Word: hardwick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FICTION: Birdy, William Wharton Dubin's Lives, Bernard Malamud Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick Good as Gold, Joseph Heller SS-GB, Len Deighton The Best American Short Stories 1978, edited by Ted Solotaroff The Flounder, Günter Grass
...other hand, Hardwick makes full use of the legendary self-destructiveness of Billie Holiday. There is the suggestion of a 1940s acquaintanceship with the great blues singer. Hardwick, the prudent observer, is fascinated by the abandon with which Holiday burned talent and life. There is a tendency to mythologize her excesses and her presence: "The lascivious gardenias, worn like a large, white, beautiful ear, the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean...
Sleepless Nights tosses and turns on such hard, solitary judgments. Mary McCarthy comes to mind and, oddly, so does the Ernest Hemingway of A Moveable Feast, who said that his book could be regarded as fiction though it also might throw light on autobiographical fact. Hardwick provides a similar safeguard when Elizabeth, her novel's unaltered ego, says to herself, "Why didn't you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when...
...Manhattanite-someone from somewhere else-Hardwick seems at home with homelessness. She also has an untiring eye for worms in the Big Apple...
Throughout, Hardwick demonstrates that she can certainly sing the blues, though her tone is more akin to the stoic captions on classical tombstones than to the bandstand. Her epigrams are the winding sheets of memory...