The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney New York Review BooksClassics, 224pp. £8.99
For much of her life she was best known as the wife of the poet Robert Lowell, but Elizabeth Hardwick was herself a distinguished and gifted writer – and a passionate chronicler of her adopted city
HOW TO DEFINE Elizabeth Hardwick – New York intellectual, trenchant critic, distinguished essayist, biographer, teacher, novelist, short story writer, wife of the poet Robert Lowell. Let’s get that last one out of the way first, since it’s the definition that has dogged her, though she was adamant right up to her death aged 91 in 2007, that she never for a moment regretted the marriage, despite its harrowing storms. She utterly refused Delmore Schwartz’s dictum that all poets’ wives have horrible lives.
Hardwick, known to her friends as Lizzie, met Lowell at a party in Greenwich Village in the summer of 1946 and they married three years later. From the beginning, he was prone to manic-depressive breakdowns that followed a predictable pattern. Firstly, he would excoriate Hardwick publicly to justify taking up with someone else, then would come the inevitable downward mental spiral, followed by enforced hospitalisation, after which he would return chastened to Lizzie until the next outbreak of hostilities. “I don’t think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasn’t a writer – an odd turn-on, indeed, and one I’ve noticed not greatly shared,” Hardwick said sanguinely of her errant husband, adding that the quality of his mind was “the most thrilling” she had ever known.
In 1970, while on a visiting professorship at Oxford, Lowell embarked on relationship with the writer, Lady Caroline Blackwood, the Belfast-born daughter of Lord Dufferin and cousin to the Guinness family. After 21 years of marital tempest, Lizzie Hardwick had had enough and filed for divorce. Three years later Lowell published a Pulitzer-prize winning collection of poems, The Dolphin, in which he famously culled lines directly from letters Hardwick had written during the bitter separation. Adrienne Rich described it as "one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry". But Hardwick never once denounced Lowell for it, much to the ire of the feminist movement.
“I don’t like aggressiveness and I detest anger,” she said, “a quality some feminists and many psychiatrists think one should cultivate in order to express the self.”
After the break-up of his marriage to Blackwood in the spring of 1977, Lowell returned to Hardwick, though it was a short-lived reunion. He died in September that same year in a cab en route to her apartment in Manhattan.
Hardwick’s other overwhelming identification was with New York – and the stories in this collection reflect her passionate relationship with the city. But the irony was that she was born in the South, in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916. She came from a large Protestant family – she was one of 11. The contradictions abound! By the age of 23, she had already adopted and dropped communism as a creed, and had made her way to New York where she was living a precociously Bohemian existence – “love and alcohol and clothes on the floor” – and had embarked on a writing career. (“Is it a career?” she once asked. “Is that the right word for being a writer?”)
Her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, was published in 1945; a second, The Simple Truth, followed in 1955. And then silence. But Lizzie Hardwick was busy elsewhere, establishing several other identities – as a fiercesome literary critic (Lowell, she said, thought her sometimes "too snippy") an erudite and passionate essayist, and a forthright intellectual presence in New York. (She co-founded the New York Review of Bookswith Jason and Barbara Epstein.) But it would be almost a quarter of century before she would return to fiction.
Many have noted that Hardwick’s fictional silence coincided with the years of her marriage, though in the introduction to this volume, editor Darryl Pinckney suggests that it was her own ambivalence about fiction that stymied her output. Always scrupulous in eschewing the role of literary victim, Hardwick declared in a 1984 interview: “Nothing interferes with my own writing except my often irresolute character and of course the limitations of my talent.” Her daughter with Lowell, Harriet, recalls that while her father bounded to his desk in the mornings, her mother’s attempts at fiction were always “doubt-laden”.
Furthermore, Hardwick's professional association with magazines such as Harper'sallowed her enormous literary freedom. She always maintained that the essays she wrote for them satisfied her creative urges and sated her energies. The NYRB, she once said, had saved her life as a writer. Between 1962 and 1998, she produced four volumes of criticism. These were eclectic volumes, covering a wide range of topics, though her most celebrated work centred on the lives of tortured literary women – Dorothy Wordsworth, Charlotte Brönte, Sylvia Plath, and Zelda Fitzgerald, among others.
HARDWICK HERSELF WAS characteristically precise about why, after a 25-year break, she rediscovered her fictional voice. Lowell's death, she conceded, allowed her the freedom to indulge in the first person. The result of her return to that lost "I" was her delicate and reticent masterpiece, Sleepless Nights(1979) – an autobiographical novel that manages, in typical Hardwick style, to be revealing without being confessional. Whatever the reason for the hiatus in Hardwick's fictional output, her New York stories reproduced here together for the first time, also reflect it. The first eight stories, published between 1946 and 1959, show us the young Hardwick, the clever, small-town girl whose stated ambition was to become "a Jewish intellectual". Their protagonists are outsiders, for the most part, ironic southerners desperate for escape from small-town concerns and anxious to learn how to "read" the city, be it New York, Chicago or Charlottesville.
The final five, published in the 1980s and 1990s, and which give this volume its title, belong to a voice so familiar with New York as to have become almost at one with it. The often effaced narrators take philosophical peregrinations in the WG Sebald mode along the “disreputable avenues” , chart transcendent moments in a second-hand bookstore, an unlikely alliance at the New York Public Library, or an attempt at redemption in Penn Station.
“Sometimes while waiting for a taxi at Seventy-ninth Street, after midnight, it is possible, with a certain amount of effort or with a little too much wine, to imagine the city returned to trees, old footpaths, and clear, untroubled waters, returned to innocence and nautical miscalculations and ancestral heroics. The sound of a rubber-soled footstep – what is that but the oars of Verrazano, slipping into New York Bay silently, to see what is there, what can be deftly unlocked without rousing a soul?”
This deft, almost hallucinatory blurring of time means that the reader not only journeys through Lizzie Hardwick’s life in the city, but enters into the very soul of New York.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist. She currently teaches on the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme in Dublin
