The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  There is an absence of particularity, of the details of experience, in Querry’s crack-up, just as there is in Fitzgerald. We reach the end of a great and adored man and accept the despair without any real idea of how it came to be. Curtness, coolness, even carelessness mark the mode of expression. Fitzgerald: “Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice box under left-overs.” Querry in disgust: “The darkness was noisy with frogs, and for a long while after his host had said good night and gone, they seemed to croak with Rycker’s hollow phrases: grace: sentiment: duty: love, love, love.” Self-condemnation, indifferent, impersonal, given out as a Confession, a general statement of sinfulness, without names or places. Art has failed to bring peace; success does not bring happiness to wives, mistresses, or children.

  From Death in Venice: Art “engraves adventures of the spirit and the mind in the faces of her votaries; let them lead outwardly a life of the most cloistered calm, she will in the end produce in them a fastidiousness, an over-refinement, a nervous fever and exhaustion, such as a career of extravagant passions and pleasures can hardly show.” This is a price, perhaps, but a noble, classic fate—far from the sardonic ash-heap of Greene. Or compare Mailer’s Advertisements, a confession in which I, at least, do not find the voice of personal suffering and so assume it was not intended. The alcoholic reserve of Fitzgerald and the manic expressiveness of Mailer show the twenty years or more that separate the personal documents. For Mailer more and more experience, more and more fame—the Congo as an assignment, perhaps, not as a retreat. “Publicity can be an acid test for virtue,” Greene says. Poor Hemingway, honorifically carried to his grave by those wooden angels, the restaurant owner Toots Shor and the gossip columnist Leonard Lyons.

  In The Heart of the Matter the weary hero faced damnation because of his unconquerable pity for the women whom destiny, capriciously, or due to his own wanting, left in his care. Pity is way beyond Querry. He doesn’t want to pretend any longer; it is all meaningless. Fornication is a burden and love is impossible. And yet, what is it about? How to account for the flight, the coldness, the refusal? We have Querry’s “aridity” seen by the priests at the leper colony, but we do not have the love affairs or the life of the great architect that make the extraordinary final emptiness important. We see the soul at a point of theological instability, and there only.

  Greene has a unique gift for plot and a miraculous way of finding a clever objective correlative for his spiritual perplexities. Loss of faith in art and love equals the “cure” of the leper, mutilated, but at last without pain. The humid tropical atmosphere, the tsetse flies, the intense colons, with their apologies and their arrogance, the strained, disputatious priests, interestingly pockmarked with weaknesses: this is the properly exotic and threatening setting for the Greene dialogue. A Burnt-Out Case seemed a partial failure to V. S. Pritchett in his New Statesman review. He felt the influence of the stage had been unfortunate and worked less well than an earlier absorption of film technique. Yet he is not entirely dissatisfied and decides that Querry, the hero, succeeds as a vehicle for certain ideas if not as a “man.” Pritchett calls Graham Greene, “the most piercing and important of our novelists now.”

  Frank Kermode in a brilliant article in Encounter is unhappy about A Burnt-Out Case. He finds it “so far below one’s expectation that the questions arise, was the expectation reasonable and has there been any previous indication that a failure of this kind was a possibility?” In Kermode’s view The End of the Affair is Greene’s best novel because, to simplify, here the author more openly and with greater seriousness faces his case against God.

  Querry, a builder of Catholic churches, is only, the novel tells us, “a legal Catholic.” He doesn’t pray, he loathes being dragged into other people’s lives by the ropes of his religion and his fame; he doesn’t want his sins to be made interesting as priests in novels like to do with villains; he resents having his vices stubbornly interpreted as incipient virtues. Father Thomas frantically insists upon accepting Querry’s devastated spirit. “Don’t you see that you’ve been given the grace of aridity? Perhaps even now you are walking in the footsteps of St. John of the Cross, the noche oscura.” In trying to come to some sort of judgment about Greene as a novelist one would have to ask himself whether a significant picture of modern life in the last thirty years could be made from doctrinal puzzles, seminarian wit and paradox, private jokes, Roman Catholic exclusiveness. The characters take their sexual guilt and stand at the edge of damnation discussing possibilities for fresh theological interpretations. They are weary and romantic and fascinated by suffering and they look upon themselves and their feelings in a peculiarly intense Catholic-convert way, a sort of intellectual, clannish, delighted sectarianism. The question is not, in the great Russian manner, how one can live without God, or with God; the question is how one can exist as a moral, or immoral, man without running into vexing complications with the local priest. Marriage, love, sex, pride, art, no matter where you turn things are not quite as the Church would have it and to function at all one has to break rules or offer new versions of the old.

  Of course Greene is fascinated by sin and heresy; it could not be otherwise. His terse novels, with their clear, firm themes and symbolic situations, are acted out by men with beautifully apt gifts for language, men raised on Cardinal Newman and Ronald Knox. His world is anti-psychological; the world of psychoanalytical motivation does not exist; its questions are never raised, its interpretations never suggested. Class, childhood, history are irrelevant, too. These are indeed peculiar novels. The omission of so much life and meaning, of the drama of social and psychological existence would seem to be ultimately limiting. There is a sense of disfiguration, baffling sometimes, and yet always intellectually exciting. Everything is sharper and more brilliant than the effects of other writers. God is a sort of sub-plot and the capricious way He treats Roman Catholics is a suspenseful background to love and boredom and pity. It is most perplexing.

