Word: hardwick
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...VIEW OF MY OWN (214 pp.)- Elizabeth Hardwick-Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
...unfinished business. As writers, women are usually mistresses of microcosm: their themes may not be large, but their literary housekeeping is unassailable-the commas properly placed, the exact word found to match an idea or thing. One of the better U.S. dispensers of this feminine mot justice is Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife of Poet Robert Lowell. Judging by this first collection of her essays and book reviews-most of them fugitives from oblivion in Partisan Review-she is also an artist in aphorism who deserves, at her best, comparison with Mary McCarthy or Virginia Woolf...
...essay gatherings go, A View of My Own is oddly uneven, since the deft Hardwick prose has occasionally been put to work at drab tasks. There are forgettable reviews of forgotten books, a surprisingly maudlin attempt to explain the death and nine legal lives of Caryl Chessman as an indictment of the U.S. inability to understand its youth. But Hardwick also writes with wit and accuracy about the proud, faded elegance of Boston, a city, she argues, "that is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult, but is, rather, a specially organized...