36 The New York Reviewthe intermingling of stories and
destinies, of cause and effect, of
crime and punishment, gave us
most of the great novels of the En-
glish and European tradition. En-
vironment, moral choice, defects
of character, defaults of luck; these
could be depended upon to lead to
some plausible resolution.Modern fiction did not simply break
this promise; it flaunted its betrayal
of the pact between history and nar-
rative. Its protagonists—exiles, ref-
ugees, paranoiacs, picaros, queers,
“divorcées, models, whores”—violated
the pledge to be faithful to their for-
mer selves. The unsettling dramas of
Henrik Ibsen and the “clear, chilly”
monuments of Henry James, her two
perpetually difficult, perpetually in-
teresting loves, laid bare what the re-
alist novel had repressed: the fractured
nature of the self and its capacity for
reinvention; the anxiety, fatigue, and
loneliness compelled by the absence
of origins and endings; the irony that
made the fragility and the emptiness
of the world bearable; and the realiza-
tion, expressed with beautiful melan-
choly by Georg Lukács, that the soul
was “wider and larger than the desti-
nies which life has to offer it.” Or as
Hardwick summed it up in one of her
essays, “The self is insatiable.”
The novelist could valorize this in-
satiability as freedom or lament it as
homelessness. Whichever way she
chose to take it, it was how life was lived
today, beyond the reach of a strange or
unique destiny. The modern novel had
to display “the mirror-image of a world
gone out of joint,” Lukács wrote. Its
art was an art of bewildering and irre-
deemable loss; an art of incongruity,
pieced together from the innumerable
shards and fragments of consciousness.
In the novel’s once- silvered and now
blistering glass, the act of thinking—
merely thinking—about the past and
its shattered relation to the present was
both its event and its mystery. “It was
June,” announces the narrator of Vir-
ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, before
showing us Clarissa Dalloway in her
room, searching the mirror for “her
self” and finding a false, glittering idol,
a reflection whose life belongs only to
the present, to this fleeting moment,
“pointed; dart-like; definite.” The lines
chime through the opening sentences
of Hardwick’s final novel, her master-
piece, Sleepless Nights (1979): “It is
June. This is what I have decided to do
with my life just now. I will do this work
of transformed and even distorted
memory and lead this life, the one I am
leading today.”2.
What about her past? Her revisions
and reinventions? Cathy Curtis’s new
biography, A Splendid Intelligence:
The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick, be-
gins with an eyebrow-raising author’s
note. “This biography of Elizabeth
Hardwick includes only as much in-
formation about her famous hus-
band,” Curtis writes, “as is necessary
to tell the story of her life.” This is an
exhilarating promise, carrying with
it a whiff of naughtiness, of feminist
insubordination. Perhaps he will be
glimpsed aslant, in cutting asides and
parentheticals, or better yet, in the
footnotes. “The famous carry aboutwith them a great weight of patriar-
chal baggage—the footnotes of their
lives,” begins Hardwick’s essay “Wives
and Mistresses.” Imagine a biographer
wily enough to insist on misreading
this statement, treating the famous
one as the wife, and her husband as her
weighty patriarchal baggage!
Yet Curtis disappoints immediately,
with the appearance on the next page
of a kind of thesis statement, blunt, ear-
nest, and dutiful:In this first biography of Elizabeth
Hardwick, I seek to go beyond the
glimpses that a famously private
person revealed in her published
writing to present a portrait of an
exceptional woman who emerged
from a long, troubled marriage
with the clarity and wisdom that il-
luminate her brilliant novel Sleep-
less Nights.The book that follows arranges the
names, dates, and places of Hard-
wick’s life with a listless and clumsy
workmanship; quotes her writing only
to measure its likeness to her life; and
is overwhelmingly, even slavishly, de-
voted to the vexatious, humiliating,
and pitiable behavior of her famous
husband. One wonders why Curtis
chose a subject whose favorite topic
was the myriad failures of biogra-
phy. Why show such indifference to
an essayist who hands reviewers the
most lacerating sentences with which
to flog biographers for their sins? For
instance: “Biographies inevitably re-
cord the demeaning moments of mal-
ice and decline and have the effect
of imprinting them upon the ninety
years.” Or: “There is no doubt that
this is ‘the material.’ But it is not an
existence.”The life, the existence, is best gleaned
by reading her work and listening to
the six extraordinary interviews Hard-
wick gave to David Farrell at the
University of Kentucky from 1977 to1980.^1 Here is the ghost of the woman
herself: the rich and disarming drawl,
the frank bursts of laughter, the rev-
erence with which she speaks of Eliot,
Hardy, James, and Mann. Her voice is
arresting, in part because the style of
speech does not and could not match
the style of her writing. Yet this is
what Farrell wants from her—a per-
formance whose poetry and romance
rival those of the page, with plots and
subplots and characters splashed with
local color—and she amuses herself at
his expense, with irony and forbear-
ance. Confronting his questions, at
times intelligent, at times obtuse, she
creates and withholds herself. Could
she describe what her parents looked
like? “They looked just like other peo-
ple.” What kind of clothes did they
wear? “They wore ordinary clothes.”
She thinks a moment and adds that her
father “wore those kind of shoes that
lace up.”
He retreats, chastened. Now it will
cost her nothing to be courteous and
to describe her childhood in Lexing-
ton with a little flair. She tells him that
her father, Eugene, was a spirited man,
handsome, gregarious, and exception-
ally musical, a fine baritone-tenor who
sang parlor songs when he walked to
the fire station to play pinochle. Her
weary, industrious mother, Mary, pre-
ferred the simple beauty of hymns,
and on Sundays, if there weren’t floors
that needed sweeping or windows
that needed washing or children who
needed tending, she would take all
eleven of them to sing in the Presbyte-
rian choir.
