THE UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK
In "The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick," the late author compares writing an essay to catching a fish with your hands. Her own are so strange, surprising, slippery and beautiful that we can see how this might be true.
Among the subjects taken up in this whimsical, uneven collection are grits souffle, the Menendez brothers, Kennedy scandals, Christmas, the end of love and female suicides. As always, Hardwick is elegant, sharp-witted, eccentric, exacting, dreamy.
One can't help feeling that the prickly and controlled Elizabeth Hardwick might not have cared for a collection of her leftover writings, many from places like "Mademoiselle" and "House & Garden," even one as thoughtfully curated as this. This doesn't mean the reader isn't grateful to have it. There is a bit more idiosyncrasy and wildness in this book than in her more willfully collected volumes. One gets to know a writer in her casual offhand pieces, churned out for money or on assignment.
One of the pleasures of the collection is lovely evocation of place. Her pieces on Maine, "where you can take little for granted beyond the gorgeousness of the storm-tossed landscape," and on her hometown of Lexington, Ky., are so vivid they almost serve as little vacations. There is also a superb and transporting essay on summer: "The weekend, commuting distance, bread and cheeses and bottles of wine, Vivaldi on the cassette, and a lot of work to be done and gladly." She elaborates on the Midwest iteration of that season: "Little of the charm of the ocean view and the table set with blue linen, and the delectable salmon, so well designed for painterly display, laid out on a platter among scattered stems of watercress. Still the American town streets — those angling off the main drag seen on the way to the airport — are a landscape of the American summer. And why should we groan with pain at the sight of the plastic flamingo on the lawn or the dead whiteness of the inflated duck coming into its decorative own nowadays? There is not much else to buy downtown, for one thing." Her prose has an entrancing power of description, a formidable prettiness combined with razor precision.
If one is the sort of person who takes pleasure in intelligent meanness, Hardwick is certainly one of its master practitioners. She is sharp in her satirizing, icy in her judgments, shrewd in her takedowns. She is what Janet Malcolm once called "fearlessly uncharitable" and what the editor of Partisan Review called "one of our more cutting minds." Take, for instance, her description of Monica Lewinsky: "Monica, who is still in the matter of discretion running a big deficit, as nurses name it when describing the victims of a stroke."
One bracing and refreshing aspect of Hardwick's work is that she does not spare herself from her own critical rigor and fierceness. She pins herself down just as she skewers other people. At one point she confesses, "As a writer I feel a nearly unaccountable attraction and hostility to the work of other women writers. Envy, competitiveness, scorn infect my judgment at times, and indifference is strangely hard to come by in this matter." Her highly fraught attitude toward other women writers will not have eluded close readers of her work, but there is something about her grappling openly with this tendency on the page that is disarming. As a critic, she doesn't shy away from the complications, ambiguities and self-incriminations many other people would leave simmering but unmentioned.
In these pages, she does not directly address the pain of the messy end of her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell or the excruciating public humiliation of his use of her letters in his poetry collection "The Dolphin." But she writes eloquently about the collapse of one's life in middle age: "Nothing is more pitiful than an older woman thrown into 'freedom,' lying like some wounded dragon in a paralysis of rage and embittered nostalgia." The disorientation and recalculation that accompany the breakdown of a marriage seem to filter into her essays on the culture at large. There is a personal urgency, a sense of the world cracked open, that makes its way into many of her interrogations of the climate of the 1970s and her more philosophical inquiries into life's difficulties.
In a peculiar and remarkable essay, "When to Cast Out, Give Up, Let Go," she speaks in general or ruminative terms of personal calamities like her own. "In love, the despair that comes from loss, from deprivation, throws us into the desert. Sometimes it is only by stark and splendid renunciations that hurt persons can find the water in the sand." She wrestles on the page with the possibility of coming to accept the loss of love. She writes that "then affection is not the weird, ambivalent manipulation of the death of love, but a sort of salute to its happier beginning."
Her unpredictable, wildly conflicted, bemused views on feminism are perhaps the biggest revelation of this edition. In a series of essays clustered around contemporary womanhood, she writes about the burdens of the new freedoms women experience, the new pressures they generate and the new problems created by the loss of domestic scripts. Is the modern, liberated world better for women? Hardwick is not sure. Elsewhere, she has commented on Simone de Beauvoir's "brilliantly confused" thinking, and we see a bit of her own here. In some of her essays on the women's movement, she seems rather lost; the authority and confidence we associate with her falters into tangled thoughts and wistful musings. She writes in 1971, "I look at little girls with wonder and anxiety. I do not know whether they will be free — the only certainty is that many will be adrift."
Some of the weaker essays in the collection feel perfunctory, slight, but they are always stylish.
The glimpse this collection gives of Hardwick, the woman, is intriguing. We experience her mind in darts and flashes. Browsing these essays is what I imagine it would be like to be standing next to her in the corner of a crowded party, in a cloud of smoke: at times uncomfortable, thrilling, alarming.
One falls a little in love with her sentences. I had to give up annotating as I read; I had marked too many lines. Some of her paragraphs are as intriguing as little novels, like a passage about a girl she knew in childhood who became a prostitute, or a college classmate who grew up on an estate on Long Island as the daughter of servants: "But this girl, her whole life scarred by a brilliant and somehow accommodating intelligence, was inarticulate and bitter and wild with rage … She, with her eternal reading of James and Proust, hated the very smell of the evening air, filled with the unsettling drawl of debutantes; but true hatred came to rest in the sound of her father's gardening shears at the hedge and the swish, swish of her mother in rubber-soled nurse's shoes and a hairnet, bending forward with a bowl of vegetables resting expertly on her open palm."
Hardwick's comment on essays generally is particularly true of those gathered here: "The most interesting will have the self-propelled interior life of imaginative literature."
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