Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

First published: 1979

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The twentieth century

Locale: New York

Principal Characters:

• Elizabeth, the self-conscious narrator
• Alex, Elizabeth’s intellectual friend and her first lover
• Dr. Z, “the eternal husband” to Madame Mevrouw Z., “fervent romancer” to the painter, Simone, and “faithless” lover of his nurse-employee
• J., Elizabeth’s childhood friend

Form and Content

Sleepless Nights is the title of Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel and the recurrent image that identifies both the narrative’s characteristic atmosphere and its inspirational source. It might have been titled nocturnal remembrances, a memoir of New York, for New Yorkers and New York City—in its supportive and destructive influences— constitute a major portion of the work’s focus. Divided into ten short chapters, it is a first-person, confessional novel (a subcategory of the autobiographical) that, in its concern for the literary process of reconstructing life and human experience through memory, is highly self-conscious and allusive, taking as it does the act of writing from a woman’s perspective and sensibility as a principal issue of the text: “But after all, ‘I’ am a woman.”

Elizabeth, the narrator, begins her story in June of an unspecified year and, through interspersed letters written at different times and places and to different people in her past, ranges over fifty-six years, from the 1920’s to 1978, emphasizing the period from 1940 (the year of her arrival in New York City from Lexington, Kentucky, to study at Columbia University) to 1973, the year of the last dated letter included in the narrative.

Sleepless Nights has a minimal amount of external action. Embodied in the complex sequence of narrated events the reader comes to understand, however, are the experiences that have shaped the writer before she begins to shape them in writing: Southern childhood in a family of eleven, with parents who paid the price of “intimacy” and adapted themselves to the disillusioned coupling of marriage; films and the imaginative freedom of reading; postadolescent loves and a surreptitious affair with an older man; university study; ill-fated love relations, a broken marriage, the gaining and losing of friends through deaths and misunderstandings; the spiritual malaise of urban social gatherings; the disorientation of change through real and imagined travels from South to North (from Kentucky to New York, from New York to Boston, from Boston to Maine, from Maine to Europe, always “carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian—all consumed in a sedentary sleeplessness”); and the ever-present consciousness of old age and death. All these experiences (interwoven so as to stress the theme of developing awareness) draw constant attention to the narrator’s attempt to control and impose an order (and therefore meaning) on her past—in retrospect—in a way that she could not while experiencing it as life.

Recurrent in the novel from beginning to end is the narrator’s awareness of the female condition. Most relevant to Elizabeth’s developing consciousness as writer and woman are the numerous observations she makes of society’s broken women: women in “squalid nursing homes” crocheting bedspreads; bag ladies who “sit in their rags, hugging their load of rubbish so closely it forms a part of their own bodies”; and women such as Josette, whose economic marital dependence upon Michael left her directionless at his death, and Ida, in Maine, whose “disaster” arrived in the form of Herman, a local man who one day “vanished for good,” taking with him everything of use he could find in Ida’s house, including, eventually, her sanity. There is also Miss Lavore, whose lonely life is redeemed by her nightly excursions to the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, where she engages changing strangers, keeping her life and theirs at a safe distance; and there is the British-accented Miss Cramer, whose earlier life of glamour and expensive possessions contrast dramatically with her lonely wait in old age for death.

The novel abounds in such illustrative perceptions of lives on the margin. Elizabeth’s own experiences of men and male betrayal are epitomized by her memories of the old “gentleman in the black suit” who gave little girls chocolate (“the predator’s first gift”) in the darkness of the movie theater so that he could run his hands under their dresses and up their thighs, and young, intellectual, politically radical Alex Anderson, whose remembered “handsomeness” brings back images of a time of “fascinated, passionless copulation.”

The longest and most symbolically revealing episode is Elizabeth’s memory of bearing witness to the tragic demise of “the bizarre deity” Billie Holiday, the jazz singer whose life and relationship with her mother, Sadie, bear a striking resemblance to Elizabeth’s life and relationship with her own mother. Holiday’s artistic aspirations, moreover, confront Elizabeth with the isolating power of art in the life of the artist.

The novel ends as it begins, returning to the narrator’s self-conscious awareness of reconstructing the emotional truths of her past through memory and the act of writing “throughout the night.”

Context

As do her two earlier novels, Sleepless Nights dramatizes—although from a much more personal vantage point—Hardwick’s concern with the almost ineffable nature of human experience and the self-conscious awareness of “difference” which is the perspective of the female writer. As a contribution to the modern confessional novel—a genre extending back to Fyodor Dostoevski’s Notes From the Underground (1864)—Sleepless Nights portrays the ways in which women struggle with modern problems such as loneliness, alienation, the difficulty of establishing meaningful and lasting relationships, and the emotional uncertainties and inner chaos that frequently accompany a consciousness of personal physical decay, economic dependence, and political marginality. Hardwick continues in this novel her exploration of the inscrutable flow of life from a perspective that is simultaneously feminine and dissident.

Essentially a writer accustomed to tackling ideas and whose preferred form is the essay as social criticism and belles-lettres, Hardwick nevertheless has been praised for her complex narrative structuring of “reminiscences” in Sleepless Nights, for her wit and understanding, and for the “sheer loveliness” of her sentences. Hardwick’s plotless fusion of autobiography with fiction uncovers the female self as it turns toward women’s experiences as a fountainhead of autonomous art. Like the theoretical articles and critical reviews that have established her presence in the ongoing feminist debate over woman as both subject and object of the literary text, Sleepless Nights, her most acclaimed novel, secures Hardwick’s place as an important voice in that continuing discourse.

Bibliography

Caplan, Brina. “The Teller as the Tale.” Georgia Review 33, no. 4 (Winter, 1979): 933-940. An essay-review of Sleepless Nights which classifies it as a “novel-memoir” and compares it with Lillian Hellman’s Three (1979). The narrative style is criticized for being too morally disengaged and fragmentary, producing the effect of an attempted “collage” that degenerates to “pastiche.”

Lamont, Rosette. “The Off-Center Spatiality of Women’s Discourse.” In Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982. Focuses on Hardwick’s “fragmentary aesthetic,” a style of indirect progression which has affinities with the treatment of narrative voice in Marguerite Duras’ films, plays, and novels. Both writers are seen as feminist dissidents whose anarchic style reflects a rapprochement between women and their female condition of marginality.

Faust, Langdon Lynn, ed. American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1988. A biographical overview with brief commentary on the thematic content of principal publications.

Peters, Margaret. “Fiction Under a True Name: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights.” Chicago Review 31, no. 2 (Autumn, 1979): 129-136. A feminist analysis of Sleepless Nights, emphasizing the autobiographical nature of the novel. The essay laments the oblique method of narration that distances the author from the narrating Elizabeth by “obliterating” much of Hardwick’s known past. Offers comparisons between Sleepless Nights and Hardwick’s first novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945).