The New York Stories

by Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney (Introduction)

Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, New York, American, 20th Century, The United States Of America, Classics

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Elizabeth Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer.

Hardwick graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1939. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. She was the author of three novels: The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and Sleepless Nights (1979). A collection of her short fiction, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, will be published in 2010. She also published four books of criticism: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998). In 1961 she edited The Selected Letters of William James and in 2000 she published a short biography, Herman Melville, in Viking Press's Penguin Lives series..

In 1959, Hardwick published in Harper's, "The Decline of Book Reviewing," a generally harsh and even scathing critique of book reviews published in American periodicals of the time. The 1962 New York City newspaper strike helped inspire Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers to establish The New York Review of Books, a publication that became as much a habit for many readers as The New York Times Book Review, which Hardwick had eviscerated in her 1959 essay.

In the '70s and early '80s, Hardwick taught writing seminars at Barnard College and Columbia University's School of the Arts, Writing Division. She gave forthright critiques of student writing and was a mentor to students she considered promising.

From 1949 to 1972 she was married to the poet Robert Lowell; their daughter is Harriet Lowell.

In 2008, The Library of America selected Hardwick's account of the Caryl Chessman murders for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime writing.

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't do it. I just can't. There are two stories left in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, and I just can't make myself trudge through them. And 'trudge' is the operative word here—because even though I find many particular things in Hardwick's stories to admire in a purely analytic sense, divorced from all feeling—nothing compels me to return to these high-minded essay-fiction hybrids. But I really should have known better. I would speculate that the vast majority of books that blurb Susan Sontag are unenjoyable (to me). Sontag writes, 'Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe.' Well, she certainly enlivened my woe as I eyed all the other books I'd rather be reading. But maybe Sontag was referring to Hardwick's better-known novels rather than her short fiction. I'm willing to be charitable here. There is, no doubt, a certain ingenuity to her stories, but they are all strangely limp and pallid. That's what it is—there's a lack of vigor in her writing. Hardwick moved from Kentucky to New York City, and it seems that her geographical relocation was merely an effort to bring her in tune with her natural temperament. Most of her stories are urbane, showily intellectual, and contrived (a little too transparently, for my taste) to introduce Major Themes. The habitués of her literature are writers, painters, erudite booksellers, and editors—the urban cultural elite, in other words. Interesting subjects, no doubt, but in Hardwick's hands they approach realness but never quite go all the way. There are a few exceptions here that deserve special mention: 'Evenings at Home' nicely conveys the narrator's ambivalent feelings about returning home to Kentucky (from New York) for a visit, and 'The Oak and the Axe' describes an unusual relationship between a successful (female) magazine editor and an unsuccessful fiction writer. (The more odious entries in the collection would be 'The Purchase' and 'Cross-Town.') Reading this collection was a lot like visiting a natural history museum for me. Many people will love it, but my enjoyment was only occasional and particular.

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me this collection divides along a line between story-driven episodes that unfold ideas & characters from a narrative, and pieces that dissolve these elements in a diffuse, intensely poetic, emotionally charged meandering. But perhaps I'm being overly convergent in seeing a line when I should detect a field of ambiguity and shade.

I often struggle with plotless writing but when I can feel a depth of glowing emotion as I can here I can appreciate. Hardwick conveys a moody, conflict-ridden yet implacable and transcendant love for New York City, partly (I'm not entirely sure how she achieves this shimmering web of effects) by piling images one atop the other in a profusion of witty contrasts. Another way she does it is by introducing vulnerable and unconventional personalities in a way that makes NYC seem like a sheltering haven where the fragile can survive

I think Hardwick is an analyst, but she manages to be remarkably gentle and unintrusive about it, never implying that misfortune or rejection is the result of some moral failure or innate deficiency. She grants everyone, however potentially pathetic, the generous sympathy of the tragedian. But of course, Hardwick is a feminist tragedian, not giving a pass to Macbeth by dragging his wife into the mud. I don't mean that everyone she paints is an angel, but they are all feeling and struggling humans caught in currents and cross-currents.

