The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  In St. Joseph, Missouri, Wilde observed souvenir hunters buying up Jesse James’s dust-bin, foot-scraper, and door-knocker, “the reserve price being about the income of an English Bishop.” He ends the paragraph from a letter: “The Americans are certainly great hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.” Conrad interprets this as “by implication” an alignment of Wilde himself with the hero as criminal. The innocent observation in the letter becomes “a self-fulfilling prophecy, for his [Wilde’s] subsequent career confirmed his heroism by making him officially a member of the criminal classes.” The punitive linking of “homosexual misconduct” and murder is one of many gratuitous asides in this work of literary and social criticism, a work of remarkable self-sufficiency, it might be added, since not a single line of other critics is drawn upon or mentioned and the reader, stopped by the many roadblocks of language and thought, is required to search himself for primary and secondary sources if he should wish to make a few before-and-after comparisons.

  Rupert Brooke’s mild Letters from America, written about his journey in 1913, is thrashed by a belligerent exegesis. Certain “pop” aspects of the American scene strike Brooke as suitable moments for a journalistic expenditure of adjective and metaphor. Automobiles, huge neon signs blinking in the sky, baseball and cheerleaders, the old grads lined up for a Harvard commencement. (“I wonder if English nerves could stand it. It seems to bring the passage of time so very presently and vividly to mind.”) On a summer day, Brooke sees a young man driving through the streets in a handsome, expensive motor car and it seems to him that the car is richer than the young man, an observation still of visual and social interest here today, if not to be so tomorrow.

  Brooke imagines he might be a young mechanic, taking the car for repair—a decision somewhat “foreign” we might say, knowing the murky economics in America of automobile owner and income. The young driver has “an almost Swinburnian mane of red hair, blowing back in the wind, catching the lights of the day.” In the summer heat, he is wearing only a suit of yellow overalls, “so that his arms and shoulders and neck were bare.” He is “rather insolently conscious of power,” and if perhaps ordinary in real life, behind the wheel he “seemed like a Greek god, in a fantastically modern, yet not unworthy way emblemed and incarnate, or like the spirit of Henley’s ‘Song of Speed.’ ”

  Conrad decides from this and other passages that Brooke wanted to “undress America.” He thinks the description of the young man in the car “conveys the concentration of excitement: Brooke has to notice separately each uncovered area. A divinity of physical delight. . . .” Delight, excitement, seem to put Brooke on the street, to say nothing of back at the hotel composing, always in a state of incessant homoerotic dreaming. Even in an “unexcited” passage on American faces: “Handsome people of both sexes are very common; beautiful, and pretty, ones very rare. . . .” To the dots which end the paragraph Conrad gives the name “yearning dots.”

  Brooke’s cheerleader “addresses the multitude through a megaphone with a ‘One! Two! Three!’ hurls it aside and, with a wild flinging and swinging of his body and arms, conducts ten thousand voices in the Harvard yell. That over, the game proceeds, and the cheer-leader sits quietly waiting for the next moment of peril or triumph.”

  “Hedonistic abandon”—a phrase Conrad uses about Brooke—applies to his own “pale fire” speculation about the cheerleader, up yelling one minute, mutely down the next: “Brooke considers this contradiction to be ‘wonderfully American’ because Americans are both agitated and idle, and switch from one state to the other automatically, dispensing with intermediaries, rejoicing equally in the body’s dynamism and its inertia, its paroxysms and (as if post-coitally) its repose.”

  •

  Kipling and the “epical America.” It would seem foolhardy to try to outpace Kipling in spiteful utterance about America and yet “atavistic rabble” and “savagery” give the clue to Conrad’s efforts. “Epical” in this chapter appears to mean a warring struggle for survival against “punitive nature,” and “the minimal human character” determined by weather and the search for a survival technology. What it may indicate about literature is extremely shadowy, since the word “epic” is not meant to jar the brain with The Odyssey or Paradise Lost but rather to send it back to pre-literate dialect and the specialized language of fishermen and woodsmen.

