The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (3 page)

It wasn’t so much that Hardwick found her voice after Lowell’s death and the publication of
Sleepless Nights
. She resumed use of the first person in fiction. It was a restoration of her narrative freedom, the reconciliation with the past. But the first person had been there all along at the core of her essays, so distinct was her prose style. She’d irritated McCarthy in an appreciation of her friend’s work when she wondered if
The Company She Keeps
and
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
weren’t richer, more aesthetically satisfying than
A Charmed Life
or
The Groves of Academe
because they have an element of the dramatic tension of autobiography — self-exposure and self-justification. In
Sleepless Nights
, Hardwick relaxed this autobiographical element in her own writing. The work to which it perhaps can be most usefully compared is Colette’s
The Pure and the Impure
. Hardwick also managed to dispense with the apparatus of the novel, the frame of storytelling that she’d always found so tiresome. She reasoned that for a woman writer, sensibility is structure.

In her late short stories, Hardwick is interested in distillations of experience, moments in which a narrator and her subject, the object of her city dweller’s curiosity, meet and achieve parity, are equally aware of each other. Or her first-person narrator simply ceases to be in the picture, behaves in the grand manner of an internal narrator, and no one notices. Everything flows so naturally that readers are comfortable in their relationship with her as everybody’s narrator. It’s a tour of a mood or the inside of someone’s head, and at every place where she turns aside, moves forward, backward, takes up position again, or talks to herself, she remembers her readers and appeals to their experience, like nineteenth-century novelists. She parts the curtains to show another scene, before walking back onstage, into place.

If Hardwick’s work in the short story shares a theme throughout her writing life, it would be her attention to urban characters, city possibilities, neglected histories. She wrote about men who did not quite add up, but not lawyers or businessmen. Her characters are people afflicted one way or another with the romance of print, the thunder of the intellectual life. Those women who have some culture in Hardwick’s stories can be consoled. As women left to fend for themselves in the city, they are softer, less bitter than those in Josephine Herbst, a writer Hardwick much admired in her radical youth.

Moreover, the atmosphere of the city is very strong in her fiction. In one of her stories from the 1950s, someone sorely misses the demolished Dutch Reform Church on West Forty-eighth Street, but the stories from the 1980s, such as “The Bookseller” and “On the Eve,” have acquired with the passage of time another layer of meaning, because they are also by now set in a vanished landscape. “Cross-town,” as a hymn to the city, rises to the level of a tone poem. Hardwick’s last published short story, “Shot,” is a good illustration of how through deftness of observation she is able to give a short work the feeling of something much longer and more complicated. It’s because her angle of attack is always odd: a black maid has been murdered; one white woman isn’t as obtuse as her friends about the gesture required.

A writer’s work has a life separate from that of the writer, Hardwick maintained, but she liked to read the work in view of the life, because the act of composition was for her above all a human drama. Maybe that was why she preferred the mournfulness of Donald Barthelme to the demanding, cloaking abstractions of Thomas Pynchon. But Hardwick didn’t want anyone to say that the time in which she could have written fiction got used up taking care of husband and child. (A child is a sacred duty.) She knew that her own diffidence had as much if not more to do with how little fiction she wrote in a career that spanned six decades. She couldn’t just sit down and see what happened. That was not how she approached fiction.

She said she couldn’t start with “The sun was shining.” She had to have an idea, and always there was the problem of the idea that was not good enough. Sometimes, when at work on her late stories, a kernel of memory would stand for the idea she was trying to express, or she would find an image so haunting she would have to investigate the atmosphere around it, and the story’s details would accrue from there, as a series of illuminations. Hence, “Back Issues” is a vessel for the emotion that overcame her when she remembered the young, somberly dressed John Berryman lecturing on
A Winter’s Tale
. The same temperament is at work in her few late stories as in her early ones from her
Partisan Review
days, and sometimes in the type of narrator, the smart girl ambivalent about her small-town roots. Her voice, like Baldwin’s, never aged.

