The distance between Darryl Pinckney’s first book, High Cotton, and his latest, Come Back in September, is the difference between Indianapolis and Manhattan. High Cotton is inward and leafy, with sprawling yards and silences, while Come Back in September is more populated, filled with the soon-to-be or already famous talking: on the street, in clubs and theaters and bars, in restaurants and apartments.
It’s a type of coming-of-age memoir that I love: the story of an artist who leaves home for a large city and finds him/herself part of a literary and artistic flourishing. The artist is young, so everything feels new. There’s always an ensemble cast, with everyone a main character in their own lives and a supporting actor in others’. They make art, talk about their art, form and break relationships, write manifestos and start journals. They meet at performances and galleries, everyone together forming a scene: Paris and Berlin in the twenties, for instance, Laurel Canyon in the sixties, New York in almost any decade.
Memoirs of these creative times often have their source in diaries and notebooks, giving the reader a sense of the scene unfolding as we read. I’m thinking of books such as Francoise Gilot’s Life With Picasso, Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, or Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Or, from Indianapolis writers alone, Dan Wakefield’s New York in the Fifties, Margaret Anderson’s My Thirty Years War, Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday, books that require only a glittering new city, an awakening artistic self, and that large cast.
Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September, the critically acclaimed memoir of his literary education in New York in the seventies, holds its own with the best of these. Published in 2022, the paperback is being released this fall.
Born and raised in Indianapolis, the son of politically active middle class parents, Pinckney left Indy for Columbia University in New York. Pinckney’s parents wanted him to go into law, but he wanted to be a writer. To choose writing as a career back then, he’s said, was as good as dropping out. He went to Columbia to be in the city where his favorite books were set, and to write his own.
While a student, he was introduced to the writer Elizabeth Hardwick by her daughter, Harriett Lowell. Pinckney took a workshop from Hardwick at Barnard, where he impressed her with the poems and pages of prose (including her own) that he had by memory, and for the next decade he became Hardwick’s unofficial secretary and mentee. That’s when his literary education begins.
As co-founder of the New York Review of Books, Hardwick’s apartment was an unofficial salon, with editors and writers such as Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal and others part of the group. Pinckney learned by listening to their talk, but primarily he learned from Hardwick, who left books for him to read on a chair by her door, read and critiqued his writing, and modeled a life of discipline, will, and critical discernment.
Come Back in September is a love letter to Hardwick and her milieu, a portrait of the women in that time and place. Its focus is on the friendship and rivalries between these strong intellectual women who come in and out of Hardwick’s life. Her famous ex-husband, the poet Robert Lowell, appears now and then. Mostly, though, we’re given access to Hardwick’s brilliant mind, to her apartment and friendships, her teaching, her wide reading, her life.
But this book is not all about writers. Pinckney’s literary and cultural education continued into the New York nights, in places like the Mudd Club and the Chelsea Hotel bar. It’s a thrilling soup of people and performances. The B52s and Blondie are extras in the book, as are Grace Jones, Bowie, Ginsberg, Warhol, and Burroughs. Luc/Lucy Sante is an important supporting character, as is the artist Basquait and others. They’re all part of the cast, the scene.
I’d like to add that Darryl Pinckney was two years behind me at North Central High School. One of his best friends in high school was one of my best friends in grade school. We’ve never met, but it seems that he was at the Beatles concert at the Fairgrounds in 1964, as was I. His novel High Cotton should be recognized, along with Come Back in September, as classics of Indiana literature.
