The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  In a world where “marriages” are subject to the most careless cancellation and children regularly abandoned, the sense of personal and family responsibility shown by poor Sánchez has a solemn beauty. By grim labor as a food buyer for La Gloria restaurant and the slow accumulation of further enterprises, he manages to keep an astonishing number of people going. For good reason he is the center of his children’s lives, the object of their most intense longings and fears. Roberto says, “Although I haven’t been able to show it, I not only love my father, I idolize him. I used to be his pride and joy when I was a kid. . . . He still loves me . . . except that he doesn’t show it any more because I don’t deserve it.” What is so dramatically striking in the story of the Sánchez children is that the same incidents and experiences are described by each one, but with pitifully different interpretations because of pride, natural lack of self-knowledge, and the enormous need of each child to keep the love of his father. The family is hemmed in at every point, confused and desperate, and yet they are powerfully interesting, full of vanity, of piercing if somewhat vague ambitions. They are conscious of hateful disappointments and have to rely, at last, on the mere capacity to endure suffering—a capacity from which little good comes and which cannot give meaning to their lives.

  Sexual pride, in both the men and the women, is a strong and often harsh master. The pregnant woman and the illegitimate child; the resentful wife and the unsatisfied husband; the drunken beatings and the bitter mornings; the casual religion and the ultimate hopelessness; the idleness and the dreadful work; the over-crowding and loneliness—alternatives of equal pain, struggles whose unsatisfactory outcome is inevitable. The lives in the Casa Grande tenement are not torpid, but violent and high-pitched. The economy and the nation have no real use for these people, and yet the useless are persons of strongly marked temperaments who must fully experience, day in and day out, the terrible unfolding of their destiny. The story truly inspires pity and terror; we fear to gaze upon these unjust accidents of birth, of nationality, of time.

  A previous book by Oscar Lewis, Five Families, is just as remarkable and beautiful as The Children of Sánchez. In that book, also taken down by tape-recorder and rearranged, the scheme was a single day in the life of five different families in Mexico City, of which the Sánchez family was one. Both Five Families and The Children of Sánchez are works of literature, even though they are true stories, told by real people. One would ask, certainly, can a work of literature be written by a tape-recorder? It cannot. Dr. Lewis’s books are both literally true and imaginatively presented. In the end it is his rich spirit, his depth of dedication, his sympathy that lie behind the successful re-creation. Dr. Lewis’s role is that of the great film director who, out of images and scenes, makes a coherent drama, giving form and meaning to the flow of reality. There is repetition in the monologues, but it is the repetition of life and one would not want it diminished. Dr. Lewis’s hope, as an anthropologist, is that his experiments with the tape-recorder will lead other investigators to the means of understanding and presenting the actual life of the unknown urban and peasant masses. This hope has the charm of modesty, but its fulfillment seems unlikely. It is the directing and recording imagination of Dr. Lewis himself that brings to light the dark words of the children of Sánchez, the pitiful summing up of Consuelo. “But though I try to disengage myself, I cannot fail to see what is happening to my family. Oh, God! They are destroying themselves, little by little. . . . Now my aunt Guadalupe is like a light going out, a wax candle at the foot of the altar; Marta is but twenty-four years old and looks over thirty. . . . Manuel? yes, he will live, but at whose cost? How many times will he test the love of his children by denying them food? It is horrible to think he will survive his own children!”

  1961

  GRUB STREET

  New York

  MAKING a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference—with words. Here in New York you walk about the shattered, but still unreformed, streets and it seems the city has suffered a scar or wound that has not only changed its appearance but altered its purpose and deepest nature. Outside my house the old Central Park Stables are empty, the windows broken. The warm yellow brick and faded blue trim still glow in the afternoon sun; pigeons tend their nests inside, squatting until the verdict is handed down about this waiting, hurt space. One does not know what to reject, what old alley of desolation to resent, what corner of newness to despise. If one hardly knows what to reject, how much harder it is to be oneself rejected. Is there anyone who hasn’t, as we say in our expressive rhetoric, made it?

