№ 32 reading list: Woolf, Hardwick & new books

Here is the reading list I promised. Perhaps I should have combined two lists into one because I have started reading books that will be on my next one. And I confess that I'm already looking longingly at books that will be on the list thereafter. One of those is Letters of Leonard Woolf. That would be the husband of Virginia, the man to thank for the access to her personal material, letters, diaries, etc. I enjoy reading letter collections, especially literary ones. Warner and Maxwell's letters on the new list, and in my image above, are gold. Each letter is well crafted and shining through is the mutual respect these writers and friends had for one another.

№ 32 reading list:

1  The Years · Virginia Woolf
2  Virginia Woolf · Hermione Lee
1  A Room of One's Own · Virginia Woolf [rereading]
3  The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick · edited by Alex Andriesse
4  A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick  · Cathy Curtis
5  De Profundis and Other Prison Writings · Oscar Wilde
7  The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and

William Maxwell 1938-1978  · edited by Michael Steinman

On my new list is Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, which I'm about to finish and can highly recommend to all Woolf fans. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Woolf's novel The Years. More on that disappointment later. My blog readers know that Elizabeth Hardwick is a favourite; on the list is a new essay collection and the only available biography of her. Now, let's look at a different list, my wish list.

Left: The autobiographical writing of poet Robert Lowell was published in August;
right: Elizabeth Hardwick on the cover of Darryl Pinckney's new book

The wish list keeps getting longer and I would like to mention two new additions. Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney comes out in October. The book is about his friendship with Hardwick and the editor Barbara Epstein. Both founded the literary magazine The New York Review of Books and were best friends and neighbours on W 67th Street in New York. Memoirs came out in August, a collection of the autobiographical writing of poet Robert Lowell (he was Hardwick's ex). Critics have highly praised it.

A nod to my next reading list

images mine, appeared on Instagram 03/08/22 and 17/09/22

№ 25 reading list: women only

Happy New Year! I would like to start the year with a new reading list, consisting of books by women only. As you probably know, Elizabeth Hardwick is a great favourite; her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal features female writers and women in literature. It so happens that Joan Didion, who has a book on the list, writes the introduction to the collection, which includes an essay about the Bloomsbury group and Virginia Woolf, who is also on the list.

№ 25 reading list:

1  Seduction and Betrayal  · Elizabeth Hardwick
2  Ninth Street Women  · Mary Gabriel
3  Approaching Eye Level  · Vivian Gornick
4  Intimations: Six Essays  · Zadie Smith
5  On Beauty  · Zadie Smith
6  The Waves  · Virginia Woolf [rereading]
7  Slouching Towards Bethlehem  · Joan Didion [rereading]

I have to confess that the list has been so long in the blog's draft that I have already read five of the seven books. I'm not far into the Mary Gabriel one - its snappy full title is Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art - but can already recommend it. Gail Levin's biography of Lee Krasner was on my № 24 reading list. I can also recommend that one but if I had to choose between the two I would pick Ninth Street Women. Even though Gabriel doesn't go into details about the artists' childhoods, I find her book more enjoyable to read. It's also better designed and images of artworks are in colour. Levin's book about Krasner is obviously well researched but the text is sometimes too academic for my taste which restricts its flow. In my copy, a William Morrow paperback, the paper is of poorer quality and the images of Krasner's artwork are in black and white only.

Lee Krasner, The Seasons, 1957

images mine, the 2nd appeared on Instagram 05/11/20 | Lee Krasner artwork, Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Whitney Museum of American Art via Haus der Kunst

№ 23 reading list: The Dolphin Letters

I cannot remember when I first heard of Elizabeth Hardwick - it must have been in relation to her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal (1974) - but it wasn't until 2018 that I read her work. Last year I was excited about the publication of The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979, a collection of letters exchanged between Hardwick and her ex, poet Robert Lowell (d. 1977), and their friends. To give you a little backstory: The title refers to Lowell's poem collection that earned him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1974. What made it controversial was that Lowell not only used Hardwick's letters, written to him in a state of emotional distress, but also changed them to fit his narrative. I thought it would take a few weeks to read through 500 pages of correspondence but found myself unable to put the book down and finished it in a few days. When I was done I went back to page 1 and started all over again, reading one or two letters before bedtime.

