“Mary says she doesn’t believe her,” she told me. Those days, she did little but read: “I start ‘War and Peace’ in the morning and I’m finished by five o’clock.” She’d enjoyed one evening alone with Mary, when they had started talking about Jane Eyre. She hadn’t been in the mood for Castine social life that summer. “Pages are existence and the eye never stops on its lookout for the worm, the seed, the fish beneath the water, the next meal.” “The Back Issues pile up in front of and behind experience, wedging the sandwich of real life in between,” she would write in that story. She called her latest piece “Back Issues.” It came from her idea that one’s life, one’s autobiography, is nothing other than what one has read. She got sick that summer-a bug she couldn’t kick-but soon she was working again. She liked to repeat stories of other people’s odd accidents, stories that ended with someone saying, “I totalled it.” She drove off that day with a new Buick. The wreck was stored in the same shop, and she was surprised by its condition: just a few dents. Mary and her husband took her to pick up a new car. It took her a while to get herself together-she told me she called Harriet in hysterics-but in the end she even recovered her groceries. The car flipped onto its side, but, miraculously, she came away without a scratch, just a sore arm from trying to wriggle out and hail a passing driver. I’d glance at her long red velvet sofa, and know that I couldn’t sit there comfortably without her “holding forth,” as she liked to say. Once a week while she was out of town, I’d let myself into her West Sixty-seventh Street apartment, sift through her mail, and send along the important items. I had been Elizabeth’s student several years before, and then a sort of secretary. In September, 1978, a year after Lowell died, she had returned with a blue box that contained the manuscript of her novel “Sleepless Nights.” She always came back to the city with something. Those calls, her confidence, were an honor and a joy. She wrote a great deal when she was in Maine, and she’d call me in New York to talk about her work. Mary lived on Main Street, but Elizabeth had remodelled a house on a bluff overlooking the water. Mary and her husband had been coming to Castine almost as long as Elizabeth had. When she arrived, she’d go grocery shopping, check in on the local couple who looked after the house for her, and be settled in by the time her old friend Mary McCarthy phoned. “The drive is very nostalgia-creating,” she told me. The flight from New York City to Bangor took only an hour the rental car to Castine added another. Even after Robert Lowell, her husband, left her, in 1970, she kept going. Elizabeth Hardwick was in Castine, the small town in Maine where she’d spent her summers for more than twenty years, since before her daughter, Harriet, was born.
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