The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  In the 1940s, Jews might have felt some anxiety about their reception in a rich enclave of old-family inhabitants viewing them with condescension if not rudeness. Such would not be true today, when a Jewish media billionaire would, if such an opportunity arose in a period of regal retrenchment, be urged to buy an ancient bit of land in the woods of Windsor, where he could, on an occasional weekend, tramp about over the bones of Queen Victoria. In Old Rimrock, the Levovs make the acquaintance of an architect, Bill Orcutt, from a Morris County family that has filled the local cemetery with worthies for two hundred years.

  The Swede, by the time he meets Zuckerman in a New York restaurant, has been divorced from Dawn and has a new wife and children; and Dawn, brought near to suicide by the cruel biography of her daughter, has returned to life with a Swiss face-lift and, in a thunderous rush of plot, made an alliance with the tombstone genealogist, Orcutt. It didn’t work out, as the saying goes, the idyll of the young couple. Jerry, the angry sawbones brother, turns Merry in to the FBI, and along the way, driven by his fraternal jealousy of his paragon brother, denounces the life Swede and Dawn shaped for Merry. “Out there with Miss America, dumbing down and dulling out. Out there playing at being Wasps, a little Mick girl from the Elizabeth docks and a Jewboy from Weequahic High. The cows. Cow Society. Colonial old America. And you thought all that façade was going to come without a cost. Genteel and innocent. But that costs, too, Seymour. I would have thrown a bomb. I would become a Jain and live in Newark. That Wasp bullshit!” But Seymour in his love and grief for his daughter knows better. “It is chaos. It is chaos from start to finish.” America gone berserk.

  Among the ruins of time is the city of Newark, where Roth reared the author, Zuckerman, with his elegiac memories of interiors, “the microscopic surface of things close at hand . . . the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and venetian blinds.” And outside, autumn afternoons on the football field; down the main drag to movies on a Saturday afternoon; record shops offering Glenn Miller; and at the high-school reunion, damaged faces that still carry the trace of teenage beauty.

  When the Swede and Zuckerman meet so many years later, Newark has been the scene of devastating riots in 1967. It is now the “car theft capital of the world”; shops are boarded up; houses, once the shrines of relentless homemakers, are now smashed and splintered orphans; gunshots split the air, causing no more wonder than the screech of big trucks backing into parking spaces: Newark, long ago the little Jewish Eden of Roth’s youth.

  American Pastoral is a sort of Dreiserian chronicle of the Levov family. Their painfully built fortune, even without the disgrace, might have declined owing to obsolescence. Maids have not for some decades been in need of the finely stitched, soft leather gloves in matching colors. Gloves, except on the coldest winter days, have gone the way of the ribbon shops in the West Thirties of Manhattan, ribbons for hats that were to go on the heads of proper women whenever they left the house.

  Still, the saga of the Levov family is a touching creative act and in the long line of Philip Roth fiction can be rated PG, suitable for family viewing—more or less.

  1997

  IN THE WASTELAND

  Joan Didion

  JOAN DIDION’S novels are a carefully designed frieze of the fracture and splinter in her characters’ comprehension of the world. To design a structure for the fadings and erasures of experience is an aesthetic challenge she tries to meet in a striking manner: the placement of sentences on the page, abrupt closures rather like hanging up the phone without notice, and an ear for the rhythms and tags of current speech that is altogether remarkable. Perhaps it is prudent that the central characters, women, are not seeking clarity since the world described herein, the America of the last thirty years or so, is blurred by a creeping inexactitude about many things, among them bureaucratic and official language, the jargon of the press, the incoherence of politics, the disastrous surprises in the mother-father-child tableau.

  The method of narration, always conscious and sometimes discussed in an aside, will express a peculiar restlessness and unease in order to accommodate the extreme fluidity of the fictional landscape. You read that something did or did not happen; something was or was not thought; this indicates the ambiguity of the flow, but there is also in “did or did not” the author’s strong sense of willful obfuscation, a purposeful blackout of what was promised or not promised—a blackout in the interest of personal comfort and also in the interest of greed, deals, political disguises of intention.

  Joan Didion’s novels are not consoling, nor are they notably attuned to the reader’s expectations, even though they are fast paced, witty, inventive, and interesting in plot. Still, they twist and turn, shift focus and point of view, deviations that are perhaps the price or the reward that comes from an obsessive attraction to the disjunctive and paradoxical in American national policy and to the somnolent, careless decisions made in private life.

  I have the dream, recurrent, in which my entire field of vision fills with rainbow, in which I open a door onto a growth of tropical green (I believe this to be a banana grove, the big glossy fronds heavy with rain, but since no bananas are seen on the palms symbolists may relax) and watch the spectrum separate into pure color. Consider any of these things long enough and you will see that they tend to deny the relevance not only of personality but of narrative, which makes them less than ideal images with which to begin a novel, but we go with what we have.

