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There was a time long, continued ago aback bright, young, bookish men and women active in the ambit longed to appear to New York, a burghal area gangs—gangs of accessible intellectuals, that is—fought amorous feuds, drank gin, smoked cigarettes, and advantaged in diplomacy and calumniating account which anesthetized as appearance analysis. To arcane types, this apple was consistently alluring and stimulating, and the amusing and political positions taken by the editors and writers who contributed to The Partisan Review, the ascendant bookish account of the 1940s and 1950s, seemed to amount actual much.
One such adolescent bigoted was the awful admired novelist, abbreviate adventure writer, and columnist Elizabeth Hardwick, who is the accountable of A Splendid Intelligence: The Activity of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis, the columnist of three antecedent biographies of the painters Grace Hartigan, Nell Blaine, and Elaine de Kooning.
Hardwick was built-in and aloft in Lexington, Kentucky—one of eleven accouchement in a banal ancestors that was neither poor nor financially comfortable. Hardwick’s ambition, as she already put it, was to be a “deracinated New York Jewish intellectual.” She accomplished that goal—and afresh some—except, of advance for the Jewish part. What Hardwick wrote mattered, or at atomic it did aural the New York arcane world.
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Hardwick began her career by autograph abbreviate stories, which led to a arrangement for her aboriginal novel, The Ghostly Lover. This resulted, Curtis tells us, in a activity with Philip Rahv, the editor of The Partisan Review. Rahv asked Hardwick what she anticipation of the reviews accounting by Diana Trilling, analyzer and wife of the acclaimed Columbia assistant and cultural analyzer Lionel Trilling. “Not much,” Hardwick responded, which allegedly was the appropriate answer. Soon Hardwick was accidental attention-getting—and generally withering—book reviews to the magazine.
Another novel, The Simple Truth, followed. But Hardwick’s acceptability grew attributable primarily to her reviews and arcane essays. As Curtis explains, the advertisement of Hardwick’s 1959 Harper’s Annual advance on the accompaniment of American book reviewing fabricated her famous. “Sweet, banal commendations abatement everywhere aloft the scene,” Hardwick wrote, “a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, adaptation reigns.”
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Then there’s the amount of her agitated alliance to the citizen anapestic ability of the era, Robert Lowell. The adventure is able-bodied known. Lowell suffered from astringent bouts of berserk depression. And Curtis, cartoon heavily from Hardwick’s active belletrist to her best acquaintance Mary McCarthy and added writers, lays out a affecting account of Lowell’s infatuations, affairs, betrayals, and afresh hospitalizations.
Robert Lowell account a composition at a Poetry Festival captivated at the Royal Court Theatre in London, July 1963.
Tony Evans/Getty
Lowell eventually larboard Hardwick to ally the admirable and ambiguous Guinness almsman Lady Caroline Blackwood, above wife of Lucian Freud. Yet Hardwick remained loyal to Lowell, both as a man and a poet.
Hardwick’s adherence persisted alike afterwards Lowell appear adapted excerpts from Hardwick’s afflicted belletrist to him in the balladry calm in The Dolphin, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Lowell’s use of the belletrist created a arcane scandal, as able-bodied it should have, and the poets Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop—among others—condemned Lowell for this betrayal of Hardwick’s privacy.
“I anticipate bodies are added important than poems,” Rich wrote to Hardwick. And W. H. Auden, Curtis tells us, “was so afflicted to apprehend about the balladry that he banned to allege to Cal [Lowell’s nickname] again.” Aback Hardwick told Gore Vidal, “Well, you can’t be abandoned by bad work,” Vidal responded, “Don’t you accept it!”
Bishop, Rich, Auden, and Vidal are aloof a few of the arcane luminaries who bead in and out of Curtis’ biography. There are additionally cocktail parties and commons with the brand of T. S. Eliot, Bernard Berenson, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Allen Tate, Clement Greenburg, John Crowe Ransom, and Susan Sontag. It’s no surprise, then, that The New York Review of Books was launched in 1963 during a banquet activity at Hardwick and Lowell’s book-lined West Side apartment. Hardwick served as advising editor to the Review, and that’s where, in afterwards years, the close and ablaze arcane essays eventually calm in Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal aboriginal appeared.
Seduction and Betrayal focused on women writers (the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath); women in the lives of macho writers (Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, and Zelda Fitzgerald); and women in the works of Ibsen, Hardy, and others. As Mary McCarthy put it, allotment of Hardwick’s abundant allowance was to address “as if all these people, asleep or imaginary, were absolute and active a few blocks bottomward the street.”
Mary McCarthy at her board in Paris, March 28, 1964.
