The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  At eighteen T. E. Lawrence took a long bicycle tour through France by himself; no young girl would be allowed to engage in any escapade, still less to adventure on foot in a half-desert and dangerous country, as Lawrence did a year later.

  Simone de Beauvoir’s use of “allow” is inaccurate; she stresses “permission” where so often it is really “capacity” that is involved. For a woman a solitary bicycle tour of France would be dangerous, but not impossible; Lawrence’s adventure in Arabia would be suicidal and so a woman is nearly unimaginable as the author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. First of all the Arabs would rape this unfortunate female soldier or, if they had some religious or practical reason for resisting temptation, they would certainly have to leave her behind on the march, like yesterday’s garbage, as the inevitable fatigue arrived. To say that physical weakness doesn’t, in a tremendous number of activities, “condemn her to a subordinate role” is a mere assertion, not very convincing to the unmuscled, light breathing, nervously unstable, blushing feminine reality.

  Arabian warfare is indeed an extreme situation. But what about solitary walks through the town after midnight? It is true that a woman’s freedom to enjoy this simple pleasure would be greatly increased if men had no aggressive sexual feelings toward her. Like a stray dog, also weaker than men, she might roam the world at will, arousing no more notice than a few pats on the head or an irritable kick now and then. Whether such a change is possible in the interest of the weaker sex is very doubtful.

  There is the notion in The Second Sex, and in other radical books on the subject, that if it were not for the tyranny of custom, women’s sexual life would be characterized by the same aggressiveness, greed, and command as that of the male. This is by no means certain: so much seems to lead right back where we’ve always been. Society must, it seems, inhibit to some extent the sexuality of all human beings. It has succeeded in restraining men much less than women. Brothels, which have existed from the earliest times, are to say the least a rarity for the use of women. And yet women will patronize opium dens and are frequently alcoholic, activities wildly destructive to their home life, beauty, manners, and status and far more painful and time-consuming than having children. Apparently a lot of women are dying for dope and cocktails; nearly all are somewhat thrifty, cautious, and a little lazy about hunting sex. Is it necessarily an error that many people think licentious women are incapable of experiencing the slightest degree of sexual pleasure and are driven to their behavior by an encyclopedic curiosity to know if such a thing exists? A wreck of a man, tracking down girls in his Chevrolet, at least can do that! Prostitutes are famously cold; pimps, who must also suffer professional boredom, are not automatically felt to be impotent. Homosexual women, who have rebelled against their “conditioning” in the most crucial way, do not appear to “cruise” with that truly astonishing, ageless zest of male homosexuals. A pair seems to find each other sufficient. Drunken women who pick up a strange man look less interested in a sexual partner than in a companion for a drink the next morning. There is a staggering amount of evidence that points to the idea that women set a price of one kind or another on sexual intercourse; they are so often not in the mood.

  This is not to say women aren’t interested in sex at all. They clearly want a lot of it, but in the end the men of the world seem to want still more. It is only the quantity, the capacity in that sense, in which the sexes appear to differ. Women, in the language of sociology books, “fight very hard” to get the amount of sexual satisfaction they want—and even harder to keep men from forcing a superabundance their way. It is difficult to see how anyone can be sure that it is only man’s voracious appetite for conquest which has created, as its contrary, this reluctant, passive being who has to be wooed, raped, bribed, begged, threatened, married, supported. Perhaps she really has to be. After she has been conquered she has to “pay” the man to restrain his appetite, which he is so likely to reveal at cocktail parties, and in his pitifully longing glance at the secretary—she pays with ironed shirts, free meals, the pleasant living room, a son.

  •

  And what about the arts—those womanish activities which are, in our day, mostly “done at home.” For those who desire this form of transcendence, the other liberating activities of mankind, the office, the factory, the world of commerce, public affairs, are horrible pits where the extraordinary man is basely and casually slain.

