ELIZABETH HARDWICK (1916–2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine.
DARRYL PINCKNEY selected The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010). He is the author of two novels, High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), and of two works of nonfiction, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (1992) and Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (2014). He also worked for Robert Wilson on his productions of The Forest, Orlando, Time Rocker, The Old Woman, Letter to a Man, and Garrincha: A Street Opera.
OTHER BOOKS BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney
Seduction and Betrayal
Introduction by Joan Didion
Sleepless Nights
Introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Selected and with an introduction by
DARRYL PINCKNEY
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Essays copyright © 1953–2003 by Elizabeth Hardwick
Selection copyright © 2017 by NYREV, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Darryl Pinckney
All rights reserved.
Cover painting: Cornelia Foss, Loper’s Path, 2000; courtesy of the artist; photograph by Christopher Foss
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hardwick, Elizabeth, author. | Pinckney, Darryl, 1953– editor.
Title: The collected essays of Elizabeth Hardwick / by Elizabeth Hardwick ; edited and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2017] | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2017014041 (print) | LCCN 2017014050 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371559 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371542 (paperback)
Subjects: | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3515.A5672 (ebook) | LCC PS3515.A5672 A6 2017 (print) | DDC 814/.52—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014041
ISBN 978-1-68137-155-9
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries
Anderson, Millay, and Crane in Their Letters
The Subjection of Women
George Eliot’s Husband
The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead
America and Dylan Thomas
The Decline of Book Reviewing
Boston
William James: An American Hero
Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson
Mary McCarthy
Loveless Love: Graham Greene
The Insulted and Injured: Books About Poverty
Grub Street: New York
Frost in His Letters
Ring Lardner
Grub Street: Washington
Selma, Alabama: The Charms of Goodness
After Watts
The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King
Chicago
Reflections on Fiction
Dead Souls: Ernest Hemingway
In Maine
Militant Nudes
Sue and Arabella
Sad Brazil
Sense of the Present
Simone Weil
Domestic Manners
Wives and Mistresses
Unknown Faulkner
Nabokov: Master Class
English Visitors in America
Bartleby in Manhattan
Katherine Anne Porter
Sons of the City’s Pavements: Delmore Schwartz
The Magical Prose of Poets: Elizabeth Bishop
The Teller and the Tape: Norman Mailer
The Genius of Margaret Fuller
Gertrude Stein
The Fictions of America
Mrs. Wharton in New York
On Washington Square
Wind from the Prairie
Mary McCarthy in New York
Edmund Wilson
Paradise Lost: Philip Roth
In the Wasteland: Joan Didion
Tru Confessions: Truman Capote
Locations: The Landscapes of Fiction
Melville in Love
The Torrents of Wolfe: Thomas Wolfe
The Foster Father: Henry James
Funny as a Crutch: Nathanael West
Sources
INTRODUCTION
COME AGAIN, Professor Hardwick said, doing that seesaw dance with her shoulders, as if to say, get a load of him. I’d no idea what she was talking about. She nodded toward the blue-and-magenta paperback on top of my notebook: it was by a distinguished, elderly member of the Columbia faculty. If I was reading that for a class, then I should drop that class right away. Who, she wondered, apart from the professor himself, would make students read him on the Romantics. Not much of interest there, she finished.
The exchange happened faster than it has taken me to recall it, from her getting settled in her seat, to me, the apple-polisher, claiming first chair and opening another notebook. She’d laughed at the class for our thinking we would want to take notes. Most of us persisted. She taught by quotation and aside, citation and remark, stone down the well and echo. Most of her lessons were for later. She would peer over the book and exhale, trusting to Fortuna that somebody sitting around the table might get it eventually.
Perhaps Professor Hardwick wanted to drift off, through the window and away, but she couldn’t. Literature meant too much to her and was the only kind of writing she wanted to teach, not that it could be taught. She hoped we’d learn to ask questions of ourselves as we wrote. How can you sustain this tone? Then enough was enough, on to the next person and her or his fifteen minutes of lip-parting attention. I’m afraid I don’t find that terribly interesting as an approach, she’d say. Your weekly offering was not much commented upon; she much preferred to be interested in what she was reading. Boredom was not listlessness, it was a nervous strain, while to be occupied with something like a great book could be wonderfully, sometimes painfully, liberating. Pedagogy—a word she would make fun of, starting from the dash. In the essays of Elizabeth Hardwick that dash is often a warning—beware of sting.