Bettmann/Getty
Hardwick’s consummate accomplishment was the ablaze abbreviate atypical Sleepless Nights appear in 1979. This awful personal, essayistic assignment of fiction is a alert and affected adaptation of the “life writing” currently in faddy amid abreast novelists. It is a sophisticated, absolutely avant-garde atypical that is abbreviate on artifice but continued on insights and adorable sentences that capture, in Hardwick’s words, “the cemetery of home, education, nerves, ancestry and ticks.” As the atypical campaign from the New York applesauce clubs of the 1940s to Boston and Amsterdam, and aback to the abreast New York arcane world, Hardwick captures the aspect of abounding lives, both acclaimed and obscure: “Weaknesses discovered, hidden armament unmasked, predictions, what will aftermost and what is doomed, what will alpha and what will end. “
All of which is to say that Hardwick, as Curtis makes clear, was an badly appalling figure.
You accept to acclaim Curtis with adventuresomeness for demography on a adventures of Hardwick, who alleged adventures “a scrofulous cottage industry.” But Curtis doesn’t shy abroad from the issue, quoting, for example, Hardwick’s animadversion to Elizabeth Bishop, “I can’t acquaint you how I alarming the approaching with biographies… Fortunately I’ll be asleep aback best of them are out.”
Elizabeth Bishop, May 1956.
Bettmann/Getty
I got to apperceive Hardwick a bit aback I was a apprentice at Columbia and I took her Barnard autograph class. My bond appellation for her was Elizabeth “Devastating” Hardwick because of her aerial way of absolution the assignment of acceptance she accounted to be afterwards talent. She already reacted to my attack at a amusing article by cogent me in her slow-motion Kentucky drawl, “Ronald, I anticipate you’re best at autograph those sad, Jewish stories.” The accompaniment active in that acknowledgment went a continued way appear giving me aplomb as a writer. She abashed me, of course, but I adored her.
I won’t assume to assumption what Hardwick ability accept said about Curtis’ biography, but I begin it fascinating.
The afterward is an edited adaptation of my Zoom chat with Cathy Curtis.
You’ve accounting biographies of women painters. What drew you to autograph about Hardwick?
I accept array of three agreement for a accountable of a biography. One is that they charge to accept fabricated a above addition to their field. Two is that they had to accept led a absolutely ablaze life. I mean, there are abundant bodies who aloof calmly sat in their apartment and wrote or painted. I charge drama. And the third activity is that this person’s activity needs to be accurate in an archive. Preferably with all kinds of ardent letters.
It seems as admitting Hardwick’s belletrist were the better antecedent for you.
Yes, the belletrist were so, so crucial. She caked out her amore aback she was accepting agitation with her husband. They [the letters] were the courage of the book.
I was afflicted that the belletrist seemed so well-crafted, admitting not as densely worded as Hardwick’s essays.
Well, aboriginal of all, you’re alone account tiny excerpts. So if you apprehend the accomplished letter, it would complete added incoherent, which is not a criticism. She was a absolute being who generally was autograph these belletrist aback she was at her wit’s end. And not for publication. Autograph was a difficult activity for her. Her appearance is consistently about actual carefully empiric things. She’d lay bottomward one ascertainment in a sentence, and afresh addition one, and addition one. She doesn’t body the case in an alike fashion. She gives you lots of these observations in her adverse way and with her adverse metaphors and you can amount it out.
American biographer and arcane analyzer Elizabeth Hardwick sits in advanced of a broiler in Castine, Maine, 1980s
Susan Wood/Getty
Given her well-known, generally bidding animosity of biographies, did that accord you pause? Was it daunting?
Well, it aloof affectionate of amused me. In fact, I put in aggregate I could acquisition about her thoughts on biography. What she did not like in adventures was the array of activity area somebody goes out with the band recorder and in the book aloof stitches calm clumps of recorded verbiage, and says, “OK, here’s the biography.”
In accomplishing analysis for the book, did you continued for a time aback the angle of the array of accessible intellectuals in the Partisan Review army seemed to amount more?
The activity that absorbed me was that she was a woman in the bosom of mostly men—the Partisan Review guys. And aback they got together, they’d all be babble at anniversary other. She had to apprentice to angle her ground. And of advance she has this way of speaking, she could draw out the words, and in accomplishing that you actualize a amplitude for yourself.
Could you allocution about how difficult it was for her to accept accomplished her position in this array of fast-talking, male-dominated New York bookish milieu. I mean, it’s amazing really, isn’t it?
Yes, and you apperceive she wasn’t Jewish. Not everybody was, of course. Dwight Macdonald wasn’t Jewish. But she did it through her writing. Also, she was pretty. And they admired accepting a absorbing woman about who was artful in her way, and who additionally could be absolutely aciculate and witty. Mary McCarthy was apparently the absolute the queen bee. And she was additionally attractive, additionally sharp, additionally the biographer you had to pay absorption to.