  Women have excelled in the performance arts: acting, dancing, and singing—for some reason Simone de Beauvoir treats these accomplishments as if they were usually an extension of prostitution. Women have contributed very little to the art of painting and they are clearly weak in the gift for musical composition. (Still whole nations seem without this latter gift, which may be inherited. Perhaps even nations inherit it, the male members at least. Like baldness, women may transmit the gift of musical composition but they seldom ever suffer from it.)

  Literature is the art in which women have had the greatest success. But a woman needs only to think of this activity to feel her bones rattling with violent distress. Who is to say that Remembrance of Things Past is “better” than the marvelous Emma? War and Peace better than Middlemarch? Moby-Dick superior to La Princesse de Clèves? But everybody says so! It is only the whimsical, cantankerous, the eccentric critic, or those who refuse the occasion for such distinctions, who would say that any literary work by a woman, marvelous as these may be, is on a level with the very greatest accomplishments of men. Of course the best literature by women is superior to most of the work done by men and anyone who values literature at all will approach all excellence with equal enthusiasm.

  The Second Sex is not whimsical about women’s writing, but here again perhaps too much is made of the position in which women have been “trapped” and not enough of how “natural” and inevitable their literary limitations are. Nevertheless, the remarks on artistic women are among the most brilliant in this book. Narcissism and feelings of inferiority are, according to Simone de Beauvoir, the demons of literary women. Women want to please, “but the writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.” Flattered to be in the world of art at all, the woman is “on her best behavior; she is afraid to disarrange, to investigate, to explode . . .” Women are timid and fall back on “ancient houses, sheepfolds, kitchen gardens, picturesque old folks, roguish children . . .” and even the best are conservative. “There are women who are mad and there are women of sound method; none has that madness in her method that we call genius.”

  If women’s writing seems somewhat limited, I don’t think it is only due to these psychological failings. Women have much less experience of life than a man, as everyone knows. But in the end are they suited to the kind of experiences men have? Ulysses is not just a work of genius, it is Dublin pubs, gross depravity, obscenity, brawls. Stendhal as a soldier in Napoleon’s army, Tolstoy on his Cossack campaigns, Dostoevsky before the firing squad, Proust’s obviously first-hand knowledge of vice, Conrad and Melville as sailors, Michelangelo’s tortures on the scaffolding in the Sistine chapel, Ben Jonson’s drinking bouts, dueling, his ear burnt by the authorities because of a political indiscretion in a play—these horrors and the capacity to endure them are experience. Experience is something more than going to law school or having the nerve to say honestly what you think in a drawing room filled with men; it is the privilege as well to endure brutality, physical torture, unimaginable sordidness, and even the privilege to want, like Boswell, to grab a miserable tart under Westminster Bridge. Syphilis and epilepsy—even these seem to be tragic afflictions a male writer can endure more easily than a woman. I should imagine a woman would be more depleted by epilepsy than Dostoevsky seems to have been, more ravaged by syphilis than Flaubert, more weakened by deprivation than Villon. Women live longer, safer lives than men and a man may, if he wishes, choose that life; it is hard to believe a woman could choose, like Rim-baud, to sleep in the streets of Paris at seventeen.

&nb
sp; If you remove the physical and sexual experiences many men have made literature out of, you have carved away a great hunk of masterpieces. There is a lot left: James, Balzac, Dickens; the material in these books, perhaps not always in Balzac, is a part of women’s lives too or might be “worked up”—legal practices and prison conditions in Dickens, commerce in Balzac, etc.

  But the special vigor of James, Balzac, Dickens, or Racine, the queer, remaining strength to produce masterpiece after masterpiece—that is belittling! The careers of women of prodigious productivity, like George Sand, are marked by a great amount of failure and waste, indicating that though time was spent at the desk perhaps the supreme effort was not regularly made. Who can help but feel that some of James’s vigor is sturdily rooted in his masculine flesh and that this repeatedly successful creativity is less likely with the “weaker sex” even in the socialist millennium. It is not suggested that muscles write books, but there is a certain sense in which, talent and experience being equal, they may be considered a bit of an advantage. In the end, it is in the matter of experience that women’s disadvantage is catastrophic. It is very difficult to know how this may be extraordinarily altered.