  Yes, some old grubbers, still suffering. The doorbell rings and you are face to face with an outcast who has come on some errand of career that can never be accomplished. He is dark, rather small and thin, hostile and yet briefly hopeful, brightly beaming with suspiciousness. A relief to believe his desperation and obsolescence are somehow closer to literature than to life. He seems to be out of a novel rather than to be writing a novel. Good! True characters, men with a classical twitch, are still alive, old veterans with their frayed flags, creatures such as fiction used to tell of. But the man is not a character in a book; he is himself a writer. His theme is, “If you’re not a pederast, a junkie, a Negro—not even a ‘white Negro,’ ha, ha!—you haven’t a dog’s chance! Just put your foot in a publisher’s office and someone will step on it!” This novelist, in his middle fifties, has known a regular recurrence of literary disaster; and yet he has stayed on the old homestead, planting seeds year after year, like those farmers in drought places who greet each season’s dryness with anguished surprise. Even teaching, our first and last refuge, had closed its heart after the poor writer gave out too many failing grades. With his special beam of despairing self-satisfaction, he said, “The students know no more about punctuation than a fly in the air! No, I will not have an illiterate Ph.D. on my conscience.” Unpleasant, insignificant, intransigent man—born without an accommodating joint, trying to grasp without thumbs. But, indeed, he makes his point; a certain pleasure, or relief, lies in the assurance that a genuine paranoid solidity cannot be absorbed by American life, that it will not break to the crush of the tooth. And that is a sort of role, perhaps.

  Age and outmoded purity and patience may kill sometimes. Old lady writers, without means, without Social Security, reading in bed all day—dear old Sibyls, almost forgotten, hardly called upon except perhaps at midnight by a drunken couple from a pad down the street. Failure is not funny. It is cockroaches on the service elevator, old men in carpet slippers waiting anxiously by the mail slots in the lobby, neighborhood walks where the shops, graphs of consumption, show only a clutter of broken vases, strings of cracked beads, dirty feathers, an old vaudevillian’s memorable dinner jacket and decades of cast-off books—the dust of ambition from which the eye turns away in misery.

  But the young, the active, rely upon themselves, or perhaps they are desperately thrown back upon themselves, literally. The drama of real life will not let down the prose writer. He can camp for a while in the sedgy valley of autobiography, of current happenings, of the exploration of his own sufferings and sensations, the record of people met, of national figures contemplated. There is beauty to be torn out of the event, the suicide, the murder case, the prize fight. The “I,” undisguised, visits new regions for us and pours all his art into them. Life inspires. The confession, the revelation, are not reporting, nor even journalism. Real life is presented as if it were fiction. The concreteness of fact is made suggestive, shadowy, symbolical. The vividly experiencing “I” begins his search for his art in the newspapers.

  From the first the reader is captivated by his surprise that this particular writer should be a witness to this particular event. We are immediately engaged by a biographical incongruity: Dwight Macdonald, the famous radical, with his beard, his “ideas” on Doris Day; Norman Mailer on Sonny Liston; William Styron on a poor convict up for parole; the novelist John Phillips on Teddy Kennedy’s campai
gn. Truman Capote is writing an entire book on an interesting murder case in Kansas and is even said to have provided the police with an important clue. Capote left his villa in Switzerland and went to the bereft, gritty little town in Kansas to study the drama of the trial. An author’s unexpected marriage to his subject is in many ways the essence of each new plot.

  Real events, one’s own vices completely understood, will have a certain, and sometimes, a pure interest. It works, it is convincing. Actuality sustains in a world that does not appear to care very much for fiction writing. In art, the labels from a can of soup, the design of motor cars, the square of the American flag—objects from everyday life put on to canvas—announce themselves as a protest against the idealism and tyranny of abstract expressionism. Imaginary people, fabricated loves and deaths, conclusions not given but to be created in loneliness: are these not also a tyranny from which the writer will some day shrink? Another puzzle: much good writing appears in entertainment magazines other writers seldom read. Circulation without audience. The re-creation of what has truly happened is a self-propelled activity, addressed to no one in particular. Or should we accept the need for money? “What God abandoned, these defended, and saved the sum of things for pay.”

