The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-04-21)

April 21, 2022 35

The Act of Persuasion

Merve Emre

A Splendid Intelligence:

The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Cathy Curtis.

Norton, 388 pp., $35.00

The Uncollected Essays

of Elizabeth Hardwick

edited and with an introduction

by Alex Andriesse.

New York Review Books,

283 pp., $18.95 (paper;

to be published in May)

1.

It is unfair to begin an essay on Eliz-

abeth Hardwick with an instance of

her cruelty; she was one of the fairest

literary critics of her time, as well as

the most elegant and humane. Yet the

faintest hint of certain themes, over-

heard in a novel or play or the chatter

of a cocktail party, could provoke her

to astonishing acts of savagery. These

themes included academics, politi-

cians, youth cults playing at revolu-

tion, biographers, diarists, and, above

all, marriage, with its unremitting and

awful capacity to turn a woman into

a wife. Consider the letter she sent to

her friend Mary McCarthy in 1973, de-

scribing the husbands and wives at a

writers’ residency in Italy:

Strangely torpid, aging academics

from at home and [the] UK; sly,

dead eyes, darting away from an

idea; envious sighs, and as much

intellectual vivacity as a wood-

chuck. And the wives, of all sizes,

yet somehow one size in their

heads! They mutter about typing

His manuscripts, and they have

not made one single demand upon

themselves, whether of mind or

body, and go forth without any ef-

fort or artifice as if they were dogs

adopted by their professore. They

are mostly kindly, but there is this

thorough acceptance of their na-

ture and they seem to have lived in

a world without mirrors.

“It is a perturbation—the laziness of

wives,” Hardwick pronounces, and her

judgment, however unjust, makes vis-

ible, audible, and dramatic the figure

of the wife. Like Frankenstein’s mon-

ster, she is a composite creature, “of

all sizes, yet somehow one size.” Un-

like him, she is sluggish, weak-willed;

destined to travel from one side of the

earth to the other and learn no more,

live no more, than had she stayed at

home. Her resignation, her obtuseness,

her simple, secretarial concern for her

husband’s manuscript—they represent

the essence of all that is undesirable in

intellectual and erotic life. But she is

not without her powers. She wields the

force appropriate to her tyrannized cir-

cumstances, the manipulations of “the

dominant-dependent woman ruling by

disguises and distortions, always on the

alert to restrain the freedom of others,

to create guilt,” Hardwick wrote. She

called it “the revenge of wives.”

The letter to McCarthy is spiteful,

petty, and vain. It is so shocking that

it prompts a question that tends to

arise when reading novels, not letters.

Who is speaking here? No one would

dispute that the letter was written by

Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Lex-

ington, Kentucky, in 1916; fifty-seven

years old; a recent and embittered di-

vorcée; the author of two novels and

dozens of reviews and essays in The

New York Review of Books, which she

had cofounded with Robert Silvers

and Barbara Epstein, among others,

in 1963. Yet the voice that narrates it

is the voice of another, tuned to some

notion of “the ideal self,” as Hardwick

described the distant and fantastic ap-

parition who speaks from within a let-

ter. Here the ideal self is everything the

wife is not, all the qualities summoned,

via negation, by her brutal dismissal.

She is independent, disciplined, self-

assertive, and mirthful; attentive to the

pleasures of artifice yet penetrating in

thought and feeling; passionate about

collective life and its moral responsi-

bilities; suspicious of power and those

who covet it; persuasive in speech, and,

when the occasion demands it, merci-

less in judgment. She is—as Hardwick

was, until her death in 2007—the con-

summate critic.

It is the critic whose outrage courses

through the letter, sneering and jeering

from behind the wives’ backs, whis-

tling at the professors’ scruffy, stubby-

legged dogs to step lively now, to pick

up the pace of their own lives. It is the

critic who holds the mirror up, not just

to the unseeing wives—may the scales

fall from their eyes one day—but to

the larger and more luminous world of

literature. The mirror was the meta-

phor Hardwick reached for most often,

though she never imagined the reflec-

tive quality of criticism, or any other

genre of writing, as symmetrical or

strictly mimetic. It was subversive. The

critic made up her objects anew, drew

lines and cast shadows over brightened

surfaces, revealed the great patterns

submerged below the petty details.

