The pleasures of reading good literary criticism include discovering the surpassing expression of one's own as yet inarticulate but definite sense of things. Or, if one has a readiness to learn, the illumination of the previously unseen.

For these and other pleasures, Elizabeth Hardwick is America's most eminent and worthwhile literary critic. She has published five books of essays, the most recent of which, American Fictions, is a Modern Library compendium of her work on writers and themes of the past two centuries. The essays cover not only fiction but also poetry, drama, biography, memoirs, and the letters of great writers.

Hardwick, a native of Kentucky, settled in New York City as a young woman in the 1940s and readily distinguished herself as a novelist and leading intellectual. She became a founder of the New York Review of Books and was married for a time to poet Robert Lowell. Her first book of criticism, in 1951, was A View of My Own, and even then, at the beginning, her view was a long one. Her life work, represented in American Fictions, forms an indispensable link of understanding between the past and the future.

Hardwick's interest has always been in the character of the writer, the writer's creations, and the society that shapes them. In the lead essay in American Fictions, she relates that while preparing lectures on Manhattan, she thought of Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener," because of its subtitle: "A Story of Wall Street." Her reading of Bartleby's famously short and impervious responses to requests that he work ("I would prefer not to"), and the moral dilemma of the lawyer who employs, then dismisses him, leads Hardwick to consider the lawyer's conscientious endurance: "If Bartleby is unsaveable, at least the lawyer's soul may be said to have been saved by the freeze of 'fraternal melancholy' that swept over him.... It is not thought," Hardwick concludes, "that many 'downtown' today would wish to profit from, oh, such a chill."

Her careful wording of this last fine, ironically allusive of Bartleby's perfect self-expression, and her delicious placement of "oh" to punctuate the turn in meaning — Bartleby is no more pitiable than those who don't recognize him — grants a shiver and extends the question of conscience from an earlier age of intoxicating financial speculation into our own.

Like the best writing about writing (V. S. Pritchett's biography of Turgenev, and Nabokov's lectures on Russian literature leap to mind), Hardwick's essays sparkle with sentences whose drama and poetry convey her wit. "Critics are often wrong," she remarks, "but writers are hardly ever wrong, hide and deny it as they will, in knowing whose opinion really counts."

Hardwick offers that line by way of underscoring an exception to the rule: Edna Millay, whose envy of poets with stature greater than her own led her unwisely to attack T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  But her envy, Hardwick notes, was natural: "You cannot give, as she did, your whole life to writing without caring horribly, even to the point of despair."

Only a writer likewise devoted to writing can write such a line, though its graceful balance between passion and disinterest results, one thinks, from Hardwick's having the insight to clarify her relationship to her work rather than, like Millay, to identify herself uneasily with it.

As a critic, Hardwick is an ideal reader, without an agenda and devoted to enhancing the conversation through which readers appreciate books and life.  She has written with equal interest on men and women and with more clarity than most on sex and gender. "Biology is destiny only for girls," she writes with characteristic concision and boldness.

She moves with apparent ease along the line of inquiry that leads from ideas to the emotions that move us. Her thinking displays a calm enjoyment of thorny, contradictory subjects:  Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Djuna Barnes, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth.  In Gertrude Stein's verbosity, Hardwick finds a paradox of minimalism, an "art of nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass."

Hardwick's gift for the exact analogy, piquant description, the pertinent aside, her ability to illuminate any particular, is informed by indifferent sympathy of her intellect, trained steadily on the human nature of literature.  If criticism is the companion on the journey of reading life, Elizabeth Hardwick is the best company imaginable.
                                                                            — Tom Jenks
 

(This review originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle)