Hardwick and her friend, the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, the pretty girls of the Partisan Review crowd. They were in the generation of brilliant girls, promiscuously read and bedded, who went to college, moved to New York from Lexington, Kentucky, and Portland, Oregon, respectively. And both had a thrillingly liberated period in the city before their eventual and expected marriages (in Mary’s case, several).
Zelda was free too, that first year in New York — Scott and her swinging through the glass doors of the Plaza, no rules, rich and unmoored — but then later, she learned, there were rules, of course, she learned once she had apparently broke them.
The critic Edmund Wilson, married to McCarthy, was the lynchpin between the two worlds — he was Fitzgerald’s roommate at Princeton and then later part of the Fitzgerald social set. Wilson was one of those who survived, who cherrypicked their second wives out of that new crop of girls who were not only personalities like Zelda but also known and accepted as talented writers. Mary McCarthy said she felt “dragooned” into the whole thing with Wilson, like the young Robert Lowell, strong-arming the fiction writer Jean Stafford into marriage. Stafford finally accepted after he fucked up her face in a car crash. Lowell known as “Cal” from his schoolboy days, for both the despotic emperor Caligula and the Tempest sprite Caliban.
In a row on my bookshelf, I have the books of Lowell’s wives — Stafford, Hardwick, Blackwood — all republished by The New York Review of Books in candy-colored paperbacks. I organize my bookshelves by literary gossip.
If John and I mimic any migratory pattern it’s probably not the modernists, it’s this American generation that came afterwards, that viewed the modernists as gods. That generation moved where their husbands could get even temporary faculty appointments in the wilds of American academe. So Hardwick left her chosen city, reluctantly, to follow Robert Lowell to Boston (a city she detested) for his post at Harvard, moved even to Iowa, which she found “flat and ugly.”
Perhaps there was always hope they would go abroad again. Hardwick in her later novel Sleepless Nights remembering so lovingly their year abroad as young marrieds, Italy, Holland (forgetting the Italian music student Lowell ran off with, the psychotic break, the Munich army hospital, him expecting her to travel to Amsterdam alone to find a place for them to live because this is where he was convinced he would write his masterpiece).
We too desire the transatlantic so desperately. There is always this hope that one of these moves will be back there, to a more voluptuous and glamorous alienation.
I am terribly lonely here. In my loneliness I’ve become ornate with the rituals of makeup. I invent more steps because there is more time. (Although some days I don’t even wash my face.) I go for counseling sessions at Sephora. I consume. I am consumed. I buy make-up I don’t need, don’t use. I ask advice about concealer from the girl with the ring on her glossy pink lip. I feel now that we are almost friends, that she recognizes me.
I buy a NARS blush called Madly.
So much of what I’ve done since I moved here is react to containment — I tweeze and pick away at myself, agonize over the shape of my eyebrows, my clothes, my bangs.
Lately I have been fantasizing again about having an affair. It seems to come with these moves, the sense that I don’t really have a life outside of John’s. When we are out in public I find myself casting around to see a man I would sleep with. At a recent poetry reading (occasions which usually make me feel sleepy, like I am at church) I find myself mildly fantasizing about the man sitting next to me with a potbelly, a librarian type, basically a less attractive version of John. I tell John this and we laugh.
I buy a NARS lipgloss called Orgasm.
In the first story in Mary McCarthy’s strikingly contemporary collection The Company She Keeps, the young wife has an affair, but McCarthy makes clear that she is doing this in order to be a character again in a new drama, to be seen and reinterpreted anew. From then on the character becomes again the single girl in the city, sleeping with or involved with a string of inappropriate men, and then, at the end, remarried, but in therapy (both therapy and affairs forms of transference practiced by these women, both perhaps about being your own character again).
But more than anything I crave female companionship. Like what Edna Pontellier found with Adele Ratignolle in The Awakening, more important for her self-actualization than the affairs. There are the women writers, almost all who also keep personal blogs, who I commune with in the comments section of FFIMS, eventually in long email chains swapping intimacies, worrying whether our missives are inappropriate or icky, venting the sometimes alienation of our current existences, sometimes inside (the domestic sphere, our relationships) and outside (as writers, in our jobs, often as adjuncts). Sometimes, when traveling for readings or visiting family, I see these confidantes in person, like Suzanne when I go back to Chicago, although oftentimes it feels more comfortable to wait until we’re back behind our screens to resume any real intimacy. I feel instead formal, unused to having to be socially fluid. Or often, my fellow darling agoraphobes, they don’t make it out to a reading I’m doing, preferring to stay inside.
Like the mad wives, these women form another invisible community for me — for we too feel invisible, but together we rally against our own erasure. My blog a way for me to negotiate and deal with this loneliness.
Yet, communicating via email or in a comments thread is not the same as getting coffee with someone. Or, I don’t know, pedicures. Or yoga. Isn’t that what female friends do together? Something simple, felt. The wife of a librarian at Duke, one of John’s colleagues, has reached out to me, and even though I really like her, I find myself afraid, feeling too fucked up to have real friends in my embodied existence. I’m seemingly always depressed and anxious about some sort of deadline or reading or project — who wants to be friends with someone that self-involved? The woman doing my makeup at the Chanel counter at Nordstrom turns out to be a wife of one of John’s colleagues, she tells me she is an artist. I go visit her and she puts on Audrey Tatou red lips for me at my request. I buy the lipstick. But still mostly: chitchat, nothing too personal. I don’t even remember her name.
The friendships I keep up online feel safer. And yet my relationships with these intellectual (and emotional) women is much more complex, our communications forming a rhythm, months of silence when life gets too intense for us. We are all so sensitive, difficult. I wonder if this is like the friendship Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy had. Lifelong frenemies, redlipsticked and tightsweatered, highballs and cigarettes in hand. Sometimes it seems impossible to be real friends with other women writers, we are all such trainwrecks, messes, it seems, but sometimes it seems impossible to be real friends with other women who do not identify primarily as writers. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: We spoke of silence.