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Authors: Elizabeth Hardwick
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objects of eternity are at hand, lest they down the years need something remembered or forgotten. A broken heart. The pharaohs need not even go outdoors to pace about in their pain, looking in shop windows, buying things. No, they may sit at home in a depression, a square of fur warming their knees, mending all the while. Everyone dreams of a servant when the ego is bruised, the vanity affronted.
To Alex I said on the telephone: You cannot imagine how well I am set up, how comfortable I appear to be, although a pauper.
It is almost seven. Should Alex walk in the door as a type, a genre? Perhaps that effort is a mistake. What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period. Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she , rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.
Back there, when I first came to New York, I observed that a number of intellectual men, radicals, had a way of finding rich women who loved them in the brave and risky way of Desdemona. A writer or painter or philosophe sailed into port and a well-to-do woman would call out, Evviva Otello! The women were not necessarily sparkling and lighthearted. More often an impressive, thick, downright strength of purpose went along with them, like an overcoat.
Perhaps a sort of perverse complacency led the lucky women to rescue a smart, sulky man, one whose ambitions and gifts were far from settled, whose intelligence was certain but whose destiny was a curling, warning question mark. Gifts, sad and defining, books read, ideas stored—all intact and battered by an inconstant will.
Envy is not the vice of the frozen intellectual. How can it seize the mind when boredom arrives before it, always ahead of time, ready? Boredom with the results of those who are always working and producing, failing or piling up money and reputation, boredom with the ordinary thoughts laid out in carefully chosen type, bound for the ages, with indexes, chapter headings, ordinary thoughts dressed in the same coats and hats as the complete works of Spinoza.
Time—that is something else. With the hesitant intellectual years fly by like a day; life is shortened by the yellowing incompletes. The “book”—a plaguing growth that does not itself grow, but attaches, hangs on, a tumorous companion made up of the deranged cells of learning, experience, thinking.
Sometimes the moneyed women with their artists and thinkers were like wives with their vigilant passion for the Soviet Union, the huge land mass that had long ago aroused in them the blood loyalty and tenderness felt for a first child. And what are a child’s “few mistakes”?
The pathos of high projects that cannot be set aside because of the investment, the “good parts,” the research, the files, the old outlines. Healthy enough on the tennis court, to be seen at the opera, the ballet, the mysterious invalids have their charm. They know something very well, perhaps too well.
In the evening, wine may revive the dead Ph.D. and in the warmth the weed-choked garden of ambition and love seems to burst forth with thorny, brave little blossoms like those on an ancient, untended rosebush. It is like the song in the hymnal, one of the many B-flat offerings of consolation.
The sun is sinking fast,
The daylight dies;
Let love awake and pay
An evening sacrifice.
And yet the perennial, hardy hope cannot last out dinner. This is New York, with its graves next to its banks.
It is a Friday night, October 1973. Smog and closeness during the long afternoon. Earlier at the New York Jewish Guild for the Blind a vicious burglar alarm was somehow tripped into violent sound. On and on it rang, as if a thousand ambulances were screaming through the city, whistling, careening, warning on their mission of remedy. The alarm sounded without mercy for an
To Alex I said on the telephone: You cannot imagine how well I am set up, how comfortable I appear to be, although a pauper.
It is almost seven. Should Alex walk in the door as a type, a genre? Perhaps that effort is a mistake. What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period. Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she , rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.
Back there, when I first came to New York, I observed that a number of intellectual men, radicals, had a way of finding rich women who loved them in the brave and risky way of Desdemona. A writer or painter or philosophe sailed into port and a well-to-do woman would call out, Evviva Otello! The women were not necessarily sparkling and lighthearted. More often an impressive, thick, downright strength of purpose went along with them, like an overcoat.
Perhaps a sort of perverse complacency led the lucky women to rescue a smart, sulky man, one whose ambitions and gifts were far from settled, whose intelligence was certain but whose destiny was a curling, warning question mark. Gifts, sad and defining, books read, ideas stored—all intact and battered by an inconstant will.
Envy is not the vice of the frozen intellectual. How can it seize the mind when boredom arrives before it, always ahead of time, ready? Boredom with the results of those who are always working and producing, failing or piling up money and reputation, boredom with the ordinary thoughts laid out in carefully chosen type, bound for the ages, with indexes, chapter headings, ordinary thoughts dressed in the same coats and hats as the complete works of Spinoza.
Time—that is something else. With the hesitant intellectual years fly by like a day; life is shortened by the yellowing incompletes. The “book”—a plaguing growth that does not itself grow, but attaches, hangs on, a tumorous companion made up of the deranged cells of learning, experience, thinking.
Sometimes the moneyed women with their artists and thinkers were like wives with their vigilant passion for the Soviet Union, the huge land mass that had long ago aroused in them the blood loyalty and tenderness felt for a first child. And what are a child’s “few mistakes”?
The pathos of high projects that cannot be set aside because of the investment, the “good parts,” the research, the files, the old outlines. Healthy enough on the tennis court, to be seen at the opera, the ballet, the mysterious invalids have their charm. They know something very well, perhaps too well.
In the evening, wine may revive the dead Ph.D. and in the warmth the weed-choked garden of ambition and love seems to burst forth with thorny, brave little blossoms like those on an ancient, untended rosebush. It is like the song in the hymnal, one of the many B-flat offerings of consolation.
The sun is sinking fast,
The daylight dies;
Let love awake and pay
An evening sacrifice.
And yet the perennial, hardy hope cannot last out dinner. This is New York, with its graves next to its banks.
It is a Friday night, October 1973. Smog and closeness during the long afternoon. Earlier at the New York Jewish Guild for the Blind a vicious burglar alarm was somehow tripped into violent sound. On and on it rang, as if a thousand ambulances were screaming through the city, whistling, careening, warning on their mission of remedy. The alarm sounded without mercy for an
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