Sherry Chandler » Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwick
From Lisa Levy, An Original Adventure, in The Believer:
…Hardwick’s genius was not limited to private letters [Ed note: These would be the private letters her husband Robert Lowell made public in his confressional poetry]. She too got to create herself, as a novelist, a teacher, and, most powerfully, as a critic. The bones of her biography are a classic fish-out-of-water tale, a Kentucky belle in the big city, but Hardwick was more like Walt Whitman tending the wounded in the Civil War hospital than Scarlett O’Hara at the Twelve Oaks barbecue—after all, she had a husband who needed constant bandaging (straitjacketing, really). Nevertheless she was a Southerner in the north; even though Hardwick didn’t put much stock in the idea that we “all are linked naturally to their regions,” as she wrote in her novel Sleepless Nights (1979), she does think “it is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live.” New York was hers, as Nights makes abundantly clear. Jim Lewis observes in his tribute to her on Slate.com that she was “one of the last survivors of a group of extraordinary women, many from the West or the South, who redefined the American essay: Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and M.F.K. Fisher, all from California, Mary McCarthy from Seattle.” She certainly harbored geographical ambitions. Her New York Times obituary recounts one from an interview in 1979: “My aim was to be a New York Jewish Intellectual. I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me—and their openness to European culture.” Thus it is a bit twisted that though she floated among the Rahvs and the Kazins, the man she married was the deepest indigo of Boston blue bloods; and the analytical quality she associated with Semitism was not totally absent, but not dominant, in Robert Lowell, casually nicknamed “Cal” (for Caliban and Caligula, and for his tendency toward decadence and excess) by his prep-school chums. Yet anyone who ever read a word she wrote knows she did not suffer in silence. Hardwick remade herself as a New Yorker, but her feeling that she was never of the world she lived in, neither a real Jewish Intellectual nor at home with the Cabots and the Lodges, helped her find an original voice.
Hardwick died last December 2. Here is her obit from The Guardian:
Elizabeth Hardwick, who has died aged 91, was for nearly half a century a prominent figure in New York’s literary and cultural life. She was probably best known for her essays and her autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights (1979). But she was also famous for the company she kept. With her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell, she was one of the group of left-liberal intellectuals who founded the New York Review of Books in 1963. Her friends included such writers as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Roth, as well as influential figures in the publishing world such as Philip Rahv and Jason Epstein.
Hardwick came to New York from the hinterlands. She was born into a large family in Kentucky, a southern border state that tends to produce literary sensibilities very different from those that flourish in the deep south. Her father was a left-leaning blue-collar worker who ran a plumbing and heating business. No doubt it contributed to her alienation from the mint julep school of southern writing that she was a city girl, from Lexington.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky and taking an MA in English, Hardwick moved to New York, where she studied briefly at Columbia University and set up as a freelance writer.
Here is her bibliography at the New York Review of Books.
And her bio at the KyLit site.
Obviously my interest here is the Kentucky connection, but I must wonder whether Hardwick would have wanted every biosketch to begin with a description of her marital long-suffering. Nothing I’ve read about her convinces me that she was of the long-suffering school of women so there must have been more to the marriage than her service to the great man.
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