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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Elizabeth Hardwick

by Janet Polansky

Other literary forms

Elizabeth Hardwick’s book reviews and literary and cultural criticism have been her most influential work. Her frank, fresh, intellectually audacious, and emotionally engaging comments provided a comprehensive critique of literary and popular culture. Her baroque style and contextual approach, yoking history with art, was formative in developing the particular brand of progressive criticism characteristic of The New York Review of Books and in the tradition of the Partisan Review, bent upon restoring texture and depth to reviewing. Her most influential essays from 1952 to 1961 were collected from the Partisan Review, Harper’s, Encounter, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review, as well as The New York Review of Books, in a volume titled A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society (1962), suggesting in the allusion to Virginia Woolf her intensely personal approach to criticism. Hardwick’s long-standing interest in feminist issues is reflected in her second collection of essays, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974). A third collection, Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays, appeared in 1983.

Elizabeth Hardwick.

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(AP/Wide World Photos)

An important Hardwick essay, “Domestic Manners in a New America,” perhaps best illustrates the connections between the public and the private self that she defined as “style,” a key concept that informs both her cultural criticism and her fiction. Appearing first in Daedalus (Winter, 1978) and later as “Domestic Manners” in A New America? (1978)—an anthology of influential articles by social commentators—Hardwick’s essay delineates the alterations in contemporary culture brought about by “the power of external forces” and a particular sort of inner change, a new expectation for the private life. The interior perception of life as a long process, one governed by cycles and seasons, is transformed by the deviation and dislocation of contemporary urban life, “the shortened life of the feelings” evidenced in the prevalent failure of will in human relationships, rules, customs, and habits. Hardwick sees in personal “style” the traumatic effects of modernity; for her, as for Jane Austen, style defines moral condition.

Achievements

Elizabeth Hardwick’s criticism engaged not only literary culture but also the wider group of committed intellectuals seeking synthesis between the diverse, apparently dislocated, aspects of contemporary life. Prominent in her critical ideology is the assumption that a substructure of history, biology, and psychology underlies the complex edifice of contemporary culture, a foundation that the critic must show as informing, though not determining, the work. Coupled with this multidisciplinary approach is that process of dynamically yoking together disparate thoughts and feelings in such a way that a new synthesis or a hidden foundation is revealed. This juxtaposition, similar in so many ways to that of the metaphysical poets, has the effect of constantly recombining and transforming experience.

The matter of style seems a crucial point in Hardwick’s work, both style as a concept and Hardwick’s own yoking of dissimilarities, startling the reader with its expressive, mercurial quality, capturing the play of a mind at work. Her writing frequently has a baroque quality—loose passages coupled with short, pithy statements. Capturing the qualities of supreme thoughtfulness along with engaged feeling, her work creates a sharp effect, combining an almost audacious assertiveness with demure understatement. Her conversational colloquialisms, playful and expressive, appear in Hardwick’s conceptual framework as “style,” that self-presentation by which the interior, one’s relationship to history, is revealed.

The other key concept in Hardwick’s thought and practice is that of the “radical,” not in the political sense, but meaning a return, often an intellectually jarring return, to the crux of a creative work or a received idea. Certain writers such as Mary McCarthy possessed what Hardwick called a radical vision, always unconventional, often involving a moral stance. Characters become emblems of these root qualities, as in the “radical innocence” of Rudy Peck in The Simple Truth. The ability of a writer or a critic to go to the crux of a problem, to perceive something not marked before, to have a genuinely new thought that brings together known facts in surprising ways, was for Hardwick the hallmark of the intellectual and creative life.

Hardwick was the recipient of many awards for creative and critical achievement. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and presented with the George Jean Nathan Award for drama criticism.

Biography

Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick’s own life provides a model of the committed intellectual, demonstrating the dialectic between history and the imagination, thought and feeling, which informs her essays and fiction. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, on July 27, 1916, one of the eleven children of Eugene Allen and Mary Ramsey Hardwick, she attended public schools and then the University of Kentucky. The sense of place so strong in Hardwick appears especially in her early work, the substructure of Kentucky rootedness juxtaposed to the restless, mobile style of middle-class yearnings. The opposite pole is New York, the “Lourdes” of cities, which educates and informs the self.

Although alert to and appreciative of southern literature, Hardwick nevertheless spoke of herself, in a letter of September, 1982, as never having felt drawn to being a southern writer but instead toward “the vague, but somewhat meaningful notion of the ’intellectual.’” In her later work, far from the dreamy southern settings of her first novel, with its matriarchal, mythical grandmother, the interwoven lives of black and white, the cockfights, the wild youth, and, finally, the journey to the wider world of the university and the city itself, Hardwick perhaps epitomizes for many the urban intellectual style.

