The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Poverty and riches, good taste and the tinsel ornamentation of bad taste are contraries that battle on the page, stamping their marks in an indelible coloration. In the sentimental fiction of bygone days there is often a union of poverty with moral purity. You enter a modest cottage and if on a plain pine table there has been placed a snow-white cloth, the whiteness is not accidental. Someone is making a statement of value or of respectable habit in dismaying circumstances. The snow-white cloth tells of washtubs, the scrub board, a sunny clothesline, and labor with a flat iron: the spare household of the neat and worth poor. The simple evening meal, potatoes on the coals, a loaf of bread or something bought with the last pennies anxiously laid out on the grocer’s counter. In the lamplight or the firelight when darkness falls a good wife or the faithful young daughter or granddaughter is mending or knitting.

  I confess to an affection for these pictorial effects of which Dickens is a master, the poet of the starving child—“more porridge!”—and since there is to be a plot, he is also the great portraitist of the hideous villains, overfed always, maniacally stingy horrors who prey with a preternatural cunning on the bereft and needy. The vicious dwarf Mr. Quilp and little Nell, the hardworking Cratchits and Mr. Scrooge before his holiday reformation, and dozens more.

  In our own literature, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a fiction of the good and the evil. Tom’s cabin in Kentucky is only one of the plantation landscapes he will be transported to, in chains, after the practical negotiations of landowners, some of whom must sell slaves to pay debts incurred in high-living or respectable household accommodations. The cabin graces the title perhaps because it is in the past and is thus a memory, the homestead of youth that plays its role in fictions of all sorts. The cabin, showing the moral worth of the slave inhabitants, Uncle Tom, and his wife, Aunt Chloe:

  In front it had a neat garden-patch, where, every summer, strawberries, raspberries, and a variety of fruits and vegetables, flourished under careful tending. The whole front of it was covered by a large scarlet bignonia and a native multiflora rose. . . . Here, also, in summer, various brilliant annuals, such as marigolds, petunias, four-o’clocks, found an indulgent corner.

  In the kitchen, Aunt Chloe, Tom’s wife, is preparing her incomparable batter-cakes and her “whole plump countenance beams with satisfaction and contentment from under her well-starched checked turban.” Busy, clean, and well starched: emblems of virtue. Uncle Tom is deeply pious, strong in the faith with Mrs. Stowe. Her last words to him and to the world are: “Think of your freedom, every time you see Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be as honest and faithful and Christian as he was.” (We may note that Mrs. Stowe in her union of domestic virtue and moral life will make the evil Simon Legree’s plantation a dismal contrast to the glowing garden of Uncle Tom. Legree’s place is mildewed Jessamine, raggedy honeysuckle, and weeds.)

  The good poor do not have a noticeable position in contemporary fiction; perhaps the poor of Victorian times are as hard to come upon as the good seen without the qualifying eye that finds motive in the saint as easily as in the crook. Many contemporary characters seem identified by “relative deprivation” rather than outright poverty. They are eating too many fried foods in packages; they have old cars sitting on the lawn with the flat tire sinking into the grass; the television set is on day and night even if still in the woeful black-and-white. Their children are somehow dressed in the same manner as the car dealer’s sons, and if there may have been some sleight of hand necessary to acquire the sneakers, that is not exactly criminal.

  The bad rich remain in good literary standing, especially the nouveau riche, who are in command of funds that put old money, trust fund fortunes, into a sort of withering shade. Edith Wharton in The Custom of the Country and William Dean Howells in The Hazard of New Fortunes shaped bitter comedies about the pretension, the riveting, loud, almost revolutionary arrival in New York of money made in natural gas and hair-waiving lotions and spending itself in grotesque acquisitions of showy household appointments. All those dollars of such curious provenance appear to be a historical threat to the nation, something like the contamination of the ozone by motor cars. The wonderful squandering hicks in Ring Lardner’s stories of the “big town” have, on the other hand, a genuine, foolish pathos. Mrs. Gullible longing to meet the famous social queen Mrs. Potter Palmer, and when the collision is accomplished in the halls of a hotel, Mrs. Palmer asks her to bring the towels.

  New York City, urbanism, is often spoken of as “electric.” The Russian poet Mayakovsky: “After I learned about electricity, I lost interest in nature. Not up-to-date enough.” Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of the century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city’s inchoate density is a special challenge. Those who engage this “culture of congestion” today need a sort of athletic suppleness, such as we find in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and E. L. Doctorow’s Rag-time.

