Elizabeth Hardwick is having a moment — and why not? The last two years have brought The Uncollected Essays, an addendum to The Collected Essays of 2017; Cathy Curtis’ biography, A Splendid Intelligence; and Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of his writerly apprenticeship at Hardwick’s feet. Like Joan Didion, a very different sort of talent and sensibility, Elizabeth Hardwick was a lion of the 1960s and 1970s (and 1980s and 1990s). Lavishly frank, instinctively original, elegant, intimate, and when she wanted, very, very funny, Hardwick was one of the great critics and great prose writers of the second half of the twentieth century. It is fit and fine that her work and example be forwarded to a new generation of readers. My own interest in Hardwick is tangled up in a larger obsession with the New York intellectuals, that storied gaggle of talkers and writers — cultural critics, political philosophers, editors, polemicists, controversialists — who bestrode American thought in the decades after World War II. Readers conversant with the group may be surprised to hear this, for of the figures typically enumerated among its members — Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, and a dozen or two others — Hardwick has never been one. It is not because she was a woman: Hannah Arendt was a key presence; Susan Sontag, the youngest of them all, is regarded as a kind of last hurrah. It is not because she wasn’t Jewish, though Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, Hardwick’s best friend, were the only gentiles. It is not because she didn’t share the same milieu. Hardwick lived in New York throughout the 1940s, left for ten years, then returned for good. She went to the parties, holding her liquor and holding her own. She was a mainstay of the journals: Partisan Review, and then, for more than forty years, the New York Review of Books, of which she was among the founders. She was universally esteemed, and not infrequently feared. It is because she wasn’t, strictly speaking, an intellectual. I don’t mean this as a deprecation; quite the opposite, in fact. Like Henry James, she had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. More than any other critic I’m aware of, Hardwick possessed the ability to speak with great incisiveness about a work, an author, without recourse to general conceptions: no theses, no theories, no larger arguments, oftentimes no arguments at all. “She stayed away from academic criticism, theory, analytic philosophy,” Pinckney tells us, while “Marxism made her distrust ideologies of criticism.” Though her reading was vast, she eschewed comparison, allusion, discussion of genres, movements, genealogies. Instead, she focused like a lover on the writer before her, bringing her entire self to the encounter, which she enacted in prose of incomparable suppleness and energy. She didn’t “review”; she metabolized. What she shared with the other New Yorkers, though, was larger than her differences. Like them, she came of age at a time when the life of the mind was lived without reference to the university — when the models were Paris and Vienna, not Harvard and Yale. Critics now are academics first: if not professors or disappointed PhDs, then former literature or “studies” majors trained in the accepted points of view. Among the New Yorkers, even those who taught steered free of academic sensibilities, manners, jargon, frames of reference. They eschewed professionalization; they stood on the authority of their own aesthetic experience. Hardwick enrolled in a doctoral program (at twenty-three, in English), but she found her professors uninspiring, and scholarship unappealing, and she soon dropped out to write — to be a writer, to have a different kind of mind and life. “They are critics and have good taste,” wrote Kazin of a pair of academic acquaintances. “I am a writer and interested in everything I can see and read and feel and touch.” Like others among the New Yorkers, Hardwick saw herself, and was, a bohemian — unsalaried and uncredentialed, living hand to mouth on freelance checks and books. Like them, she self-educated, stubbornly and idiosyncratically. With them, she gathered to debate, to individuate, not to align and
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