  Art as a religion—Rilke—seems to be passing; not the work of Rilke, but the style of life, the austere dedication, sustained by the hope that poems and novels would save us. Those holy pages, produced in pain (Flaubert: “You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word”)—is there time? From patience, at last, they had perfection. And a security, a fringe benefit, a pension fund such as one can hardly imagine nowadays. Think! Richard Ellmann tells us that Joyce thought the worst thing about World War II was that it distracted the world from reading Finnegan’s Wake.

  Glass is the perfect material of our life. James Baldwin recently had a long, astonishing essay in The New Yorker. The work began as an unbearable memoir of Baldwin’s youth in Harlem, but it did not remain simply a painful memoir. It became one of those “children in the hands of an angry God” sermons on the Hell of American life for the Negro. Baldwin was determined to make us feel each unutterable day of suffering and humiliation, to make us cringe from the fraud of the democracy and Christianity that had betrayed the Negroes, those most faithful in their devotions. The work was written in a mood of desperation, with full eloquence and intellectual force—and with something more. It was clearly threatening. Baldwin felt the Negro to be approaching a final, revengeful fury.

  So there it was. Everyone read it. Everyone talked about it and seemed to feel in some way the better for it. The guerrilla warfare by which the weak become strong, or at least destructive—even the threat of that could be taken, apparently, accepted, turned into glass. Only Russia and Communism arouse—there, writer, watch out.

  A peculiar glut, historically interesting. But who wants to be a cook in a household of obese people? The poor, the hungry, fly in by air, brought on official visits, missions of culture. A South American in a brushed, blue serge suit, wearing polished black shoes and large cufflinks of semiprecious stones. His fingernails and his careful, neat dress tell you of all the polish, the care, the melancholy mending done at home by mothers and sisters. This man was one of those whom struggle had drained dry. He had arrived, by hideously hard work, at an overwhelming pedantry, a bachelorish violence of self-control. The pedantry of scarcity. This pale glacier had been produced in the tropics, a poor man in a poor country, trying to lift himself into the professions, to cut through the jungle of deprivation, save a few pennies of ambition from the national bankruptcy. At last with his nervous precision, his aching repression, he declared that the huge, romantic, excessive Thomas Wolfe was the American with whom he felt the closest spiritual and personal connection. He meant to write a book on Wolfe, in Portuguese. He sat looking out of the window, glumly taking in the commercial spires in the distance; his sallow, yearning spirit seemed to have come forth from some mute backland in which his efforts had a bitter, pioneer necessity. Thomas Wolfe! He blinked. “He is my life.”

  At the entrance to the subway station, there is often an archaic figure giving out a folded sheet of information about the Socialist Labor Party, or some other small, oddly extant group. In only a few minutes after the distributor takes up his post the streets are littered with his offering. The pages are not thrown away in resentment or disagreement, but cast down as if they were bits of Kleenex: clean white paper with nothing at all written on it, falling into the gutter.

  1963

  FROST IN HIS LETTERS

  SIMPLICITY and vanity, independence and jealousy combined in Robert Frost’s character in such unexpected ways that one despairs of sorting them out. He is two picture puzzles perversely dumped into one box and, no matter how much you try, the leg will never go rightly with the arm, nor this brown eye with that green one. Perhaps the worst you could say about Frost was that he could not really like his peers. The second circumstance the observer of “the man” must deal with is that, as an engaging but insistent monologist, he was not especially mindful of the qualities of his auditors and therefore spent a good deal of time in the company of mediocrities. And, further, you could say about Frost, as Dr. Johnson said of Pope, that he had the felicity to take himself at his true value.

