A Splendid Intelligence by Cathay Curtis — fearless critic Elizabeth Hardwick’s turbulent life

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The spirit of Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) is pervasive and invisible. Her prose’s sharp edge and rhythmic bent were emulated by Joan Didion, who passed them down to authors across the generations, from Bret Easton Ellis to Rachel Kushner and Emma Cline. Hardwick’s exceptionally unusual 1979 novel Sleepless Nights appears to anticipate compressed, koan-like autofictional methods employed today by Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti and Maggie Nelson. She co-founded the New York Review of Books. And yet a taste for Hardwick seems the preserve of the initiated.

Her quiet, almost academic reputation is the result of a combination of factors: most of her work happens to be criticism, and her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell created a limelight that only had room for one. (Though in their world, there was no question surrounding the equivalence of their talents. They were both giants.) But it could also be down to the lack of a biography: a project made more intimidating by Hardwick’s hatred of the form and dread of one being written about her.

Hardwick circulated among the best writers of the day, while being admired and feared by them

Cathy Curtis has written previous lives of painters Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan and Nell Blaine, and she is a keen observer of Hardwick, especially when following the “darting linkages” of the author’s mind in her writing. We are taken briskly through Hardwick’s working-class childhood in Kentucky and her escape to New York in 1939 where, after tiring of postgraduate study and bit work for publishing houses, she wrote short stories and book reviews for the Partisan Review.

Friends with Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, Hardwick circulated among the best writers of the day, while being admired and feared by them. One acquaintance called her “frighteningly severe and intellectual”. Another called her mind “dreadful” as a compliment. “Hatchet woman sounds too gentle for her,” the novelist Katherine Anne Porter said. She wrote brilliant essays her whole career, and when she eventually became famous in 1959, it was for a piece in Harper’s attacking the blandness of mainstream books coverage. It is quaint to imagine a time when this could have caused so public a scandal that newspapers phoned her extended family for comment.

In 1948, she became involved with Robert Lowell in the midst of what she would later be able to identify as one of his manic episodes. After the two were married they spent the first years of the 1950s traveling around Europe, with Lowell doing what he liked and Hardwick carting their luggage between a succession of unheated rooms. There were frequent spells in mental health facilities for him, as well as separations owing to his “infatuations” with other women. Curtis describes for us a terrible situation. Friends deemed Hardwick’s behavior “heroic”. There was eventually some financial stability, fixed addresses in America and a daughter, Harriet. But their marriage followed the above pattern until Lowell left her for Caroline Blackwood in 1970.

What followed was the central torment of Hardwick’s life. Lowell wrote The Dolphin, a poetry collection about his infidelity and their break-up that quoted from her letters to him but changed and even invented her words, lending authority to an image of Hardwick that had very little relationship to the truth. The fallout led to reviewers criticizing her (and even their teenage daughter) personally. In 1973, the book won a Pulitzer. Curtis is good at linking the public humiliation that Hardwick suffered as a result of The Dolphin scandal, to that caused by the openness of Lowell’s previous affairs over the years.

Hardwick’s thoughts about biography were numerous, sometimes contradictory — she ended up writing a short one about Herman Melville — and nearly always pessimistic. But a belief that there should be “some claim to equity between the subject and the person putting on the shoes” often appears in her work in different permutations. She also requested “serious, incomparable reflection” from the biographer.

No one would require of the writer’s own biographer that their verbal gifts match those of Hardwick, who Susan Sontag said wrote “more beautiful sentences than any living American writer”. But the reflection offered by this book can be too thin. There is commentary as Curtis goes, but she rarely stays with an idea long enough to build on it. When critical insight is given, for example that “Elizabeth’s gift for pointed observation is less in evidence” in a certain late review, we are offered neither demonstration nor qualification. These judgments would be unconvincing even if they bore out when tested against the material, which they don’t always.

The result is that Hardwick doesn’t exist as vividly for us as she might. And this fault carries an unfortunate irony, since Hardwick’s essays could pungently summon an author or literary character for a reader in a couple of sentences. Mary McCarthy said Hardwick could make figures “dead or imaginary” seem to be “living a few blocks down the street”.

A Splendid Intelligence shows us, through quotes and the facts, the things she said and wrote and did. But Hardwick herself seems to remain just behind the curtain of this book: courageous, loyal but with an integrity that sometimes appeared to those she knew and whose work she criticized like disloyalty. Read the essays, though, and the subject Curtis narrowly fails to embody materializes; there she is, mimicking her enemies and alienating her friends with hour-long streams of tipsy, polished invective.

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis Norton, £25, 400 pages

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