  Among the best of the older New York novels are two melancholy landscapes of defeat. Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth was free of superiority to the invading hordes from dumbbell towns in the hinterland and thus wrote a stinging portrait of “society” at the turn of the century. The mood is not elegiac or protective and is instead a picture of the remorseless struggle of a handsome, well-connected young woman to keep up in the rich world she was born to. It is a fiction about money, a genuine creation dramatically staged in Manhattan.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a supreme work of the imagination. It has a tonal purity of style, an unwavering accent of lamentation for those caught in a plot of tragic finality. In Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald has created an American as unforgettable as Captain Ahab. A good deal of the action takes place on Long Island, but it is a New York City novel, Long Island being a weekend road out of and back to Manhattan. At Gatsby’s house, “a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy,” every Friday “five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York.”

  Jay Gatsby is an impostor, a man deeply interesting as a complex model of the imitative as a force in the creation of character, or if not character at least personality as a series of gestures. Gatsby has devised a name for himself, imagined an eloquent background of situations and accomplishments. The money he has made is also unreal and subject to disappearance, like a ghost vanishing at dawn. And yet he has his “greatness” as a dreamer who created his imaginary self in pursuit of an overwhelming love. So real is this unreal man, Gatsby, that you feel he might still be somewhere in New York today, perhaps on Park Avenue, a signifying address, or like Dreiser’s Hurstwood fallen into hell, dying on the Bowery, yet another indicative address in the city.

  Hurstwood in Sister Carrie is a provincial form of Gatsby, a doomed man of a lower order of desire who manages a New York saloon. His need for Carrie, an old love risen as a sort of star on the stage, leads him to the theft of the night’s receipts he was to have deposited in a vault. Both of these men in pursuit of the loved one, the green light as Fitzgerald calls it, know only one kind of ambition. It is money, money in a hurry, not the weekly paycheck of a patient, plodding clerk, clocking in of a morning and out at dusk. They come to utter ruin, to death for Gatsby, but of the two only one, Gatsby, could truly be called great, in the author’s conception. Hurstwood, in the majestic Sister Carrie, was imagined in the complex spirit of American realism.

  Interiors: purchases that represent a hope for expression of private style even if dominated by the most autocratic arbiter of taste, the amount of money at hand, oddly known as disposable income. The spare and elegant, each selection just so and fitting together; modern wares if sought with scholarly precision can make claim to being the
most expensive, outpacing the search for the cherry hutch or the Victorian claw-foot chair. Instead for knowing characters, citified couples, it will be bits and pieces such as a leather chair, an Eames copy in molded plywood, an architect’s name on a coffeepot or a cocktail shaker. Mary McCarthy in her memoir celebrates a 1940s cocktail shaker by Russel Wright.

  In most fictions, a change of interior is a move upward to a better house, a better address. In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, acute attention is given to the alterations of prosperity. The old family, father a dealer in hides, makes its way up to “finished basements, their screened-in porches, their flagstone front steps.” Their children are in a more drastic, dreaming mode: “a barn, a millpond, a millstream . . . a fireplace large enough for roasting an ox, fitted with an oven door and a crane to swing an iron kettle on.” Up and back to a colonial farmer’s domestic landscape, all peacefully lying in history, with two cars in the garage.

  In Richard Ford’s Independence Day, the narrator is a real estate broker, an occupation that will be a gladiatorial combat with buyers in a blinding, paralyzing calculation of cost, street, neighborhood. Images of themselves encased in the mausoleum of their choice, fittings of small and large preference, turn out to be disorienting rather than defining. One troublesome couple wants to forsake its once-loved place in Vermont with “its cantilevered cathedral ceilings and a hand-laid hearth and chimney using stones off the place” for something else in New Jersey. But what?

  Aesthetic models torment the greatly, famously rich in a violently expansive way. Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, which Henry James remembered as a pleasant summer escape to long walks, sea breezes, and the town library, had when he visited it in 1904 become the nation’s most notable exercise in monumentality. He found castles of Rhenish and French inspiration. White elephants, he calls them, “peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion.”

  The sad, history-heavy countryside, the pain of the Confederacy, the khaki-colored earth, the dusty, immemorial, drowsy streets, the cunning, secretive faces of the Snopes family, the fatal running of Joe Christmas and Miss Rosa Coldfield and Quentin Compson in the “empty hall echoing with sonorous, defeated names.” William Faulkner, the grandest fictional talent our country has produced, land-obsessed and with an imagination of staggering fertility and scope, found in Mississippi an epic vision. Shrewd swamp-bred families, disinherited gentlefolk, immense plots that go back and forth in time and yet seem immovably still there, alive.

  The landscapes of fiction, the houses and things, are a shell for the creation of human dramas, the place for the seven deadly sins to do battle with probity and reality or outrageous demand and vanity. The shells, the habitations of America are volatile, inventive, unexpected, imponderable, but there they are, everywhere. In recent American fictions, short stories and novels, you will find people cooking dinner inside or shaking the mop outside a trailer. This humble abode that does not weather but shows its age in a bit of rust or chipped paint is becoming more and more the primary “affordable housing” for citizens who cannot qualify for the expense of conventional home ownership and may not even prefer it.

