Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays are filled with quiet insights, so quiet that I found I had to read them in the mornings, when my mind was fresh enough to pay attention. She sifts plot and character to reveal universal nuggets of truth, such as, “the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings.”
As she explores numerous works of great writers, Hardwick is always sensitive to the challenges women have faced, but she resists blaming sexism. In the essay on Sylvia Plath, Hardwick writes, “Every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both. All art that is not communal is, so to speak, made at home… The birth of children opens up the energy for taking care of them and for loving them. The common observation that one must be prepared to put off work for a few years is strongly founded.”
Instead of blaming misogyny if a woman hasn't made good on her talents, Hardwick takes a more interesting approach, identifying the excesses or absences in character that have hindered the writer or artist. Jane Carlyle, for example, composed lively letters that suggest a gift for novel writing, but she “lacks ambition and need—the psychic need for a creation to stand outside herself.”
I don’t agree with Hardwick on every point. I like Leonard Woolf better than she seems to. But her pleasure in deep reading, in careful contemplation of works of literature, is inspiring. As are her occasional admissions of humanness, such as her reaction to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: “I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful.” Yet even when she says something lackluster, she inspires me to read more.
Hardwick has a soft spot for artists who pursue their work in the face of discouragement or indifference. She admires Zelda Fitzgerald's “extraordinary zeal and strenuous effort to get well, be real, to function, above all to work at something.”
Hardwick applauds the Bronte sisters who were restricted by their gender, class and situation, yet “seized upon the development of their talents as an honorable way of life and in this they were heroic.” Their efforts are in marked contrast to their brother’s, a type for whom Hardwick has less compassion. “It is only by accident that we know about people like Branwell who seemed destined for the arts, unable to work at anything else, and yet have not the talent, the tenacity, or the discipline to make any kind of sustained creative effort.”
To Hardwick, that creative effort is an end in itself. For Zelda, surrounded by people who tried to discourage her passionate pursuit of the arts, the goal was not to succeed so much as to find meaning, to experience “the sheer advantage of the discipline itself, the joy she took in it. The glaring clarity of the good it might do in providing her not fame as a great dancer but a milieu in which to live and find work and satisfaction of some related kind.”
Hardwick’s biography of Melville is similar to her magnificent literary essays. Rather than offering a complete life story, she focuses on Melville’s writing life. Melville the man remains a shadowy, moody character. But Hardwick’s approach may be the only one possible. She writes that Melville “is not a painter of his own face in the mirror…He is a mystery, and perhaps, like Bartleby the Scrivner in a late story, ‘no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of the man.”
As in her essays in Seduction and Betrayal, Hardwick pays homage to perseverance. There is something impressive in Melville's doggedness: “Melville writes fiercely, anxiously, tirelessly - that’s all of his life; even in the years of ‘withdrawal’ he does what he can after the days at the Custom House. He is in love with language, with reading, thinking.” So is Hardwick and her biography of Melville makes for a happy pairing.
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