Tears but not idle tears — and knowing what they mean

Gabriel e Annan

SEDUCTION AND BETRAYAL by Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books, £7.99, pp. 257, ISBN 0940322781 SLEEPLESS NIGHTS by Elizabeth Hardwick New York Review of Books, £7.99, pp. 139, ISBN 0940322722 Seduction and Betrayal is a collection of essays and lectures first published in 1970. Sleepless Nights came out in 1979 and was then (though not now) described as a novel — following the outline of Hardwick's life, but full of invented characters and episodes. Both books are unforeseeably wonderful — funny and sad, penetrating as a scan and full of passages of such breathtaking perception and felicitous wording that it would be a luxury to be able to remember them verbatim for the rest of one's life. Both books could be read as collections of short stories — about women, mostly.

In Sleepless Nights the women are loners, eccentrics, bored, disoriented heiresses, touchingly devoted, hard-up cleaning ladies, bag ladies

who do not know what they look like, do not see their lives, and so they wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovideci for.

There is also a man, a sweet-natured, uxorious, but uncontrollably promiscuous Dutch doctor who quotes Holderlin in a letter to his mistress and looks after his irritating French wife right into her alcoholic dotage, when she can no longer stand alone, and 'dangled on his arm like a black shopping bag'. On the last-but-one page Hardwick writes:

Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone — many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.

Well, the light tone is charming and witty, but the underground river of tears can be heard bubbling away underneath.

The women in Seduction and Betrayal are either writers like the Brontës, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf; or their relations: Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle; or else their creations: Ibsen's Nora, Hedda, and Rebecca West; Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Clarissa, Donna Elvira, Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, and the heroines of Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. The rate of mental illness and suicide is high among both real and fictional women. 'The suicide season arrives with the first snowfall.'

Still, there is nothing soppy about Hardwick. She judges and pronounces:

One story has poor Branwell visiting the National Gallery and, in the presence of the great paintings there, despairing of his own talents. This is hard to credit, since the example of the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre.

The last bit is hard and true enough to be by In Rochefoucauld. Hardwick is less harsh but equally sharp-sighted about Charlotte:

Sometimes she gave [her heroines] more rectitude and right thinking than we can easily endure, but she knew their vulnerability, the neglect they expected and received, the spiritual and psychological scars inflicted upon them, the way their frantic efforts were scarcely noticed, much less admired or condoned.

On the other hand, Sylvia Plath's 'work is brutal, like the smash of a fist, and sometimes it is also mean in its feeling'. This doesn't stop Hardwick from admiring and understanding it:

Orestes rages, but Aeschylus lives to be almost 70. Sylvia Plath, however, is both heroine and author: when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her plot.

Hardwick's writing is so masterly (and masterful) that it seems more sensible to quote than to describe it. On marriage (she was married to the poet Robert Lowell, but this is a propos of the Carlyles) she says:

This is the unspoken contract of the wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out that this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

Less sardonic and even more profoundly penetrating is her take on time in fiction;

Every moment of the present is rushing into its fate as the past .., Nevertheless, the past is not a blur of memory, but a forest in which all the trees are human beings, rooted, breathing, sustaining the axe, or withering. To think of the past as a series of agreements with others that make an everlasting claim on us is unreal, and yet it is one of the most interesting questions ever asked about the subject matter of so much art: youthful Love. It is a radical questioning of the way society understands the flow of Life, the rules it has made for the human collisions that are, fictionally, our biographies ... It is a question that goes beyond an answer.