But Hardwick’s diffidence frustrated her because she knew that it was an expression of her perfectionism. She would tell her students that genius and perfectionism only looked alike, but they were not at all the same thing. Perfectionism had an inhibiting effect. She admired fluency, expansiveness in other writers, and cursed her own inability to spin anything out. She remembered how, as a student, she would finish writing in her blue exam book and look in amazement at the rest of the class, still scribbling away. She got poor grades because she could not bear to repeat to teachers information she knew they had already. The waste of time was morally offensive to her young self. Better to say too little than too much, Chekhov said, and there was never anything Hardwick could do as a writer about her economy of form, her compression of language.

Hardwick’s diffidence, her perfectionism, had everything to do with her greatest passion: reading. She loved to read; she read faster than anyone in the room and she never skipped a word. When in her old age she said she’d spent the morning reading
War and Peace
again, she really had. She was a writer because of her love of reading. To read was such an intense experience for her, so transporting, that to write was about the only means by which she could find relief for the emotions that built up.

She believed in the masterpiece and defined a genius as someone who cannot be imitated but who somehow leaves the literary landscape changed. She thought a flawed work often had more to teach us. She liked the story Edmund Wilson told on himself, about how he couldn’t understand why it was that while he was the outstanding student at Princeton, it was his dolt of a classmate, Fitzgerald, who was the literary genius. But every word of
The Great Gatsby
was right. She disliked the word “creativity” and preferred to speak of the mystery of talent. She read Dickens for the wildness of his language, the surprise of what he’ll say next. She did not agree with Chinua Achebe at all about
Heart of Darkness
being racist — think of the writing — and black people who minded Nancy and Dilsey in “That Evening Sun” simply weren’t thinking straight. Besides, it was something of a vulgarity to speak of a writer of Faulkner’s transcendent language as a part of Southern literature. Meanwhile, Melville’s loneliness of language she revered above that of any other American novelist.

Virginia Woolf read poetry before she wrote, and Hardwick was touched by the echo of the Elizabethans from Leslie Stephen’s library in the dialogue of
The Waves
. Nadezdha Mandelstam had to commit her husband’s work to memory, and Hardwick thought that Mrs. Mandelstam’s immense two-volume laying out of her husband’s and her country’s fate was that body of work releasing itself in her, uncoiling at long last. However, instead of saying that Hardwick wrote a poetic prose, one should say that she composed prose line by line, as though it were poetry. She couldn’t go on to the next sentence if the one before it wasn’t right. One line determined the color and purpose of the line immediately to follow and the one after that. Everything came back to language, or through language. Just before “Back Issues” was printed, she rushed with changes to the
Review
’s offices. “I thought, ‘What are these prancing banalities?’ You think it has the freedom of the sketch, but once these constructions are framed, they seem too tight.” She had a special affection for the small, seemingly random lyric work — Rilke, Baudelaire.

Hardwick liked to say that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. Yet she wrote to honor the literature she cared about, which was why in fiction she was so easily discouraged. She could always think of someone whose work she liked better than what she proposed to do on the same subject. She loved the glamour of midtown but never doubted that her true subjects were back in those bohemian rooming houses, with the socially marginal who somehow inspired her to capture the cultural drift, the movement of a life, in an arresting phrase. In her short stories, the qualities that make her prose an art that cannot be imitated, its rhythmic, pure sound, its control and sensuous texture, its daring intellectual pitch — all of these shine on and on and on.

— DARRYL PINCKNEY

[
1
]Harriet Lowell remembers her father telling the story of his first meeting with her mother that seemed to be the scene he describes in the poem “Man and Wife”: “you were in your twenties, and I, / once hand on glass / and heart in mouth / outdrank the Rahvs in the heat / of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet — / too boiled and shy / and poker-faced to make a pass, / while the shrill verve / of your invective scorched the traditional South.” Irving Howe, in an article on what he saw as the weaknesses of the confessional school, published in
Harper’s
in 1972, objected to the line about the speaker having outdrunk the Rahvs in Greenwich Village, on the grounds that most readers wouldn’t know who the Rahvs were. Hardwick, in talking about Howe’s piece, disagreed, arguing that it was clear enough from the context that the Rahvs were friends, whoever they were, that knowing who they were was not necessary to the understanding of the poem, and Philip Rahv was hardly obscure anyway. As for whether the night happened the way Lowell describes it in the poem, she couldn’t say, but it was a safe bet that it had, there were so many such nights, because back then people drank martinis, lethal things that took off the top of one’s head.