  Robert Louis Stevenson also weaves in and out of Kipling’s anti-novelistic America, but he is woefully weak in the chest, soul-sick in the pursuit of his married lady, and suffering from the refinement of his prose style. For Conrad this “chivalric quester” posing in the derelict Silverado mine is just that, a poseur, but then, “so is America, since it is a vacuity onto which each emigrant projects his own fantasy.”

  Ideas, many in a state of alarming freshness. As you go through Conrad’s densely written pages, it is a little like wandering about an arboretum with plaques giving the name and the place of origin of the trees and shrubs. Brought here from China, brought here from India. The English writers have all been elsewhere and have many things, other than America, to think about. Most of them were productive without intermission. In Imagining America, it is not precisely the authors, and certainly not the complexity of their oeuvre, not even America that are being labeled—no, not exactly. But still they are transplants, for a long or a short time, and onto the tree that is themselves there is a showy grafting of the branches of Conrad’s ideas, an ingenious hybridization.

  The obsessive, incomparable reflections of D. H. Lawrence on America seem with their jerky, private originality to be beyond paraphrase, all gleaming intuition. Yet when Lawrence uses capital letters in Studies in America (THOU SHALT NOT) Conrad is alerted to the grating meeting of mind and country. So, “In corrupting his own language Lawrence was supplying America with a style appropriate to its overbearing crassness.”

  •

  When we come at last to Huxley, Isherwood, and Auden, the English writers who remained in America, Conrad’s language rises with a deplorable heat. The scorching is painful indeed and the critic, like an immigration officer catching aliens whose visas have expired, becomes, in Auden’s phrase, “a summary tribunal which in perpetual session sits.”

  It is as if these extraordinary talents had arrived empty of learning, experience, temperament and were blank pages waiting to be scrawled upon by New York tenements, the sun, American boys, drugs, drive-ins, “hymns and movies and Irving Berlin.” Huxley and Isherwood landed as unthinking guided missiles, driven by an awful, deserved destiny, in California. (Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come down there.) These three Englishmen are not only to be grounded in America, but each is to be defined by the particularity of New York or California. Places have almost a genetic fatality. They guide the helpless writer as if he and the city were identical twins, separated at birth, but doomed to be hit at last with twin cancers and uniformly faltering heart beats. For Auden, the “numbered grids” of New York’s streets “encouraged his punctilious ritualism,” his attraction to regular meter and a liking for crossword puzzles.

  Perhaps no country can deserve the grace that fell upon California with Huxley, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Thomas Mann; or the beneficence to the East Coast of Auden, Hannah Arendt, Nabokov, and I. A. Richards. But the subject matter, the landscape, the magical rendering of American follies and symbolic meanings do not make Nabokov’s American novels “American.” The strength, the majesty of the creation of self, style, idiosyncrasy—the very claim of art and their individual practice of it the exiles brought with them to America. They are not, like the prairies, blotting paper to soak up the inchoate ink stains of Los Angeles and New York.

  Aldous Huxley appears from his letters, his books, his exhausting curiosity, his roots in his family, his large and unexpected learning to be a genuine and valuable person of great innocence and gullibility. Above all, he strikes one as incorruptible. Part of the incorruptibility lies in his removal
from class snobbery, and in the austerity of his personal life and habit. Asceticism in him unites with a peculiar experimentalism that had in it an eager supply of hopefulness; the hopefulness of the Bates Method as a way of alleviating his tragic near-blindness, or the hope of a relief from “intolerable self-hood” by way of mescaline.

  The mechanistic direction of Huxley’s urge to transcendence is characteristic. He seems to have been overwhelmed by the mystery of brain, body, and temperament, and he inevitably saw in Sheldon’s classification of body types a clue to the individual struggling with his obdurate self under the doom of height and distribution of weight.