I am sometimes exasperated with white malaise but Hardwick makes the floundering anguish of her characters both comic and pitiable, symptoms of the disease of civilization that the glowing embers of life force inside people are vainly trying to fight off. Besides, the prose is just about irresistible.

The final tale is my favourite; a black part-time maid has died, and the incident allows Hardwick to sketch New York's racial contours, gently unpeeling the ignorance of liberal attitudes. As in the tale 'The Purchase', she also explores the shifting meanings of wealth and class in a supposedly classless society (this is the title of another tale), critiquing middle class greed in a way that indicts the social structure and treats characters humanly, without ever sliding into an author-voiced harangue.

The introduction by Darryl Pinckley is insightful and intriguing, lit by a warmth towards Hardwick that seems almost personal; a friendly appreciation rather than reverence. He gives us a critical and intellectual woman from the South in ecstasy in New York, a prose poet, a writer's writer. Read her and fall in love.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this one. Hardwick was a masterful stylist, every brushstroke in this little miniature is perfectly placed. And she captures that mid-century something that I love, that delicious feeling of opening up an old issue of the New Yorker and vanishing into a slightly shabby, more genteel New York of once upon a time that is so familiar from other stories and movies and yet so tantalizingly out of reach. Indeed, New York is the most constant character in these stories (and the stories where it is absent are noticeably drier and stiffer).

In this vein, one of the revelations was reading the stories written in the early 80s and coming suddenly face to face with a New York (a Times Square full of porn theaters and record stores, a Bryant Park that was a place of illicit assignations) that was actually my first New York, one that I remember perfectly, and that seen in this anthology context is marked for what it is -- as solely fictional and utterly irretrievable as the shabby Greenwich Village of 1950s beatnik artists, or a Columbia University swept by the competing intellectual currents of the post-war years.

But ultimately, I did not love the book. It was a little too New Yorker in the end (not the city but the magazine) in that layers of allusiveness made up for action and characters, and things had that muffled quality where sentence upon sentence piles up without bringing you closer to feeling anything. So in the end, 3 stars, even though I admired it.

[Maciek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished this, but only barely. Mostly because throughout the majority of The New York Stories there was simply not enough of what I expected - New York and stories, of both the city and its people.

The "stories" are largely plotless, and not very engaging - they are concerned with characters whom I found to be largely uninteresting, and who like to partake in discussion on subjects which scream "Big Themes" from a mile. To put it bluntly, this is a very easy book to put down and newer return to, and which becomes almost impossibly tedious when you try to read more than one story at a time.

To put it a bit more gently - this is not a very engaging collection, which ultimately failed to provide me with a memorable impression and at least some food for though. I think the author might be a better novelist, giving herself more space and time to properly develop her plots and craft interesting characters - her stories are too devoid of
both to be enjoyable and memorable.

[Sasha]

♦ I've spent several days now with The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick , and it had to be slow-going, because she demanded I savor her. All the other books I'd planned on reading with her, gently replaced on the shelves. Hardwick wanted all of me, or nothing at all. I was all too happy to give her, well, all.

♦ As I read more and more of her, I knew I'd be saying, "Elizabeth Hardwick, where have you been all my life?" Seriously. Hardwick's one of the best discoveries in my travails through the NYRB Classics catalog, this whole reading year, short fiction. Initial impressions: She reminded me a lot of Richard Yates. Less harsh -- that is, not with that stoic restraint; she allows herself to love the language more freely -- but no less melancholic. Also, Mad Men. This is all Peggy Olson and a handful of Betty Draper-Francis right here, kids.

♦ The stories themselves -- people torn between their great potentials and their realities, and all these standards bleeding over to their relationships with the people in their lives. It's about New York. It's not so much about falling in love in New York as it is dealing with the fact that New York isn't a place to fall in love in. Most of these stories are odes to New York, and everything that the place represents, it's always so tangible and almost often decisive.