[
2
]“Boston: The Lost Ideal,”
Harper’s
(December 1959), collected in
A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society
(Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962).

[
3
]“The Gang,”
The New York Review of Books
(September 26, 1963). The two friends knew how to get at each other. McCarthy was absolutely sure that Randall Jarrell in his satire of academic life,
Pictures from an Institution
, based the character of Gertrude on Hardwick, when Hardwick said that it was so clearly McCarthy.

[
4
]In some of the poems in
The Dolphin
(1973), Lowell makes use of letters Hardwick wrote during the collapse of their marriage, and he also makes up lines and attributes them to her. “You cannot carry your love with you like a suitcase / Don’t you dare mail us the love your life denies” she particularly objected to.

[
5
]“The Sense of the Present,”
The New York Review of Books
(November 25, 1976), and “Reflections on Fiction,”
The New York Review of Books
(February 13, 1969).

I had been living for some time in the same house on Riverside Drive with Dr. Felix Hoffmann and his wife before I actually met them. He was known to me as a prominent German Protestant theologian and when I saw his name on one of the mailboxes in my house I was not without curiosity about him. Had I not developed a friendship with this family I believe that winter in New York would have been unendurable, because I was living under conditions that often seemed to me almost uncivilized. For reasons of economy I had taken a room in one of those co-operative apartments around Columbia University in which many ladies, most of them well past middle age, live. The place was clean and had once been a fine family apartment with a good view of the river, but most of the ladies living there were quite mad and had a way of dividing into warring camps over a foolish issue like the answering of the telephone and sometimes they engaged in the most distressing fights in the hall. I felt rather depressed about all of them because they were lonely and idle and, since I found one as pathetic as the other, I was inclined to be a bit unscrupulous and to try to take both sides in their arguments. This was disastrous; each side repeated what I had said and I sometimes trembled for fear of retribution when I put my key in the door. Also, the place was very bad for my studies. If I had had the courage to ignore the ladies I might have got along better, but though I kept telling myself that haughtiness was far more honest than the hypocritical friendliness I had assumed, I found myself irrevocably committed to the latter. It was too bad because it was very cold that winter and I often stayed in the library longer than I wished rather than go home to face my “friends.” Such social life as I had was spent mostly in drugstores where I drank so many cups of coffee I was constantly dizzy.

Living in this atmosphere, it perhaps isn’t surprising that I should have welcomed meeting someone else in the house and that I should have thought the Hoffmann household extraordinarily attractive. I met Dr. Hoffmann by accident. One day as I was entering the building I heard my name called and turned around to meet a young man from Kentucky who was studying at the theological seminary where Dr. Hoffmann held a post. I had known this friend was in New York but we had never made an effort to see each other because we hadn’t been compatible in Kentucky. At college he had been an overbearing and sanctimonious young man who had never distinguished himself in anything except as captain of the debating team, in which capacity he delivered energetic arguments on safe subjects. Also, he was a member of the Presbyterian church to which my family belonged and I used to get very impatient with my mother’s accounts of his brilliance in Sunday School and the fine way he represented our young people’s group at the Vacation Bible Study Conference held in North Carolina every summer. Whenever I attacked him as a fool, my mother always maintained that I didn’t like him because he wasn’t
fast
like the other young men in the town. It was certainly true that he wasn’t very spirited, but that was merely a matter of choice because the church was very lax on social questions and prided itself, I thought, on being too sophisticated to condemn horse racing from the pulpit and on the fact that the minister was more likely to be stirred to eloquence by Lloyd C. Douglas’s latest book than by hellfire and damnation. We left the delineation of the vivid results of enmity with God to the crude Baptists.