The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Harry Greener, Faye’s father, once in vaudeville, now selling door-to-door Miracle solvent, a furniture polish of his own devising. But Harry is now sick, dying, his death you might call an opportunity for a funeral scene. In his “box,” he’s “wearing a Tuxedo . . . his eyebrows shaped and plucked and his lips and cheeks rouged. He looked like the interlocutor in a minstrel show.” Faye, looking beautiful in her black dress, “platinum” hair under a black straw sailor. “Every so often, she carried a tiny lace handkerchief to her eyes and made it flutter there for a moment.” Residents of the Berdoo are in attendance and the Gingo family (too?), Eskimos brought to Hollywood for a picture about polar exploration. Unfortunately, an electric organ plays a record of Bach’s chorale, “Come Redeemer, Our Saviour.” That doesn’t go down well with the assembled mourners. There is an invitation to review the remains, not very beckoning except to the Gingos.

  Earle Shoop: cowboy from Arizona, occasionally worked in horse operas. Six feet tall, Stetson hat, boots with three-inch heels, always broke, he stages an appalling, murderous cock fight. In the end, Earle and Faye go off to the sunset or to the trailer park.

  •

  The final chapter of The Day of the Locust is a painful, dazzling scene of the mob outside a theater, waiting for the celebrities to arrive for the première of an important film. West steps aside for an intrusion of his general thoughts about Americans, some of them, at least:

  They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment. All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs. . . . Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? . . . They get tired of oranges. . . .

  They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. . . . [Newspapers and movies] fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. . . . The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. . . . They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

  Tod Hackett, the Yale man, is caught in the mob, his leg painfully injured. He, foolish aesthete from New England, is standing on a rail, trying to sketch the scene for a painting to be called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” What is burning is “a corinthian column that held up a palmleaf roof of a nutburger stand.” The Day of the Locust was published in an edition of 3,000 copies. 1,464 copies sold. That’s the story for a masterpiece.

  Nathanael West’s stunning four novels are American tales, rooted in our transmogrifying soil. Morality plays they are, classified as comedies. They are indeed often funny. Funny as a crutch.

  2003

  SOURCES

  “Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries” first appeared in Partisan Review.

  “Anderson, Millay, and Crane in Their Letters” first appeared in Partisan Review.

  “The Subjection of Women” first appeared in Partisan Review as a review of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

  “George Eliot’s Husband” first appeared in Partisan Review.

  “The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead” first appeared in The NewRepublic.

  “America and Dylan Thomas” first appeared in Partisan Review.

  “The Decline of Book Reviewing” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine.

  “Boston” first appeared under the title “Boston: The Lost Ideal” in Harper’s Magazine and also in Encounter.

  “William James” was first published as an introduction to The Selected Letters of William James, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick.

  “Living in Italy” first appeared in Partisan Review.

  “Mary McCarthy” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine.

  “Loveless Love” first appeared in Partisan Review as two separate reviews of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case.

  “The Insulted and Injured” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine, and the review of The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family by Oscar Lewis first appeared separately in The New York Times Book Review.

  “Grub Street: New York” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Frost in His Letters” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer.

  “Ring Lardner” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Grub Street: Washington” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Selma, Alabama” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “After Watts” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots.

  “The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Chicago” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Reflections on Fiction” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Dead Souls” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker.

  “In Maine” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Militant Nudes” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Sue and Arabella” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Sad Brazil” is an expanded version of an essay first published in The New York Review of Books.

  “Sense of the Present” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of Speedboat by Renata Adler.

  “Simone Weil” first appeared in The New York Times Book Review as a review of Simone Weil by Simone Pétrement, trans. Raymond Rosenthal.

  “Domestic Manners” first appeared in Daedalus.

  “Wives and Mistresses” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Unknown Faulkner” first appeared in The New York Times Book Review as a review of Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner.

  “Nabokov: Master Class” first appeared in The New York Times Book Review as a review of Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Fredson Bowers.

  “English Visitors in America” first appeared under the title

  “Love It or Leave It!” in The New York Review of Books as a review of Imagining America by Peter Conrad.

  “Bartleby in Manhattan” first appeared under the title “Bartleby and Manhattan” in The New York Review of Books.

  “Katherine Anne Porter” first appeared under the title “What She Was and What She Felt Like” in The New York Times Book Review as a review of Katherine Anne Porter: A Life by Joan Givner.

  “Sons of the City’s Pavements” first appeared in The New York Times Book Review as a review of Letters of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Robert Phillips.

  “The Magical Prose of Poets” first appeared under the title “The Perfectionist” in The New Republic as a review of The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Robert Giroux.

  “The Teller and the Tape: Norman Mailer” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of Mailer: His Life and Times by Peter Manso.

  “The Genius of Margaret Fuller” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Gertrude Stein” first appeared in The Threepenny Review.

  “The Fictions of America” was a paper presented at the Wheatland Conference on Literature in Washington, D.C., April 1987.

  “Mrs. Wharton in New York” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “On Washington Square” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Wind from the Prairie” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Mary McCarthy in New York” was published as the introduction to Intellectual Mem
oirs: New York 1936–1938 by Mary McCarthy.

  “Edmund Wilson” is an expanded version of an essay first published in The New Yorker.

  “Paradise Lost” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

  “In the Wasteland” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion.

  “Tru Confessions” first appeared in The New York Review of Books as a review of Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton.

  “Locations” was first published as the introduction to American Fictions by Elizabeth Hardwick.

  “Melville in Love” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “The Torrents of Wolfe” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “The Foster Father” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  “Funny as a Crutch” first appeared in The New York Review of Books.