This is the first piece I ever read by Elizabeth Hardwick. I had seen her touted as one of the great essayists and knew she had a hand in founding NYRB. I was amazed at the expressiveness of the writing and have since read most of her essays. Sentence after sentence was a marvel of prose with evocative descriptions, startling adjectives, and surprising metaphors; it is the kind of prose that has seemingly been lost in most contemporary writing, perhaps due to an unwillingness to invest time in what she has referred to elsewhere as “the cold hardship of writing”. Is this a short story, is it an essay, or is it memoir? A slightly revised version appears as a section in her novel Sleepless Nights, and I think of it as a short story, where certain factual events have been embellished.
The narrator lives in a hotel, which is surrounded by “futile shops” selling “incurious curiosities”. She begins to frequent jazz clubs with her roommate where she encounters the “stately, sinister” Billie Holiday, with her “splendid archaic head dragged up from the Aegean” and her air of “luminous destruction”. “Here was a woman who had never been a Christian”. Her erstwhile trumpeter and lover with his lovely face, “looked like a sacrifice impaled on the stalk of his head”, and his brother, her gofer, was a “hectic Hermes, working in Hades”. Ultimately, the defining characteristic of Billie Holiday was style, her “retrieval from darkness of pure style.” I periodically reread Hardwick’s essay ‘The Art of the Essay’, a paradigm itself of essay writing, to revivify my own writing. In this latter essay, Hardwick ends it by stating that the most important aspect of an essay, which also applies to short stories, is “the soloist’s personal signature flowing through the text.” Few writers can match Hardwick’s personal signature.
First published in the New York Review of Books, March 1976, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics, A Selection, edited by Edwin Frank, New York Review Books, 2019
A Personal Anthology 