Considering the toll it takes on me to construct a writing boiled down to within an inch of its life about something I think, punctuate it punctiliously, then figure out too late what I’ve said, much less thought, if anything, it got my attention when Darryl Pinckney said that Elizabeth Hardwick was “a writer who composed prose like poetry.” This doesn’t mean her prose was “poetic,” God grant. I prefer it to mean that her prose partakes of the “exquisite compression and technical precision” that Dwight Garner elsewhere attributes to poetry. That way in my dreams go I on the page.
Of several delicious reminiscences cited in the review of Pinckney’s memoir about Hardwick, there’s one whose sprightly wickedness on the part of a woman who loved gossip keeps cracking me up (note the parentheses; they enhance the mischief):
(“Gossip, according to Hardwick, was merely ‘analysis of the absent person.’”)
Then there’s this: “As Hardwick once put it, ‘Reading was such a wonderful thing that to have made a life around the experience was almost criminal it was so fortunate.’” That’s for you, cherished reader. You know who you are.
(Maggie Doherty, “”Elizabeth Hardwick’s Master Class on Literature and Life,” New York Times, 10-23-22; Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal, “19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art,” New York Times, 6-18-21)
(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
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Delicious!
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This poem came to mind (rather irrelevantly)
Ode to Gossips
BY SAFIA ELHILLO
i was mothered by lonely women some
of them wives some of them with
plumes of smoke for husbands all lonely
smelling of onions & milk all mothers
some of them to children some to old names
phantom girls acting out a life only half
a life away instead copper kitchenware
bangles pushed up the arm fingernails rusted
with henna kneading raw meat with salt
with coriander sweating upper lip
in the steam weak tea hair unwound
against the nape my deities each one
sandal slapping against stone heel sandal-
wood & oud bright chiffon spun
about each head coffee in the dowry china
butter biscuits on a painted plate crumbs
suspended in eggshell demitasse & they
begin i heard people are saying
i saw it with my own eyes [ ]’s daughter
a scandal she was wearing [ ]
& not wearing [ ] can you imagine
a shame a shame
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