  People, large numbers of them, settle in their “park” on the outskirts of town, hook up the gas, electric, and sewer lines, root utilities. Inside all is likely to be a place of old-time memory: rag rugs, a patchwork quilt, a ship’s clock, hand-knit nylon pan-grippers providing a sort of Americana coziness. Trailer park, on the page or in speech, will mean hard up, and sometimes on the evening news it projects a sort of unsteadiness as when a relative, friend, or ex-husband invades the hospitality to hide out until the police car, top light whirling and flashing, catches up.

  In this world too there are wide separations of type and possibility to be found, degrees of identity. The very large, expensive homes rest down in Florida for the winter but take to the road for a summer change in Maine. These deluxe motor palaces may travel in groups for socializing. Up goes the plastic awning over the door; if the weather is agreeable, out comes a folding table and place mats, and on the lawn, as it were, the flat parking spaces for the spacious machines, there will be arrangements for tea or cocktails. In a photograph of an interesting early motor home, all was plain, handsomely utilitarian. Custom-made for Anne and Charles Lindbergh: puritans.

  There’s a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.

  1999

  MELVILLE IN LOVE

  1.

  HERMAN Melville died in 1891 at the age of seventy-two. He was buried next to his son Malcolm in a cemetery in the Bronx. His death was marked negatively, as it were, by an absence of public ceremony; just another burial of an obscure New Yorker. This obscurity, or neglect, was to become part of the dramaturgy of Melville’s image, even for those who hadn’t read him in the past, as well as for those, more than a few, who haven’t read him in the present. The man and his work—nine novels, brilliant shorter fictions, poems, and his departing gift to American literature, the beautiful Billy Budd, published after his death—were unearthed in the 1920s and the whole skeleton given a voluptuous rebirth.

  Melville was not a gifted angel winging up from the streets, the slums of the great metropolis, Manhattan. His father, Allan, came from a good merchant family of Boston who could claim the sort of heraldic honor that to this day, two centuries later, keeps the prideful busy with the genealogists; that is, service in the American Revolution. Allan’s father, Thomas Melville, was among the young men who, in 1773, boarded the ships of the East India Company and dumped their tea in the water. A felicitous bit of patriotic vandalism which the family could claim like a coat-of-arms to hang with noble diggings in their Scottish ancestry. Melville’s mother was Maria Gansevoort of Albany, prominent Dutch early settlers. Her father was also a hero of the Revolution, fighting at Fort Stanwix against Indian and Tory troops.

  When Melville was twelve years old, his father, Allan, died of what seems to have been a virulent pneumonia. He died as he had lived, in debt, a condition for which the Melvilles may be said to have had an almost genetic liability. (Dollars damn me! the author, Herman, could honestly announce. His life after the financially advantageous marriage to the daughter of Judge Lemuel Shaw of Boston was ever to be punctuated by “on loan from Judge Shaw” and “paid for by Judge Shaw.”) The father’s business in imported luxury goods had led him to move the family from Boston to New York, where the son, Herman, was born in 1819 on Pearl Street. Matters did not go as profitably as the beleaguered entrepreneur had hoped and so it was to be a move to Albany, the principality of the much more prudent Gansevoorts. However, the radiance of these solid patroons did not cast its beams of solvency and, with the death of the father, creditors were in scowling pursuit.

  In Albany, unremitting black weather for the Melville household. The widow and her children were forced to sell much of their furniture and other effects and to escape in ignominy to a cheaper town, Lansingburgh, nearby. Herman for a period taught school, took an engineering diploma at Lansingburgh Academy, failed to get a position, wrote some youthful sketches which were published in the local paper—and then, and then perhaps we can say his true life began. However, the life he left behind, the losses, the grief, the instability, the helpless love of a helpless young man in a damaged family marked his sensibility quite as much as the wanderlust, the strong grip of the sea, so often claimed as the defining aspect of his nature. In 1839, he signed on as a common seaman on the St. Lawrence, a merchant ship bound for a four
-month trip to Liverpool. He was soon to be twenty years old.

  •

  Melville’s state of mind is revealed some years later with a purity of expressiveness in the novel Redburn, one of his most appealing and certainly the most personal of his works. He is said to have more or less disowned the book, more rather than less, since he claimed it was only written for tobacco. Whether this is a serious misjudgment of his own work or a withdrawal, after the fact, from having shown his early experience of life without his notable reserve and distance is, of course, not clear. For a contemporary reader, Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast among the vicious, ruined men on the ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in the late 1830s, even meeting with the homosexual hustler Harry Bolton might have more interest than Typee’s breadfruit and coconut island and the nymph, Fayaway. But it is only pertinent to think of Redburn on its own: a novel written after Typee, Omoo, and Mardi in the year 1849, ten years after he left Lansingburgh to go on his first voyage.