38 The New York Reviewinterview, her husband, the poet Rob-
ert Lowell, had been dead for only
a month, and that at the time of his
death, he had not been her husband
for five years. Meekly, Farrell tells her
he thinks she was very brave to “take
on Lowell” after he had been released
from the hospital. Her words are per-
fectly deflating. “Well, he got over it,”
she says. Farrell does not seem to have
the courage to contradict her. “A lot
of other people have been willing to
forbear also,” she laughs, trying to res-
cue herself from the humiliation of his
compliment by crushing it with the hu-
miliation of her husband’s affairs.Had Hardwick derailed the plot of
her life by becoming a wife? Well, not
exactly; she merely had diverted it onto
another track, a rickety and unfinished
one. She and Lowell spent the first
three years of their marriage wheeling
around Europe, seeking a reason for
their self-imposed exile. The essays in
Partisan Review that bear the marks
of these years preserve the fears and
the possibilities of tearing away from
one’s place of origin—the freedom of
solitude, the guilt of indolence, the in-
tense, irreconcilable pull of both the
new and the familiar. “The expatriate
sometimes suffers painfully from the
dread of losing touch with the world
he has left but towards which he looks
back... with all the tart ambivalence of
the injured lover,” she wrote in “Liv-
ing in Italy.” “It is, after all, the fickle,
abandoned country for which the exile
writes his books.” And the sense of his-
tory in Europe was deeper, more sober-
ing, than what America had to offer. In
Vienna, the opera house rose like a
jewel box amid the rubble of the war. In
Amsterdam, the air was cold and sor-
rowful, but the life they lived, with little
money and endless conversation about
the Old Masters, was “marvelous.” (In
the background—his flights.)
When they returned to America in
1953, it was without settling into it.
Boston, where they lived on and off
until 1960, “isn’t particularly good
for women,” she informs Farrell, who
suggests that her description of the
city (in her 1959 essay “Boston”) as
“wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of
nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous
oils, provincial, self-esteeming” may
have offended Bostonians. “Only fools
identify themselves with a place,” she
laughs. “Who cares?” They spent a
year in Iowa City, where her husband
taught at the esteemed writing work-
shop. Of the essays she started drafting
there, it is “George Eliot’s Husband”
that contains the most optimistic hints
of the connubial life she imagined.
Eliot and her husband wereinconceivable as anything except
what they were, two writers, bril-
liant and utterly literary. They
led the literary life from morning
to midnight, working, reading,
correcting proofs, traveling, en-
tertaining, receiving and writing
letters, planning literary projects,
worrying, doubting their pow-
ers, experiencing a delicious hy-
pochondria. The Brownings, the
Webbs, the Garnetts, the Carlyles,
Leonard and Virginia Woolf,
Middleton Murray and Kather-
ine Mansfield—the literary cou-
ple is a peculiar English domestic
manufacture, useful no doubt ina country with difficult winters.
Before the bright fire at tea-time,
we can see these high-strung men
and women clinging together, their
inky fingers touching.Might the list of couples end one day
with “the Lowells”? The university
made this fantasy hard to sustain, de-
spite its difficult winters and her bad
nerves. “I was present as the wife of a
teacher,” she recalled in the bitter af-
terword to her second novel, The Sim-
ple Truth (1955), which she wrote when
she could not get a job teaching because
the university refused to hire wives,
she claimed. (In the background—his
flights. A return to Boston. A move to
New York.)
The Simple Truth prolonged the
Jamesian spell that had gripped her
since her college years, but in a pop-
ular genre: the true- crime novel, a
useful vessel for a twentieth-century
writer thirsting for the eventfulness of
nineteenth-century sensational fiction.
