Word: hardwicks
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...amusing as an effeminate and disgusting ambassador of Henry VII; Miss Dorothy Tutin, who fancies she is an actress, and proceeds to read a sketch of the Kings of England by the fifteen-year-old Jane Austen as if it were the work of Baby Snooks; and Mr. Paul Hardwick, who is plain enough. Musical interludes are provided by Mr. James Walker, a harpsichordist,--Mr. Barton, luckily, seems to have been unable to devise a way of making the harpsichord funny--and by three gentlemen of indeterminate voice who give the worst performance of the "Agincourt Song" in more than...
...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...
...notorious McCarthy story, she writes, "is about contraception in the way, for instance, that Frank Norris's The Octopus is about wheat. There is an air of imparting information-like whaling in Melville." Reviewing Simone de Beauvoir's prolix attack on male imperialism. The Second Sex, Hardwick pricks its Utopian pretension that women are stronger and better than men in a commonsensical line: "Any woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch...
What is best about the essays is not Writer Hardwick's critical conclusions, which tend to be prudent rather than profound, but her rare talent for skewering a flaw or evoking a literary presence in a single, ringing epigram. Items...