№ 23 reading list:

1  Sleepless Nights · Elizabeth Hardwick
2  The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert

Lowell, and Their Circle  edited by Saskia Hamilton

3  How to Write an Autobiographical Novel · Alexander Chee
4  A Tale of Love and Darkness · Amos Oz
5  Mislæg gatnamót · Þórdís Gísladóttir [Icelandic poetry]
6  To Kill a Mockingbird · Harper Lee [rereading]
7  Museums as Cultures of Copies  edited by Brita Brenna, Hans

Dam Christensen and Olav Hamran

Translated by: 4) A Tale of Love and Darkness: Nicholas de Lange

I would like to thank Routledge for the museum studies textbook on the list, which consists of 17 chapters by leading scholars in the field. It will enable me to keep up with my studies this summer without any deadlines.

Back to The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: If you already know the backstory and are intrigued then you may want to watch writer and critic Hilton Als in conversation with Saskia Hamilton, who edited the letter collection and added useful footnotes. What made this event even more memorable is actress Kathleen Chalfant's citation of three letters by Hardwick. In my copy I have marked many sections, one where Hardwick describes a certain mood in a letter to Lowell on January 13, 1976, when they were back on friendly terms:

... and strangely enough I do feel like writing just now and have fallen into a mood of reading books, thinking, idling about–all that puts one into the frame that makes writing possible and the life of literature beautiful and thrilling.

On the reading list is also Hardwick's Sleepless Nights (1979), a slim novel, partly autofiction, which I have also finished. I think I benefited from reading it after her personal letters, in which one learns about its writing process.

Sleepless Nights · Elizabeth Hardwick

I have fallen so hard for Elizabeth Hardwick since reading a collection of her essays released in 2017. I had already put Sleepless Nights (1979) on my to-read list when Faber & Faber released this new edition last summer, which they describe as 'a kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman’s memories; a collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams, and one of the greatest New York novels of all time.'

Cover image: © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Cover design: Faber

Simultaneously, Faber also released her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal (1974), which you will find on a reading list one day. Another book I have added to my wish list is the newly published, in the US, The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, edited by Saskia Hamilton (FSG).

Sleepless Nights
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Paperback, 144 pages
ISBN: 9780571346998
Faber & Faber

№ 16 reading list | Black History Month (UK)

Libraries are my happy place. Or so I thought. Last week I was at the library with a notebook, in which I have written down some of the titles I would like to read. As you can imagine, on my way there I was like a little kid going to Disneyland. As I walked up the stairs and entered the floor of the humanities (this is the university library, it's big), I was in a state of bliss, walking between the rows of bookshelves. Browsing books, touching books. Removing books from the reading list I already had in my mind to make space for books that demanded to be on it. Putting books back on the list to perhaps remove them again. Normal library behaviour.

Then something happened, something I was not prepared for: I experienced a moment of panic. For a few seconds, as I stood by the first row of shelves of American fiction, it suddenly dawned on me how many books there were on that floor, on all those shelves: In this lifetime I would never be able to finish my to-read list, which keeps getting longer. I cannot be the only book lover who has experienced this fear. No way. There better be an afterlife, with a library that has all your unread titles just waiting for you. There better be.

№ 16 reading list:
1  Blue Nights  by Joan Didion
2  Go Tell It on the Mountain  by James Baldwin
3  Sing, Unburied, Sing  by Jesmyn Ward
4  The Human Stain  by Philip Roth
5  Stet  by Diana Athill
6  Train Dreams  by Denis Johnson
7  The Bookshop  by Penelope Fitzgerald
8  Do Not Say We Have Nothing  by Madeleine Thien
9  The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick  ed. by D. Pinckney

On Saturday - you may have seen it on Instagram already - I read Didion's memoir Blue Nights in one go. She wrote the book after the death of her daughter Quintana, who was only 39 when she died. (She wrote The Year of Magical Thinking after the death of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne.) I liked Blue Nights. It's not a sob story that makes you reach for the tissue. Didion's style isn't emotionally overloaded. She is just trying to make sense of it all. Trying to find answers to questions that cannot be answered.

October is Black History Month in the UK (February in the US). I'm showing my support with two novels on the list, by James Baldwin and Jesmyn Ward. She won The National Book Award 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing. It was her second win; in 2011 she won for Salvage the Bones.