  How often Greene sees the living thing as a dead or trivial object, an article of manufacture. “A smile like a licorice stick”; “the pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life”; “he was like the kind of plant people put in bathrooms, reared on humidity, shooting too high. He had a small black moustache like a smear of city soot and his face was narrow and flat and endless, like an illustration of the law that two parallel lines never meet.”

  Licorice sticks, purses filled with snakes, leggy bathroom plants are lined up for the argument, the great debate over a whisky and soda at some peaceful, intellectual Priory. And meanwhile it is really to church that Sarah (The End of the Affair) is going and not to meet her lover. God laughs maliciously. On this stage, with its oddly clear and yet humanly peculiar themes, with its weary, engaging purity of design, these brilliant, original works take place, each one as arresting as the other, Catholic-convert dramas of sex and renunciation, belief and defiance.

  1961

  THE INSULTED AND INJURED

  Books About Poverty

  I descend from no name—

  poor from my mother’s womb,

  poverty claws me down.

  My father was poor; Horace,

  his father, was the same—

  on my ancestor’s tomb,

  God rest their souls! there is

  neither scepter nor crown.

  —VILLON

  UPPER Broadway, Riverside Drive, the ulcerated side streets hanging on the edge of the academic plateau, shuddering over the abyss of Harlem and the gully of Amsterdam Avenue. In the 1940s, when I was at Columbia, I used to live in the rooming houses around the University. Those bricky towers in the smoky air had huge, dark apartments inside. Some of them, under
sly arrangements violating the rent-control laws, were divided into rooms which were rented singly. Downgraded but still rather collegiate and hopeful, the region was preparing itself with great practicality for the dismal future.

  Very little adjustment was necessary for the coming residential exploitation of the Puerto Ricans and the restless Negroes in the next decades. The marigold odor of multiple occupancy, the airless arithmetic of “co-operative facilities,” the greasy couches and scarred table tops (furnished) were waiting to receive the bodies of the new tenants, ready to pile them on the top of the bones of the old West Side bourgeoisie whose history and stay in the region have been annihilated, as if by a bomb. Blank brick, dirty mirrors, flaking cherubs on forgotten, undusted cornices. These houses stand now in the menacing scene, bursting with the boredom of the exile, the relentlessly exhausting dissipation of the idle. Sordid dawns and bleary mid-nights; Mayakovsky’s “men as crumpled as hospital beds, women as battered as proverbs.” The cool, drained look of dark-skinned men lounging on the steps of decrepit Windsor Manor, sodden Carleton House, scandalous Excelsior, leprous Queen’s Palace.

  Julius Horwitz’s novel, The Inhabitants, is hopeless as a work of fiction and so should be read for what it is, an important document of our people on Welfare assistance, the West Side rooming houses, the illegitimate children, the drug addicts, the tubercular swains, the squalid kitchens, the rats, roaches, and the eternal, vain search by the state and the mother for the vanished fathers of countless children. “I watched the baby hungrily sucking its milk. The baby would never know happier days.” Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people. They are somehow abandoned by life, and exist without skills or meaning. Blankly they watch the drug addicts rip the telephones off the walls in order to get the nickles and dimes. They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions. There is a loss of domesticity that the crowding together of several generations cannot conceal. They live in a doom for which none of our concepts has prepared us—the queerness, the uselessness. I think I read recently that before many years have passed it is expected that nearly half of the residents of Manhattan will be living on public assistance. Horwitz gives a vivid picture, through the eyes of a social worker, of this perplexing peculiarity. Is this the world of the destitute as we have been accustomed to think of it? I have stood in front of the houses and imagined every sordid corner. I can feel the crowding, the crying, the dirt, the illness, the hopelessness. There is the soiled, careless white man, a sort of guard, looking after the owner’s putrefying property. But out of the houses come the beautiful babies in the Welfare layettes, being pushed along in their new Welfare prams. Infancy is indeed the most prosperous moment in these new lives; they come forth into the world, as if for a confirmation, spotlessly, chastely dressed.

  The clothes of the urban indigent are often so nice that only the drunks look poor; hot dogs, pizzas from the corner shop, and candy bars prevent hunger. There is a strange lack of urgency, as if all these people had been sentenced to an institution of some kind where food and warmth are provided and where one waits, waits for the father of the baby to turn up, for the lover to telephone, the Welfare check to arrive in the mail. Who would ever have thought that urban poverty would become the nervous fatigue and hopelessness of institution life? For these younger people are not exactly unemployed; for one reason or another—illness, pregnancy, psychological disability—they are tragically unequipped. Our ideas are somehow out of date; they do not really tell us what we want to know about all this. New York City, with its Bosch-like horrors, its hideous deformities, has this rotten density everywhere. There is some connection between the New York of the “national-market” offices and the old and new slums. It is of the essence that Manhattan should be the “borough of the very poor and the very rich.”