We, her fascinated and silent creative writing class at Barnard College in 1973, knew who she was. Needful facts, as she would say: Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, left graduate school at Columbia University because she wanted to write. I don’t remember if she told the class that or not. Her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, was published in 1945. The first thing I ever read by her was the opening chapter of Sleepless Nights, the novel she was writing then under the title The Cost of Living. That stunning first chapter was published in The New York Review of
Books while I was in her class. She told me later—it has been one of the honors of my life to have studied with her and to have benefited from her generous conversations about literature down through many years—that Stuart Hampshire wrote her at the time to say that the chapter was so amazing he couldn’t imagine how she’d be able to go on from there. As a beginning, it was an impossible act to follow. She said she found out that he was right and she ended up breaking up the chapter and redistributing it throughout the novel.
I was about to say that because I’d read her fiction first I always thought of her as more than a critic. But I can hear how blistering she’d be about that phrase—more than a critic. For her, literary criticism had to be up there with its subjects; real literature should elicit criticism worthy of the achievement in question. We got that from her straight off. The kind of modern literary criticism she was talking about—Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, William Empson, Randall Jarrell, R. P. Blackmur, John Berryman, F. W. Dupee, Mary McCarthy—was as stimulating as the work it was exploring. Then, too, she wanted us to take seriously the essay as a form. The American essay—Thoreau, Emerson, Twain, Henry Adams—was an important part of American history. Professor Hardwick had a fearsome reputation on campus. She wasn’t regular faculty; she was that lowly thing, the adjunct, a very New York position in a city full of writers who supplemented their income or saved themselves by the odd teaching job. She did not undertake her duties lightly. She stood for something. The New York Review of Books, for starters, and that was intimidating enough, once I learned what it was. From the very beginning, I understood that Elizabeth Hardwick was what used to be called a writer’s writer.
We would all be better off in law school, because writing wasn’t a profession exactly, and certainly not much of a life. She discovered that I thought Grub Street was a novel by Dickens. She made fun of your choices, what you were wasting your time on, but she never made you feel odd for not having heard of something. It was just what you didn’t know yet. Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope were experiences to look forward to, as she once had, up from the University of Kentucky, refusing to be buried alive in graduate school at Columbia University. Moreover, the more you read, the more discriminating you became about what you read. She lived to read. Her passions were instructive.
•
Of Hardwick’s published work, a slender volume of short stories, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, took a lifetime to accrue, and her three novels, The Ghostly Lover, The Simple Truth, and Sleepless Nights, are separated by years. We think of the essay as a constant in Hardwick’s writing life. She published her first review in Partisan Review in 1945. In the late 1940s, Hardwick, then in her early thirties, was already doing the “Fiction Chronicle” for Partisan Review, writing, for example, about Kay Boyle, Elizabeth Bowen, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and the dreadful Anaïs Nin. Philip Rahv, together with William Phillips, had revived the journal in 1937 as the organ of the anti-Stalinist left, and in the postwar years, Partisan Review, that ring of bullies she called it, was central to the New York intellectual scene, anticommunist, dissident.
What she remembered as the cutting reviews of her youth were long ago. Attacks on inflated reputations were moral battles for young writers just starting out. She said often that it is much harder to write about what you like than it is to write about what you don’t like. One of the things she admired about Susan Sontag, she said much later, was that her essays were mostly appreciations, enthusiastic introductions to an American audience of the avant-garde European culture she cared about. It was a pleasure to discover a forgotten writer—one who was worth it. Sometimes a campaign on someone’s behalf doesn’t work. Hardwick didn’t think she’d done anything for Christina Stead—as yet. But one day her view of Stead might be more widely shared. She was amused by Gore Vidal’s attempts to revive Frederic Prokosch’s fortunes. When Dawn Powell’s novels were coming back into print, Hardwick said that she knew that Powell had had a hard life and it was very much like a man for Edmund Wilson to have lost interest in her because she was not pretty, but even so she did not want to write about her enough to do so. Sympathy for an intention was not going to make a book any better than it really was, and the danger of writing from a preconceived position was the harm having to be false does to a writer. No constituency was worth the sacrifice, she cautioned, in those days of feminist and black-nationalist pressure.
Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about what engaged her. Over the years, I would hear her say that she’d had to tell an editor she didn’t want to write about a certain book or author because she found she didn’t have anything interesting to say after all. It pleased her that John Updike reviewed books, so few novelists of his stature did. She paid attention to what went on in her world, that of serious literature, in English and in translation, and matters of cultural and social interest, an all-hands-on-deck kind of service. She was reasonably aware of audience, of just who was picking up what at the newsstand. But it didn’t matter if she was writing for glossy publications with her eye on the word count, for a venerable quarterly with a thick spine, or for a newspaper book-review section not looking for controversy. Every assignment got Hardwick at full sail, all mind and style. Nothing is casual, she said. You are always up against the limits of yourself.
Hardwick published four original volumes of essays in her lifetime. The majority of the essays gathered in A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society (1962) first appeared in Partisan Review. Several of them are, as she would say, of considerable length, and in them she is reading letters, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, novels, poetry, sociology, psychology; she is going to plays and looking back on cities where she has lived. The title perhaps asserts the value of her opinions, of their being hers—when A View of My Own was published she had been married for more than a dozen years to Robert Lowell. She’d been one of the few women writers associated with Partisan Review, and she was the only other one to join Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt as women writers who had their own identities at the magazine and weren’t known as literary wives.
In 1959, in an article that appeared in Harper’s, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” Hardwick attacked what she described as the unaccountable sluggishness of book-review sections. There “had been room for decline . . . and the opportunity has been taken.” Sunday mornings with the book reviews is “a dismal experience.” She was just getting started. “The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself—have made The New York Times into a provincial literary journal.” The drama of the book world was being slowly, painlessly killed, she went on; she deplored the lack of strong editorial direction in such publications.
The communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself, is the very least one would expect from a journal devoted to reviewing of old and new works. Beyond that beginning, the interest of the mind of the individual reviewer is everything. Book reviewing is a form of writing.
In Martin Scorsese’s and David Tedeschi’s documentary about The New York Review of Books, The 50 Year Argument (2014), Robert Silvers reads from Hardwick’s article on book reviewing. He’d been the young editor, just back from The Paris Review and his houseboat on the Seine, who urged her to write the article. In the film, he tells the Town Hall audience commemorating The Review’s fiftieth anniversary that Elizabeth Hardwick’s words were on his mind when, in 1963, Hardwick, Lowell, Jason Epstein (editorial director of Random House), and his wife, Barbara Epstein, founded The New York Review of Books. They asked Silvers to be co-editor, along with Barbara Epstein. Rea Hederman took over from Whitney Ellsworth as the publisher in 1984. For Hardwick, The New York Review was freedom. Whenever she chose, what she wrote could now have the most honorable of destinations. “The drama of real life will not let down the prose writer,” she observes in “Grub Street: New York,” her f
irst published essay in The New York Review.
The New York Review of Books distinguished itself for its unaccommodating reflections by some of our best writers on the catastrophe of the Vietnam War. Hardwick liked Poe’s phrase “the intense inane.” In her own pieces for “The Paper,” as the founders called it, during the turbulent 1960s, she thinks about Selma, Watts, and goes to the march of the striking garbage collectors for whom Dr. King had come to Memphis, Tennessee, when he was killed. She considers the coarse power of popular works about the sexual revolution. Her candor is a pleasure, her judgments unexpected. She once said that Lowell was made uneasy by the thought of what she might contribute to The New York Review. After her essay on Robert Frost appeared, Lowell complained to her, only half jokingly, that she was just going to attack all his friends.
In this period, Hardwick went to the theater a great deal. (Lowell’s adaptations for the stage were written in the 1960s.) Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts opened down the street from where she and Lowell and their daughter, Harriet, lived—the Epsteins and their two children were only a few doors away—and maybe she could escape her family obligations long enough to immerse herself in a fleeting experience, in imagining others. She has a way in her theater reviews of sounding as though she has just come in, still talking about what she has seen. Moreover, she is coming through the door and analyzing real people as she takes off her coat. Nora, Hedda, their problems. Hardwick’s detractors used to say that in her criticism she didn’t make enough distinction between fictional characters and the real world. While she was curious about different traditions in the arts, realism on stage, on the page, spoke to her with the most force. She writes somewhere that characters can make structure. But perhaps it is because in realist drama and fiction much depends on a character’s motives. It is through the conscious or not conscious enough depiction or projection of what is driving the work that the writer’s meaning can be discovered. Hardwick had a thing about people, whether imagined or real, and what made them tick, what their stories were. To have insights, or true insight, about human nature and human histories was the essence of her critical spirit.
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