The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  An avid reader of old and new works, Hardwick never stopped thinking about the state of fiction. Then, starting in 1970, with an essay on Zelda Fitzgerald, came a series of essays on women writers, taking in treasured amateurs, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, as well as the geniuses, the Brontës, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf. The essays accumulated quickly, for her, and became the volume Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974). The era provided occasions, new biographies of culturally important women, for instance, and there was a marked increase in interest in women writers past and present. The second wave of feminism made an immediate difference in American literature. Then, too, Hardwick’s way of seeming to understand their lives from the inside perhaps came from knowing something herself about woman’s fate. Lowell split up with her in 1970 and they were divorced in 1972. The following year, he published The Dolphin, in which he tells through his poetry his version of the end of their marriage and his move to another country in order to be with another woman.

  Hardwick would draw on her work in The New York Review of Books to fill out two additional books of essays: Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983), in which the malicious, handsome Frost comes to life again, and Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998), which was somewhat revised for its paperback edition the following year as American Fictions.

  I thought to look again at Melville’s story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” because it carried the subtitle: “A Story of Wall Street.”

  There did not appear to be much of Wall Street in this troubling composition of 1853 about a peculiar “copyist” who is hired by a “snug” little legal firm in the Wall Street district. No, nothing of the daunting, hungry “Manhattanism” of Whitman: “O an intense life, full to repletion and varied! / The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!” Nothing of railroad schemes, cornering the gold market, or of that tense exclusion to be brought about by mistakes and follies in the private life which were to be the drama of “old New York” in Edith Wharton’s novels. Bartleby seemed to me to be not its subtitle, but most of all an example of the superior uses of dialogue in fiction, here a strange, bone-thin dialogue that nevertheless serves to reveal a profoundly moving tragedy.

  The essays of Sight-Readings, or American Fictions, like those of Seduction and Betrayal, have a unity just in being what they are about: the American experience, the assumptions of national character, even the influence of the landscape or the mythic landscape. For Hardwick, the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.

  What mattered most in the end was a writer’s language. She adored Dickens for the wildness of his language, Conrad for his independence of usage, Henry James for his eccentricity, his stunning excess, and William James for being such a nice guy about it all. Hardwick did not write about everything that interested her. Sometimes she didn’t feel equal to the task, given what the work deserved or what had been said about it already. You always wish she’d said more about her subject—so did she, she once laughed, but she couldn’t. The helpless compression of her fiction can be felt in the essays. The economy expresses her temperament. She won’t tell you what you already know. Part of the freedom of The New York Review was that she didn’t have to spell everything out. Its readers were sophisticated, or wanted to be.

  That conciseness, not wanting to waste anyone’s time or mar her style with lumber, not only meant that it took a long time for the essays to add up but that she did not conceive of book-length nonfiction projects. Spinning things out, beating things to death, going on and on just to get from cover to cover—that is what academics did, and whatever they did was not to be done. (Historians had no place to be other than the university.) Never mind that many of the writers she respected also taught. To have come of age at Partisan Review maybe accounted for her lack of interest in the New Criticism of the McCarthy era and its concentration on the text at the expense of the social or historical context. She was similarly indifferent to deconstruction and its influence on academic criticism in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. What she held against academic criticism was that most of it was so badly written. She blamed the computer for finishing a lot of books that ought not to have been.

  And then she did commit to a book-length project, a critical biography of Herman Melville for the Penguin short biography series. She said somewhere that Faulkner was the greatest American writer, but in spite of his unevenness she maybe loved “the extraordinary American genius” of Melville more. Herman Melville, her incredibly moving study, was published in 2000. It was to be Hardwick’s last major creative effort. An unkind review from someone who, she said, clearly had never read Moby-Dick made her resigned, diffident about bringing out anything else.

  Her late essays in The New York Review showed her fascination with sensational murder cases of the 1990s. She was looking for a way to write about murder in literature and murder in real life, the difference being that in literature you can study motive. She kept fewer notes on the subject as time went by. She never liked publishing a book anyway, she said. The vulnerability, she did not need to say. To publish in The New York Review meant that she was protected; but it also spurred her on to do her best because of the essays that she knew were going to surround her, the company she was going to keep.