  Cards on the table.

  This writer is the poet, if you like, of the airplane and the airport. Offhand journeys to Malaysia or to troubled spots in Central America are undertaken as if one were boarding the New York–Washington shuttle. For the busy men, we learn somewhere in the pages that any flight under eight hours is called a “hop.” So, we head out for the blue yonder by air as earlier novelists wrote of signing up for a term on ship. “Sailors are the only class of men who now-a-days see anything like stirring adventures; and many things which to the fire-side people appear strange and romantic, to them seem as common-place as a jacket out at elbows” (Melville, preface to Typee). Flying round the world every day is for her characters just a “jacket out at elbows.” Nothing unusual. Trying to keep pace with an ethereal mobility now become as mundane as a dog trot is a mark of this writer’s original sensibility: “She had been going from one airport to another for some months; one could see it, looking at the visas on her passport. . . . People who go to the airport first invent some business to conduct there. . . . Then they convince themselves that the airport is cooler than the hotel, or has superior chicken salad.”

  And from the current novel, The Last Thing He Wanted:

  I see her standing in the wet grass off the runway, her arms bare, her sunglasses pushed up into her loose hair, her black silk shift wrinkled from the flight, and wonder what made her think a black silk shift bought off a sale rack at Bergdorf Goodman during the New York primary was the appropriate thing to wear on an unscheduled flight at one-thirty in the morning out of Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport, destination San José, Costa Rica but not quite.

  Her first novel, Run River, appeared in 1963. It is rich in talent and also rich in the virtues of traditional fiction: families, generations, births and deaths, changes of fortune, betrayals. Set in the Sacramento Valley between 1938 and 1959, it begins with a gunshot: “Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one.” (“Seventeen minutes to one” brings to mind the surgical precision of the information that will be offered in the later fiction.) The intervening pages and chapters explain what went before the opening shot. In the final pages of the last chapter, we read, “She sat on the needlepoint chair until she heard it, the second shot.” The first shot was the husband killing the wife’s lover, and the second shot was the husband killing himself. Some families in Run River are descendants of the pioneers who made the trip of hardship and promise across the Great Pl
ains. There are hardship passages in the subsequent fictions, although not in a covered wagon but in an airplane carrying your uncertain identity in a six-hundred-dollar handbag.

  Her nerves are bad tonight in the wasteland of Haight-Ashbury; she has migraines, generalized and particular afflictions that bring on tears in “elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries.” Joan Didion’s revelation of incapacity, doubt, irresolution, and inattention is brought into question by the extraordinary energy and perseverance found in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and the later collection, After Henry. If she has “nerves,” she also has “nerve” in the sense of boldness and fortitude. She will do the lowest work of a reporter; make the call, try again when the promised callback is not forthcoming. She scouts the neighborhood, finds the houses, and once inside notes the condition of the sink, the baby lying on a pallet and sucking its thumb, and the five-year-old on acid—“High Kindergarten.” She spends time with Otto and Dead-eye, among other stoned hippies; visits that need the self-denial of a Sister of Charity, although what she brings is a presence, free of strategies of redemption.

  At three-thirty that afternoon Max, Tom and Sharon placed tabs under their tongue and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara’s room. . . . A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until seven-thirty, when Max said, “Wow!”

  Moving down the coast from the numb deprivation of Haight-Ashbury to the alert consumerism of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento and then in the White House, Didion finds them apart from the usual politicians who cherish, or so pretend, their early beginnings in Hyde Park, Kansas, or Plains, Georgia. The Reagans’ habits, or perhaps their modes of operation, do not spring from marks left by their placement on the national map. The Reagans come from the welfare state of Dreamland; their roots are Hollywood.

  This expectation on the part of the Reagans that other people would take care of their needs struck many people, right away, as remarkable and was usually characterized as a habit of the rich. . . . The Reagans were not rich; they and this expectation were the product of studio Hollywood, a system in which performers performed, and in return were cared for. . . . She [Nancy Reagan] was surprised to learn (“Nobody had told us”) that she and her husband were expected to pay for their own food, dry cleaning, and toothpaste while in the White House. She seemed never to understand why it was imprudent of her to have accepted clothes from their makers when so many of them had encouraged her to do so. . . . The clothes were, as Mrs. Reagan seemed to construe it, “wardrobe”—a production expense, like the housing and catering and first-class travel and the furniture and paintings and cars that get taken home after the set is struck—and should rightly have gone to the studio budget.