  If these faults are unfortunate, at least one must say that retribution has not been lenient or slow to come. During Frost’s lifetime he was the subject of many astonishingly uneventful books and hopeful was the soul who imagined his death would bring an end to this. His friends were and are dismayingly disposed to sentimental reminiscences. People could not only listen to Frost and read his verse, they could also write about him as if they somehow felt he was not much better than they themselves were. No hesitation intervened and few complications of feeling arose. Frost was his own stereotype. He was already written, so to speak, and one had only to put it all down. He was the spécialité of many a comfortable maison—a college president here, a governor or two there, and at last even the great Chiefs themselves. Nice, successful people tended to see him as, simply, Robert Frost, a completed image. And as for his work, well, that too was clear. New England human nature he loved and next to nature, art—although as the most tenacious of old, old men he was never, not even at eighty-eight, “ready to depart.”

  Here are Frost’s letters to Louis Untermeyer. They begin in 1915 and they end in 1961. That is a long time and it would take a heart very hard indeed not to agree that Louis Untermeyer, having set upon these eggs for forty-five years, was naturally impatient. His idea had always been to bring the letters to print at the earliest possible moment. Actually, relief had been promised in 1961 and Untermeyer, at that time, prepared the volume for publication. But Frost stalled and stalled. (“When the manuscript was ready for the printer, he made excuses for delaying the publication.”) No matter, here they are. They are printed without an index and are very difficult to use for that reason. Still they are certainly quite “interesting.” And one must confess, full of vanity, ambition, and ungenerosity.

  Frost was a good letter writer, but not a superlatively good one. Indeed, except of course in his poetry, he is untranslatable from the spoken to the written word and that is why those thousands, under the enchantment of what he said, will always be perplexed about how cold he appears in his letters and how dull in his biographies. He was malicious and capricious, but there was, hanging about it all, the famous blue-eyed twinkle, the liquid chuckle, the great head, handsome and important at all ages. And when he had said everything his hurt heart had stored up inside him, then he twinkled once more and took it all back, calling it “my fooling.”

  In 1915, when the letters begin, North of Boston had just been enthusiastically received in America (by Louis Untermeyer, among others, and therefore the correspondence) after the very important reception it had received the previous year in England. From that time on, Frost was recognized
as a major American poet, even though, of course, he had the usual dismal scratch to make a living and there were many ways in which he endured the intermittent neglect of fashion and the narrow interpretations of some of his more complacent admirers. In 1915, when fame and assurance came, Frost was forty-one years old. That fact is often made to bear the burden for whatever limitations of spirit he may sometimes have shown as a man.

  Until the publication of North of Boston in England, Frost lived a lonely and more or less isolated life with his wife and children. He had various jobs—always he worked as little as possible because he never had any doubt from the first that his fate would be to devote his whole life to writing poetry. He had started writing in high school and even after he was married he went back to Harvard to study the classics, to prepare himself for his clear destiny. He was never more than an indifferent farmer. He wrote slowly and did not flood the offices of magazines with his verse, only to suffer rejection. He was not immediately recognized and no doubt the tardiness was cruel; yet when fame came it was not dramatically late and it was certainly dramatically brilliant. One cannot altogether credit the indifference he showed to the claims of his fellow poets to an unbearably long wait for public approval. After the success of North of Boston, he began the rounds of readings, intervals at various colleges, appearances and so on from which he made a living—this, with his writing, filled up the rest of his life. He was to be the most gregarious of lonely men, the most loquacious of taciturn Vermonters, the most ambitious of honest Yankees.

  Frost had a very active and expansive idea of the kind of figure he meant to cut, the kind of role a poet should play in society. His sense of public demand was always acute even though much of his best work, nearly all of it, grew out of his early days of isolation, his experiences with the farm people of New England. That was the treasure upon which he drew. The privacy of his earlier years was as much a reflection of his wife’s character as his own. About his wife, Frost writes to Untermeyer: