The Weight of Words
I’m so excited about Elizabeth Hardwick’s New York Stories. From the Barnes and Noble review:
the later stories, in addition to “the absence of the lumber in the usual prose” and “the relief from spelling everything out, plank by plank,” as she put it, almost exclusively use an unusual, highly attenuated first person.
Reading late Hardwick—Sleepless Nights and American Fictions—you realize, that’s what a sentence in English can do. As Hilton Als writes:
her influence can still be felt in any writer who knows that a story or essay’s tone is based as much on a word’s weight, and the rhythm of a paragraph, as it is on thesis and intention
The furniture of realist scene-building seems dutiful and perfunctory by comparison, the confessionals of language-oriented fiction floaty and solipsistic. Hardwick knew too much of the world to only look inward:
Antwerp and Ghent: what wonderful names, hard as the heavy cobbles in the square. Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long, you seemed to hear the turning of pages: pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire — and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars.