  Play It as It Lays (1970) is the first of the digressive, elusive novels, typical in style and organization of the challenging signature of a Joan Didion work. Shadowy motivation, disruptive or absent context in a paragraph or pages here and there are not properly to be read as indecision or compositional falterings. They display instead a sort of muscular assurance and confidence, or so one is led to believe in the face of a dominant, idiosyncratic style that if nothing else scorns the vexation of indolent or even sophisticated readers who prefer matters and manners otherwise expressed. But, as she says, we go with what we have. The author is in control of the invention, and if the machine is a little like an electric automobile or one running on pressed grapes instead of gasoline in a field of Chevrolets, the autonomy—it does run—puts the critic in an uneasy situation.

  The opening sentence of Play It as It Lays is: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”

  “I never ask” is a useful introduction to Maria Wyeth: the sound of the extreme negativism, withdrawal, depression, or terminal disgust of this still young woman, a marginal figure in the movie business, brought up in Silver Wells, Nevada, by her drifting parents, divorced, finally in the book from her husband, a director. One might, however, question that the unanswerable evil of Iago would be on her mind, an evil that led even the great Coleridge to fall back upon “motiveless malignity.” But who’s to say she has not at a bar heard a discussion of the ecstatic treachery of Iago that makes its tragic progress to the suffering and death of Desdemona and Othello? It’s just that the inclination to pedantry in instances of piddling, measly inconsequence are sometimes the only protection one has against the witchery of this uncompromising imagination, the settings so various and the sometimes sleepwalking players who blindly walk through windows and fall into traps of great consequence such as the Vietnam War or the world of the Contras.

  The women in the novels suffer losses, serious blows from fate that enshroud them like the black dress European peasant women wear lifelong for bereavement; but they are not wearing a black dress except for stylish definition, like the black dress of Anna Karenina in her first appearance at the ball. Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays has a damaged daughter off somewhere in a hospital; she loves the girl obsessively, but there is no reciprocation from the screaming, indifferent child. Maria has had a cruel abortion. At the end of the book, a lover or sometime lover dies in her bed from an overdose of Valium, saying “because we’ve been out there where nothing is.”

  In A Book of Common Prayer, the daughter of Charlotte Douglas has disappeared and is wanted by the police for a political bombing. In Democracy (1984), Inez Victor’s daughter is a heroin addict and Inez’s father, in an onset of lunacy, has killed her sister and another person. Inez has also had cancer. In The Last Thing He Wanted, Elena McMahon has lost her mother and in walking out on her rich husband has lost the affection of her daughter. The interior in which the women live is a sort of cocoon of melancholy, but their restlessness is modern and cannot be expressed like that of a country wife sighing at the moonlight as it hits the silence on the front porch. Maria Wyeth sleeps by her pool when she is not driving the L.A. freeways all night, stopping only for a Coke at a filling station. But she is driving a Corvette. The women have credit cards, bank drafts, an Hermès handbag, or a large emerald ring. In the heart of darkness, men fall in love with them, bereft and downhearted as they are. The sheen of glamour is useful to give entrance to the melancholy adulteries and to the plot of costly wild travels and also, in some cases, to politics that come out of the Oval Office or some room in the White House basement and turn up on the runway in Saigon or Costa Rica.

  A Book of Common Prayer is a daring title, a risk, even, some would name a presumption. Perhaps the title is meant to bring to mind: “Have mercy on us in the hour of our death . . . Prega per noi.” Charlotte Douglas is wandering the earth by air, aimlessly hoping to run into her daughter, Marin, “who at eighteen had been observed with her four best friends detonating a crude pipe bomb in the lobby of the Transamerica Building at 6:30 am, highjacking a P.S.A.L. 1011 at the San Francisco Airport and landing in Wendover, Utah, where they burned it in time for the story to interrupt the network news and disappeared.” Charlotte Douglas goes to a miserable, corrupt little place called Boca Grande, an ungoverned and ungovernable country near Caracas. Her plane took her there with the blinkered idea that her daughter must be somewhere—and why not Boca Grande? Charlotte is killed by some machine-gun-toting activist in the almost weekly coups and countercoups. And meanwhile, Marin, the Berkeley Tupamaro, is actually in Buffalo. A Book of Common Prayer is an odd and most unusual study of secular violence and, in the case of the wandering mother, a sort of heathen inanition. Unable to think on the appalling plight of her daughter, Charlotte fills her mind with memories of her happy at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, devouring coconut ice under “the thousand trunks of Great Banyan at the Calcutta Botanical Garden.”

  Democracy: Washington, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Saigon, and Jakarta appear along the road in this novel of outla
ndish ambition, justified and honored by the scope, the subtlety, the agenda, as they call it. The time is 1975, the aftermath of Vietnam still in the air, and we go back to the way of setting the scene, a sort of computer lyricism:

  I would skim the stories on policy and fix instead on details: the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENT WIND. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was MONEY BURN. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.