckney calls ‘a needy, insecure, throbbing hope’. Sontag is ‘chagrined’ when they all watch the Oscars, not wanting to ‘smudge her record on “never having looked at TV”’. Later, grander, she moves on, won’t return calls, and it is Hardwick’s turn to feel slighted. Despite everything she owes him, Sontag wavers about Robert Silvers. She agrees to write something for his sixtieth birthday but ‘couldn’t print two-thirds of what she thinks of him’. Sheepishly, she admits to Pinckney: ‘I guess I’m too virtuous.’

In Sleepless Nights, Hardwick wrote: ‘I have always, all my life, been looking for help from a man. It has come many times and many more it has not.’ Help, in a way – companionship, encouragement, love – came in the end (improbable though it seemed to some) from a chatty, disorganised black undergraduate and hedonist. This created some confusion. The sight of them together –this grande dame off to the ballet with a black guy in his twenties – led to gossip, a certain prurience. Never, though, do Pinckney and Hardwick seem to have been confused about what they had.

Race, inevitably, pervades the book. Pinckney has been writing now for decades about the lividity of race in America, while also helping to retrieve key figures in African American literature. Hardwick, who grew up in Kentucky, could be tactless; there are some spectacular lapses, inadvertent or not. Pinckney listens, takes notes, but is forbearing. He sees through or beyond the South. In his essay on James Baldwin in the volume Busted in New York and Other Essays (2019), he recalls Baldwin’s famous words to the astonished Cambridge Union Society in 1965: ‘What has happened to white Southerners is much worse than what has happened to Negroes there.’

In the end, we are left with an illuminating portrait of the most diagnostically acute critic since Virginia Woolf. Michael Hofmann, in his admiring review of Uncollected Essays, writes: ‘It’s as though no one thought to tell Hardwick that being literary was a no-no. Or they did, and she told them where to get off.’ In her own essay on ‘Grub Street, New York’, published in the first issue of NYRB, Hardwick proclaimed: ‘The great difficulty is making a point, making a difference – with words.’ How ringingly and undeterrably she did so from her red sofa on West Sixty-Seventh Street, vodka to hand, Darryl Pinckney by her side. g