Reading Darryl Pinckney’s freewheeling new memoir, Come Back in September, is like being at a particularly fabulous literary party. Wander its book-lined rooms, and in time you meet just about everyone who was anyone in New York in the years – wild and unstoppably creative – between 1973 and 1989. Here is Susan Sontag dancing at a West Village joint called the Cock Ring with Fran Lebowitz, and here is Mary McCarthy writing, indelicately in the eyes of some, of her late friend Hannah Arendt’s feet (“I think she only once had a corn”). Here is the critic William Empson with chewing gum in his ears (intended to drown out the noise of students at the college where he was a visiting professor), and here is the poet John Ashbery pulling hard on a Gauloise as he reads from his new collection (Jacques Derrida was in the audience).
Norman Mailer struts by and so does his arch enemy, Gore Vidal; James Baldwin and Elizabeth Bishop both appear. But the real star of the show – the book’s constant and slightly terrifying presence – is the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, Pinckney’s friend of more than three decades and the key that first turned the lock on his exciting New York life. Pinckney, an award-winning novelist, playwright and essayist, has long kept a diary – he began it as a closeted teenager – and for the purposes of writing this book, which he did mostly during the Covid-19 lockdown, he has raided it as one would a well-stocked larder. Though Hardwick’s life has been much picked over since her death in 2007, the biographers and other vultures attracted as much by her marriage to the troubled Pulitzer prize-winning poet Robert Lowell as by her own dazzling output, you’ll never find her more vividly described than in the pages of Come Back in September: her clothes (chic), her cooking (bad), her aphorisms (which struck like bolts of lightning).