Her eyes and ears, her mind, her heart,

were pledged to the written word, more

interesting in its variety and complexity

than any single person could hope to

be. Here, at last, was a union capable of

withstanding boredom, triviality, fear,

and constraint, in life as in the making

of art.

Push the conceit a little further, and

the responsibilities of the critic are

clear. Her obligation is to her materi-

als—to apprehend them faithfully, to

represent them honestly, and to coax

from fiction’s acting, speaking, and

thinking beings those half-glimpsed

truths of the human condition. Her

resolve is strengthened by a stubborn,

if short-lived, fidelity. Hardwick’s best

essays attend with considerable en-

ergy to a single author, sensing that

other critics paid for breadth, and for

the grand pronouncements about the

state of fiction that often accompanied

it, with a certain shabbiness of thought.

The “we”—invoked by couples and crit-

ics alike, and never more pointedly than

in moments of insecurity—troubled

her with its falseness, its unscrupulous

and overbearing insistence on a single,

shared vision. “I am not a law-giver,” she

liked to assure people. She knew that the

last thing anyone needed was more laws

or people eager to enforce them.

Whether through intuition or ex-

perience or the acuteness of her

sympathetic imagination, Hardwick

understood that the expression of judg-

ment was an act of persuasion, not co-

ercion. The art of criticism turned on

convincing readers that one’s judgment

was not merely a permissible opinion

but a universal truth. The best critics

do not order or whine or throw long,

baffling tantrums. They reason and

qualify and defend. Occasionally, they

do it with such a thoroughly integrated

array of tactics—a splendid particu-

larity of description, metaphor, and

paraphrase; a casual fluency in the

language of genre and form; a knowl-

edge of literary theory, psychoanalysis,

sociology, and history; an ear for irony;

a gift for compassion—and with such

unusual refinement that the reader may

confuse the brisk and polished exercise

of critical reason for the eccentricities

of style or the operations of sensibil-

ity. This has been Hardwick’s fate so

far, to be worshiped as a stylist. It is an

unfortunate fate, in its way, but a fate

she tempted for four decades in The

New York Review, where she glided be-

tween her comically impertinent judg-

ments—“Carlos Baker’s biography of

Ernest Hemingway is bad news,” “Al-

most every idea or opinion in this book

is a banality”—and her very precise

justifications of them.

And her justifications, it must

be stressed, were always historical,

grounding the singular shape of a novel

in the actualities and possibilities that

gave rise to it. Hardwick wrote about

history on various scales—the life of

an author; the decades of the 1940s,

1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; the pre-war

and postwar periods; the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries—“as if history

were a concert program, some long and

some short selections, a few modern

and the steady traditional,” she wrote.

Whatever the length of the selection,

she traced the same Yeatsian arc. A

bourgeois social world that had once

seemed so pleasantly and progressively

arranged, with a logic and a purpose

and a center that could hold, had dis-

sipated into something “formless”: “A

fearful gap, not only in generations,

but in common sense, in ordinary un-

derstanding of the world about us,

has opened up. And how can we face

this, except with dread?” Unpredict-

ability ruled the day. Suffering could

no longer be treated as an obstacle to

be overcome—the painful but well-

proportioned middle of a story—but

the yearly cost of living in a world with-

out accountability. The injured and the

insulted waited, first at the windows of

their dirty lodgings, then in the streets,

for a redemption that refused to come.

This is registered in her criticism

by a split in the history of the novel.

The nineteenth-century realist novel

clutched at the moral and aesthetic

powers of destiny, “the orderly se-

quence whereby the seed brings forth

a crop of its kind,” as Hardwick liked

to quote Silas Marner. Certain acts—

auctioning off your wife and daughter,

sheltering an escaped convict, sleep-

ing with the local pastor, marrying a

mole-speckled pedant with a sexually

magnetic nephew, or, really, marrying

anyone at all—were fateful, marking

a character as profoundly and irrevo-

cably as Odysseus’s scar. These acts

transformed people into the protag-

onists of novels and set the wheels of

plot turning. Mysteries were solved;

misdeeds were punished; honesty and

generosity were rewarded. As she ex-

plained in “Reflections on Fiction”:

Through a natural determinism,

character and action came together,

Elizabeth Hardwick; illustration by Yann Kebbi

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