April 21, 2022 37It is a curiously incorporeal descrip-
tion—no eye or hair color, only meta-
phor and atmosphere—worthless for
the sketch artist but ideal for the judge of
character. Already, the man’s sins have
risen to the surface of his flesh. The be-
ginning and the end of his relationship
with Marian—her vulnerability, his be-
trayal of her, his callousness—flash like
“white lightning, a flash that spread,
and spread again, and stayed,” as James
would have it.
The chilly, abstracted nature of the
description raises the same question
as the letter to McCarthy did. Who is
speaking here? For while Marian is the
one looking, her perception is filtered
through layer after layer of reflection
by the narrator, whose foreknowledge
seals Marian’s fate as tightly as the
tomb of some unfortunate fairy-tale
princess. So effaced, the narrator lin-
gers everywhere, passing judgment:
behind the “alert, trigger-set, dry and
scorched eyes” of Hattie, Marian’s
maid, for whom “the people of the
world were perpetually in a state of
indecent exposure”; behind the mask-
like face of Marian’s brother Albert,
“sharp, lithe, and curious as a glisten-
ing dagger” among the “slow-eyed peo-
ple” at a cockfight; beneath the harsh
glare of Marian’s mother, Lucy, who
belonged to that “special category: a
wife.”
The compression of story through
point of view is useful for a certain
kind of critic, who, short on space
and patience, must assess a writer’s
life and work in three or four pierc-
ing sentences. But this tactic lends
The Ghostly Lover the same airless,
frozen, and cruel quality as the man’s
face. It is as if the characters, modeled
to perfection and glazed by the narra-
tor’s moral judgments, have nowhere
to go and nothing left to do. Here is
a novel that is not only bereft of plot
but fatal to its characters’ vitality.
There is no life in it; no voice, save the
all-knowing voice of the critic, strain-
ing to free herself from the constraints
of fiction.3.
Was it this voice that compelled Philip
Rahv, the editor of Partisan Review, to
believe that Hardwick would make a
good reviewer? The letter he wrote to
her after reading The Ghostly Lover
most likely reached her at the Hotel
Schuyler on West 45th Street, where
she and a friend had rented an apart-
ment after she left Columbia. They
worked odd jobs, scraping together
enough money to live in sleazy glam-
our, surrounded bya nettling thicket of drunks, actors,
gamblers, waiters, people who slept
all day in their graying underwear
and gave off a far from fresh odor
when they dressed in their brown
suits and brown snap-brim hats for
the evening’s inchoate activities.She wrote short stories for little maga-
zines and copy for a “crummy publish-
ing company,” whose books left not a
single mark on her memory. She taught
literature to cloistered debutantes at
a “horrible Southern academy” in a
“gray stone house” on Riverside Drive,
its stately beauty diminished by its
dull, frivolous inhabitants. “But it was
history, wasn’t it?” she wondered, re-calling how she “worried a great deal
about ‘disgrace’: about pregnancy, pro-
miscuity, gossip, mistakes.”
“The Family”—the name that Rahv
and his fellow New York intellectuals
gave themselves—took her in. They as-
signed her Partisan Review’s monthly
Fiction Chronicle and published her
famous and scathing review of Simone
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. They
saved her from the tepid ooze of mid-
dlebrow publishing and the indignities
of teaching high school, waved away
her quaint notions of disgrace and
downfall and fate. From the beginning,
her role in the Family was defined by
what they believed she was destined
never to be: a wife. “There weren’t
many women in it,” she tells Farrell,
who points out that wives did not seem
to be considered part of the Family. In
a voice edged with pride and uncom-
mon prejudice, she recalls the lordly
parties that Rahv threw for the critics
to discuss art and politics. “You didn’t
do anything,” she qualifies. “You just
talked all the time. It was all ideas.
But nobody ever addressed a word to
a wife. They just sat there like stuffed
dummies.”
Farrell wonders why they bothered
coming at all. “Well, you can’t leave
your wife at home,” Hardwick replies,
shocked. “Unless you just get so fed up
she must stay.” And the literary critic
Diana Trilling? “Did you consider her
a wife?” “I still do,” she laughs, a mali-
cious laugh.
There is a deep, almost punitive irony
in the fact that she met her famous hus-
band in the Rahvs’ living room in 1947.
Later, he wrote a poem titled “Man and
Wife,” which seemed at once to com-
memorate and to mourn the occasion.
Farrell recites part of it to her: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.“He wasn’t fainting at my feet. That
was hyperbole,” she remarks, very dry
and a little wistful. She encountered
him casually here and there, then more
fatefully at Yaddo in early 1949, where
he, “handsome, magnetic, rich, wild
with excitement about his powers,” had
deigned to consort with lesser beings.
“What were you doing there?” Farrell
asks, rather stupidly. “Just what we
were all doing up there—just writing!”
she exclaims. But the man was not
doing what they were all doing. He was
helping to whip up an FBI investigation
into Yaddo’s subversive director in-
stead of writing poems. Later, he drove
across the country to harangue friends
and assault policemen outside movie
theaters. She kept him company during
what she calls his “flights”—a word she
utters with muffled tenderness—and
what his psychiatrists would diagnose
as “his struggle with bipolarity.” They
were married that summer, after he
was released from Baldpate Hospital, a
name so absurd even Dickens could not
have dreamed it up.
“My husband,” she calls him. “My
own husband.” It comes as a shock
to realize that, at the time of the firstSpring Books
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