Bartleby in Manhattan: & Other Essays

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Unlike Seduction and Betrayal (1974), this collection of 24 essays--mostly from The New York Review of Books, some dating back to the 1960s--does not offer a rich, inter-related sampling of Hardwick at her challenging best. The diverse items here include much that is minor, dated, and (especially when attempting broad socio-cultural observation) unpersuasive: reflections on the JFK assassination seem especially dubious now ("Above all, Oswald was a pre-television spirit. Perhaps only a person immunized to TV by the iron of his nature could actually kill Kennedy"); a mosaic of thoughts about the insecurities of 1970s life is similarly un-prophetic. But none of these pieces is without flashes of Hardwick's quirky/common-sensical insight, her powers of lyrical yet hard-headed description. "Biological melancholy" is the perfect phrase for Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man; likewise, the art of Ring Lardner is eloquently summed up as "pure subversion on the run from the common man and his old jokes""; Thomas Mann receives a splendidly concise 100th-birthday tribute. (""His awareness of the tawdry and shameful humanized his concentration on the very act of art. He is saved by the perverse, by the knowledge that comes from having looked at the lost."") And a few of these essays do present Hardwick at impressive full-throttle: her demolishing review of Peter Conrad's Imagining America is a breathtaking, whip-sharp performance; there's a grand, sad, ironic piece on the "Wives and Mistresses" of the famous, focusing on Sonya Tolstoy, Pasternak's Olga, and Lady Byron (but with inevitable, deepening echoes of Hardwick's own marriage to Robert Lowell); and the title essay is a tour de force of close-reading criticism--as Hardwick shoulders her existential way, almost line by line, through Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" . . . and nearly bullies us into hearing a ""terrifying, pure harmony in the tides of negation that define Bartleby," solely through ""his incomparable self-expression."" Always shorthand-stylish, if not always up to her own high standards: a nonetheless welcome arrival from one of our most valuable critics.

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