The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, ed by Alex Andriesse 2022

I have been fascinated with Elizabeth Hardwick since I read her introduction to The Best American Essays: 1986.  This was the first volume in a series that has gone unbroken for 37 years now, and Hardwick’s being chosen as the volume’s first editor was no accident.  She was the co-founder of the New York Review of Books, the author of three novels and a biography of Herman Melville, and the author of hundreds of critical essays in magazines from Vogue to Daedalus.  She had also been married to the poet, Robert Lowell and had taught at Columbia for years.  This is how Maggie Doherty describes her in her 2021 New Yorker review of a new biography of Hardwick: “There was Hardwick the merciless reviewer, who co-founded The New York Review of Books; Hardwick the exile, who left the South; Hardwick the young bohemian, who wanted to write fiction. In the years since her death, in 2007, she’s been praised as “inimitable,” a “landmark” critic, and a writer who grasped “the relentlessness of collective experience,” which is to say—and it really cannot be said enough—that she often wrote about the struggles of the poor.”

Her ‘Collected Essays’ were published in 2017 to some acclaim, so why this additional volume of 35 essays from Vogue, Mademoiselle, The NYRB, and a few other journals?  And why did the editor feel free to do the choosing from among the dozens of other essays without input from the author (granted, she was dead, but even so.).  Perhaps this is why I felt vaguely dissatisfied upon completing the book.

Yes, she is an extraordinary writer as seen in the reprinting of that 1986 introduction to the Best American Essays entitled The Art of the Essay.  And, yes, her essays about Balanchine, Sontag, Katherine Anne Porter, and the emigres Nabokov, Stravinsky, and Balanchine among others were worth the slog through some of the later essays in the book.  But, as she herself comments in the Art of the Essay, ‘intemperance in political writing has its hacks’ and several of her essays about the Kennedys, Jimmy Carter, George Wallace and others border on that territory.  I also found her writings on feminism to be a bit over the top, though one must grant some forgiveness given the three decades since most of them were written.

The bottom line is that she’s a marvelous writer and a brilliant critic.  I should have begun with The Collected Essays but having failed to do that, I will likely move on to Darryl Pinckney’s new book about Hardwick, ‘Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street’ published recently.