On Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007)

At a memorial service for Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney and Joan Didion shared their memory of the late co-founder of The New York Review. The full article is available online.

From Darryl Pinckney:

"Sometimes she read in order to write, in order to begin, to find her way in. She agreed with Virginia Woolf that to read poetry before you wrote could open the mind. She typed at a desk upstairs in her apartment on West 67th Street; she typed at her heavy machine on the dining room table. She wrote in big handwriting on legal pads that then waited on end tables for her doubts; she wrote in little notebooks that she tucked between the cushions of the red velvet sofa. When she wrote, books piled up all around her, opened, or face down, each asking questions of her, whispering about the way in."

... ...

"Writing was not a collaboration. In the solitude of the blank page, everyone was up against the limits of himself or herself."

From Joan Didion:

"She understood at the bone the willful transgression implicit in the literary enterprise—knew that to express oneself was to expose oneself, that to seize the stage was to court humiliation—and she accepted the risk. Every line she wrote suggested that moral courage required trusting one's own experience in the world, one's own intuitions about how it worked."

Anyone Read Richard Yates?

Can I just run a poll on how many people have actually read Richard Yates? He's an author that my friend Missy have recommended to me more than once. But part of his appeal is the bleakness of his prose. In his fiction, there are sad people, living sad lives. They dream, only to realise they have been lied to all their lives: that there never was this thing known as The American Dream.

I admit -- it sounds so depressing I have avoided it for a long, long time.

The Guardian visits the works of this American writer. They describe his works as such:

'My characters all rush around trying to do their best, trying to live well within their known and unknown limitations,' Yates explains. 'Doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are.' This tragic sense is what singles him out from a legion of lesser contemporary chroniclers of failed middle-class lives. 'He sees how valiantly people try, how they struggle with their own mediocrity,' says Hare. 'They're half-good, half-gifted, and it isn't enough against the immense forces of luck and circumstance.'

If we're doing Outmoded Author Challenge: Round 2, Richard Yates seems like someone to add to the list.

Or, Outmoded Author Challenge 2: The American Edition.