♦ In "A Season's Romance," Adele of The Great Potential allows New York -- her ambitions, the life she knows she deserves -- dictate her loving of this pretty much awesome guy who's asked her to marry her, and snuggle into the suburbs over at Texas:

In New York, Matt was possible. His soul had some gritty grandeur of the city itself; like a nomad, restlessly seeking, he roamed the midtown plains with all the knowingness of an animal that has found its natural grazing spot. The beauty of Matt's life was defined by taxis, expense accounts, even his dingy little flat on East Fifty-second Street.

Matt just isn't the Matt she wants if he doesn't come with New York.

♦ Another favorite, "The Oak and the Axe" -- It's classic: Pretty successful girl falls for the romantic idea of this fixer-upper of a man. He simply does not measure up, to any of the standards she set for herself, to anything. And Henry Dean is okay with that. He's happy the way he is. Clara Church, however, just can't seem to let it go. This is how Clara feels when she visits Henry at his hotel room [apartment!] for the first time:

For a moment, Clara could not speak. Her hands trembled. It was not the room itself that frightened her so much as coming upon it suddenly and without preparation; it was like falling out of the clear sunlight into utter forlornness. It bit into her, chilled her; the bleakness and the dismal quiet seemed to challenge reality -- life itself. Clara considered the "real" Henry the man with the anecdotes, the light irony, the possible talents, and everything in her fought against the horrible chill of the room, the drawn blinds, the old newspapers, the unpolished silver cup, the silent violin.

Well, honey. Well. But Clara rolls up her sleeves, and gets to work, intent on loving Henry, and making the best of things. Because that Henry, what a catch he is, the very idea of him! Oh, Clara:

Clara made a great effort to give up her study of Henry, but she could not achieve this desired incuriosity. The confounding facts of his temperament, with his absolute self fixed and bound to its weaknesses in a way that was somehow majestic, were not to be fully grasped.

And Clara finds herself changing, conveniently or no. And, well, because this is a Hardwick story, there's just the right touch of Sadness Is Inevitable coursing through the narrative, no matter how much the characters convince themselves otherwise:

Gradually, she was moving along with Henry into a world of strange distinctions, sudden ironies, and unexpected preferences; she found humor where she had found none before, and sighed with ennui where she had precisely been fascinated. All her senses seemed alarted, and she felt in herself that exhilarating but dangerous clarity climbers experience at the top of a mountain.

If I were being cheeky: Chile, been there, done that. And you know what, I ended up really liking Henry; I think it's because he was so immune to Clara's machinations.

♦ Many of the stories deal with this divide between what is wanted, and the holding off for better things. In "Yes or No," for example, our narrator looks through her old notebooks, reading vignettes and notes she made about this Edgar who -- guess what -- just wasn't good enough. For anything. And yet, and yet: the obsession. The people in Hardwick's stories are fixated on finding something not right with what they have right now -- because nothing can hold a candle to their grand dream, to New York. And the dissatisfaction, so rampant. Not resigned, exactly, but serene with the consequences of one's ambition:

It is awful to be faced each day with love that is neither too great nor too small, genrosity that does not demand payment in blood; there are no rules for responding, to schemes that explain what this is about, and so each smile is a challenge, each friendly gesture an intellectual crisis. [from "Evenings at Home"]

It's ambition and happiness waging a battle when no one's looking -- and it's never schmaltzy. Hardwick's narrative is always dignified. It's her prose, I know. It's the point of view she employs as well: first person or otherwise, there's always this trace of clinicalness, this determined distance. But it was never cold. Being witness to these character's struggles -- acknowledged or otherwise -- made sure of that. Ah, it was awe-inspiring? Gahk, it was all just so gosh-darned awesome, okay?

_______

♦ Elizabeth Hardwick was the co-founder of The New York Review of Books. That makes her more awesome, surely? In Darryl Pinckney's introduction, there were teasers of how Hardwick approached literature, whether in the reading or the writing of it. I want to read more of her. I want to read more of what she wrote, I want to read what she wrote about the things she read. I so have a crush now. That's the knee-jerk reaction to an author who likes to say "that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge." /faint

[Michael Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several refreshingly authentic stories in this collection relate the day to day life of a young woman from Kentucky moving to New York City to begin a career. The stories are not all about the same person but do have similar plot points of young marrieds who fail at the game and then try and sometimes try again to see if they (meaning she) can make it work, often it fails again. Hardwick is a brilliant writer who appears to have found a method that she believes in. Married for a time to the poet Robert Lowell, her work is poetic in tone and often more satisfying than one would assume considering its repetitiveness. Recommended.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, these are hit-or-miss. I believe Hardwick was primarily known for essays, which I have never read, so perhaps this just isn't her preferred writing format. She does fairly well with developing characters, but then you get to the end of each story and realize nothing more has happened. Many lack not only what might be called a plot, but any action whatsoever, and are more like character sketches. The later stories are particularly dull, and many are just the stereotypical "an ordinary day in NYC is poetic just because it's NYC." Well, I am a New Yorker myself, but this notion that describing the daily events of a particular street as somehow poetic is a bit trite and hackneyed and a hallmark of out-of-towners. I mean, not to be all snobbish but yeah, the streets are poetry, but people also live their actual lives here, that is why the city is interesting. Some of the earlier ones are pretty good, though. That's the vexing thing - Hardwick can turn a phrase and write interesting little short stories, like "Shot: A New York Story" which is quite engaging, or "The Final Conflict" which is also a pretty good one, but it seems like most of the time, she just chooses not to, preferring hackneyed musings on "the city" or character sketches about dreary cheating spouses and that's the bulk of the story: so-and-so cheats on his wife.

Since I have never read any of her other fiction, I won't dismiss her as a writer, but this book is not exactly a sterling example of good short fiction.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories felt generally uninspiring to me. "Evenings at Home" was great, delving into the psychology of someone who has built ramparts around their newly constructed self-identity as someone who has written out of the cultural poverty of the South only to find that such elaborate defenses were unnecessary. But most of the stories involve characters who don't do or experience anything particularly interesting. There are academics who don't like each other, painters don't like each other, people have money but not a ton of money. The later, more experimental and prosaic stories from the 1980s feature beautiful phrases but are hard to follow and are more general "life in the city is poetic by its existence" kind of writing. I preferred the more situation-driven (because there's still no plot) aspect of the last story, in which a black maid's murder becomes the occasion for the narration to describe the backgrounds and habits of her white employers, in a sly enactment of the way those of the servant class recede into anonymity. But overall, the collection is forgettable, making it difficult to read over any length of time.

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Elizabeth Hardwick in a way that will probably feel embarrassing to me in a few years. There's just something about her writing that feels deeply ... relatable, maybe? for me. Like the narrator of Yes and No, she's not likeable but she's immediately understandable to me. I like whingey overly detailed plotless stories about women who aren't as good as they think they are but still think they're better than everyone else. So this is almost perfect.

[David Marchese · Rating 3 out of 5]