Hardwick’s radical criticism and progressive aesthetic developed from her study of literature and culture, from graduate study at Columbia and the early influence of the Partisan Review, an intellectual milieu that she describes as a “combination of radical political ideas of a complicated kind and avant-garde literature.” This method was not formalistic or belletristic but always represented the paradoxical product of the progressive politics of the Partisan Review and the particular intellectuality and wit of the metaphysical poetry that enjoyed a revival at the time. Hardwick’s aesthetic also was influenced by her long teaching career, at Barnard College and at other places, including Columbia Graduate School of the Arts, where she taught creative writing. Many of her essays have the flavor of classroom interchange, a flash of contact between mentor and student, a dynamic oral quality, and a sense of extemporaneous composition, sometimes with inserts and headings like a teacher’s lecture notes.

Much of Hardwick’s later creative work involved imaginative reconstruction of personal experience, the encounter of the individual with others and the world in modern history. Her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell in July, 1949, exemplified in some ways that special relationship between two creative people that the two of them found in George Eliot and Henry Lewes. Lowell and Hardwick shared not only their intellectual background but also their political commitment, evident in Lowell’s indictment for conscientious objection to militarism. In his Notebook 1967-68 (1969), Lowell writes of Eliot and Lewes, “Writers marry/ their kind still, true and one and clashing,” and upon his own twenty-year marriage, “We stand set; two trees, their roots,” recalling shared lives, age, friendships, illness, and war, and many cities—Boston, Maine, and New York. “I was then a ’we,’” Hardwick says in Sleepless Nights. Her marriage to Lowell ended in divorce in 1972, to be followed by his death in 1977. Of their only child, Harriet Winslow Lowell, Hardwick spoke of feeling a “passion almost criminal.” Hardwick died in New York City on December 2, 2007.

Analysis

In her three published novels, Elizabeth Hardwick demonstrates the complex interplay between the buried life of the emotions, “the cemetery of home, education, nerves, heritage, and tics,” and the emerging life in which the individual seeks self-definition by her own consciousness, her sense of autonomy and transcendence.

The Ghostly Lover

The protagonist of The Ghostly Lover, Hardwick’s first novel, is an obviously autobiographical figure. Marian, slowly coming to terms with family and hometown boyfriend, pursues her somewhat foggy destiny far from her southern home in a city university. She has depended on two illusions: that she can only be supported by some outside force, usually a man, and that she must herself support her two rootless parents, who have abandoned her and her brother since childhood. Parents, powerful in the imagination but in life weak and absent, first the “savage’s totem” from which “being and power” are derived, are lost in pursuit of the American Dream. Her mother, who has “been in too many places, had lives in too many houses, and been neighbor to too many people,” represents in her unformed femininity that immanence of which Simone de Beauvoir speaks, a “guide for the preordained destiny of the daughter” from which Marian must extricate herself at the end, when she is asked to loan the inheritance money on which her journey to the city depends.

Likewise she must reject Bruce, the father-lover of her adolescence who, replacing her own father, pays for her tuition, and then Leo, the city boyfriend, more a peer, but yet representing an escape into marriage and safety. The grandmother, who has reared the children, is an inscrutable matriarch in whom the archaic powers of home and family are located. She personifies that “animal nature,” “the hidden violence of union between the two sexes”; her experience, unredeemed by thought and judgment, is found to be not mysterious but simply illiterate.

In a reversal of the traditional scheme, the shy, repressed girl escapes, while the wild, resourceful brother, Albert, is trapped in the family home, conveniently married to a dumpy, unimaginative town girl. Hattie, the black servant girl, is Marian’s black double, the frightening other whose stubborn autonomy is at once fearful (“black sinfulness”) and attractive. Other women complete her initiation into the underworld of female possibility—neighbor Mary, mother’s friend, with her secret abortion; Gertrude, the German library-science student, lost in the anonymous city; another woman friend who attaches herself pathetically to a man. Moving from the deceptive paradise of childhood to the necessary reality of the adult world, she arrives finally at Grand Central again, meeting the objective correlative of her condition, an “icy ray of light,” no man to meet her, “separated…forever from him [Leo] and his shelter like the forbidden gates of Eden,” self-created at last.

The Simple Truth

Published in 1955 and dedicated to her mother, Hardwick’s second novel, The Simple Truth, concerns moral initiation in a midwestern university town, a location symbolic of American culture and midwestern space and disconnection, marked by psychological introspection and personal anonymity. Rudy Peck, a university student and the son of Finnish immigrants, himself an “anonymous creation” aspiring to selfhood, has murdered his upper-class girlfriend. The girlfriend was an adventurer, self-created in her own uniqueness and style, a quality well noted by Doris Parks, whose Austenesque “true sturdiness” and acute moral sensibility involve her at once as evaluator of the moral landscape in which Rudy, “innocently guilty,” is acquitted.

