by
Cathy Curtis
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The essay Elizabeth published in Vogue in the summer of 1971 was unusually personal. “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” begins with a confession about her ever-present anxieties and tendency to worry about all sorts of things.20 As a young woman, she wrote, her worries were centered on “disgrace,” the potential results of her involvements with men (at a time—as she did not feel the need to explain here—when the taint of promiscuity or an out-of-wedlock pregnancy could destroy a woman’s good name). Even marriage to the wrong man could mean not living “the life you wanted.” Then, as a married woman, the birth of her child temporarily made her reluctant to travel. Working on her writing involved “an almost puritanical pressure,” but it was important to pay attention to housework as well, “if that makes someone else happier.” (In reality, as soon as Elizabeth could afford it, she hired other women to do the cleaning.) This shadowy “someone” takes on a greater presence in succeeding paragraphs, where she invokes a poem by Sylvia Plath about children whom “an educated, sophisticated man” has left behind “when he changed his mind.” The woman doesn’t become accustomed to the absence of this man. She is forced into self-reliance, but not by women’s liberation. “The brevity of love must be acknowledged,” Elizabeth concluded. Her self-revelation is heartbreaking.
A long article Elizabeth wrote during this fraught period offers a window into her state of mind. In “When to Cast Out, Give Up, Let Go,” she likens the “pinching shoe, the single glove” that women often hang on to despite their uselessness to “the longings, the clingings” of women’s inner lives.113 She writes of “painful memories . . . enshrining resentments and long, futile angers” that only forgiveness would allow women to relive “without desperation.” In her view, “the inclination to repeat our grievances, to insist that payment is always due us . . . is an indulgence that everyone must sooner or later give up.” Elizabeth concludes that by throwing away “one-sided love,” women can attain “a true condition of ‘loving’ someone who has long ago treated us badly. Then affection is not a weird, ambivalent manipulation of the death of love, but a sort of salute to its happier beginning.” This extraordinary essay suggests an answer to those who wonder how she could have loved and stayed with Cal all those years: “To think about a troubled person is to ask . . . where does he hurt and how can it be changed? . . . Sympathy is a gift, sometimes almost an occupation.” Elizabeth’s ultimate loyalty was to an ethical ideal: “Always what is most important in one’s personal life is to forgive the unforgivable.”
wow
Elizabeth “loomed large . . . almost as though she was a character in a novel,” the novelist Anna Quindlen said. “That combination of charm and brilliance, and manners, and steel-trap mind.”40 Students felt there was something formidable about Elizabeth. “You didn’t feel like you were going to be pals with her,” Minot said. In a class full of young people in casual attire, her presence was memorable: a chain-smoker with curled hair, wearing eyeliner and bright lipstick. Her skirts were full, her blouses were neatly pressed, and her shoes were low heels or elegant flats. The novelist Mona Simpson thought Elizabeth’s style gave the impression that she was “too busy to care how she looked but just happened to look great.”41 While some students were put off by her Southern-ness and her critical edge, others found her fascinating. Frances Connell fondly recalled the way Elizabeth would gesture “as if there were an imaginary audience over her shoulder.”42 Sigrid Nunez was surely not alone in being curious about “how she lived, what she ate, and what she did when she wasn’t with us.”43 Because of the fracas around The Dolphin, Elizabeth’s private life had become all too public. In Benedict’s view, this “taught us about the messiness of adulthood and the consolations of literature in the midst of it.”44
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Turning to the teaching of writing, Elizabeth said that rather than help students revise their work, she preferred “to stimulate a whole questioning of the process, how you go about it, and what’s worth writing, and what’s being written.” She looked for students who read all the time, discussed books, and thought about literature “as a philosophical and moral question.” She lacked sympathy with students who “think short stories are written out of sensation and feelings,” which are, she said, among “the most difficult things to make real in literature.”
cool
“Writing a Novel,” the short story Elizabeth published in the New York Review in 1973, opens the same way the novel does: “It is June. This is what I am going to do with my life.” Among the many fascinations of this piece is her notion of “a short-wave autobiography, one that fades in and out, local voices mixing with the mysterious cadence of a stranger. Truth should be heightened and falsity adorned, dressed up to look like sociable fact.” She quotes Pasternak: “To live a life is not to cross a field”—life is no easy stroll.131 Memoirs were beset by “troubles large and small,” as a result of writers’ “defamed and libeled” self-portrayal. There was also the problem of a woman’s memoir, “because there isn’t enough sex, not even enough longing for consummation.” (She was apparently referring to potential negative opinions of the book she would write.) “In love,” she wrote, what really matters “is to discover whether we have experienced conquest or surrender—or neither. Courage under ill-treatment is a woman’s theme.” Of course, it is very much her theme.
ayyyy
Elizabeth’s talk on this occasion was about reading and readers—specifically, “the readers a writer has in mind when he writes.”68 Many of her observations are still timely. She distinguished between readers who understood the difference between “the wish to write a book, which every citizen seems to have, and the wish to make a contribution to literature.” She noted that, although reading appears to be passive, it is actually “violently active” because of the imaginative work involved “to create in [the reader’s] own mind a sort of moving pageant of action . . . and emotion.” She rued the fact that the time-saving aspects of modern life did not result in an accumulation of time for reading; on the contrary, “people with time on their hands are an object of pity.” Information overload was to blame for novels that no longer served to inform readers about life in other places and other times. The current vogue for first-person fiction seemed to be based on the premise that the author was unable to say “anything new about the larger world.”
love her
Elizabeth was the last survivor of her circle of women who were notable twentieth-century cultural critics, including Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag (who had died in 2004), and Hannah Arendt (1975). At her memorial service, Derek Walcott’s remarks—read by Hilton Als—described Elizabeth’s merry side. She was, he said, “more fun than any American writer I have known. She preferred gaiety to malice and had the laugh to go with it.”164 Joan Didion said, “every line she wrote suggested that moral courage required trusting one’s own experience in the world, one’s own intuitions about how it worked.” She had “a way of putting words together that could make the most subtle connection seem at once thrilling and matter-of-fact. . . . She never took for granted what is often presented as a given.” Elizabeth’s former student Darryl Pinckney recalled how she told the class that “there are really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge” and that “the only way to learn to write is to read.”165 The December 16 memorial, held at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, was an intimate affair befitting Elizabeth’s under-the-radar existence at the time of her death. After the service, a group of her friends gathered for dinner at Café des Artistes in her building to celebrate her long and extraordinary life.166
Elizabeth wrote to Robert Silvers that she was working every day on her novel, making fixes “that gleam out like flares.”97 Revision was what she liked best about writing: “You’re up against your mind, you’re up against your experience, you’re up against the quality of your insights, you’re up against your command of language, up against your knowledge, you’re up against your moral vision.” [...]