New Yorkers with post-graduate degrees talk movingly about their feelings, often in a frustratingly causal and didactic fashion.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best words in the best order and it's PROSE. Getting sick of New York and all of its accoutrements but this woman, the reticent clairvoyant, needs to be read again, and again, and again.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In hindsight it was probably unrealistic of me to expect to find the down at heel New York that is glimpsed so provocatively in Hardwick’s wonderful Sleepless Nights. I was even initially miffed to find that four of the 12 stories aren’t even set in New York. Nevertheless I’m glad I read the collection as it really gives an insight into the development of Hardwick as a writer.
The first story in the collection (arranged chronologically) is The Temptations of Dr Hoffman written in 1946. This story, about a distinguished theologian who flees Nazi Germany to live in New York, is only one of a few that I didn’t connect with. Evenings at Home written in 1948 is about the ambivalent feelings of a young woman who is visiting her family at home in Kentucky. This story like the first is also written strongly in the first person.
Yes and No written in 1948 is about a young woman remembering an early boyfriend and from what I can work out is also set in Kentucky:
“Old flame, lost beloved - I have left out of my little ‘story’ my abject dependence upon you! How mad I was about you, how perversely aware of my sinful enjoyment of your affection for me.”
We get to the next story - The Final Conflict - and the switch in her style (the first person narrator has gone) is immediately obvious. Here is what Darryl Pinckney had to say about the switch in his excellent introduction to the stories:
“The omniscient narrator that Hardwick employs in each story of the 1950s projects something of the gritty dynamism of the city, that feeling that could turn a corner and one’s life could change. At the same time, her voice is somewhat remote, however forceful and fast her observations.” I am in complete agreement wit Pinckney but I felt that there was more of a storyline in these stories than the first three.
“In “A Season’s Romance” (1956), a bored art historian is joined by her mother in the exploitation of a generous but unstable man. In “The Oak and the Axe” (1956) a career woman mistakenly believes her love can redeem and indolent dreamer.” These two were probably my second and third favourite stories of the collection. I wasn’t so interested in “The Classless Society” about an older couple who entertain two single people at their home, bitchily portrayed. In “The Purchase” (1959) a successful portrait painter finds himself drawn to the wife of a rising abstract expressionist.
And then suddenly years have gone by and we are reading a short story that is more essay than short story (at least for this reader). The next story “Cross-town” was written in 1980 and opens with my favourite paragraph in the whole collection:
“In the evening there was a moon in the eastern sky outclassing every miracle. It hung over Lexington Avenue where the stores were at last closed and where many little shoes and blouses were enchained for the night’s sleep. Sometimes while waiting for a taxi at Seventy-ninth Street, after midnight, it is possible with a certain amount of effort or with a little too much wine, to imagine the city returned to trees, old footpaths, and clear, untroubled waters, returned to innocence and nautical miscalculations and ancestral heroics....”
It seems that finally, as Pinckney says, Hardwick found her voice after Lowell’s death (her husband and a famous poet) and the publication of Sleepless Nights. And more importantly she resumed her use of the first person in fiction. The next three - The Bookseller, Back Issues and On the Eve are enjoyable but my favourite story is the last - Shot: a New York Story written in 1993. For me it is the characters, their attitudes and their individual reactions to a tragedy, that make this story remarkable. A highly recommended collection.

[Andrew]

Strongly surprised by how different this was to Hardwick’s other work. I’m used to the dissection of literature, I’m used to the nail-biting 4 a.m. prose, but these are stories in the broad American realist tradition, the tradition that’s responsible for both the highest heights and the most callow lows of American fiction. Where is Hardwick? Somewhere in between, although on the higher end of the spectrum. It’s still not the essential reading that Sleepless Nights is, but she crafts a fine story.

[Rachel Zilkey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll admit, I did lightly skim over some stories. I definitely enjoyed some more than others.

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a weird little collection- I liked this a lot

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The absolute quality of his nature, the way his efforts did not bear fruit, the way he could sweetly accept his lot without demanding help from others—all this made him haunting and dear to her.”

“She was incorrigibly reminiscent. The disposition came upon her with the regularity of a stutter.”

[Raquel]

La primera me pareció brillante. El resto fluctúan.

[Matt Schlesinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kentucky childhood, NY bourgeois send ups, etc. THE CLASSLESS SOCIETY was so good

[Don Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The early stories here are conventional, drunk on extraneous words, as many writers were back then. Hardwick keeps it interesting through her characters though. In a story called "The Purchase," about an older, successful painter's competition with a young upstart, the older painter is first repulsed by the young painter's wife, then unreasonably infatuated with her. Hardwick paints such a vivid picture of the woman that I began to have feelings for her myself. The older painter's sudden attraction made all the sense in the world.

The later stories are virtuosic, the evidence of a writer in full command of her powers. A couple of them come off as more memoir than fiction, but the precision of her craft make them a real joy to read. These come during and just after the time of Sleepless Nights, Hardwick's novel, was published. They are very much in the style of that book, which I loved.

