The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (2 page)

Hardwick met Robert Lowell in 1945, when she was summoned by a group of literary wives a hotel in midtown Manhattan to be questioned as to whether she was having an affair with Allen Tate. (Many years later when Tate’s biographer informed her that Tate had claimed that they had had an affair, she said that Tate could have an affair with her for his biography if it meant that much to him.) She was given martinis at her interrogation, needed help when some of Tate’s friends, Lowell among them, broke up the meeting, and as Lowell handed her into a taxi, she turned and threw up at his feet.
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She once hid in a doorway along Second Avenue when she saw him coming, so great was her attraction to him.

They met again, at Yaddo, toward the end of 1948. He was just arriving; she was leaving. Lowell asked Hardwick to come back and she did. Elizabeth Bishop warned him against her; McCarthy considered Hardwick to be getting above herself. Lowell’s doctor advised her not to marry a man so tormented in mind, but in 1949 she did. She said she was only grateful for the life he opened up for her and one of the reasons she resisted entreaties to write about their time together was that it had been so extraordinary. She said to do justice to the poets and thinkers they’d known she would need the gifts of Dostoevsky. Thirty years after his death in a taxi at her door in 1977 she said she still wept for Lowell’s genius.

In her fiction, Hardwick would write about women for whom the men they married were their significant experience. She didn’t consider herself one of them, because Elizabeth Lowell never wrote anything, she said. Yet Hardwick more than anyone was aware of what a liberation it was for her to produce the essays on women and literature that went into
Seduction and Betrayal
after Lowell left her for Caroline Blackwood in 1970. (He and Hardwick divorced in 1972. Before Hardwick, Lowell had been married to Jean Stafford. “Robert Lowell never married a bad writer,” Hardwick said.) Similarly, when she wrote
Sleepless Nights
, she recognized that she hadn’t published fiction in the first person in thirty years, and that maybe Lowell’s death had moved — or freed — her to do so.

Hardwick couldn’t explain why she gave up for so long on trying to write novels after
The Simple Truth
appeared in 1955. When the novel was reprinted in the early 1980s, she remained unhappy with it, an idea the working out of which had given her no pleasure, a project that had helped her to get through their living in “insufficiently subtle” Iowa where Lowell was teaching. (When asked why a certain character is crying at the end of the novel, Hardwick said, “Stop. It took me a week to get that tear.”) Concerned with the effects of a murder trial on a troubled faculty wife in Iowa,
The Simple Truth
, with its innocent-seeming college boy who probably did murder his girlfriend, could be read as Hardwick’s comment on the cynicism and sentimentality of McCarthyism.

In the 1950s, Americans were traveling abroad again, not having been able to go to Europe since the 1930s. Lowell and Hardwick lived in Holland and Italy for a time, excited by the art, the churches, the opera, meeting artists and writers. Lowell had come to a sort of impasse with his third book,
The Mills of the Kavanaughs
. But after the death of Lowell’s mother in 1954, they returned to the States. New York’s cultural life had been quickened in the previous years by the intellectuals driven out of Europe by Fascism. Moreover, a new generation of American writers was emerging in the city. However, Lowell and Hardwick ended up in Boston, Lowell’s home, his inheritance. Their years in Boston saw Lowell accomplish a revolution in his work through the confessional poetry of
Life Studies
(1959). For Hardwick, however, wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted, provincial, self-esteeming Boston was a deprivation.

Hardwick toiled at her fiction, and her ambivalence about the short stories she published in the 1950s, her Boston years, stemmed from her thinking them entirely too conventional in structure and intent, in her handling of character, in her just trying to have plot. But Hardwick was altogether too hard on herself in her evaluation of this work. The stories of this period are case studies, strenuous explorations of motive and temperament, a reflection maybe of the influence of psychoanalysis in the culture at the time. Hardwick once laughed that Freud had uncovered the last great plots in fiction.

