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Elizabeth Hardwick lives on the west side of Manhattan, on a quiet street near enough to Central Park to have heard the crowds and speakers at the great political demonstrations in Sheep’s Meadow. Her apartment is light and spacious. “Like modern architecture,” she says, “it looks much better in photographs.” The building was designed for artists, and the living room is dominated by a large window. Behind the enormous plants and the freestanding tiles, one can see a comforting fixture of urban life: a fire escape.

Her home is clearly that of a writer constantly at work, and strewn throughout is a lifetime’s accumulation of furniture, objects, paintings, posters, photographs, records, heirlooms, and countless books. On either side of the living room are more books: ceiling-high shelves of histories, fiction, and poetry. It is a working library, accumulated with her late husband, the poet Robert Lowell. The daily effort to keep a large library in order has made Hardwick favor paperbacks, preferably those lightweight and storable ones that can be whipped out on a bus or an airplane—nonsmoking section—without too much fuss.

Just as there are books everywhere that indicate the life of the mind, so one frequently comes upon notebooks and notepads on the coffee table, on the dining room table, things in which she has jotted down lines, questions, ideas. The typewriter goes from room to room, one day upstairs in her study, the next morning downstairs. And then there are the manuscripts from former as well as current students from her various writing classes, which she will read and comment on extensively.

This interview took place in her home, where she occasionally puttered, setting stray books in their places as we talked.

 

INTERVIEWER

I have the feeling you don’t like to talk about yourself, at least not in a formal way.

ELIZABETH HARDWICK

Well, I do a lot of talking and the “I” is not often absent. In general I’d rather talk about other people. Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character analysis.

INTERVIEWER

Sleepless Nights is reticent, perhaps, but it certainly has the tone of lived experience, of a kind of autobiography.

HARDWICK

I guess so. After all, I wrote it in the first person and used my own name, Elizabeth. Not very confessional, however. And not entirely taken from life, rather less than the reader might think. 

INTERVIEWER

Many of the essays in Seduction and Betrayal have an oddly personal tone. The stress on certain parts of the texts shows that you have dug things out in an unusual, somehow urgent manner, as if you had lived them. I’m thinking of the Jane Carlyle essay and your way of looking at Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.

HARDWICK

Jane Carlyle was real, but of course I didn’t really know her, as the saying goes. The people in Rosmersholm are figures of Ibsen’s imagination.

INTERVIEWER

What is the reason for your deep attraction to Ibsen?

HARDWICK

I don’t know that I have a deep attraction for Ibsen. Sometimes I think he’s an awful dolt . . . wooden, and in certain plays stolidly grandiose like the mountains that are such an unfortunate apotheosis in Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken. I don’t like the poetic Ibsen, but I have found myself deeply engaged by the beauty, you might call it, of the old Ibsen domestic misery.

INTERVIEWER

Someone once said to me that he was fascinated by your essay on Rosmersholm, about the triangle between the man and the two women. But when he went to the play he couldn’t always find your ideas there on the page. What do you make of that? 

HARDWICK

I certainly hope what I said is on Ibsen’s pages and of course I think it is. Still, you’re not writing an essay to give a résumé of the plots. You choose to write because you think you have something fresh to say on a topic. That is, if you’re writing from choice and not just as a journeyman doing a job. Perhaps it’s true that in reading certain works, not all works, I do sometimes enter a sort of hallucinatory state and I think I see undercurrents and light in dark places about the imagined emotions and actions. This often stimulates me to write, particularly about novels. Of course the text is the object, the given, and the period is not often one’s own and if there is anything detestable it is the looking at fictional characters as if they were your friends. I have found that horrible inclination among students, more and more so. They don’t know the difference between calling a character “silly” and realizing that they are reading a masterpiece of created, located, visionary “silliness.” I think every reader and critic falls into a hallucinatory state and that is as true of the technocrats, the deconstructionists, as of any others.

INTERVIEWER

When you say “hallucinatory state,” are you trying to describe how the creative process works for you?

HARDWICK

Perhaps hallucinatory is too strong or too mysterious a word. What I meant was that in reading books and planning to write about them, or maybe just in reading certain books, you begin to see all sorts of not quite expressed things, to make connections, sometimes to feel you have discovered or felt certain things the author may not have been entirely conscious of. It’s a sort of creative or “possessed” reading and that is why I think even the most technical of critics do the same thing, by their means making quite mysterious discoveries. But as I said, the text is always the first thing. It has the real claim on you, of course.

INTERVIEWER

Do you fall into this state when you write fiction?

HARDWICK

I don’t fall into a state at all. I just meant to describe something happening in the brain when it is stimulated by reading imaginative works. As for writing fiction, well, you don’t have any primary text, of course. You have to create that, and yet the struggle seems to be to uncover things by language, to find out what you mean and feel by the sheer effort of writing it down. By expression you discover what you wish to express or what can be expressed, by you. Things that are vague in the beginning have to be made concrete. Often, what you thought was the creative idea ahead of you vanishes or becomes something else.

INTERVIEWER

What comes first in sitting down to write—I guess we’re talking about fiction. Is it a concept? Is it a character? Is it a scene?

HARDWICK

It takes many things to make a work of fiction, but I suppose it is true that there is a kind of starting point in the mind, a point that may be different for each piece of work. Sometimes I have had the impulse to begin fiction from a single line I had in my head. 

INTERVIEWER

Can you give an example?

HARDWICK

I remember that I started writing Sleepless Nights because of a single line. The line was: “Now I will start my novel, but I don’t know whether to call myself I or she.” 

INTERVIEWER

Was this a first line, a beginning line?

HARDWICK

No, it was to be the last line of the opening scene. I published the first chapter in The New York Review of Books and the line was the ending of the scene. But as I went on to write the book, I did call the narrator “I” and so I deleted the line from the final text. Some readers noticed the omission and asked me about it. I think now that I could have retained the line and just gone on with the narrative “I,” as if to say I had made the decision.