Elizabeth Hardwick and Writing Well

To teach high school English is to worry about how poorly students write. They have nothing to say. They say it imprecisely. Is this the fault of the assignment? Is this the fault of the teacher? Has it always been this way? These are the standard themes of conversation and complaint. Embedded in these concerns is the problem of a missing target: When students write analytically about literature, we are not entirely sure what we want them to do.

Returning to the mid-century glory days of the literary essay offer some correctives to this problem. The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, the most recent of which is now 15 years old and the earliest of which was published in 1953, are of varying interest today. Her insights into the style of letters and diaries are as close to "timeless" as any genre criticism is likely ever to be; her thoughts on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in their interest in how religion and race overlap, must have as much force today as they ever have. Her long descriptions of the Maine countryside, on the other hand, can try the patience of the modern reader (or, at least, this particular reader who has no particular interest in Maine).

Despite some passages that have, understandably, not aged as well as others, let us stipulate that Hardwick's essays, taken as a whole, can be seen as a kind of analytical writing we might want to aim for. They are smart. They are interesting in their structure, never getting bogged down in a predictable series of claims and counter-claims. They provide evidence that is suggestive and interesting, but never hammer home an argument with quote after quote in the way of the sophomoric student paper. They are interesting and creative in their use of language, playing with sentence structure and word choice in ways we have been trained not to expect from this kind of non-fiction writing.

How does Hardwick achieve this kind of writing? The obvious answer is that she is a rare genius, and that is obviously true. There are, though, two lessons that can be learned here--lessons that can be generalised beyond Hardwick's personal skill and that fly clearly in the face of how English classes ordinarily teach and assign writing.

The first is that Hardwick's writing is evaluative. Much of her work was book reviewing and, as she amusingly points out in an early essay, a "review" would seem to strongly imply stating an opinion (64). Such evaluative writing is, if not quite a taboo, certainly discouraged in many high school (and university) classrooms. To take two driving forces behind high school curricula, neither the AP nor the IB has any place in their formal, concluding examinations for any kind of evaluation of the quality of a work, and a student who ventures such an opinion is very likely to be penalised for writing outside of the expected genre. This is a shame, because Hardwick's clear positions on the strengths and weaknesses of a writer give her essays not only some of their verve but also a kind of narrative excitement: What is she going to say about Mary McCarthy? Surely she must hate Norman Mailer as much as I do? What does the title "Militant Nudes" even mean? No "analysis," in the schoolmarm sense of the word, could carry with it that implicit suspense.

The second lesson here is the breadth of Hardwick's subject matter. The Collected Essays include the expected topics of a professional book reviewer (William James, Henry James, Edmund Wilson, Gertrude Stein, etc.) but also the riots in Watts and at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention, the exploration of Brazil and a protest against Theodor Adorno. And within the traditionally literary topics, there is a great deal that is not traditional textual analysis: thoughts on the life of George Eliot's husband; the problem of being an intellectual in Washington, D.C.

The essays that leave behind strictly textual criticism are still in every important way "literary." The creativity with language is still there, as are the experiments with essay structure. Maybe most importantly, these essays bring to their subject matter a literary standard of argument: evidence is offered, but so are generalisations and impressions beyond what the historian or social scientist would allow.

To write like Hardwick would be to abandon much of what makes student writing bad. It would be to let students say "I hated this book," but also to let them abandon the book entirely and write about, say, a parade or a protest or a city they visited on vacation. That might be more than the high school English class, as currently structured, is quite ready to accept.