On foot surgery - Joanne O’Leary in LRB:

“Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office clerks, beauticians, farmers, but Hardwick had larger aspirations. ‘How can you be from here and think like you do?’ a fellow Southerner asked. The Kentucky of thoroughbreds and tobacco was not for her: ‘I would have gone to the ends of the earth to escape from ashtrays with horses on them.’ Curtis shows her on home turf, however, flirting with jockeys on the front porch. It’s amusing to learn that her charming, conniving father, Eugene, a plumber who enjoyed baseball and jazz, once cheated his mother-in-law out of enough money to buy himself a boat, and that her mother, Mary, a stout woman with a ‘boneless, soft prettiness’ and the ‘scarcest of eyebrows’, was a devout Presbyterian who believed that to get married was ‘sort of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.”

(…)

“Curtis’s biography coincides with a revival of interest in Hardwick after decades of neglect. Collected Essays appeared in 2017; Seduction and Betrayal and Sleepless Nights were republished in 2019; the Uncollected Essays came out earlier this year. There has been hagiographic praise of her elaborate syntax, her strange yet apposite adjectives, her lacerating one-liners, the depth of her learning and breadth of reference – even the placement of her commas. Hardwick’s acolytes make fleeting apology for her ambivalence about second-wave feminism, her bitchiness about her female friends (her parody of McCarthy’s The Group was published in the New York Review of Books in 1963 under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne), her snobbishness and her inexplicable indulgence of Lowell.
A Splendid Intelligence is not the biography Hardwick’s champions have been waiting for, however. The section on her early life is skimpy, while later chapters are full of inane details – ‘the bland, insistent recording of the insignificant’, as Hardwick once described a Life of Hemingway. At its worst, the book embodies what Hardwick detested about biographies: the sense of being trapped ‘on a long trip with the subject in the family car’. Do we really care that Lowell and Hardwick played tennis with a clergyman in Maine in 1958? Or that the same year she switched from ‘using fabric flowers’ to ‘Italian-made plastic roses that looked amazingly life-like’? What about the leaky roof in the summer house and the squirrel invasion midway through a reupholstery project? The foot surgery Hardwick had to correct her ‘tormenting middle toes’? Anyone?”

(…)

“Seduction and Betrayal’s fetishisation of female suffering is all the more troubling when Hardwick is writing about real people. For Plath, ‘suicide is an assertion of power, of the strength – not the weakness – of the personality. She is no poor animal sneaking away, giving up; instead she is strong, threatening, dangerous.’ Nor is Hardwick afraid to pit Plath’s suicide against that of another female writer: ‘When the day comes for Virginia Woolf, the pain of the illness bears down on her and she feels only apology, gratitude and depression.’ Woolf’s death is unremarkable, where Plath executed things with panache: ‘When the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her plot.’ ‘Style matters,’ Hardwick wrote in her essay on Woolf, even a ‘deformed kind of style’. Hedda Gabler is at her best ‘when she shows nothing beyond her style’. Billie Holiday somehow ‘retrieved from darkness the miracle of pure style’. Hardwick’s own reputation rests on that slippery word ‘style’. Who else would have written of Gertrude Stein: There is nothing hothouse in this peculiar American princess. For one thing, she is as sturdy as a turnip – the last resort of the starving, and native to the Old World, as the dictionary has it. A tough root of some sort; and yet she is mesmerised and isolated, castlebound, too, under the enchantments of her own devising ... We can see her like a peasant assaulting the chicken for Sunday dinner. She would wring the neck of her words. And wring the neck of sentences, also.
Hardwick’s conceits often rely on contradiction: Stein is a peasant and a princess.”

(…)

“Hardwick had a great command of pattern and some of her characterisations jingle like a good ad: Frost was ‘malicious and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’; Marianne Moore gave us ‘treasures of eccentricity and authenticity’. It’s an aural trick: if one thing sounds like another, their pairing seems right.”

(…)

“The first of many ‘other women’ was Giovanna Madonia, a music student whom Lowell met in Salzburg when he and Hardwick were travelling in Europe, not long after they were married. ‘Honey, I love you,’ he told his wife, ‘but I think I want a divorce to marry Giovanna.’ When Hardwick was pregnant with their daughter, Harriet, Lowell began seeing a young poetry student who looked, according to Edmund Wilson, ‘like a Renoir’. On one occasion, the girl played hostess at their house in Boston, while Hardwick retreated upstairs to cry. Bishop cut short a visit in the summer of 1947 after Lowell began declaring that he was in love with her. When the couple visited Bishop in Brazil in 1962, Lowell had a one-night stand with Clarice Lispector; Hardwick flew home early.”

