Bliss Elizabeth Hardwick would be ninety-seven today. Robert Lowell wrote some poems about her which I wish – but what’s it to do with me? – that he hadn’t written. He also wrote some wonderful poems about her: https://youtube/watch?v=haZVp8wDIQE I don’t think anyone could forget the first time they reached the back of Life Studies read that. Thank you once more, Bedford Public Library. But she was a very fine writer herself, and Derek Walcott puts it infinitely better than I ever could: ‘Distance requires formality, but I cannot be distant writing about Lizzie Hardwick since everything has come alarmingly closer—the curls, the infectious chuckles, the drawl like poured-out honey, the privilege of sharing her astute delight, and the benign devastations of her wit. Because she hated pomposity she was more fun than any American writer I have known. She preferred gaiety to malice and had the laugh to go with it. Memories of her rise like butterflies from a bush, all darting, elate, and light; the use of three adjectives is the signature of her style, perhaps because of the precise languor of her Kentucky accent. That meter entered her husband’s poems and Cal sometimes sounded as if he were talking in Elizabeth’s voice, as Robert Lowell blended into Elizabeth Hardwick. Laughter is a gift, not mockery; even to giggle at the invisible clothes of the emperors of our fiction and poetry, which she had to do in her criticism, was natural; that quality of lightness lifted us up too. You felt that she wrote for you, you hoped that those brilliant monologues of the best prose writer in America would not ever reach a period, but you also knew that she would outlast it. They rise thick and fast from the hibiscus bush, merriment in the December sunshine: memories of Lizzie running backstage at the interval of one of my plays, so happy for me; Lizzie being so fond of Margaret, my second wife; Cal and Lizzie with Harriet and my son Peter in Trinidad; and, invisible from that ordinary goodness, the essays that I read with as much care as if they were poems, not only for their meaning but their scansion, with the hibiscus bush now bare of the bliss of her thought, her butterflies.’
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 07:13:15 +0000
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