  •

  In the Sicily of Danilo Dolci’s book, Outlaws, poverty, hopelessness, hunger, played-out land—classical economic tragedy and suffering—survive, old relics of injustice and indifference. Dolci, formerly an architect, went to Sicily in 1952 to study Greek temple ruins. The misery of the people led him to the decision to dedicate himself to the relief of their condition. He settled in a poverty-stricken fishing village and married a fisherman’s widow with five children. The personal decision, the individual act on behalf of mankind, the belief in possibility, the ultimate responsibility: these are still the only relief from guilt and indifference the human soul can offer.

  His first book, Report from Palermo, dramatized, by the very successful literary method of direct quotation in the language of the people, the plight of the poor at Trappeto. The Sicilian desperation, the extreme conditions of life there have led Dolci to ask for nothing less than a total moral reorganization of society. In Outlaws, an account of the people of Partinico, a center of Sicilian banditry, he writes,

  The best concerts, films, and plays in the world should be dedicated to the sick of mind and spirit. The least we can do is to see that the highest recompense goes to those with the most unpleasant jobs, those who clean out drains and toilets. . . . A less barbarous society than our own would see to it, at least, that the old, the defenseless, the destitute, and the children, the ‘last’ of today, were the first to occupy the first-class compartments in the trains and boats and to receive the best treatment in hotels and hospitals, on the most favorable terms or entirely free.

  There is an account of Dolci’s arrest and prison term which grew out of his project whereby unemployed men began working to rebuild an abandoned road rather than remain in demoralizing idleness. Some of the affidavits offered by fellow writers show an interesting insight into Dolci’s character. The novelist Vittorini writes, “I have always distrusted the sort of activity which mixes religion with social reform. As soon as I got to know Danilo, however, all my doubts vanished. And as for his ideas, his plans, and his methods . . . I must admit that I found them eminently suited to conditions in Sicily.”

  Carlo Levi says of Dolci: “It is this confidence which overflows into the lives of the poor among whom he lives and whose sorrows he has so taken to heart. It is this confidence which has opened their eyes to hope. . . .” As the essence of Dolci’s thought Levi chooses the statement: “We are living in a world of men condemned to death by all of us.”

  The importance of Dolci’s literary work comes from his decision to allow the people to speak for themselves, in their own words, without trying to find another form, such as the novel, for their story. When you have actually felt the lives of the bandits of Partinico, at that time Dolci’s recommendations have all the urgency of a living need: “If the seven or eight hundred million lire which were found immediately for the upkeep of the police force in Partinico alone, had been used immediately for building a dam . . . the winter flood waters could have been utilized for irrigating 8,000 hectares and today there would be no banditry and no unemployment.”

  We are all inclined to undervalue a great rare effort of the sort made by Dolci, and to feel a certain embarrassment about, for instance, Albert Schweitzer. I heard a woman who had met Schweitzer express her dismay that he was more concerned with his own salvation than with a disinterested love for the natives!

  •

  The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family by Oscar Lewis:

  The children of Jesus Sánchez live, along with some seven hundred other souls, in a huge, one-story slum tenement, the Casa Grande, in Mexico City. Not a member of this family has ever known happiness; they cannot succeed or realize their hopes; no matter what drudgery, effort, or inspiration they try to bring to their existence, they will inevitably fail because they were born in poverty. Indeed the four children of Sánchez—Roberto, Manuel, Consuelo, and Marta—are actually sinking into greater deprivation than they were born in. Their efforts are not as effective as those of their father. The children live in a modern state, but they are “marginal,�
� unprotected; they are sophisticated and knowledgeable way beyond their father but it does not yet mean a genuine advantage. The Sánchez children represent in their lives and the drama of their condition something of all the poor young people in all the great cities of the world. In this book about them, the anthropologist, Oscar Lewis, has made something brilliant and of singular significance, a work of such unique concentration and sympathy that one hardly knows how to classify it. It is all, every bit of it except for the introduction, spoken by the members of the Sánchez family. They tell their feelings, their lives, explain their nature, relate their actual existence with all the force and drama and seriousness of a large novel. The stories were taken down by tape-recorder, over a period of years, and under various circumstances. The result is a moving, strange tragedy, not an interview, a questionnaire, or a sociological study.

  For a number of years, Dr. Lewis has been making radical literary experiments with his Mexican families, struggling, through them, to tell the story of the poor of the world, to render the actuality beyond statistical truth. And yet he measures his own work by the standard of “scientific” truth, not by the measure of fiction. The huge slum tenement—the neighbors, relatives, lovers, enemies—surrounds the family, enlarging and deepening the personal history so that what one actually has is the story of the condition itself, poverty. Poverty is the fate of this whole world; it is the chief character in this book. The Sánchez family is not of the lowest economic group; the prodigious efforts of the father have given the family a slight, brief lift. The father, a wooden, earnest man, was born in ignorance and destitution in the state of Veracruz. “We always lived in one room, like the one I live in today, just one room.” His wife, the mother of the children, dies and Sánchez gradually takes new wives, new mistresses and their children, under his harsh but uniquely protective care.