  Coquettes, mothers, prostitutes, and “minor” writers—one sees these faces, defiant or resigned, still standing at the Last Judgment. They are all a little sad, like the Chinese lyric:

  Why do I heave deep sighs?

  It is natural, a matter of course, all

  creatures have their laws.

  1953

  GEORGE ELIOT’S HUSBAND

  SHE WAS melancholy, headachey, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair in middle age. Because she was driven, worn-out, dedicated, George Eliot needed unusual care and constant encouragement; indeed she could not even begin her great career until the great person appeared to help her. Strange that it should always be said of this woman of bold strength that she “was not fitted to stand alone.” She waited for help, standing in the wings, ailing, thinking and feeling—speechless. She was homely, even ugly, and perhaps that accounted for some of her thoroughness and quiet determination; she was afraid of failure and rebuff. She suffered. Who can doubt that she was profoundly passionate and romantic? You cannot read her books or study her personal history, search for her character and temperament, without feeling her passionate nature immediately. It was agony not to be able to appeal in a simple, feminine way. Her countenance quite spontaneously brought to mind—the horse. Virginia Woolf speaks of George Eliot’s “expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power” and Henry James felt himself nearly in love with the “great, horse-faced, blue-stocking.” If she did not appeal, she impressed overwhelmingly. Her genius, her splendid power of mind, yes, but there is something powerfully affecting about her too, the fact that it was this particular woman who had the genius and the mind. When she died Lord Acton said, “It seems to me as if the sun had gone out. You cannot imagine how much I loved her.”

  Nothing was easy. It was always unremitting effort, “raising herself with groans and struggles.” Sometimes it seems that she is at the mercy of her intelligence; she is not an argumentative woman and likes peace and affection about her. Still she had to learn German, was compelled by an inner demon to suffer through a decision about going to church with her father; she must read Spinoza, must make up her mind about difficult matters. In an almost helpless way she cared about philosophy, politics, moral issues as other women care about clothes while often wishing they needn’t. Again Virginia Woolf: “the culture, the philosophy, the fame and the influence were all built upon a very humble foundation—she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.” A great deal of the drama of this bewitching life can be found in Professor Gordon Haight’s edition of the first three volumes of George Eliot’s Letters. Haight’s massive scholarship, his long and brilliant work could hardly be surpassed.

  George Eliot’s fame was immense; her books sold well and she made money; she was a distinguished public figure; her image and spirit were ennobling without being cold or for the few. She was solid and reassuring, of a dignity as large and splendidly detailed as her solid, deep, dignified novels. It is easy to think of Queen Victoria and some people who cherish George Eliot seem to want us to think of the old, puffy-cheeked Queen. This novelist’s history has always contained an instructive moral possibility. She is seen as the supreme cultural fact demonstrating the value of sober living, earnestness, and the brisk attention to matters at hand of a reliable man with a family business. Serene, brilliant, responsible: there she stands in her paradoxically plain grandeur. As one grows older this industrious, slowly developing soul becomes dear for a secret reason—for having published her first story at the age of thirty-eight.

  Still, too much is made of the respectability of a great lover. Her most daring act, the most violent assertion of self, was not the “marriage” with Lewes, but her marriage eighteen months after Lewes’s death to Mr. Cross, “one many years her junior and totally unknown and obscure.” Cross was probably a mistake; in all his public appearances he is firmly on the dull side. (It is astounding to learn in Haight that this man lived on until 1924—a strange old coot for the Jazz Age.) George Eliot was obviously strongly impulsive, but then many of the Victorians were troubled in spirit and indulgent in habits. Even the familiar Dickens had his love problems, Tennyson drank, and Wordsworth had an illegitimate child. George Eliot was certainly not Queen Victoria. She was pre-eminently an artist, with all the irregularity of temperament and determination to do as she pleased common among such personalities. She and her husband, Lewes not Cross, are inconceivable as anything except what they were, two writers, brilliant and utterly literary. They led the literary life from morning to midnight, working, reading, correcting proofs, traveling, entertaining, receiving and writing letters, planning literary projects, worrying, doubting their powers, experiencing a delicious hypochondria. The Brownings, the Webbs, the Garnetts, the Carlyles, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield—the literary couple is a peculiar English domestic manufacture, useful no doubt in a country with difficult winters. Before the bright fire at tea-time, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching. No “partnership” was more fantastic than that of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. They were heroic, slightly grotesque—nearly the last thing one can imagine is that these two creatures would become a public institution. Edmund Gosse describes the great pair driving home in a victoria. “The man, prematurely ageing, was hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thickset sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something pathetic and provincial about it.”