In this variation on the traditional seduction and betrayal motif, Rudy, a serious, thoughtful young man, is, like Theodore Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths, finally not morally accountable. The trial draws the obsessive attention of Doris’s husband Joseph, a bumbling, sensitive, aspiring writer of ambiguous possibilities, and Anita Mitchell, a small-town faculty wife seeking escape from her limiting environment of “beefsteak, peas, and whiskey”; both Joseph and Anita see in Rudy an expression of their own unresolved condition. At the close of the novel, Doris, whose perspective has gradually become that of the narrator, recognizes the distinct moral spheres she and Joseph occupy and, with a few tears, accepts her own independence and aloneness, one of the “new women” setting out in the politically and psychologically ambivalent American landscape.

Sleepless Nights

Hardwick’s third novel, Sleepless Nights, published in 1979, reconstructs personal experience not in the confessional mode associated with Robert Lowell, but as a piece of “transformed and even distorted memory,” in a series of communications to a friend, “Mary McC” (Mary McCarthy). From contemplation of her rag rug, “product of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home,” the narrator examines the combination of deprivation and survival, loss and preservation in the histories of the “unfortunate ones”—Juanita the prostitute, bag ladies, spinsters, cleaning women, Billie Holiday, and the new woman Marie—with a mixture of “sympathy and bewilderment” at their shared “fateful fertility” on one hand and, on the other, “the old, profound acceptance of the things of life.” In an aura of intimate conversation, they confront broken veins, disease, backbreaking work, self-destruction, divorce, separation, boredom, and perhaps autonomy.

Hardwick’s perspective demands connection and sympathy, not the detachment of either irony or sentimentality. Submerged female life, the other side of time-conscious, outer-directed material culture, becomes emblematic, as female weeping becomes the “weeping sores” of the ulcerated legs, the shame and poverty lurking under the intricate surface detail. Hardwick’s own childhood, her Columbia homesickness and friends, the life in Maine, Boston, and New York, the “lifetime of worrying and reading,” are fused in memory with the paradoxical power and tenacity of the buried life, as the woman, now no longer young, traverses the final sections of the journey into “strange parts of town” fundamental to her creativity and connectedness.

Bibliography

1 

Als, Hilton. “A Singular Woman.” The New Yorker, July 13, 1998. This article, published to coincide with the release of Sight-Readings: American Fiction, discusses Hardwick’s redefinition of the genre of the literary essay; examines her life, writings, and literary career, including her work with The New York Review of Books; and presents other writers’ comments about her work.

2 

Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn, ed. American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. 2d ed. 4 vols. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 2000. This reference guide includes an essay on Hardwick containing biographical information, commentary on the thematic content of her principal works, and a bibliography.

3 

Lamont, Rosette C. “The Off-Center Spatiality of Women’s Discourse.” In Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982. Lamont analyzes the “off-centeredness” of Hardwick’s writing from the perspective of feminist literary theory.

4 

Lehman-Haupt, Christopher. “Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic, Novelist, and Restless Woman of Letters, Is Dead at Ninety-One.” The New York Times, December 5, 2007. One of the more comprehensive Hardwick obituaries. Recounts Hardwick’s life and career, discussing how the “studious Kentucky belle” fulfilled her ambition of becoming a member of the New York literati.

5 

Miller, Jane. “Resisting the Bullies.” In Women Writing About Men. London: Virago Press, 1986. In this chapter, Miller mentions Hardwick’s book Seduction and Betrayal and its reference to women who become heroes by gaining mastery over their husbands. In so doing, Miller places Hardwick in the genre of women writers—such as Virginia Woolf—who write about women striving for recognition in their own right.

6 

Nobile, Philip. Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and “The New York Review of Books.” New York: Charterhouse, 1974. Examines Hardwick’s role in the founding of The New York Review of Books and her theories about writing as they pertain to the periodical’s editorial policies.

7 

Peters, Margaret. “Fiction Under a True Name: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights.” Chicago Review 31, no. 2 (Autumn, 1979): 129-136. Peters provides a feminist analysis emphasizing the autobiographical nature of the novel, and she offers comparisons with The Ghostly Lover.

8 

Reynolds, Guy. “Dysfunctional Realism: Ann Petry, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford, Jane Bowles.” In Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction: A Critical Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Hardwick’s work is analyzed in this history of fiction writing by American women. Reynolds examines the authors’ establishment of their identities and recurring themes in their fiction, and places their work within the cultural context of their times.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Polansky, Janet. "Elizabeth Hardwick." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_12840149900721.
APA 7th
Polansky, J. (2010). Elizabeth Hardwick. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Polansky, Janet. "Elizabeth Hardwick." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2026. online.salempress.com.