Elizabeth Hardwick once remarked, “It is easy to reach an ironical wisdom from a low spot, especially if you are disinclined to hopeless feats of emulation and not easily moved to admiration.” Hardwick, in life and in literary criticism, possessed that ironical inclination that every fine essayist must-have. Perhaps it helped that she had herself been in a low spot when she eked out a living in midcentury New York by writing for Partisan Review. That she was not prone to vain imitation or cheap praise also helped. Isaiah Berlin, to Hardwick’s delight, called her “much more bitchy” than Mary McCarthy, “but sharper and more original.” That originality consisted in her staunch refusal to rely on prefabricated phrases or cliched sentiments. Confident of her talents, she had no emulative impulse.
In The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse, we find some of her ripest pieces republished. By excluding her fiction, movie, and theater reviews, Andriesse makes the case that her essayistic abilities far exceeded the bounds of criticism. The volume contains essays on everything from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal to the pleasures of having grits souffle. It has pieces on persons (George Balanchine, Susan Sontag, Herman Melville) and places (New York, Lexington, Maine). Several of her forays into political writing have been included: In one essay, she dissects President Bill Clinton’s inane filth, and in another, she chronicles the scandals of the Kennedys, who “seem to have drunk a glass of bleaching-powder.” In perhaps her sharpest political essay, she paints a Menckenian portrait of George Wallace, whose rhetoric “promises nothing except the pleasures of winning a gang fight.”
One of the most intriguing essays is on the European emigres who, like human flotsam from the wreck of history, came to America’s shores. Whether fleeing in response to communism or fascism, these emigres found in the United States what England had offered to Alexander Herzen and Karl Marx. They settled in a country that not only protected them from Europe’s tragedies but also gave them its full intellectual curiosity. Among them were Einstein and Godel, Nabokov and Stravinsky, Arendt and Strauss. Merely listing their names, Hardwick comments, “is a sort of embarrassment because it seems to reduce the irreducible.” She knew. The University of Kentucky, where Hardwick entered in 1934, had benefited mightily from employing emigre intellectuals. It was there, through contact with European high culture, that Hardwick escaped whatever lingering provincial limitations she still had.
There were two ways of reacting to this kind of cultural enrichment. One could either embrace it or reject it. In 1904, when Henry James returned to America after 21 years abroad, he complained about the “effects of infusion” from foreign countries. His patrician sensibilities were offended by the myriads of foreigners he encountered everywhere on the streets of New York. The Italians were un-Italian, he thought, and every ethnicity, no matter its origin, seemed to butcher the English language. But while James took exception to the Yiddish-speaking Cafe Royale, calling it one of the “torture rooms of the living idiom,” Hardwick found cultural cross-pollination exhilarating. She had none of his lumpen narrowness or ill-concealed antisemitism. Only half-jokingly, she said that she aspired to be a Jewish New York intellectual. By the time she came to New York, it had replaced Paris as the capital of emigre literature. It was thus fitting that she likened her own reasons for moving there to those of a provincial in Balzac yearning for Paris.
Sontag praised Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights for its “epigrammatic dash.” How right she was. Few essayists have written more memorable lines than Hardwick. In the opening essay of this volume, she writes that some phrases have “serenity of precision.” Her own prose had that in superabundance. She had an uncanny ability to find unexpected yet fitting adjectives. For example, in Sleepless Nights she remarks on how the “tender, warning word disgrace … freezes the radical heart with lashing whispers.” Similarly, in an essay on her native Lexington, she writes: “How close to the surface, like capillaries of a vein, are the traditions of local life.” That surprisingly fitting simile makes her observation palpable. Her sentences thus had a Montaignian vibrancy, eliding surplus information to focus on the essential.
Hardwick elevated every subject she touched. Only she, I feel, would begin a piece on political elections for Vogue by retelling the story of Grendel, before proceeding to quote Kant and Hazlitt. She believed that the essay relies on the premise that “equity exists between the writer and the reader.” Never condescending, she expected her readers to have read just as much as herself. She thus felt comfortable in remarking, without providing identifying information, that had Baron de Charlus lived through the ’50s, he would have ended up married and with a few children — she expected her readers to know their Proust. Elsewhere she paraphrases Alexander Pope without attribution because she assumes that we have read enough of his poetry to notice it. Hardwick said the essay “rests on singularity rather than consensus.” She could have added that her own singular essays rest on the existence of a common literary canon.
There is no controversy surrounding Hardwick’s literary stature. She is universally regarded as the consummate critic. To her many fans, anything but abject praise borders on high heresy. And yet, she was not without her weaknesses. These weaknesses, merely latent when she writes on highbrow culture, emerge more clearly when she writes on the lowbrow. Her tonal range was limited — she was better on the sober than the skittish, the patrician than the plebeian. Hardwick’s critical pose thus resembles that of someone leaning back in a comfortable chair. The reason for this, I think, is that she is seldom outright funny. She had a sense of humor, that sibling of irony, but she hoarded it. She writes in Sleepless Nights that “love was a treadmill, like churchgoing, kept alive by respect for the community. Many have this evangelical view of lovemaking: There! I’ve done it once today and twice the day before yesterday.” This is funny, but when she let her humor free, it only emphasized how often she would keep it hidden. Learned solemnity, not levity, was her leitmotif.
Hardwick sometimes belabored her sentences. Her register failed her from time to time, especially when the distance between her tone and the subject itself became too wide. Describing, for instance, America as “a vast transcendental diaspora under the celestial protection of two oceans” is overwrought. There is no doubt that Hardwick was eloquent, but eloquence can be a way of talking around the subject: “As our superstitious flaying of our psychic flesh increases with the everlasting question, there is a noticeable relaxation of secondary sexual functions.” That thought could have been expressed in half the words with twice the force.
Though her prose could occasionally be sluggish, its flaws originated from Hardwick trying to pack more lyricism into sentences than they could hold. The times when this failed were perhaps the necessary costs of those times it succeeded. Many infelicitous phrases could be forgiven of someone who could write that Clinton, when he denied having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, seemed as “solemn as a rogue in a Molière comedy.” There is, in the works of Hardwick, little that needs forgiving. She set the standard that subsequent critics had to measure themselves against.
Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.
