14 S UNDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2021
WHEN ELIZABETH HARDWICK left Ken-
tucky in 1939 to enroll in a Ph.D. program at
Columbia, she hoped to become, as she fa-
mously put it, a “Jewish intellectual.” This
was an unusual aspiration for a Southern
woman from a large, working-class Protes-
tant family. But Hardwick always seemed
to know where she was going, and who she
was going to be. Bored by academic re-
search and skeptical about her job
prospects, she dropped out of Columbia
and began writing for Partisan Review. For
years she lived in drab rooming houses,
sometimes on the edge of starvation. Even-
tually she became part of the Review’s in-
ner circle, married Robert Lowell and
helped found The New York Review of
Books. When she died in 2007, she was one
of the most influential — and feared —
American critics of the postwar era.
William Phillips, the co-editor of Partisan
Review, called her, dryly, “one of our most
cutting minds.”
Hardwick’s reviews were always pene-
trating, and sometimes brutal. She made a
lifelong enemy of Lillian Hellman and did
not spare even her best friend, Mary Mc-
Carthy, from malicious satire when she par-
odied McCarthy’s 1963 novel “The Group”
in The New York Review. But she was a ro-
mantic at heart and her life’s grand passion
was literature — worth all the poverty, sac-
rifice and burned bridges. She read every-
thing and took her role as a standard-
bearer seriously: If not her, then who?
Hardwick’s marriage to Lowell, whom she
thought one of the best poets of his genera-
tion, was a manifestation of this great liter-
ary passion. Hardwick was cleareyed
about Lowell’s mental illness but reluctant
to give up on him, even in his nastiest
phases. “I will never find his equal,” she
wrote to a friend. By saving Lowell, over
and over, she saved his extraordinary gift;
her loyalty was as much to the poetry as to
the man. Hardwick knew history was
watching, and she knew what was ex-
pected of her: “It’s been my experience
that nobody holds a man’s brutality to his
wife against him.”
The Hardwick-Lowell marriage com-
prises the heart of “A Splendid Intelli-
gence,” the first, succinct biography of
Hardwick (1916-2007), despite an early dis-
claimer that we won’t hear much about
Lowell. Cathy Curtis follows the lead of two
recent books — “The Dolphin Letters, 1970-
1979,” edited by Saskia Hamilton, and
“Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire,”
by Kay Redfield Jamison — in revealing
Hardwick’s trials, strength and compas-
sion during the Lowell years. Curtis sheds
new light on Hardwick’s academic wander-
ings with Lowell in Iowa and Ohio, and
their miserable sojourn in Europe. (Hard-
wick shopped, cooked and cleaned with no
help from Lowell. “I have known the bot-
tom of drudgery and ugliness,” she wrote to
her friends the writers Peter and Eleanor
Taylor.) We learn, through lib-
eral quotation of Hardwick’s
unpublished letters, how
deeply she suffered through
Lowell’s manic episodes, hos-
pitalizations and adulterous
love affairs. She wrote to
friends about the “moral and
psychological torture” Lowell
inflicted upon her, and con-
stantly apologized to editors
for missing deadlines on ac-
count of “family troubles.”
For all her pain, Hardwick
tried hard to keep her hus-
band’s struggles private: The
farther he fell, the straighter
she stood. But by the time
Lowell left her for the writer
Caroline Blackwood, a daugh-
ter of a Guinness heiress, in
1970, Hardwick was ready to
let go. Blackwood had her own
problems and, as Hardwick
predicted, could not give Low-
ell the practical and emotional
support he needed during his
manic phases. He died in a
New York City taxi, on his way
back to Hardwick. She later
said the marriage, despite its
turbulence and indignities,
was the best thing that ever
happened to her.
Like her friends Elizabeth
Bishop and Susan Sontag,
Hardwick made her literary
name in a man’s world that
was tough and unsentimental, and she was
initially suspicious of second-wave femi-
nism. Her critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s
“The Second Sex,” which appeared in Parti-
san Review, is a masterpiece of feminist
equivocation: “This book is an accomplish-
ment; on the other hand, if one is expecting
something truly splendid and unique like
‘The Origins of Totalitarianism,’ by Hannah
Arendt, to mention another woman, he will
be disappointed.” Hardwick argued that
women lacked worldly experience, and
were thus incapable of matching men’s lit-
erary accomplishments. Someone had to
raise the children, make the meals and
clean the house, and “women are fairly well
adapted to this necessary routine.”
