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The Hard Choices of Elizabeth Hardwick | The New Yorker

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Elizabeth Hardwick was a master of the opening sentence. Few writers have the guts to begin so boldly—or with so many adjectives. Here’s the first line of her 1955 essay on George Eliot: “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 in middle age.” An essay about the poet Dylan Thomas begins more briskly, but with equal intrigue: “He died, grotesquely, like Valentino, with mysterious weeping women at his bedside.” Her biography of Herman Melville, from 2000, carries on the tradition: “Herman Melville: sound the name and it’s to be the romance of the sea, the vast, mysterious waters for which a thousand adjectives cannot suffice.” Sound Hardwick’s name, however, and it’s at least a thousand and one adjectives; they paint an enticing portrait, though not necessarily a clear one. To William Phillips, the co-founder of Partisan Review, she was “charming even when most

Save this story Save this story Elizabeth Hardwick was a master of the opening sentence. Few writers have the guts to begin so boldly—or with so many adjectives. Here’s the first line of her 1955 essay on George Eliot: “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 in middle age.” An essay about the poet Dylan Thomas begins more briskly, but with equal intrigue: “He died, grotesquely, like Valentino, with mysterious weeping women at his bedside.” Her biography of Herman Mel

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