Come Back in September - Darryl Pinckney

‘Genrely’ speaking this is a memoir but it actually reads like a Who’s Who of American literature in the 70s and 80s. And then you add New York into the mix. For me New York is like a character all of its own. I always had this theory that even if you removed every human being from Manhattan it would throb along with its own syncopated  life. But in this very erudite and intellectual memoir New York pulses with literature!  At the centre of this glitterati literati is Elizabeth Hardwick, friend and mentor to the author who has created the most detailed and palpable picture of this notable woman. So much so that I really felt I got to know her and if we were to meet I could immediately strike up a conversation based on Pinckney’s portrayal of his friend. Costarring Robert Lowell, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt - you might almost accuse Pinckney of namedropping! Except that it doesn’t come across that way at all. If anything he’s in awe all of these people as much as the reader. But he is an astute observer and creates the most tangible character sketches of all the people that he meets. But it is a memoir and as much as his friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick dominates the narrative he also gives us insights in how it was to be a gay, black man in New York during those years when AIDS was such a destroyer of life. And it’s also a book about reading and writing, the highs and the lows of both those pursuits for the professional, published writers and the scribblers. There is an engrossing insight into the New York Review of Books and how it’s run, by Elizabeth Hardwick’s friend Barbara Epstein.

The book itself had a curious structure that it took me a while to get used to. Once I did I loved it. For times it reads like the meandering thoughts that we all have only here it’s all written down and it isn’t that it’s disjointed, it is that it can flit from one, for want of a better word, anecdote to another just as one thought leads to another. Ultimately it became almost conversational albeit an extremely intellectual conversation!

It offers the reader a fascinating portrait of life in the literary world during those times. It brings life to those names that may just have been at the foot of a poem as perhaps in the case of Robert Lowell. If, like me, you have a tendency to place writers on a pedestal almost as if they were celebrities of the movie star popstar status this book shows that they were living, breathing people with the same ups and downs, arguments and traumas that we all endure. Towards the end of the book Pinckney offers his journal entries for the end of the eighties which is where the book ends. 

It’s an homage to, not just a time gone by, but a time and a place gone by. Like everything New York has changed and evolved over the decades. This book captures it as an almost literary snapshot if you will. I can’t see that it’s a book with universal appeal but for those with literary inclinations and lovers of New York City it’s an engaging read.

My thanks to Ana McLaughlin of Riverrun books for a gifted copy.