  Her husband: George Henry Lewes. He was witty, lively, theatrical, industrious, a very conspicuous figure in London intellectual life. Lewes sometimes went about lecturing, liked to produce and act in his own plays, and was successful as an important editor. As a literary man he displayed the same animation and variety for which he was known in the drawing rooms of his friends. To give but the slimmest idea of his production one can mention farces by the titles of Give a Dog a Bad Name and The Cozy Corner, a novel called Rose, Blanche and Violet, a large undertaking like the Biographical History of Philosophy, separate lives of Robespierre and Goethe, books on the drama, innumerable articles on literature and philosophy—this husband knew all about the pains of a life of composition. Leslie Stephen speaks of Lewes as “one of the most brilliant of the literary celebrities of the time.”

  Lewes was not exactly the person a match-maker would seize upon as a suitable husband for George Eliot. There is a mar
ked strain of recklessness and indiscretion in his charm; he was, as a temperament, extremely informal—Jane Carlyle called him “the Ape” and found him “the most amusing little fellow in the world.” Lewes was not a handsome man, indeed he was “the ugliest man in London,” according to Douglas Jerrold. George Eliot herself was somewhat put off by his unimportant appearance and had prejudice in that direction to overcome before she could entirely accept him. The impression he made was an odd one, well enough perhaps for literary circles but not up to snuff for conventional social life. “He had long hair and his dress was an unlovely compromise between morning and evening costume, combining the less pleasing points of both.” Some idea of the relaxed standards of Lewes’s circle when he was living with his first wife may be found in the following anecdote from Jane Carlyle: “It is Julia Paulet who has taken his [Lewes’s] soul captive!! he raves about her ‘dark, luxurious eyes’ and ‘smooth, firm flesh’—! his wife asked ‘how did he know? had he been feeling it?’ ”

  Lewes’s first wife, Agnes, was beautiful, intelligent, and free-spirited in a literal and alarming way. To her children by Lewes she added two by Thornton Hunt, the son of Leigh Hunt. Lewes endured this fantastic intrusion for some time with a remarkable lack of rancor. Even after his “elopement” with George Eliot good relations were kept up on all sides. Henry James in his first visit to them found George Eliot in a state of great anxiety because one of Lewes’s sons had been injured in an accident. She herself paid Agnes’s allowance after Lewes died. The attitudes of everyone indicate a generous, unconventional spirit of the sort we are accustomed to find among artists and writers but would not demand of the “respectable” and especially not where matters of such overwhelming emotional charge are concerned. Still it was all very irregular and strange. Looking back at Lewes’s pacific behavior, his endurance of suffering and humiliation, we can see a sort of prefiguration of the unusual position in which he later found himself. He was bright and sympathetic and yet there is an infinite longing in his lavish, humble love. As a husband Lewes discovered his wife’s genius, or rather he “uncovered” it as one may, peeling off the surface inch by inch, uncover a splendid painting beneath. All this he did with excitement and delight, as if it were his own greatness he had come upon. The most haunting fact ever recorded about this odd man is from Charlotte Brontë: “the aspect of Lewes’s face almost moves me to tears; it is so wonderfully like Emily’s. . . .” Perhaps what Charlotte Brontë saw in “the Ape” was his wild and tender uniqueness, his inexplicable nature.