  When he first sits down to take mescaline, in the company of his English friend, Dr. Humphrey Osmond, he has a tape recorder beside him, to see what it does. His early (1954) and dismaying eulogy of mind-altering drugs, The Doors of Perception, is a sad book, telling of happy, rather orderly visions. It is completely out of touch with drug culture and the uses to which his friendly Mind at Large might be put. For himself, in the course of ten years, his “sessions” are estimated to be about a dozen. In the last three years of his life he went through, without complaint, a medically sensible struggle with cancer.

  Huxley is one of the oddest figures in English literature: brilliant, credulous, something of a wizard. He is not Californian. Both of his wives were European and his true friends were Englishmen like Dr. Osmond and—how to name his opaque qualities—Gerald Heard. Huxley’s world is the library, that first of all, and a sort of libertarian hope for the laboratory. Huxley’s curiosity was general rather than intimate and as a wanderer he was tolerant of the vulgar and outrageous, of the drugstore, the drive-in marriage bureau, the most hideous cemetery, and always, it appears, abstracted, not measuring his worth or even his convenience.

  Conrad is rancorous on Huxley, clobbering him for abiding some time in a rented house with a naked-lady lamp and a full-size Fay Wray in the paws of King Kong; berating him for stoicism when a fire burned down another house containing his library and files; degrading his concern for overpopulation, treating him as a fool, the object of a ludicrous condescension.

  “Drugged” appears as a Conrad adjective again and again. “Huxley prefers his chemical heaven to the drab world.” The last line in the chapter on this unusual man is: “At last, without noticing it, Huxley became a drugged subject of his brave new world.”

  Christopher Isherwood is “blithely self-indulgent and self-forgetful, and therefore suits hedonistic California, which licenses Isherwood’s peculiar manner of self-deprecating narcissism.” That these qualities, even if they were an accurate description, would need a state, a climate to “license” them simply cannot be thought about with any reasonableness. Isherwood is said to have only one subject, himself, and then is told that “he doesn’t know himself.” This arises as a way of discrediting Isherwood’s artistic good fortune in discovering the rightness for him of first-person narration, the rightness of Goodbye to Berlin, Mr. Norris, and Prater Violet, works of art able to stand with the best of the last forty years. It appears to Conrad that Isherwood may write novels but he is not a novelist because his own “nonentity obliges him to write novels about a character who is not a character.” Many curious prunings of the tree of art are suggested by Conrad, and Huxley, in a California slump, is rebuked for admiration of Joyce and Lawrence, Boulez and Pollock. Isherwood, in his narrations, has “cancelled himself out” by “treating himself as discourteously and dismissively as if he were someone else.”

  In A Single Man, the central character dies at the end, a very common plot device that has more convenience in fiction than in life. The “blacking out” of George is extraordinarily well done, although there is some worry about point of view in a death that is not seen from the bedside but from the dying heart and fading brain itself. To Conrad this fictional death draws its meaning from geography, not from nature. It signifies that “the choice of America is not the choice of life, but the choice of self-extinction.”

  Sometimes in this critical work, the intimacy of rejection is so warm that we feel that the author must have had private viewings of the persons. Isherwood, present tense, sometimes “looks tired, lined, and shriveled, like an ancient monk, but when he laughs he regains the face of an adolescent, with a shy smile and sparkling eyes.” The agreeable concession of smile and eyes is not, however, entirely a compliment since Isherwood is thought to be impossibly working against time and trapped in the belief that “youthful form is recoverable.”

  •

  No scruple deters Peter Conrad in the swift execution of W. H. Auden. He slices on, in his practiced, glinting way, gathering authority where he finds it, in yesterday’s garbage pail, in policemanlike sifting of texts, in the scene of the crime, New York City, in bad associates, cash in the drawers. Poems are evidence and he investigates them in the sense that a handwriting expert investigates a ransom note. The question throughout Imagining America is nearly always the question of evidence, the challenging circumstantial kind, inessential, but rich with adversary hintings. The book is about writers but no sentiment clings to the fact of accomplishment. Irascibility, Conrad’s, lies on the pages like some hidden code, impossible to decipher. How far will he go? Ah, don’t ask, as we say.