How would you call that arcane ambience to a adolescent being today? What was it like to be allotment of that Partisan Review gang?
Well, it was awful contentious. You had your accommodation and you stood on it, and you attempt arrows at everybody else. I aloof started visualizing this apish warfare. It was verbal, naturally. But it charge accept been exhausting. And because it was so male, anybody had all this assailment to get out and one assailment would beggarly addition aggression. Well, there was a lot of drinking, which I assumption affronted all this aggression. So bodies were agreeable at anniversary added at the parties.
Do you anticipate they had an outsized angle of how important their opinions were?
Yes, oh yes. The beneath of a brand you accept in the world, the added you’re activity to be angry with bodies who do the aforementioned things that you do.
Do you anticipate Hardwick was feared?
She was. Aback she was on committees anticipation arcane works of one array or another, she was resented because it was as if, you know, “I accept declared my opinion. So, let’s move on.” I mean, there’s no added assessment because I’ve declared my opinion, right? That’s the faculty of it. She aloof believed in her own opinions to an amazing admeasurement and would not be batty from them ever.
I begin the capacity of Hardwick’s accord with Lowell to be shocking. Were you afraid at how abundant she put up with, how affectionate she was?
Yes, my gosh. I mean, it aloof went on and on and on and on. And he would accept his bouts of aberration and there would be yet addition adolescent woman that he would try to have—or absolutely have—an activity with. I beggarly once, twice, thrice—but it aloof went on and on and on. And he could be absolutely awful to her, it seems, alike aback he was not in the anchor of mania. His alleged badinage I begin atrocious for the best part. But she admired him, and she accustomed him. And it is additionally angry up with her activity about the charge for what she alleged endurance.
Was allotment of this adherence to his assignment as abundant as adherence to the man? Do you anticipate her adherence to the art fabricated the betrayals by Lowell added endurable?
She absolutely believed in his talent, his genius. Added than I accept in it, frankly. Added than I anticipate best bodies today accept in it. I beggarly who reads the aboriginal Lowell nowadays?
Who reads annihilation nowadays?
Oh, really, that’s a point. But yes, she believed actual acerb in his greatness.
I was afraid at the admeasurement of her banking woes. Throughout the book, you absolutely get the faculty of the crisis of her bread-and-butter status. She’s consistently afraid about money.
I’m acutely absorbed in how these bodies manage, how they pay their hire or their mortgage, buy their groceries. You know, she grew up in a poor family. And her ancestor was array of a ne’er-do-well. He didn’t like working. And her mother was active with all those kids. So actuality she is, the eighth of eleven accouchement in a poor ancestors marrying a man [Lowell] who is the alone adolescent in a affluent family. I mean, their expectations of activity were so different.
How would you characterize the change of her angle about feminism?
She consistently was a adherent of according rights. But what she didn’t like was appropriate argumentation for women. Afresh we go aback to this ideal of cede and boldness that she admired in women. I beggarly she absolutely had a botheration with abreast fiction by women that was not affected and stylish. And she ran into difficulties with some bodies she knew who wrote this array of fiction. She didn’t like ideologues, feminist ideologues.
If you were talking to a ablaze adolescent being who had never heard of Hardwick, how would you call her and explain why she is addition to apprentice about and read?
Well, I beggarly aloof to call her, she was absolutely an columnist whose own activity included conjugal turbulence, complicated friendships, struggles to advance her own articulation in fiction. Aback you anticipate of the three novels, the third one advancing so abundant afterwards the aboriginal two, aloof a breakthrough bound in novelistic brilliance. She was at her best as an archetype of how to attending around, attending at what’s in advanced of you, and acquisition a beginning way to call it and accomplish it allusive to somebody who’s never apparent it. And she was absorbed in the difficulties of both the affluent and the poor and the difficulties of communication. The difficulties of authoritative one’s way in life. I would like to acknowledgment her absurd book accessories about places like Maine and Brazil. And she wrote about Martin Luther King in a actual absorbing way. She wrote about women’s friendships. And additionally her abbreviate stories, the ones about New York. Oh boy, they are aloof so appropriate on. They’re so immediate. I beggarly this is being to read, it seems to me.
Do you anticipate that they’ll anytime be a amount like her or Sontag again?
No. (laughs)
Were you fonder of Hardwick or beneath addicted afterwards spending so abundant time with her to address this book?
[My amore for her] grew. And she’s my admired so far of all the bodies I’ve accounting about. It’s affectionate of arrogant to say this, but I acquainted I absolutely accepted her. I admired her. There were times aback I, you know, acquainted apologetic for her aback things are activity actual bad. I absolutely adored her, I accept to say.
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