(…)

“Lowell married Blackwood in 1972, the same year that ‘Is the “Equal” Woman More Vulnerable?’ appeared. Hardwick’s thoughts on women’s liberation speak directly to the pain of her divorce. ‘Nothing is more pitiful than an older woman thrown into “freedom”, lying like some wounded dragon in a paralysis of rage and embittered nostalgia.’ ‘With women,’ she wrote, ‘resentment often arises out of a sudden, piercing cry that all they have felt and sacrificed is somehow not constantly foremost in the minds of those they have felt and sacrificed for.’ It’s easy to trace a line from here to her literary criticism. ‘Independence is an unwanted necessity,’ she writes of Charlotte Brontë, ‘but a condition much thought about. All of one’s strength will be needed to maintain it; it is fate, a destiny to be confronted if not enjoyed.’”

(…)

“But writing about the help doesn’t make Hardwick any more of a class warrior than Seduction and Betrayal makes her a feminist. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more patronising account of the lives of working women: ‘When I think of cleaning women with unfair diseases I think of you, Josette. When I must iron or use a heavy pot for cooking, I think of you, Ida. When I think of deafness, heart disease, and languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela.’ In interviews about the novel, Hardwick stressed her ‘unconscious identification with damaged, desperate women on the streets, cleaning women, rotters in midtown hotels, failed persons of all kinds. C’est moi, in some sense.’ This wasn’t just hypocritical (‘I do begin to think that it will take at least two years before Theresa can answer the phone’). From her study in New York, the narrator laments the ‘intolerable beatitude in the rhythm of slaves’; ‘the energy of [their] lustful movements’. When Elizabeth is reunited with Ida, she thinks: ‘Oh, God, there she is, homely, homely, scabby with a terrible skin rash, heavy in her cotton housedress, lame in her carpet slippers. She is violently cheerful.’ Her ‘large, muscled arms hold me for a moment in a pounding embrace. The smell of laundry is, truly, like a bitter, sacred incense.’ People bought into the myth. Sleepless Nights became a bestseller and Hardwick saw no contradiction between such statements as ‘I myself am poor people’ and her complaints about the tax on earnings from the book: ‘I don’t see how I can possibly keep Maine and this exorbitant life [in New York] going.’ According to Curtis, the success of the novel put Hardwick on ‘New York’s cultural A list’: party invitations from Woody Allen, honorary doctorates, panel appearances (at one such event, she announced that Henry James was ‘the greatest American female novelist’). The final chapter of A Splendid Intelligence is titled ‘Literary Lion’, and the last 27 years of Hardwick’s life, from 1980 until her death in 2007, are crammed into fifty uneventful pages.”

(…)

‘Hardwick found it difficult to move beyond the small-mindedness to which she confessed in ‘On Reading the Writings of Women’ (1959): Toward the achievements of women I find my own attitudes extremely complicated by all sorts of vague emotions ... As a writer I feel a nearly unaccountable attraction and hostility to the work of other women writers. Envy, competitiveness, scorn infect my judgments at times, and indifference is strangely hard to come by in this matter.
If Hardwick’s reputation as a champion of women and poor people has been exaggerated, her views on race have been smoothed of contradiction.”

(…)

“Hardwick, on the other hand, saw things out in style. A month before her death, she and her assistant Jon Jewett indulged in one of their rituals – white wine and oysters at a restaurant opposite Lincoln Centre. ‘Sweetheart, I’m dying, and it’s really not so bad,’ Hardwick told him. ‘Let Mother try her oysters one more time.’”

Read the essay here.

Foot surgery can be really interesting. Never underestimate the feet.
Every author that matters, discovers sooner or later, that style matters. Without style, there is nothing. Bukowski wrote a good poem about style (“style is the answer to everything”) without falling in the trap of definitions. He suggests that suicide can be a matter of style too.

The ruthless honest of Hardwick attracts me and only because of her marriage with Lowell (that marriage must have been fun, at least to read about it) she deserves probably a better biographer.

Also: “(She wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $4000)”

Never leave your bed for less than 4000 us dollars, after inflation 7000 us dollars.

That’s the goal. The detour can be worth your while as well.