  Elizabeth Hardwick’s nonfiction—imaginative prose, she called it—spans six decades and includes book reviews, theater reviews, thoughts on opera, travel writing, literary criticism, social essays, memoir. The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is like the first Collected Works of most poets—its existence invites a revised Collected, because it has not been possible, here, to publish everything. Her Herman Melville isn’t excerpted, but a late essay on Melville in love goes some way to make up for it. Seduction and Betrayal has been left out in its entirety, available, as it is, from New York Review Books, with an introduction by Joan Didion. Seduction and Betrayal includes her essays on Ibsen’s heroines, and a section of her theater reviews would really miss them, so there are no theater reviews reprinted here.

  The remaining omissions are arbitrary, such as occasional pieces, her glossy journalism. Also not here are letters to editors, statements of support for causes, her introductions to books that are still in print. And eulogies. I seem to be writing mostly eulogies these days, she said. The last piece Elizabeth Hardwick published in The New York Review of Books was in 2006, on the death of her dearest friend, Barbara Epstein. Hardwick died the next year.

  Most of the essays collected here are of her literary subjects, her excited contemplations of writers on their paths. She approaches their work through their lives, or looks from a work to the life. Hart Crane’s letters tell her that maybe he didn’t jump overboard, maybe he was having a happy life as a lover of men and of the grape. Three volumes of George Eliot’s letters reveal the drama of a woman of melancholy genius at the mercy of her intelligence. Hardwick paid attention to the domestic, to the intimacy—and limitations—of letters and diaries. In her masterful essay “Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries,” she explores what Boswell and the Goncourt brothers mean in their literary cultures. But as interested as Hardwick was in diaries and letters, she was always troubled by biography, a genre that feeds on letters and diaries as raw material. A biography of Hemingway that she is reading is just plain “bad news”—for Hemingway. Her compassion for Dylan Thomas suggests that she may have seen him in the desperate condition of his last years, and Delmore Schwartz, too. She knew Katherine Anne Porter and had been around Frost enough to remember his aura. She wrote about Edmund Wilson and Norman Mailer and their biographies, or the mess Capote made of memoir. It is clear in her essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s prose that she knew her, but also that she found the work striking long before she met Bishop, reading her in Partisan Review down at the University of Kentucky in 1938.

  Hardwick looks at the riddle of Graham Greene’s novels about sin and heresy or ponders the fates of the two women in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. She follows Byron’s and Paste
rnak’s mistresses and sad Countess Tolstoy into their afterlives. She wrote about Auden, Huxley, and Isherwood in America; the literary gifts and accumulation of losses that Nabokov brought with him to America; and the last days of Dylan Thomas in New York City. But as time went by the individual writers whose work she addressed tended to be American.

  Melville, Henry James, and Edith Wharton were foundational as novelists of certain kinds of American experience that still have resonance. Carl Sandburg, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, and Thomas Wolfe are in themselves American tales. Margaret Fuller, Gertrude Stein—who anticipated Philip Glass, Hardwick says—and Djuna Barnes are women writers, rebels, but also Americans abroad. Joan Didion expresses the restlessness of the America Hardwick felt around her. Yet in the provocative essays included here on the writer’s life or the changes in American fiction and its possibilities over the years, her reading is wide, international.

  In her published essay collections, Hardwick organized her selections around general themes. However, the essays here are presented chronologically, so that the social essays from the 1960s and 1970s—on the riot in Watts, the protests in Selma, the march in Memphis, the trauma of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, or the legacy of the 1960s—join with her memories of Boston, Florence, Maine, and, yes, Brazil, to describe her own cultural context. She is reading Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in 1974, understanding how the “great, green density” of the country “makes the soul yearn to create a gray, smooth highway.”