[Jackief · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few of these stories are memorable (thus 3 stars), but generally a disappointment. It didn't help that I read this just after Mavis Gallant's Paris Stories, which I loved. Hardwick's stories are uncomfortable, and some are tiring, but a few--notably "Back Issues," "The Purchase," and "Evenings at Home" stand out for me.

[Lonnie Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her prose are deeply intellectual and her characters are complex. Her style of writing is probably impossible to imitate but there is a flow that resembles abstract artwork. The narrative seems to be concerned with who is observing and how that individual feels about the plot and characters; she forces readers to see what she sees. Overall, I enjoyed the stories. The Purchase, The Classles Society, Shot: A New York Story, and The Final Conflict were my top choices.

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a bizarre book. The first two thirds, maybe even three quarters of this book I could not get down with at all. Then all of a sudden it jumps to stories written a decade or two later and they're incredible. Like Renata Adler meets Leornard Michaels good. It feels weird giving a book a glowing recommendation but also recommending you ignore everything before pg. 156. I dunno.

[erik moreno]

«Es horrible enfrentarse cada día a un amor que no es ni demasiado grande ni demasiado pequeño, a una generosidad que no exige un pago en sangre; no hay reglas para responder, ni esquemas que expliquen de qué se trata, y por eso cada sonrisa es un desafío, cada gesto amistoso una crisis intelectual.»

«Evenings at Home» (1948), Elisabeth Hardwick

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

not as brilliant as SLEEPLESS NIGHTs, but a nice collection of character studies about people and NYC. the style shifts from studied to the essayistic fiction of SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, and always with restraint and intelligence.

[Tommie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In which people think they have more Great Potential then they probably actually do, but are still terrified of settling. Highlights include A Season's Romance, Evening's at Home, and Shot: A New York Story.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-carved, thoughtful prose with the storytelling power to create deep interest in a very quiet scene with very ordinary characters. A book to dip in and out of.

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

These stories are more character sketches, not short stories. They are interesting, but not engaging.

[Andy Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Hardwick was primarily known as a novelist and essayist but in 2011 this collection of short stories she wrote between 1946 and 1993 was published. They are arranged in chronological order so that we can see how Hardwick's writing and her life evolved as her stories were personal and just as important we see how New York and all of our society evolved as her stories also reflected the customs and values of their time. A summary of some of these stories gives a taste of those evolutions.
In the 1946 story "The temptation of Dr Hoffman," the narrator is a young woman who escaped Kentucky and its culture after graduating from college to live in a coop apartment near Columbia University. An acquaintance from Kentucky introduces her to Dr Hoffman and his family. Dr Hoffman is a famous professor who escaped Nazi Germany before the war and the narrator is drawn into the family and its conflicts.
The narrator in the 1949 story "Yes and No" reflects on an old affair with Edgar when the reads a story she had written about the thinly disguised Edgar years before. The story reenforces the theme that Hardwick's stories are thinly disguised stories about herself and here gives insight into Hardwick's romantic life which was adventurous, diverse, and perhaps never satisfying.
"The Final Conflict" tells of an antique store manager who meets a young college graduate who comes to the store. As they become involved romantically she becomes a de facto co-manager of the store and has they become more intimate the manager starts an affair with a hairdresser to perhaps balance his intellectual and in depth relationship with the college graduate.
The spirit of the 1956 story "A season's Romance" is captured by an early sentence "Adele looked like a debutante, and everyone, even her mother, thought it engaging and a little absurd that she recently had earned her doctorate at New York University." The story recounts Adele's post graduation trip to Europe where she begins a romance with the older Matt, which reflected much of Hardwick's own romances. Money and Class are important contributors to the romance and its potential unraveling.
The 1959 story "The Purchase" tells of a meeting set up between Johnson Palmer, an older and established artist, and Thomas Frazier, a young, upcoming modern artist. The meeting, which includes the two wives, is to discuss the older Palmer purchasing a work from Frazier who is on financial ice. But as the story moves forward we learn that Palmer does not have much money as he enters a downturn in his career but his initial refusal is tempered by his pursuit of Frazier's younger wife.
Hardwick's later stories shifted from the more personal to more observational. For example, the last story "Shot: A New York Story" tells of a nephew of Zona, housekeeper, going to an apartment building where she cleaned for a number of the residents to tell them that Zona had been shot to death. Each interaction causes the apartment resident to reflect on their lives including their relationship with Zona and their reaction to how Zona was killed as well as their reaction to being asked to give cash to help with expenses