“Lizzie,” as they called her, was the
eighth. She was raised to be thrifty
and self-sufficient, it being her moth-
er’s opinion that the two worst things
a woman could do were go into debt
and get married. The Hardwick girls
were supposed to wear patched dresses
and wait for the July sales on Main
Street to buy new things. They were
supposed to go to college and become
schoolteachers. A poor, pragmatic up-
bringing is not ideal for the biographer
who wants to put her young subject in
touch with “glamour, fantasy, and illicit
pleasure”—Curtis’s description of fin-
de-siècle downtown Lexington—but
in the case of Hardwick, the drama
seemed to emanate from within, from
an elemental restlessness, a vigor, and a
desire for sovereignty over her intellect
and emotion, over money and every-
thing it determined.
She was still living at home when
she enrolled at the University of Ken-
tucky in 1934. There was something as
pure as water and utterly unabashed in
her love of literature; she recalls, over
forty years later, “the thrill of fresh-
man English.” And it was, indeed, a
thrilling moment in literary studies in
America. New Criticism had diffused
a strange, excitable air into Kentucky’s
English Department. “T. S. Eliot had
just made the seventeenth century sort
of the thing,” she twangs. John Crowe
Ransom, “a very elegant, refined, very
complex man,” had come to Lexing-
ton to teach summer classes to high
school English teachers. The writers
she adored, the left-wing, anti- Stalinist
critics of the Partisan Review, were
leading the revival of interest in James
and introducing readers to Kafka, res-
cuing American literary culture from
the clutches of a feeble and decaying
regionalism. The first play she remem-
bered seeing, the “first knockout blow”
delivered by art, was Ibsen’s Ghosts
on a trip to Cincinnati during college.
In this southern landscape, a seed was
planted whose shoots would be “flow-
ering to their fate,” she wrote of her
adolescence. Looking back, she could
see the beginnings of her disdain for
provinciality, her fascination with “the
history of now,” and her sense that lit-
erature was, in some oblique way, part
of that history, but also a liberation
from it.
In her essays on Kentucky these
years have a sort of lost and squalid
beauty to them, the sadness that comes
from measuring the distance between
now and then. What does it mean to
be from Kentucky? What part of her
has endured? “What can I answer ex-
cept to say that I have been, according
to my limits, always skeptical,” she
writes, in a piece included in Uncol-
lected Essays, a new volume of her
criticism. Kentucky was horse races
and tobacco farms and unblended
whiskey:It was Gratz Park and the Pub-
lic Library, Morrison Chapel at
Transylvania College, the JohnHunt Morgan House, Dr. Buck-
ner’s house, called Rose Hill, and
surviving amidst the rusty oilcans
of a filling station, backed by the
peeling frames of poor people, a
fine old garden facing an adjoin-
ing rectangle of old pipes, broken
clothesline, Coke bottles, and the
debris of hope—those unchurning
washing machines, discarded toilet
bowls, rusting tire rims.The avarice with which the sentence
hoards these details is heightened by
their uselessness; they are worth noth-
ing to anyone, now. This salvage yard
of dreams—above all, the dream of a
comfortable life for the poor people
of the South—holds the clutter of her
past, the autobiography of her people.
But she is no longer the teenage girl
who stopped at the filling station on her
walk home. That girl can only be seen
across a great distance, in the lovely
decrepitude of her people’s old things.
“The possessor must at last come to
an end,” she wrote, “while the things
live on in the mute, appealing obdu-
racy of the inanimate. The decline of
one and the endurance of the other
is plot.”The plot of her life would shift the
story from the deprivations of many—
this, after all, is only backdrop—to the
fortunes of one. In college, she prided
herself on the distance she kept from
group life and its clannish sentiments.
She hated sororities, loathed student
journalism, found the very idea of ath-
letics ludicrous. “What did you do?”
Farrell pleads, sounding irritated and
demoralized by her contempt for extra-
curricular activities. “I talked. I drank,”
she cackles. “I drank a lot of whis-
key.” When the war began, she rode
the Greyhound to New York to start a
graduate degree in English literature
at Columbia. She found the professors
appallingly “conventional”—dried lit-
tle sticks of men who wouldn’t lift a fin-
ger to help place a woman in a tolerable
professorship in a tolerable city. “There
wasn’t much point in getting a Ph.D.,”
she says, “because women did not get
very good jobs.” Twice she left the city
to go back to Lexington for the sum-
mer, and on her second visit she was so
determined to avoid studying for her
general exams that she wrote a novel
instead. She threw it away—“It wasn’t
very good,” she says—then wrote an-
other, The Ghostly Lover, which was
published in 1945.
The Ghostly Lover is artful and un-
pleasant, claustrophobic, and more
gratifying to think about than pleasur-
able to read. It marks the beginning of
Ha rdw ick’s ta lent as a n i nti mate, nea rly
metaphysical portraitist. Here, for in-
stance, is sixteen-year-old Marian Cole-
man by her porch in Kentucky—“Of
course that’s me,” Hardwick tells Far-
rell—looking at the older man who will
seduce her:She looked squarely at his face.
It was relaxed and had fallen into
its purest shape. The face was like
that of a baby who had grown into
full manhood with a beard and
lines, but still retained the child’s
lack of pain and indecision. It was
a face of the present, a startling
face that seemed to have reached
some ultimate static stage. It was
remotely arrogant and cruel.(^1) The interviews can be found at the web-
site of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral
History at the University of Kentucky
Libraries, kentuckyoralhistory.org.
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