A haunting novel

in memoir fashion

SEEPLESS NIGHTS: A Novel, Elizabeth Hardwick; Random House, 151 pp., $8.95.

By Wilma Salisbury This exquisite novel is not long. But it is deep. It does not tell a story. It does not develop a theme.

Rather, it is a memoir. Percep tive and probing, it looks back at sharply remembered images of unrelated people and places.

benarrator is a writer: named Eth, like the author born and raised in Kentucky and educated at Columbia University in New York, the city where she now lives. She has also lived in New England and Europe. She has been married, chen unmarried. She has had unsettling sexual experiences. She has seen the seamy side of life.

Writing from the vantage point of the present, she selects what she wants to remember "like a can from the shelf."

"Here I am back in New York on 67th Street in a high, steep place with long, dirty windows," she writes in a letter to "Dearest M."

Place is important to Elizabeth. She writes of "the stain of place (that) hangs on not as a birthright, but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic." She analyzes the emotional scars of "residential fate."

In a cold Maine bungalow, she finds a stubborn old laundrywoman "homely, homely, scabby with a terrible skin rash, heavy in her cotton housedress, lame in her carpet slippers, pushing to the door with painful, heavy slowness For a moment, she is framed against her new white washing machine as if waiting to be photographed savage, miraculous, with the ambiguous smile of an old hearth goddess."

WARAN

In a neat, plastic-furnished mobile home in a Florida trailer park, she sees a retired Boston cleaning woman who “all day long dusted vases from France, swept over

Oriental rugs, admired marble mantles and brought elaborate brass andirons to a high shine. She made up beds with antique spreads, looked into mirrors with eagles on them and on weekends, she and Michael got into the Buick and drove off to trailer parks."

At a chic New York cocktail party, she meets a handsome middle-aged woman with a Ph.D. who talks about love, disillusionment and divorce "with the resignation of experience, the harem resignation."

At the White Rose Bar in 1943, she observes Billie Holiday with her "murderous dissipation (that) went with the music, inseparable, skin and bone. And always her luminous self-destruction."

Looking back to her childhood in Kentucky, she tells of a young woman from a good, loving family who chose prostitution "without any clear economic necessity.”

Seeing a New York shopping-bag woman in rags, she fills in the background of an autocratic music teacher who lived in grand style` until "poverty came like a bulldozer, gouging out her pretersions, her musical education, her trips to Bayreuth."

Elizabeth occasionally writes of men: the homosexual roommate with whom she shared a "marriage blanc," the Dutch doctor with the insatiable sexual appetite, "happy in his love pain," the burly worker "terrible to look at" who became the lover of a timid rich girl caught up in socialist causes.

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Mostly, though, Elizabeth writes of women pathetic, failed, scarred women who have been victimized by men, society, poverty, disease or their own ridiculous pretensions.

Subtly highlighting her dark gallery of haunting word portraits are illuminating phrases from great artists of the past. Apollinaire,

Elizabeth Hardwick

Goethe, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Pasternak, Delacroix and others are quoted like old friends who accompany the writer's journey into memory and comment on her thoughts.

Autobiographical in tone, Sleepless Nights stems from Elizabeth Hardwick's experiences as a novelist, essayist, critic for Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books and wife of the late poet Robert Lowell.

The images she creates are unforgettable. The places and people she describes are presented quickly and precisely, as if revealed in a flash of lightning. Her recurring references to memory bind disparate fragments together in a fine tapestry of intelligent, beautiful writing.

Sleepless Nights, the first novel Ms. Hardwick has written in 24 years, is a profoundly moving work of art.

Wilma Salisbury is a Plain Dealer staff writer.