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourite lines

"And the wives - completely stunned by the marvelous possession of these blithe, busy husbands." p.25

"He knows, he knows, I decided. Men can sense these things. Let me die now." p.27

"His silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in the hand." p.35

"In New York, Matt was possible. His soul had some of the gritty grandeur of the city itself..." p.75

"[He] filled her with a baffled and yet determined love." p.85

"Each day the rooms were brightened briefly by a pale, dust-filtered sun, which treated the place with the same haste and indifference shown by the chambermaid." p.88

"...the fact that at present bothered him most acutely was Mimi's indifference to what he thought of as his own nature. She had somehow deprived him of the qualities other people found in him - his charm, his knowingness, his intricate feelings - without supplying any discoveries of her own to take their place." p.150

"In the evening there was a moon in the eastern sky outclassing every miracle. It hung over Lexington Avenue where the stores were at last closed and where many little shoes and blouses were enchained for the night's sleep." p.153

"And then, looking up into the sky in which lights from so many rooms flicker like yellow stars..." p.170

"I do not understand this deranged typing. It is not hope of fame, or money, or even of publication. It is not anything that can be known." p.173

"...with the rotting barn, its roof beautifully smashed in like a felt hat..." p.180

"His correct Greek pronunciation bejeweled the already glittering consonants and vowels of the names of his countrymen." p.192

"Health is not always easy to maintain because he is living in the gold of his middle age. Cream sauces at the banquet table, the velvet of sofas on Park Avenue, the roller-coaster elevators in the Waldorf Towers..." p.195

"He nears the Hotel Ansonia, a declining Parisian beauty, sun-spangled on the upper windows." p.196

"He is aware of a green patch of feeling for Joanna and for their brief love affair ten years ago. Ring the downstairs bell, wait, climb the stairs of the brownstone, enter the small, neat apartment, see the freesia in a white vase, hear the ice crackling in the glass, listen to Harold in Italy, watch the bare feet in the lamplight near the bed..." p.203-4

"The hospitable evening skyline, a tempest of incandescent meteors. Ackermann cannot see the culminating stars of the sky-city to the south of him, but surely a white light shines in the Empire State tower and the squares of private life on high floors are a glamorous zodiac of bulls, crabs, lions, goats and virgins." p.205

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had not heard of Elizabeth Hardwick until recently, and then she suddenly was popping up everywhere I turned - as a memoirist, as an essayist, as the wife of Robert Lowell who cared for him at at time when he was deeply in the grips of mental illness. Then browsing through the Raven used book store in Shelburne Falls, Mass, my wife found this book and called it to my attention, not because she knew Ms. Hardwick or because I had been encountering her a lot recently in my reading but because she was from my home town of Lexington, Kentucky. Not only that, she was exactly the same age as my father, though she had moved out of town long before he got there. Still, I think that he must have known her because as the librarian at the University of Kentucky he would surely have pursued her for her papers, though they seem to be housed at the University of Texas.

The stories here are sometimes very good but not great. She tends to trot out her characters with basic expository introductions and then put them in an uncomfortable situation that shows them to be less than stellar people, as she does in "A Season's Romance, " "The Oak and the Axe," "The Classless Society" and "The Purchase." I preferred the ones where the principal character is viewed more affectionately, though he may still be flawed - the possibly atheist theologian in the "The Temptations of Dr. Hoffman" and the rumpled proprietor of a bookstore in "The Bookseller." The best for me personally was "Evenings at Home," in which the protaganist is an aspiring writer, returning to her home in Lexington for a visit, feeling repelled by the people and the memories that she feels she has moved on from but coming to understand that they are still an important part of her.