When I wrote, here, about Elizabeth Hardwick, I took note of the vivid openings to many of her essays, and I set a couple of them down. Now I have one to add. An essay on Ibsen's A Doll's House begins:
Ibsen could never be agreeable for very long. He seemed to have the fat of choler in his bloodstream, all of it collecting there from a youth as bitter, homely, and humiliating as a man could endure. Fate kept this large mind and angry ambition working as a druggist from the age of sixteen to twenty-two in the freezing cold of the little town of Grimstad. Well-named. He was sore at his family because they were worse than poor; they had gone from being well enough off to a great diminishment—the kind of reversal that stood out like a birthmark in the nosy, petty provincial world of Ibsen's life, and of his plays.
The Ibsen family had to move from town to a miserable little farm on the outskirts. Father Ibsen had the inclination to bankruptcy and shadiness Ibsen used over and over in his work, and along with it the sardonic wit of a small-town failure who drank too much. . . .
And she's off! There is no "great diminishment" as she proceeds, maybe just an imperceptible modulation from panache to acute intelligence as she delves into the details of the subject at hand. Maybe it sounds slavish or unduly worshipful, but I've read certain books mainly just to find out what Hardwick had to say about them. Scan the Table of Contents. "Ibsen's Women"? Okay, I'm reading A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm. One knows, dimly, that Nora, in A Doll's House, is regarded as a feminist hero for leaving her family in order to find herself, or whatever, and it's a relief to feel one's own discomfort endorsed at the end of Hardwick's essay:
Nora's children—this is a hedge of thorns. Abandon Helmer, all right, but bundle up the children and take them with you, arranging for his weekend and vacation visits. Even in Ibsen's day one actress refused the part saying, "I could never abandon my children."
[Snip]
When Helmer says that she cannot leave her children, she might have said, "Millions of men have done so," and in that been perfectly consistent with current behavior. Nora seems to be saying that she cannot raise her own children in the old way and that she needs time to discover a new one.
Nevertheless, the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora.
Whew! Would have hated to disagree with Elizabeth Hardwick!
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