In Praise of Elizabeth Hardwick
By Lauren Groff
There are books that enter your life before
their time; you can acknowledge their beauty and excellence, and yet walk away
unchanged. This was how I first read Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,”
after it was recommended in David Shields’ “Reality Hunger,” a thrilling
manifesto that tries to make the case that our contemporary world is no longer
well represented by realist fiction. While I loved “Sleepless Nights” on that
first read — it is brilliant, brittle and strange, a book unlike any
preconceived notion I had of what a novel could be — I moved on from it easily.
I’ve lived two thousand and some odd days since, read hundreds of other books
and published three of my own, all in a bright, hot landscape of
somewhat-realist fiction.
The middle of the night has become a lonely
stretch of time, especially in the past few years, with vastly increased
anxiety — over climate change and politics and what lies in wait in my little
sons’ future. I normally salve insomnia with reading, but few new books have
felt so revolutionary or so brave as to be able to rock my tired brain to
attention. Only the great ones remain: George Eliot’s infinite wisdom in
“Middlemarch,” Jane Austen’s gracious and low-stakes sublimity, Dante’s “The
Inferno,” which makes our world above seem downright kind. And strangely, of
all the books I have reread to comfort myself, I have turned most often to
Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” not without a little bitter tang of irony
because of its title. The book didn’t dovetail with my heart on the first
reading, but the world has changed around me, and now I find myself hungering
for its particularity, the steady voice of Elizabeth Hardwick a balm to my
aching, vulnerable mind.
Elizabeth Hardwick grew up in Kentucky, a
charming young woman with a dagger of a mind. She left for New York City after
college and took up with the Partisan Review crowd, becoming best friends with
Mary McCarthy and writing for The New York Review of Books from its inception.
“Sleepless Nights,” her third novel, is unambiguously her chef d’oeuvre; it was
published when she was 63, after a career of writing sharp, ingenious pieces of
criticism and after her long marriage to (and divorce from, then reunification
with) the poet Robert Lowell, whose profound psychological struggles and
infidelities and plagiarism of Hardwick’s letters in his books must surely have
tested her strength. As a result, “Sleepless Nights” feels elemental, an
eruption of everything that had been slowly building up over decades. Though there
are books that are distant kin to it — Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” Maggie
Nelson’s “Bluets” — I have read nothing close enough to be called a sibling.
This is rare; a feat of originality.
“Sleepless Nights” brings the profound gift of plotlessness, as
it is organized more like a piece of music than like a traditional novel, with
its long slow build of themes and lives; as such, you can open it to any
chapter and start to read, just as you can play movements from a symphony out
of order without damaging the experience of letting individual movements pour
over you. You can put the novel down at 3 a.m. and toddle off to bed, then pick
it up in a different place a week later, and be carried away by its voice and
description and sheer astonishing linguistic power and flexibility.
In the novel, our protagonist, also named Elizabeth, is seen
only out of the corner of the eye, not as the focus or subject of the book, but
rather as the one who draws an outline of herself through precise and laserlike
observations of the places and the people she has loved. In her review of the
novel at the time of publication, Diane Johnson called it a “work of negative
capability.” It is also a vision of a radical new kind of writing, one suited
to a woman’s body and language and experience outside of the primarily
masculine narrative tropes of the past.
It slowly occurs to the reader that Hardwick
is developing her own sharp vision of a female narrative mode in her work:
fragmentary, allusive, shifting in its layers of time, sharp as a Fury’s whip.
Most of the subjects of her memories are women: Elizabeth’s Kentuckian mother
who’d had nine children, with her “round, soft curves, her hair twisted into
limp curls at the temples, her weight on the stepladder washing windows, her
roasts and potatoes and fat yeast rolls; and her patient breathing in the back
room as she lay sleeping in a lumpy old feather bed.” From New York City of the
1940s, Billie Holiday walks seductively into the text, “glittering, somber and
solitary,” a woman singing her own oracular doom. There is a loyal, ravaged
Irish housekeeper in Boston named Josette, whose “grayness was filled with
light and it is an embarrassment to speak of one so good.”
From “Sleepless Nights,” I have moved on to
other Hardwick books, particularly to her essays, which never fail to dazzle
with their lightning-bolt insights and cool clarity. Her book “Seduction and
Betrayal” is an early feminist consideration of literary history, a passionate
and conflicted and exhilarating tour through the mind of a critic who seems to
know absolutely everything. Hardwick’s own great passion was reading: in her
Paris Review interview, she said that “in reading certain works, not all works,
I do sometimes enter a sort of hallucinatory state and I think I see
undercurrents and light in dark places about the imagined emotions and
actions.”
Darryl Pinckney writes gorgeously of his friend, saying that
“She believed in the masterpiece and defined a genius as someone who cannot be
imitated but who somehow leaves the literary landscaped changed,” and that “she
thought a flawed work often had more to teach us,” than a perfect one does.
Elizabeth Hardwick has become a friend,
although she died before I could meet her. I delight in her wit and
intelligence, and find her criminally underappreciated by bookish people,
perhaps because she is subtle, and because her light beams outward into the
world, not back to illuminate herself. She shows us the many ways of being a
human, if we could only look harder and love more deeply all that we’re seeing.
There is such sympathy in Hardwick’s fleeting glances; it feels
that each character, writer, or book she considers is held, for a moment, in
her generous yet unsparing palm. Her sympathy extends all the way to the
exhausted reader, the heartbroken reader, the reader who, like Bartleby, would
prefer not to engage with the world, the reader who is too frightened or
anxious or weary or sick; this reader too is carried along with Hardwick’s fine
intelligence. With Elizabeth Hardwick as a guide, for a minute or for a long
white night, one can almost forget the darkness pressing in.
Elizabeth Hardwick: A Starter Kit
‘The Collected Essays
of Elizabeth Hardwick’
The New York Review of Books did us a
tremendous favor by releasing the bulk of Hardwick’s brilliant essays in one
volume, with an introduction by her friend Darryl Pinckney. It’s moving to see
such a keen and generous brain focus on writers like Henry James, Katherine
Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy and Robert Frost. Even when Hardwick enrages (as
with her essay on Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”), she’s thrilling.
‘Seduction and
Betrayal’
“The Collected Essays,” however, don’t contain
the excellent essays in this collection on women and literature. I find
Hardwick especially fine on Ibsen’s heroines.
‘The New York Stories
of Elizabeth Hardwick’
The most successful stories in this collection
have the verve, leapfrogging thought and acidity of Hardwick’s best essays.
‘The Ghostly Lover’
and ‘The Simple Truth’
These two are early novels, before Elizabeth Hardwick hit her
stride and created the devastating voice of her later work. They’re
well-executed, but probably best saved for the hard-core Hardwick completists
of the world.
Lauren Groff is the author of the novels “Fates and Furies” and
“Florida.”
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