In “A Season’s Romance” (1956), a bored art historian is joined by her mother in the exploitation of a generous but unsuitable man. In “The Oak and the Axe” (1956), a career woman mistakenly believes her love can redeem an indolent dreamer. Instead, his bachelor habits destroy her carefully built-up life. A professor’s sense of rivalry with a younger colleague in “The Classless Society” (1957) leads to his realization that he is trapped in his life. In “The Purchase” (1959), a successful portrait painter can’t stop himself from embarking on a possibly destructive affair with the tough wife of a rising young abstract expressionist. For Hardwick, the individual is also a type, doomed to struggle against his or her general outlines in the psychological drama of everyday experience.

“The Classless Society” is set in Chicago, and Hardwick goes out of her way to call the family history Edith Wharton–like, perhaps because the philistine cousin of good family represented to Hardwick too much of a Boston type. A previously unpublished work, “The Final Conflict,” a superb study of a heel as he disappoints a desperate girl, is set in the seediness of Beacon Hill in the 1950s. The remaining stories are New York stories; the characters, even the ones falling apart, are to be envied their luck in being in the city, among other escapees like themselves, and true to themselves, whether in their Park Avenue studios or their gloomy West Side rooming houses.

The omniscient narrator that Hardwick employs in each story of the 1950s projects something of the gritty dynamism of the city, that feeling that one could turn a corner and one’s life could change. At the same time, her voice is somewhat remote, however forceful and fast her observations. One can almost feel Hardwick working to restrain herself as the teller, to contain her narrative energy, to stay behind the camera or offstage. Then, too, these New York stories were also stories that appeared in
The New Yorker
and in an odd way that is what Hardwick most had against them when she was asked years later to consider collecting them. She could not forgive herself for having spent so much time trying to be accepted by
The New Yorker
, trying to fit herself to what in her mind was a sort of formula in fiction. It was not that she found this work insincere. If anything, it was too earnest for her, too constrictive.

As intelligent as Hardwick’s fiction of the 1950s was thought to be, her reputation, like James Baldwin’s, came more from her accomplishments in the essay. Hardwick had kept up her connection as a book reviewer for
Partisan Review
throughout the 1950s and the essays she wrote for
Harper’s
during this time were striking in their candor, their literary and cultural range, and their grace of expression. Her work for
Harper’s
was largely due to the admiration of a young editor, Robert Silvers. Hardwick and Lowell had resettled with their daughter in New York City by the time
The New York Review of Books
was founded in 1963, with Silvers and Barbara Epstein as its co-editors. Hardwick said more than once that her association with
The New York Review
saved her as a writer. She was given the freedom to be utterly herself, to contemplate works and events as she chose. Silvers had a way of coaxing the work out of her. She said that he never failed to make her feel that it was important for her to write on a given subject, that her views were needed. Silvers represented the ideal reader for her, because he was entirely of her view that the essay was as much imaginative prose as fiction.

Hardwick’s daughter noted that while her father had no trouble going to his desk every day to write verse, her mother found it hard to sustain her doubt-laden exertions at fiction, which made her respond all the more readily to deadlines for nonfiction pieces. In the 1960s, Lowell published the majestic poems of
For the Union Dead
and
Near the Ocean
, but there had been a number of breakdowns in those years as well. (Hardwick speculated that Lowell revised so obsessively the sonnets of
Notebook
,
History
, and
For Lizzie and Harriet
because after each hospitalization, he was always ashamed when he came home, though he had nothing to be ashamed of. Yet he was, and he would go to his study, much like the husband who goes to the garage to tinker with an engine after an argument, only Lowell had no car to tinker with, he had only his poems to fine-tune.) The peculiar demands of Hardwick’s home life as Lowell’s fame increased, her constant vigils of his seasonal agitation, could accommodate the essay; she could find blocks of time in which to concentrate long enough for a certain number of pages, but not longer. In addition, the politi-cal upheavals of the time formed a tumultuous background for work, leaving little chance for the reflection she believed she needed for fiction. What was happening in the larger world did not speak to her as fiction. It was more engaging for her as a writer to be a witness, to go to the funeral of Martin Luther King, for example.