  Thus: “The United States offers a sleek affluent new life: Auden and Isherwood in 1938 were ravished by the luxury of New York, dizzied by their own celebrity, teased by the availability of athletic sexual partners, and sustained in a state of euphoria by daily doses of Benzedrine and Seconal; no wonder they hastened back in 1939 for more of the same.” Auden, on the one hand, is a “shrewd businessman” out for “top fees,” and, on the other, a miserable, rootless derelict. The drastic inflation of the riches to be gained from writing poetry, reviews, from giving readings and lectures was shared perhaps by Auden himself and is a testament to the outstanding modesty of his commercial ambitions.

  One of the American texts by Auden, examined by Conrad in a sweeping interpretation suggested perhaps by the theme, is Paul Bunyan. This is an unimportant, throw-away libretto for music by Benjamin Britten, written in 1940, soon after Auden’s arrival in America. The text was never reprinted by Auden and exists now in a 1975 publication by Faber, offered when the work had its second performance in England that year. This jazzy working of a folk legend is propitious for Conrad because Paul Bunyan cuts down trees, clears the forests of the West to make way for towns and settlements. Moral judgments of the most extreme kind can fall on Auden who is, as if in some kind of retribution, flattened under Bunyan’s murdered trees.

  Let the architect with his sober plan

  Build a residence for the average man;

  And garden birds bat not an eye

  When locomotives whistle by . . .

  Conrad: “Milton’s justification of the fall is a metaphysical leap of faith. . . . Auden’s justification is more complacently economic. The fall is fortunate not because it immortalizes the soul but because it enriches the body.”

  When Auden says, in his celebrated phrase, that poetry makes nothing happen, we are advised to see this as an admission that “poetry is artificial, formulaic, inconsequential.” In New Year Letter the circumstantial evidence of the setting is looked upon as impugning. The poet is on Long Island, at the house of a friend who is in exile from Poland; they are listening to Buxtehude. Conrad’s interpretation would have it that Auden and his friends are no longer citizens, being exiles, and are outside the moral conditions imposed by nationality and roots. “Having ceased to be subjects of political authority, they now constitute a voluntary group convened in and by art.” But in what sense are they not subject to authority, if only the authority of the Long Island police force?

  “Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm,” a beautiful poem in the classical English lyric mode, is intolerably chastised in a governessy aside of great foolishness. Conrad writes: “Personal ties in America remain breezily casual, never becoming familial as they do in Eng
land, where everyone seems to be related if not by birth then by the homogenizing institutions of school, college club, or adultery.” Or adultery, a happy afterthought for sequestered England, represented in Conrad’s comparative clauses as a smug little group of atoms, homogenized and pasteurized like milk in a bottle.

  Auden’s house in Kirchstetten, Austria (“Thanksgiving for a Habitat”), by dividing up its space for work, guests, cooking, etc., becomes far from home but another New York, “not a public place but a catacomb of separate privacies . . . an arbitrary selection from a global crowd of displaced persons.” This “compartmentalization of his territory,” Conrad imagines to derive from the philosophical reflections of Hannah Arendt who had “decamped [sic] from Germany during Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.” By way of The Human Condition, which contains a chapter on public and private space, Hannah Arendt is somehow felt to be in connection with Auden’s New York and its “grid” and with the arrangement of the house in Austria because of its allocation of space for various uses.

  This is a travesty of Hannah Arendt’s thought. If there is any value in her analysis of alienation, it is the value of an analysis of modern life and modern man, and would be as true of Conrad himself in England as of Auden in New York and Austria.

  About the person, Auden, Conrad sinks into a galling hysteria, abusive and in repetition somehow savoring of its own adjectival inventiveness. Auden’s New York apartment was “a cave of defilement.” This rootless, friendless caricature delighted in “domestic ordure” and “the squalor of the nursery.” He is “pickled and prematurely aged” and “looked forward to senility and did his best to advance it, behaving like an ungovernable, finicky baby, organizing his regime around regular mealtimes and early nights. . . .”