This review was widely praised; Lowellwrote to Peter Taylor that Hardwick had
proved “with all the eloquence of Shelley
that no woman can ever be as good as a
man.” (He was only half-joking, Curtis
notes.) Although Hardwick admired her
husband’s groundbreaking 1959 collection
“Life Studies,” she was more skeptical to-
ward what she considered the excesses of
women confessional poets. She admitted
that she felt a “nearly unaccountable at-
traction and hostility to the work of other
women writers. Envy, competitiveness,
scorn infect my judgment at times.” She
commended Sylvia Plath’s austere poetry,
but characterized her suicide as an act ofdramatic performance art. She infuriated
Maxine Kumin when she called Anne Sex-
ton’s suicide “sostagy.”
Yet Curtis, the author of a biography of
the artist Elaine de Kooning, among other
books, complicates our understanding of
Hardwick’s feminism, such as it was, not-
ing that she was less complacent about
women’s struggles than she appeared.
(“Courage under ill-treatment is a woman’s
theme,” she wrote in 1973.) Hardwick pub-
lished a celebrated essay collection, “Se-duction and Betrayal,” about women writ-
ers, and had strong female literary allies,
not only McCarthy, but also Bishop and
Adrienne Rich, who rallied round her dur-
ing the “Dolphin” controversy, when Low-
ell published parts of her letters without
her permission; and she was devoted to
Sontag, who dedicated an essay collection
to her. Joan Didion wrote that Hardwick
was the only writer she knew “whose per-
ception of what it means to be a woman and
a writer seems in every way authentic, rev-
elatory, entirely original.”
As the years passed, Hardwick grew less
wary of the women’s movement. She con-
ceded in 1985 that her review
of “The Second Sex” had been
shortsighted, and that Beau-
voir’s work had ushered in a
new era for women. And she
understood better than most
the obstacles women faced in
their struggle to gain power,
writing that “women will have
to take it from the present
holders — men.... It will not
come as a gift.”
Curtis treats Hardwick’s
work with respect and admi-
ration, though her detailed,
dutiful summaries of essays
and fiction sometimes grow
tedious, and come at the ex-
pense of historical context and
literary insight. Her discus-
sion of Hardwick’s acclaimed
novel “Sleepless Nights”
quickly dissolves into a list of
blurbs and reviews. If we get
too many details about the
work, we sometimes get too
few about the life. Curtis skims
over Hardwick’s childhood
and adolescence in Kentucky
and her relationship with her
parents, who are shadowy fig-
ures here. Alarming sugges-
tions of sexual assault are
dropped into the narrative and
left to sit, unexplored. Curtis
spends considerable time on
the Hardwick-Lowell mar-
riage, but is nearly silent
about Hardwick’s experience of mother-
hood.
These omissions may be due to a dearth
of primary sources — Hardwick’s daughter,
Harriet Lowell, declined to be interviewed
for the book — but even well-known figures
sometimes get short shrift. I wanted to
know more about Hardwick’s sustaining
friendships with McCarthy, Sontag, Rich,
Bishop and Arendt — legends whose
names appear often, but mostly in outline.
Curtis quotes from letters among these
brilliant women, but does not really probe
the deeper currents of their affections, alli-
ances and rivalries. Still, I finished this
book with a strong sense of Hardwick’s re-
solve and intelligence. Hardwick, who
hated biographies, might have approved. 0Razor Sharp
The cutting mind (and romantic heart) of a revered critic and novelist.
By HEATHER CLARK
A SPLENDID INTELLIGENCE
The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick
By Cathy Curtis
Illustrated. 388 pp. W.W. Norton & Company.
$35.
Elizabeth Hardwick in 1967.PHOTOGRAPH FROM EVERETT/SHUTTERSTOCK
Hardwick’s reviews were always
penetrating, and sometimes
brutal.HEATHER CLARKis the author of “Red Comet:
The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia
Plath,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Pul-
itzer Prize and the National Book Critics
Circle Award for biography.