Hardwick published no fiction in those years when first back in New York — apart from wicked little parodies in
The New York Review
under the name Xavier Prynne, such as her lampoon of McCarthy’s best seller of 1968,
The Group
.
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Where the frankness of the sexual scenes in McCarthy’s early fiction had been for Hardwick episodes in McCarthy’s career of dissent,
The Group
struck her as rather conformist and a cliché, and she noted in it also a loss of irony. But Hardwick was out of step with the sexual revolution and out of sympathy with attempts to be explicit about sex on the page. She had never taken Anaïs Nin or Henry Miller seriously; she admired John Updike, but not the male point of view in his descriptions of what went on in the back of the car. She shrank from a kind of women’s or gay fiction that was too intent on recording the sexual act. She admitted to a degree of prudery, but she was adamant nevertheless that nothing dated fiction as quickly as sex scenes. It was not what Humbert Humbert said, it was how Nabokov made him say it, “a rhapsodic call to literature itself.”

Hardwick sometimes gave the impression in the 1970s that the influence, the success, of feminism had taken her by surprise. She wished she could retract what she had written in 1952 about “the briskly Utopian” and “donkey-load undertaking” of
The Second Sex
. What had not been possible for women then was a different matter twenty years later. Yet she wasn’t interested in what young theorists called the critique of patriarchal society, she just couldn’t bring herself to talk that way, or to endorse hostility to men as men, or to denounce Lowell publicly for the poems
of The Dolphin
.
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That all seemed a fad to her anyway. She did not need literary politics to be interested in women writers. Much as she valued the work of Peter Taylor, or as fascinated as she was by Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
, Hardwick never wanted to be a Southern writer. But she was greatly invested in her identity as a woman writer. She cared about Hawthorne’s injustice to Margaret Fuller.

She thought about women writers and measured herself against them. She watched Joyce Carol Oates at committee meetings and concluded that she must write all the time, as if under a spell. Only Elizabeth Bishop’s stories deserved to be talked about as “Kafkaesque.” She treasured George Eliot and Joan Didion for the way they could handle information, for what she called their masculine knowledge of systems, how things work, what the world is made of. She did not subscribe to Simone de Beauvoir’s view that in essence there was no difference between men and women. (Sometime in the early 1960s in Paris at a dinner for Alice B. Toklas, by then a tiny, shriveled-up figure with a mustache, Hardwick felt someone jab her in the ribs. It was Katherine Anne Porter, who whispered, “Honey, if I looked like that I’d kill myself.”) Hardwick believed that society still had such different rules for women that they continued to experience life on another level from men — even if medical science and changed social attitudes had lifted the threat of pregnancy and the fear of disgrace, so that biology was no longer destiny only for women.

Unlike Susan Sontag, Hardwick as a woman writer did not resist the category of women’s literature, and she took for granted that its natural tendency was, like black literature, toward the subversive. But it was not enough that a woman writer merely give the woman’s side of things; Hardwick was disappointed when a work of fiction by a woman did not challenge the novel as a form. It was almost a cultural obligation, given the intense experimentation in fiction that was taking place in America in the 1970s. Hardwick would assert in two provocative essays on the state of fiction
[5]
that social change, life itself, had removed the traditional motives for fiction and how it was constructed.

Yet experimentation could go too far, drain the text of its pleasure — Nathalie Sarraute was not a writer to curl up with at night. By challenge, Hardwick meant something more about what the novel was looking at, how its narrative developed because of who was doing the looking, more than she did taking hammer and chisel to the novel as an edifice. What transfixed Hardwick about Renata Adler’s
Speedboat
was her narrator’s indifference to anything other than her own perceptions. Involvement with a critical self suited the life of the single woman. To be a woman alone in the city in the 1970s was nothing like what it had been when Hardwick first came to New York, when to enter a bar or a restaurant unescorted was the first of many nervous calculations of an evening. Hardwick felt guilty that her first thought was of the independence she’d be giving up when in 1976 at Harvard, Lowell, exhausted by his stormy life with Blackwood, whom he still loved — she represented Aphrodite and ruin, he said — asked Hardwick if she’d consider taking him back.