  When you open the doors, so to speak, to one of her essays, you can sense there on the threshold that this is going to be interesting. She always makes you add to your reading list. In line after line, she is saying things you had not thought of, or telling you something that it is stirring to be told. Her love of literature has in it a profound humility. There is nothing cruel in her intelligence. Her wit and charm are unerring, unfailing. You didn’t know the skeptical mind could be so graceful. Her concentration is complete. Elizabeth Hardwick can surprise you. You didn’t know you would need to stop right there and go think about what she has just said. You re-emerge, you look up, and you’d no idea her beauty of expression had taken you so far away. Or you didn’t expect such exhilaration just from reading about reading. It isn’t only what she is saying, it’s how she is saying it. Her prose style is unmistakable and like no other.

  •

  This volume would not have been possible without the dedication of Susan Barba to seeing Hardwick’s work into print.

  —DARRYL PINCKNEY

  THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  MEMOIRS, CONVERSATIONS, AND DIARIES

  ALAIN, the philosopher and writer, arrives first, Valéry two or three minutes later. “Les deux illustres,” meeting for the first time, introduced by Henri Mondor, sit down and begin to order luncheon. Valéry, refusing the duck in favor of the meat, remarks, “Without meat, you would have with you only M. Néant.” Alain professes himself able to eat anything, adds that because of his teaching at the Normale he drinks very little, except sometimes milk. Valéry also likes milk, he explains, but goes to excess only with coffee. And then Alain, unable to restrain himself another moment: “Avez-vous travaillé, ce matin, Orphée?” (Italics mine.) Yes, Valéry works in the morning and at eleven o’clock his work for the day is finished.

  A note by Clive Bell in the Symposium collected in honor of T. S. Eliot’s sixtieth birthday: “Between Virginia [Woolf] and myself somehow the poet became a sort of ‘family joke’: it is not easy to say why.” In the same collection, an essay by Desmond Hawkins: “I recall an afternoon tea in the early 1930s. I am the only guest and my host is a ‘distinguished literary figure.’. . . I affect to despise the great man, of course. . . .” (Italics mine.)

  The night boat from Calais chugs along confidently, taking us, in the hommage as in the cuisine, from the French soufflé to the English cold veal.

  •

  We hardly know how to approach these “minutes” of the luncheons between literary men in France, those “Mardis” of Mallarmé’s, those evenings at Magny’s restaurant in the Goncourt Journals where Saint-Beuve and Gautier with a mysterious and almost painful genius still exist on the page, neither life exactly nor fiction, but like one of those dreams in which dead friends, with their old crumpled smiles and grunts, their themes, meet you turning a corner.

  About Valéry, Mallarmé, or Gide you may pluck the same berry from a dozen different vines. An occasion is not recorded by a singular guest of some peculiar stenographic energy, an observant dilettante with no other literary occupation to fill his time; no, breaking up at midnight, everyone goes home, not to rest, but to his journal intime, his bulging diary. If he is Gide he will ponder himself upon the occasion, if he is another he will “write up” Gide. Abundant comparisons are thus left for posterity: you may read Roger Martin du Gard’s “Notes on André Gide”—opening line in 1913, At last I have met André Gide!—or Gide’s musings in his journal on the meetings with Martin du Gard.

  The information above on the first meeting of Alain and Valéry is taken from a current copy of the recently revived La Nouvelle NRF. At the beginning, M. Mondor informs us that this same event, this “déjeuner chez Lapérouse,” was committed to print by Alain himself and appeared in the old NRF in 1939. M. Mondor, robust meeter and recorder, has also written on the first meeting of Valéry and Claudel and even the great “premier entretien” of Mallarmé and Valéry. His document on the latter begins with the information gleaned from the Alain conference: “Paul Valéry, almost every day, after eleven o’clock in the morning liked to rest from his work.” It is by repetition and excess that a national eccentricity is recognized.

