Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer.
Hardwick graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1939. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. She was the author of three novels: The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and Sleepless Nights (1979). A collection of her short fiction, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, will be published in 2010. She also published four books of criticism: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998). In 1961 she edited The Selected Letters of William James and in 2000 she published a short biography, Herman Melville, in Viking Press's Penguin Lives series..
In 1959, Hardwick published in Harper's, "The Decline of Book Reviewing," a generally harsh and even scathing critique of book reviews published in American periodicals of the time. The 1962 New York City newspaper strike helped inspire Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers to establish The New York Review of Books, a publication that became as much a habit for many readers as The New York Times Book Review, which Hardwick had eviscerated in her 1959 essay.
In the '70s and early '80s, Hardwick taught writing seminars at Barnard College and Columbia University's School of the Arts, Writing Division. She gave forthright critiques of student writing and was a mentor to students she considered promising.
From 1949 to 1972 she was married to the poet Robert Lowell; their daughter is Harriet Lowell.
In 2008, The Library of America selected Hardwick's account of the Caryl Chessman murders for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime writing.
“The greatest gift is a passion for reading.”
“Canadians, do not vomit on me!”
“The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner--all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner.”
“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”
“In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia--a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitious and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in experession, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity.”
“Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband and we cannot, in our hearts, asssent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart. Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man's practice, if not his stated belief, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment.”
“The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories--mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium--are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a breaking point, frantic to find any way out. If the flaws are only to be attributed to the practicce of popular fiction of the time, we cannot then explain the large amount of genuine feeling that goes into them. They stand for the hidden wishes of an intolerable life.”
“[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.”
“There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. Wuthering Heights is a virgin's story.”
“the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre”
“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”
“All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally.”
“You have grown a little beard, I said.You see it is not true that one can't change.”
“Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.”
“It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door. ”
“I often think about bachelors, a life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, of every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility. For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor, turn a few corners and bump into marriage?”
“The greatest gift is the passion for reading.It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.It is a moral illumination.”