Elizabeth Hardwick, who died in 2007, was born July 27, 1916, in Lexington, Kentucky, the eighth of eleven children of Eugene Hardwick, a heating and plumbing contractor, and his wife, Mary, who stayed at home with the kids. Her New York Times obituary notes that in the autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights the narrator observes that the kids' "mortification" over their parents' fecundity was expressed "in their passionate love for their kind, happy mother and in a singularly low birth rate for themselves."
She attended the University of Kentucky in her hometown--B.A. in 1938, M.A. in 1939. Though her resume to this point was all Lexington, Kentucky, she seems to have had her eye on a New York literary life, and her next move was to enroll in a PhD program at Columbia University. Her focus was 17th-century English literature, but she withdrew without a degree in 1941. She would become renowned as a "literary essayist" who wrote with authority on art, music, theatre, politics, American places, American crime (the Menendez brothers), American literature, especially her contemporaries Updike, Roth, Didion, Mailer, and Richard Ford, though Melville was another favorite, as well as women writers from all over (Plath, Jane Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, Dorothy Wordsworth, Nadine Gordimer, Simone Weil), but she did not, as far as I can tell, devote any attention after 1941 to 17th-century English literature. Maybe she mainly wanted to get to New York, where she spent most of the war years writing fiction, including a novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945), and touring jazz clubs, often in the company of gay men, one of whom she shared an apartment with. The question of how she financed herself during this time is addressed briefly in the aforementioned obituary, which states that she eked it out on fellowships and family help before allowing her own words to summarize her days (and nights): it was a life signified by "love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor."
For obscure reasons, The Ghostly Lover attracted the attention of Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, who solicited her contributions. This was how she got her start as an essayist, and her output over the next fifty years was collected in four volumes: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998). I've tried to indicate above her wide range of subjects; it's harder to describe the flavor of the individual essays. The openings tend to be vivid and perhaps just setting down a few of them is the way to proceed. Her most frequently reprinted essay might be "The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King," which begins with a description of the city in which King was assassinated on the weekend between the murder and the funeral:
The decaying, downtown shopping section of Memphis--still another Main Street--lay, the weekend before Martin Luther King's funeral, under a siege. The deranging curfew and that state of civic existence called "tension" made the town seem to be sinister, again very much like a film set, perhaps for a television drama, of breakdown, catastrophe.
"Citizen Updike" commences:
John Updike, the dazzling author, appeared, and still appears, to be one of Augustine's "fair and fit"--and never more so than when viewed among his male literary colleagues who often tend to show the lump and bump of gene, bad habits, the spread and paste of a lifetime spent taking one's own dictation.
And here she is setting out on someone who in certain respects reminds me of her:
Edmund Wilson, one of our country's supreme men of letters, is sometimes remembered as being autocratic and intimidating. My own memory, not the most intimate, is of a cheerful, corpulent, chuckling gentleman, well-dressed in brown suits and double martinis.
In the next sentence she refers to Wilson's "astonishing range of subjects"--astonishing to us, for sure, though it's not clear why she should have been surprised.
The association with Partisan Review was not forever. In the winter of 1962-63, there was a newspaper strike in New York, and Hardwick and some of her set, preeminently Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, decided that the absence of the Sunday book sections was an invitation to show that they could do better in any event. Thus was born The New York Review of Books, "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language," according to Esquire, and, according to Tom Wolfe, "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic." It was the organ in which for the rest of her long life most of Hardwick's essays were first published. There was for her an aspect of put-up-or-shut-up in this venture since she had a few years earlier published in Harper's, which was at the time edited by Silvers, an essay on the decline of book reviewing and the unrelieved dullness of those now absent Sunday book sections. It's an excuse to set down another sample of her prose, always alive on the page and an antidote for the very thing she was criticizing:
A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised. Sweet bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory.
[Snip]
It is not merely the praise of everything in sight--a special problem in itself--that vexes and confounds those who look closely at the literary scene, but there is also the unaccountable sluggishness of the New York Times and Herald Tribune Sunday book-review sections. The value and importance of individual books are dizzily inflated, in keeping with the American mood of the moment, but the book-review sections as a cultural enterprise are, like a pocket of unemployment, in a state of baneful depression insofar as liveliness and interest are concerned. One had not thought they could go downward, since they have always been modest, rather conventional journals. Still, there had been room for a decline in the last few years and the opportunity has been taken.
She had heard that Wilson was autocratic and intimidating! Yet one is not aware of lambastings in her assessments, just judicious intelligence and memorable expressions. Possibly her place among those in the Review's inner upper circle allowed her to write about what interested her and the writers who interested her were not those whose reputations she thought needed puncturing. Her tours of many oeuvres take note of strengths and weaknesses, the former predominating, in prose that one might almost term breezy--so conversational and free of jargon is it--but for the intellectual heft: the achievement of an alchemist.
Regarding her private life, the inevitable main event is her 23-year marriage to Robert Lowell, who is regarded by many to be the best American poet of the second half of the last century. Lowell seems almost to have compensated for being a genius by also being a terrible husband. A manic depressive, he was in and out of hospital beds, and in and out of bedroom beds, too. In one excruciating anecdote, related by Hardwick herself, a bitter extracurricular lover sent to their residence some unpaid bills, which Lowell, after opening, tossed on the floor: she says she picked them up and paid them. It got worse. He left her for an English woman, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and then, without her permission, used lines from her anguished letters sent across the ocean in his new book of poems, The Dolphin, a work in the "confessional" mode. He was upbraided by friends--Elizabeth Bishop told him in a letter that "[a]rt just isn't worth that much"--but Hardwick seems never to have uttered a word against him in public. He and Blackwood were an awful match, she being approximately as stable as he was, and after their break-up Lowell and Hardwick were apparently reuniting--he had gone back to England in the fall of 1977 to collect some things and was on his way from Kennedy Airport to her Manhattan duplex when he died of a heart attack in the cab. They had one child, a daughter, Harriet, born in 1957, when Hardwick was 40--her tardy contribution to her generation's "singularly low birth rate."
The image of Hardwick kneeling to pick up the bills sent by her husband's lover, and then paying them, seems in line with what an outsider can glean of her character. Without histrionics or fanfare, she did what needed to be done, and kept doing it. Her last essay for The New York Review, on the American novelist Nathanael West, was published in 2003, when she was 87. It may not have been that hard for her to stay steadily at it, for she once told an interviewer:
As I have grown older I see myself as fortunate in many ways. It is fortunate to have had all my life this passion for studying and enjoying literature and for trying to add a bit to it as interestingly as I can. This passion has given me much joy, it has given me friends who care for the same things, it has given me employment, escape from boredom, everything. The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
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