  This overloaded pantry of memory and dialogue has a genuine literary and historical fascination—and delights of an unnameable sort: the pleasure of frayed picture albums, where no surprise is expected, and still one’s heart skips a beat as he looks yet another time at the old faces, the eyes squinting in the sunlight. In France no hint of moderation nags this appetite. Not a word is lost in the afternoon dreaminess, not an accent of Mallarmé’s swirls off to oblivion with the pipe smoke in that apartment on the rue de Rome, not even a silence is drowned in the punch, which, you may read in countless sources, is brought in quietly at ten o’clock by Mme. Mallarmé and her daughter. Dining almost anywhere, they have hardly unfolded the table napkins before Valéry is saying, “To read, to write are equally odious to me.” Like Napoleon’s hat, these remarks have a national, historical life of their own; a schoolboy would know them any place. But this man who hates to read and to write does not then, as an American might expect, speak of women or sports, but of his feelings of dizziness and fatigue after the first performance of Jarry’s Ubu Roi! If women are mentioned at all, it is hardly what we mean when we say “they talked about women.” Instead Valéry remembers Heine’s witticism: “All women who write have one eye on the page and another on some person, with the exception of the Countess of Hahn who has only one eye.”

  In France not only literary people but the civic powers display a ready courtesy and appreciation of artistic citizens which to their English and American partners must appear almost idolatrous. Our artists openly wish such recognition only when they are in a sick mood of persecution or drunkenly blowing their own horns in a way they will regret the next morning. Wandering about Paris, foreigners of a literary mind think, “The Avenue Victor Hugo, that you might expect . . . but the rue Apollinaire, and so soon!” Regretfully we remember those Washington Square ladies who tried in vain to get a corner named after Henry James.

  •

  It is very difficult for the English and Americans to compose a respectable hommage, to spend a lifetime or even a few prime years on private memoirs, even comfortably to keep a journal, a diary. For these activities the French have a nearly manic facility and energy, but when we grind away at this industry it is as if we were trying to make perfume out of tobacco juice. Every sort of bruising st
umble lies in wait; you observe one law of social morality only to break another. No matter where one turns the ground of possibility weakens and the writer sinks into an indiscretion at the best, nearly a crime at the worst. Reverence, which the French display without stint, seeing it a privilege, a mark of grace, to serve, to draw near, to be a witness, seems to us to impugn honesty and self-respect. If we cannot do this for the Virgin, the Saints, without an exotic act of the will, how shall we be expected to do it for a mere author of secular dramas? Art is a profession, not a shrine. And even if one does not hesitate to make a fool of himself, there are others to consider. By immoderate praise, rash compliments, one may seriously offend the modesty and reasonable expectations of the great person, who will be thrown into embarrassment by the suspicion of flattery. The fear of toadying is an overwhelming obstacle to the production of an hommage.

  Nevertheless, we do have a great English classic in this vein; one can say it outdoes the French, that when all the memories of Gide and Valéry are at last gathered together—if an end to that enterprise can be imagined—even then they will be mere fragments by the side of Boswell’s Johnson. Yet it is remarkable about this work of genius that, though it is known and loved to a fabulous degree, the spectacle of its coming into being has always struck a great many right-thinking readers as repellent. Even a schoolgirl must shrink with disgust from that loathsome young man, Boswell, “buttering up” Dr. Johnson, hanging about his coattails like an insurance salesman after a policy, opening up topics and then with a diseased lack of pride rushing home to write down the answers, as though he wished somehow himself to partake of Johnson’s magnificence, to insinuate his own disturbing image on the screen of history. Dr. Johnson is treasured, but odium attaches to his giddy memorialist. Grateful as readers have always been for the book, they cannot imagine themselves stooping to this peculiar method of composition. Until fairly recently Boswell seemed both repugnant and insignificant—everyone knows Dr. Johnson thought his friend missed his chance for immortality by not having been alive when “The Dunciad” was written. And one would have thought the amazing longevity of the Boswell family’s shame about this member would have been modified by the undying popularity of his great work. Still they seemed to think: that fourth bout of gonorrhea fully recorded elsewhere by this dog—that is our kinsman! This other thing brings credit only to Dr. Johnson who, unfortunately, is not even a connection of the Boswell family.