#Elizabeth Hardwick

[bookaddict24-7]

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading."

Elizabeth Hardwick

[thequietabsolute]

She was melancholy, headachey, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair.

— Elizabeth Hardwick on George Eliot

[thevividgreenmoss]

One winter she wore a great lynx coat, and in it she moved, menacing and handsome as a Cossack, pacing about in the trap of her vitality. Quarrelsome dreams sometimes rushed through her speech and accounts of wounds she had inflicted with broken glass. And at the White Rose Bar, a thousand cigarettes punctuated her appearances, which, not only in their brilliance but in the fact of their taking place at all, had about them the aspect of magic. Waiting and waiting: that was what the pursuit of her was. One felt like an old carriage horse standing at the entrance, ready for the cold midnight race through the park. She was always behind a closed door—the fate of those addicted to whatever. And then at last she must come forward, emerge in powders and Vaseline, hair twisted with a curling iron, gloves of satin or silk jersey, flowers—the expensive martyrdom of the “entertainer.”

At that time not many of her records were in print, and she was seldom heard on the radio because her voice did not accord with popular taste then. The appearances in nightclubs were a necessity. It was a burden to be there night after night, although not a burden to sing, once she started, in her own way. She knew she could do it, that she had mastered it all, but why not ask the question: Is this all there is? Her work took on, gradually, a destructive cast, as it so often does with the greatly gifted who are doomed to repeat endlessly their own heights of inspiration.

...Her whole life had taken place in the dark. The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café; the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night—working, smiling, in makeup, in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again. The aim of it all is just to be drifting off to sleep when the first rays of the sun’s brightness begin to threaten the theatrical eyelids.

Elizabeth Hardwick on Billie Holliday (from Sleepless Nights)

[viecome]

Crítica de 'Seducción y traición', de Elizabeth Hardwick: la apabullante brillantez de una escritora única

La escritora Elizabeth Hardwick. / La Opinión La editorial Navona salda una deuda con una de las mentes más destacadas del siglo XX en EEUU con la publicación del libro de ensayos ‘Seducción y traición’ y de su magistral novela ‘Noches insomnes’ Origen: LIBROS | Crítica de ‘Seducción y traición’, de Elizabeth Hardwick: la apabullante brillantez de una escritora única

[pneumaticpresence]

on Elizabeth Hardwick's prose -- poetic or not

Darryl Pinckney, Come Back in September

[biblioklept]

Mass-market Monday | Herman Melville's Redburn

Redburn, Herman Melville. Doubleday Anchor Books (1957). Cover art by Edward Gorey. 301 pages. Redburn is as good a place as any to start with Melville, I suppose. From Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Melville in Love,” which prompted me to finally read Redburn: Melville’s state of mind is revealed…with a purity of expressiveness in the novel Redburn, one of his most appealing and certainly the most…

[dk-thrive]

Sterile, ostentatious and essentially plotless, “Parade” is an antinovel, a little black box of a book. It fails the Hardwick Test. The sole burden of an antinovel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, is that it must be consistently (“each page, each paragraph”) interesting.

— Dwight Garner, from "The Artist is Present (and Pretentious) in Rachel Cusk's Latest (new novel "Parade") (NY Times, June 10, 2024)

[davidhudson]

Elizabeth Hardwick, July 27, 1916 – December 2, 2007.

With Darryl Pinckney.

[kilterstreet]

I am looking out on a snowstorm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all simple struggles to an end.

from Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

[dykemind]

tumblr needs to hear this for real

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #386

An end of week recap “The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” – Elizabeth Hardwick (born 27th July 1916) This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look…

[razorsadness]

If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from the shelf.

—Elizabeth Hardwick, from Sleepless Nights

[thequietabsolute]

… she had the devotion of a man whose love had in it that element of adoration and self-suppression which is dearest of all to a woman like George Eliot, at once jealous and dependent, demanding exclusive devotion and needing incessant care — but ready to give all she had in return.

— Eliza Linton, regarding George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s husband.

[thevividgreenmoss]

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

[pneumaticpresence]

searched for podcast episodes on Elizabeth Hardwick because I can’t stop learning about her and am not ready to give up on book podcasts even though I almost never like them. the two hosts of this podcast called Book Fights have accused her of “tapdancing in the spotlight” in her essay on MLK’s funeral — they suggest that her prose is too showy and flowery, and given the gravity of the subject matter she should have “gotten out of the way with [her] own bullshit” … I haven’t read the essay but this take really doesn’t cohere with what I know of her motives nor my experience of her writing. so now I have to read it for myself. will try to keep an open mind about the piece but these men seem like assholes with reading comprehension problems — frankly surprised that they edit a literary magazine

[thatwritererinoriordan]

It is literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick's birthday. The photo is accurately captioned as a photo of Elizabeth Hardwick's husband, Robert Lowell, with his fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop and Lowell enjoyed a 30-year friendship. To be clear, Bishop is an entirely different Elizabeth (and a lesbian) than Lowell's wife Hardwick (not a lesbian).

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil