Darryl Pinckney

This week’s podcast features a review from ABR Editor Peter Rose of Darryl Pinckney’s absorbing new memoir, Come Back in September: A literary education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney’s early years in New York and his unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick, the American literary critic, novelist and short-story writer.

first went to New York City in January 1975. It was wonderfully dilapidated. There was a blizzard of sorts, but I had the light jacket I had bought in Athens. If it was cold, I didn’t notice. The morning I arrived, there was a particularly gory pack murder on the subway. I read about it in the Times. So I avoided the subway and walked everywhere, through the sludge. We all knew what happened if you strayed into Central Park. Folks in Columbus, Ohio, where I had been staying with friends, had implored me not to visit New York. They couldn’t imagine why a nice young boy from somewhere called Melbourne – anarchically long hair and freakish wardrobe notwithstanding – wanted to visit that sinful city. (Still missing Nixon, they spoke of sin and sodomy.) I stayed in Midtown, in a grungy hotel soon to be demolished. The old black-and-white TV was on a constant loop, but I followed The Dick Cavett Show as best I could. The louvred door to my room cast terrifying shadows over my bed whenever anyone passed my room. Each night I dreamt that an ogre was on his way from Wall Street to stab me to death. In the morning I had breakfast for 99 cents – or, if I was hungry, $1.99. Then I didn’t eat for the rest of the day. I haunted the grand old bookshops that lined Fifth Avenue in those days. I visited the Metropolitan Museum for the warmth, but I didn’t know about the Frick. Velvet Underground wasn’t playing at the Metropolitan Opera, so I skipped that. During my stay in New York I didn’t speak to a soul, which suited me fine. It was the purpose of my visit.