The Writing Life

Elizabeth Hardwick takes her time. In an essay on Carl Sandburg, she spends almost 17 pages discussing Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters before turning to her ostensible subject. When writing book reviews, she’s in no apparent hurry to engage the book under consideration, which may be because the real subject under consideration is her own critical faculty, her view of the world and of literature’s relationship to it. In a writer less astute and engaging, this meandering style would be annoying and self-indulgent. But Hardwick is astute and engaging, so reading her ruminations on virtually any subject is a delight.

Her new collection, “Sight-Readings,” includes essays on such disparate writers as Henry James, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Bishop and Nadine Gordimer. But many of the pieces concentrate on the top guns of postwar American fiction, including John Cheever, John Updike, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Richard Ford and Norman Mailer. She discusses several biographies, too, virtually all of which she loathes. In fact, she regards the vogue for fact-filled, scandal-stuffed biographies--with their “exhaustive, definitive coziness”--with unrelieved scorn and describes practitioners of the form as “the quick in pursuit of the dead.”

Of Joan Givner’s life of Katherine Anne Porter, Hardwick writes, “Garrulousness and a certain untidiness in 1932 are excavated and rebuked in 1982, showing at least one of the dangers of living. The celebrated do not understand that they are chatting away in a bugged universe,” and she mocks Givner’s belief in “the presumed umbilical attachment of life and fiction.” Sandburg’s 1991 biographer, Penelope Niven, who waded through the “great haystack” of the poet’s papers, is likened to a “celestial Xerox machine” churning out “details that consciousness erases overnight.”

Hardwick is also decidedly unimpressed by so-called oral histories or oral literature, be they those of Studs Terkel, Peter Manso (biographer of Norman Mailer) or Mailer himself (in “The Executioner’s Song”). “It is often the task of the historian and the imaginative writer to discover the silences behind speech, the silences that produced the romantic text of James Agee’s ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ ” Hardwick writes. “Instead, what we have here is a sort of decomposed creativity, a recycling similar to that of the obsolete ragman who turned old clothes into paper.” (Indeed, after reading this new collection, only a fearless or foolhardy writer would embark on a biography of Hardwick herself--which may be part of her point.)

Hardwick’s unsentimental view of the often tangled relationship between love and marriage--somewhat reminiscent of Doris Lessing’s--emerges like a subterranean theme throughout these essays. (Hardwick’s long marriage to the poet Robert Lowell was famously difficult; I will leave it to far braver souls, however, to ascertain how, or even whether, that union influenced her writing.) She notes that her friend Mary McCarthy “has written in her memoirs of her detestation of [Edmund] Wilson’s body and soul, information provided by her decision to become his wife.” She describes Porter as “a woman who was not made for marriage and thus married four times” and observes: “She never liked the constant presence of her husbands or lovers and did not like, she soon found out, to be alone--a dilemma in one shape or another common to most of mankind.”

Hardwick reports that Wilson was influenced by, among other works, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, with its “[s]obriety, terseness, lucidity, and precision--and, indeed, his own compositions are wonderful in clarity, balance, movement, language, always at hand to express the large capacity of his mind and experience.” This is an excellent summation of Hardwick’s own style and strengths. Yet there is a certain frustrating, overly subdued tone--an indirection, a lack of passion uncharacteristic of Hardwick’s previous work--that sometimes emerges in these essays.

She gently raps John Updike’s support for the Vietnam War, noting his “peculiar” ideas and “dubious” doctrines. But perhaps Updike’s stance deserves a staunch, even outraged, rebuke rather than a gentle, respectful skewering. She notes that Joan Didion “puts the critic in an uneasy situation.” But Hardwick does not clarify the problematic aspects of Didion’s work--such as her saturation in overwhelming irony and minute, often statistical details--both of which, I would argue, become a capitulation to helplessness rather than a form of illumination. Instead, Hardwick seems to evade the problem: “This author is a martyr of facticity, and indeed such has its place in the fearless architecture of her fictions. . . . The detail works upon the mind of the reader, gives an assurance, or at least a feeling, that somewhere, somehow all of this is true, fictional truth, or possibility.” But there is a significant difference between an “assurance” and “at least a feeling,” and an even larger difference between what is “true,” “fictional truth” and “possibility.”

The tonal problem in “Sight-Readings” is, I suspect, directly related to the authors under consideration. Deracination, alienation, ennui, fragmentation, disjuncture and ironic detachment are leitmotifs of much (although obviously not all) modern American fiction. Didion’s women bathe in “extreme negativism, withdrawal, depression, or terminal disgust”; Ford employs a “tactful, muted eloquence” to describe people “sleepwalking into calamitous consequence”; Cheever depicted “[t]he American bourgeois world and its pains” (which, truth be told, may not be all that interesting).

In contrast, Hardwick’s brilliant 1974 collection, “Seduction and Betrayal,” pulsed with inspiration. But then her subjects--writers such as the Bronte sisters and Sylvia Plath, fictional characters like Hardy’s Tess, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Tolstoy’s Maslova and Ibsen’s Nora--were fiercely thrilling. This does not mean that Hardwick ever sentimentalized those subjects or attempted to turn them into that most ridiculous of constructs, the so-called role model. (What woman would want to actually live the suffering-infused life of Emily Bronte or Plath, Tess or Hester?)

But Hardwick did analyze--with acute eloquence--the astonishing emotional lucidity, the unwavering loyalty to lived experience, the courageous disregard for appearance and the almost inexplicable moral freedom that characterized these women. Of Hester, she wrote, “It is actually Hester Prynne who is outside history. . . . [H]er defiance, the striking skepticism of her mind, the moral distance she sets between herself and the hysterias of the time--these qualities are the cause for wonder.” Of Nora, she wrote, “In the end she leaves her husband and her children . . . but it is not the final gesture that makes her free. Anna Karenina left her husband and her son, but she was tragically dependent. . . . The truth is that Nora has always been free; it is all there in her gaiety, her lack of self-pity, her impulsiveness, her expansive, generous nature. . . . [S]he is liberated by her intelligence and high spirits.” Of Plath--dead (like Emily Bronte) at 30--she wrote, “When she died she was alone, exhausted from writing, miserable--but triumphant too, achieved, defined and defiant.”

It is a puzzle as to why the canonical American novelists in the second half of our century--which, in comparison to all previous ones, is so liberated when the economic, psychic, familial, sexual and emotional lives of women are concerned--have for the most part failed to produce female characters as memorably vital as those of the great 18th and 19th century novels. Which woman character imagined by Cheever, Updike, Roth, Didion, Ford or Mailer can compare with Tess, with Hester, with Cathy Earnshaw, with Jane Eyre, with Elizabeth Bennet or Marianne Dashwood or Isabel Archer? (Indeed, who can remember any woman character at all from the works of Cheever, Updike, Roth et al.? They seem to fade so easily. . . . )

It may be, of course, that the very restrictions placed upon women in previous times created (or even imposed) the emotional heroism of Tess and her sisters; far be it for me to wax nostalgic for an age of fearsome repressions, harsh mores and no antibiotics. And it’s certainly nice that female martyrdom no longer accompanies--or need no longer accompany--female passion. (As Hardwick has pointed out, male martyrdom, at least in the service of passionate love, has never been part of the equation.) Still, it is curious that, in modern-day literature as in modern-day life, resplendent, expansive Hester Prynne seems so quaintly anachronistic, while fretful, shriveled Arthur Dimmesdale seems so terribly contemporary. Today, only an ironist would call a book “Great Expectations.”