“There is beauty to be torn out of the
event, the suicide, the murder case, the
prize fight,” she later wrote in “Grub
Street: New York.” “Real life is pre-
sented as if it were fiction. The con-
creteness of fact is made suggestive,
shadowy, symbolical.” While the writ-
ers attracted to true crime—Norman
Mailer, Truman Capote, William Sty-
ron—planted themselves at the center
of the excitement, as an obstinate and
“vividly experiencing ‘I,’” she stayed in
the shadows of the third person in The
Simple Truth.
The book’s murder trial was based
on one she followed closely during
her time in Iowa. It comes into focus
through the affable eyes of Joseph
Parks, a writer who haunts the court-
house while his wife, Doris, bleaches
the kitchen, puzzling “over the way
to be both a housewife and a ‘free
person.’” With the impressionability
and the heartlessness of youth, they
create a fiction out of the unrequited
love the murderer, Rudy Peck, nursed
for his victim, Betty Jane Henderson.
But when Joseph meets Anita, a shy,
middle- aged, professor’s wife, spouting
a “loose and generalized Freudianism”
in the visitor’s gallery, she becomes
his confidante and the analyst of his
fictions.
Fiction and its interpretation tempt
Joe away from the uncertainty, the
poverty, and the banality of his life into
snobbish speculations about intention
and consciousness, about psychological
and sociological explanations for why
human beings hurt one another. Doris,
hearing her husband on the phone to
Anita, chooses simply to ignore it all:
she “put another cigarette in her black-
and-white holder. A single cool tear
clung pleasantly to her eyelashes.” This
single cool tear is a sphere of beau-
tiful unfeeling. In its reflection lurks
the danger of transforming real people
into fictional characters and putting
them through the paces of scandal. It
makes them easy to weep over and easy
to forget.
In her essays, Hardwick reproved
and indulged the temptation to fiction-
alize. How could she help it? Between
the person and the page lies the prism
of fiction, always. No genre can avoid
it. Even criticism, if it is to speak of
the lives and works of the dead, must
bring the dead to life—the words of the
past distilled in the words of the pres-ent. The only reprieve comes from re-
treating into generalities, speaking of
archetypes and myths rather than indi-
viduals. Through the 1950s and 1960s,
she wrote of “the American woman as
snow-queen” and “the Turks, with their
scarecrows in colored rags doing all the
work in the fields.” Dylan Thomas was
not a person but “the charming young
man of great gifts, wilfully going down
to ruin. He was Hart Crane, Poe, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, the stuff of which his-
tory is made.” Robert Frost “was his
own stereotype.”
The current ran in the opposite
direction too; writing about fiction
presented her with a repository of char-
acters and tropes to help make sense of
reality, to yoke the past to the present.
Her pieces on the obliterated hopes of
the civil rights movement, dispatches
from Selma and Memphis, from Chi-
cago and Los Angeles, remain in thrall
to novels. This gives them a distant, un-
real quality, a sense that they have been
observed by a presence hovering high
above the action rather than a reporter
with her feet on the ground. Martin
Luther King Jr.’s solitary evangelism
recalls Adam Bede, when “Dinah
preaches that Jesus came down from
Heaven to tell the good news about
God to the poor.” The scorched south-
ern countrysideinevitably brings to mind flamboy-
ant adjectives and images from
Faulkner. Immemorial, doomed
streets, policed by the Snopeses
and Peter Grimms, alleys worn
thin in the sleepless pursuit of a
thousand Joe Christmases.Neither “the Southern Negroes” nor
“the white people” are made of flesh
and blood, but ideas and symbols; it
is startling to realize that not a single
proper name, except for those of the
heroes and the villains, appears in
these essays.
(In the background—a daughter,
Harriet, born in 1957, whose “smiles
were, in Sylvia Plath’s phrase, ‘found
money,’” and whose privacy Hardwick
guarded with ferocious love. A summer
home in Castine, Maine, “where man
and nature are one, or seem to be,” she
wrote, perplexed by the state’s immu-
nity to change. And his flights, leaving
her to raise the child by herself for long
stretches of time.)4.
