Word: hardwick
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...other hand, Hardwick makes full use of the legendary self-destructiveness of Billie Holiday. There is the suggestion of a 1940s acquaintanceship with the great blues singer. Hardwick, the prudent observer, is fascinated by the abandon with which Holiday burned talent and life. There is a tendency to mythologize her excesses and her presence: "The lascivious gardenias, worn like a large, white, beautiful ear, the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean...
That is not the statement of a Boston Brahmin but of a Kentuckian, born 62 years ago in Lexington, a daughter of a small businessman. Hardwick's fugitive group was not that of Southern Poet-Critics John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. Hers included the restless young intellectuals who headed north to freedom from regionalism. She studied literature at Columbia, wrote fiction under a Guggenheim fellowship, married Poet Robert Lowell in 1949 (they were divorced in 1972), contributed to the Partisan Review and The New Yorker, became a founding fixture at the New York...
...essayist, Hardwick fashioned an authoritative style out of liberal commitment and sharp sense. As a fiction writer, she has turned the crutch of feminine sensibility into a dangerous weapon: "Actually Louisa, the young girl visitor, has just gotten quite a good job. She knows a few things and a few people. She went out early, but not too early, in black pants and a black leather coat. She put on a scarf with the name of a French designer displayed with such prominence it might have been he who was the applicant...
Sleepless Nights tosses and turns on such hard, solitary judgments. Mary McCarthy comes to mind and, oddly, so does the Ernest Hemingway of A Moveable Feast, who said that his book could be regarded as fiction though it also might throw light on autobiographical fact. Hardwick provides a similar safeguard when Elizabeth, her novel's unaltered ego, says to herself, "Why didn't you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when...
...Manhattanite-someone from somewhere else-Hardwick seems at home with homelessness. She also has an untiring eye for worms in the Big Apple...