How does marriage matter for criti-
cism? This is an embarrassing question.
It is, however, the correct one to ask
of Hardwick’s writing in the 1970s.
What does it mean to be married for a
long time, for twenty or thirty or forty
years? Nothing, perhaps. “You’re never
really a married person,” she informs
Farrell. Anyone who claims to be one
is pretending, for if marriage teaches
you anything, it is how “alone one al-
ways is,” she says. “This is just common
experience.” A person, a wife, does not
need to suffer what Hardwick suffered
to know it.
But betrayal added injury to injury.
She is reticent when Farrell brings up
the end of her marriage. The record of
it is already public, in the poems her
husband wrote about leaving her for a
woman he met while on a fellowship at
Oxford, altering and embedding snip-
pets from the letters she sent him whilehe was having the affair.^2 The letters
trace a too- familiar plot: the decep-
tion and devastation of the wife. He
praises the loveliness of the country-
side, pretending that he is tucked away
among the dreaming spires, when he
plays house with his mistress in some
charming London square. Hardwick is
his housekeeper, his bookkeeper, his
child-minder, his archivist, his frantic
and destitute secretary. “I have been
absolutely overwhelmed with all this,”
she writes, “the taxes, insurances,
houses, studies, papers, schools orga-
nized, mail answered, things turned
down.” Over her side of the correspon-
dence, which, in her husband’s words,
“veers from frantic affection to frantic
abuse,” there hangs a blackened cloud
of dramatic irony. The reader of the
letters is forced into the wrenching po-
sition of the friend who knows before
the wife does.
But the plot has a twist, or maybe
another change of track: the appear-
ance of the critic, the possessor of an
achieved, enjoyed, and triumphant life.
Until that point, “I wasn’t very con-
scious of Elizabeth Hardwick,” she
tells Farrell. “It’s been a kind of an
accumulation of a little bit of reputa-
tion”; “I didn’t write so terribly much.”
Everyone is vulnerable to projection,
and I cannot help thinking that, in her
letter to McCarthy, she unleashed the
voice of the critic in all its severity on
the wife she had been. In doing so, she
revealed the strange structural corre-
spondence between the critic and the
mistress; to their great relief, they are
both not the wife. They gain their daz-
zle from her blindness, their verve from
her complacency.
Most of all, the freedom they repre-
sent—the freedom to create anew, to
judge without obligation—is sweetened
by the debt the wife extracts. “This is
the unspoken contract of a wife and her
works,” Hardwick wrote. “In the long
run wives are to be paid in a peculiar
coin—consideration for their feelings.”
Yet the true tragedy of the wife was not
her betrayal by her husband but her
failure to create for herself an endur-
ing structure, a form, that assisted and
protected her. “In the end what strikes
one as the greatest personal loss,” she
observed of the life of Jane Carlyle,
among others, “is that the work could
not truly build for the women a bul-
wark against the sufferings of neglect
and the humiliations of lovelessness.”
If, in marriage, there is a triangle that
matters for criticism, it is the shifting
allegiances among the wife, the critic,
and the mistress. This is the immanent
logic (and sometimes the theme) of
much of the criticism Hardwick wrote
in the 1970s: “Sue and Arabella,”
“Sense of the Present,” “Domestic
Manners,” “Wives and Mistresses,” the
essays gathered in Seduction and Be-
trayal, the occasional pieces on women
for Mademoiselle and Vog u e. They are
not personal essays. She never strayed
from her anti-confessional ethic, never
abandoned her belief in reticence or
her contempt for writers who made art
by betraying the secrets of those they
had loved.(^2) For more on that correspondence,
see Langdon Hammer’s review in
these pages of The Dolphin Letters,
1970 –1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Rob-
ert Lowell, and Their Circle, edited
by Saskia Hamilton, December 19,
2019.
Emre 35 39 .indd 38 3 / 23 / 22 4 : 55 PM